EIght days on

Eight days after our mental health panel, I’m still recovering. I’m not overwhelmed by the reaction, but there definitely is a reaction.

The impact on me of telling my story to a room full of people surprised me. More powerfully than ever before, I was confronted with my madness. For the first time I was speaking it aloud, not to a group of sympathetic fellow sufferers or newcomers at my support group, most of whom are reeling from their first disturbing, excruciating experience of mental illness, either of their own or of their son or daughter or husband or wife. This time I was speaking to a room full of 'normal' people, who had never dealt with psychosis. The fact of my insanity hit me square in the face. Three times in my otherwise very responsible adult life I had been completely out of control.

It didn’t help that I couldn’t see many familiar faces. Every Sunday, I teach nine and ten year olds while the other adults meet together for classes. New graduate students and professionals routinely move into our congregation while others move away. There were many unfamiliar faces.

And it wasn’t just the madness. It was my description of my physical and mental limitations, the result of psych meds. To demonstrate the tremor, I tried to spoon water into my mouth. I tossed the empty spoon away halfway to my mouth. (Jim said later that it was hard to believe I wasn’t doing it on purpose, though he did believe me; it made an effective demonstration.) I expend a good deal of effort on masking my tremor. I don't drink soup in public and I’ve become expert in controlling the tremor when eating anything else. I eat only crisp and crunchy iceberg or Romaine lettuce salads: I can’t spear baby spinach or leaf lettuce.

Speaking my experience aloud, removed me far enough to see my behavior the way ‘normal’ people would, people with no history of losing their minds and sanity. It was sobering and disturbing.

I’ve written about two of my psychotic episodes in memoir-writing classes I’ve taken online with Gotham Writers Workshop. (I love GWW! Their online classroom structure is brilliant.) The student comments have been positive, and not just because that’s part of the ground rules, to be kind and empathetic, to find the good in every piece. I believe I have the skill to convey the madness and involve people emotionally. Many readers comment that mine is an important story to tell. It's exhilarating to write about the episodes.

But the panel was emotionally exhausting. A week later, as I spoke with a good friend who attended, I was still processing the experience. At first I had thought it was because I didn’t recognize many faces in the audience, that I was afraid of being dismissed as a human being by so many strangers. But, I soon realized that I’m afraid of being dismissed by myself. Can I trust myself to know the difference between mental health and mental illness? A therapist, back in 1996, when the ‘diagnosis’ was still a fresh, raw wound to my psyche, said there was a fine but  definite line between sanity and mania. He was trying to calm me, to assure me that I could trust myself and that I could function in the real world. And in most ways, I can. I don’t second-guess myself about everything; I just live life. But how do I balance the desire for creativity with the need for sanity?