Taking a Class with Those Mentally People
I'm starting a new class on Wednesday, called Peer-to-Peer. It's a NAMI class for people with serious mental illnesses who are working on their "recovery" process. I've signed up for it twice before and bailed both times -- because the location gave me panic attacks when I drove to it, but mostly because at the first class I looked around (at a circle of perfectly normal if weary looking people) and said to myself: I don't belong here! These people have sad narrow little lives shadowed by their huge mental illnesses planted in the middle like an oak tree! They are what stigma says they are! They're not like ME. They don't run Facebook groups, write letters to the editor, blog about their lives, research everything online, have a sense of humor, love someone and are loved in return! If they're taking this class, they've been ground down and reduced to just surviving. They don't already know it all, like me. They don't even try to pretend they're normal. They are essentially and always just "the mentally ill."
But I am different from them. Right? I must be different from them. I absolutely have to be different from them.
But I'm not. I am exactly like them. I am them. Because they are not one-dimensional "mental patients." They are not thoughtless sheep being herded toward "recovery" with no personal resources to draw on. They are not like the people I knew in institutions 35 years ago. They are not like I was 35 years ago, medicated to the point of mindlessness and dumb acceptance. That was a different time. Severe mental illness itself was different. It is not the grim life sentence it was then. It does not rob people of their personalities, possibilities and adventures, their joys and amusements and empathy -- of their futures. It is merely one of their many dimensions. It's normal now to be different.
Yet I cling to the idea that one day I could be "cured." A deus ex machina could descend and wipe out my past. I could be the person I always dreamed of being, moving through the world lightly and gracefully, leaving poetry in her wake, not knowing what she had narrowly escaped. My whole life with a mental illness could be lifted from me and I could walk proudly toward the future with nothing to weigh me down. I would not need this "Peer-to-Peer" class because I would be in "discovery" not "recovery."
But that's all bullshit. It's a dream. And it eats up the time I have left in my life with fear and fantasy. It prevents me from knowing and befriending people who are just like me, just like anyone but with the depth of character this illness bestows -- one of its few gifts.
I want to cling to the fantasy anyway because it's comforting. It lets me sustain my denial. And denial is one of the few sources of peace I know personally I am like my 80 year old mother, outraged by the suggestion that she consider moving to a retirement home. "Those people are all OLD! They look old and they act old! They're going to DIE soon!"
But, you know, she is still old , just like them. And I'm still a person with a serious mental illness, just like my "peers."
And we're all just people, we're all still alive, and there is always hope.
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