I carefully cleaned and filed my nails until they were all shiny and respectable. Then I planted seeds in trays with wet soil and my nails are filthy and look like I’ve been clawing my way across wet oily train tracks smelling of creosote and damp steel.

Yesterday I let a close friend and her classmate interview me for their psyche class. I said yes to it because this is the thing I must do. They asked me about my childhood. They asked me a lot about my childhood. I felt like a wax doll rigged with explosives. On the surface I believe I was calm and matter of fact, but my internal organs got tangled up over skeletons of the past I thought I’d slayed a long time ago but which, apparently, still have sharp teeth. I recounted a story I’ve never said out loud to anyone though I’ve written it down many times in journals.

I just now realized that the only person I’ve ever told that story to was the psychologist who diagnosed me and is dead.

All the way home I sucked on the irony of having been triggered into a panic attack and a dark place by being asked personal questions about my past and my mental illness so soon after 1,203 people took my Suicide for Beginners survey in which I asked them the most personal painful questions about their depression and suicidal ideations which many couldn’t finish because it was triggering and stressful.

Mad respect for every single person suffering mental illness who tries to bring it into the light, whether they can or can’t go through with it. It’s so fucking hard to talk about. It makes us so vulnerable in a devastating way to talk about it, particularly to anyone who isn’t like us and doesn’t know what it feels like to live through this unwelcome hell.

It doesn’t take a lot to push my dark buttons. You can be simply asking me if I think communes are cool and I’m likely to explode my venomous opinions about them without warning at the end of which you’ll want to wash yourself with fresh lye soap.

I’ve spoken a lot on this blog about how I am a master at subterfuge. Reading the small number of surveys I have so far, this is shaping up to be a universal theme. People who have serious chronic depression develop great skill at not showing it to protect themselves (and more often than not, also the people they care about). It isn’t that they’re necessarily lying so much as they’re super skilled at showing you only the parts of themselves that they think you can handle. After all this time trying to describe this facility, necessity, and what may be the great phenomenon of seriously depressed people being perceived as cheerful funny upbeat people, I still can’t quite tell you how we do it or how it isn’t really a lie at all. It’s an amplification of some signals and the obfuscation of others. They both exist honestly in us, we just choose to keep the less accepted ones safe in quiet shadow.

I’m amazed at how vulnerable I constantly feel about my mental illness after over a decade of being vocal about it. I still feel alien, small, creepy, flayed, and disconnected from my corporeal self.

Is it even possible to change public awareness of mental illness so that I don’t have to feel like a naked Smeagel-freak at an Edwardian ball every day of my life?

I have to believe that if we all speak up and demand to be heard and treated with the same respect as people with broken bones that the world will respond. The other option is insupportable.

I have a couple of new brain ticks*

“Robin Williams has probably sat in many redwood hot tubs”

and

“Sha-sizzle!”

(a real Jazz-handy number I find simultaneously amusing and distressing)

I think I might be getting to where I can’t listen to a lot of music without taking me to an unhealthy emotional place. I read one survey response that mentioned this and it felt like a brick being thrown at my head. Like a horrible blinding truth splitting my brain open. Can I have gotten too vulnerable to music? Music has been such a guide, support, and pleasure for my whole life, can it be pushing my dark buttons now too?

I know a lot of things I don’t want to know. About myself. About the world. About the people around me. About the universe. I’d like to restrict the flow of knowledge the way blood can constrict the flow of oxygen.

 In the end it doesn’t matter what I want. There is only what IS, and what IT becomes.

*Thoughts or words that repeat in my head randomly and often without invitation or context. FOREVER.