*The Cracks

The world, to me, is grouped into different categories when it comes to mental illness.  Of course, it is the same with religion, politics, and any other Big Thing.  We all have our own set of beliefs, and those beliefs are most often nurtured out of personal experience than from anything a book or the Authority on the matter can tell us.  When it comes to mental illness, the very word screams "in your head!"  I really hate the term, actually.  I hate all the wisecracks about it, and I hate the shame it creates.  Mental.  Illness.  What does it mean, really, to be mentally ill?  Does anyone really know?  The history of its treatment in centuries past is something right out of a horror movie.  A lot has changed since then.  But now, in 2014, a lot is still the same.

Some don't believe in mental illness.

I thought acceptance would be the end of it.  Acceptance leads to treatment, and treatment leads to healing.  Healing leads to being able to sweep it under the rug and never look back.

But it didn't work out that way.  I know now that it rarely ever does.

I blamed the medication.  I blamed the lack of it.  I blamed myself.


Pieces of me.  Who I was.  Who I am.  The in-between.  Life breaks people in different ways, to varying degrees.  One person may soar through with little more than a chip on the rim; another may end up with quite a few cracks; another will completely break down, their once whole tea cup diminished to a pile of rubble.  And in all of these cases, the original shape can be restored, but the amount of time and effort to do so varies according to the damage.  And even then, the seams will always show, and it will be easier to crack at the same places, sometimes to more and more irrepairable degrees.  It will never be the same.

I will never be the same.  I still look for that little girl.  I see her face in my mind.  I hear her thoughts.  But she is ages apart from me.  Hiding under a table in Sunday school.  Already afraid of the voices she heard, the Shadowy men who visited her at night.  She already knew to hide, to pretend, to try to forget.  But they just kept coming.  She never fit in at school.  She never fit in with family.  But she tried.  She tried, despite the little chips here and there.  She grew older and tried even harder.  She married.  She had two daughters.  She tried oh so hard.  But that storm just kept building.  She prayed and she believed her prayers were heard, no matter how bad it got.  But the cracks got bigger, and the pieces began to fall.  And promises got broken.  Promises to be a good wife, a flawless mother.  She always wanted her children to know the joys of an unbroken home, never knowing she would be the one to do the breaking.

Bad choices were made.  And in the midst of them, doctors made their claims.  Bipolar disorder.  Schizophrenia.  Some other disorder.  This one.  That one. All of them.  She knew she was supposed to feel relief from this new knowledge.  To know what's wrong, that is the key that unlocks the door.  Take this pill, they say.  Take this one, and another and another. But some pills made the voices louder, and some made even her own voice stop. She stopped.  And started.  She blamed the diagnosis.  She blamed the medication, and then the lack of it.  She blamed herself.

I have tried to travel backwards instead of forward, as if to go back there in my mind could change something.  I still seek out that little girl who grew up to be a mother who grew to leave her little girls in the rubble.  I don't know whether to hit her or to hug her, I love and hate her so much.  I have never shifted blame onto anyone else for the decisions I made.  I know in my right mind I would have never made those choices, but I cannot say exactly why I was not in my right mind at the time.  I still come unglued from time to time, those cracks ever widening, and I am no wiser than I was before except that the breakage is a little more familiar.  The only thing in this world that makes me whole is my children, yet so many times I feel like I am much more of a child than they are.  I hate that about me, and I hate how I try so hard and seem to always break down anyway.  With or without medication.  With or without God.  With or without any inkling as to where this broken road is taking any of us.

I prefer to look at things in a logical, rational manner.  I like to be in charge of my behavior, in control of my emotions.  But I don't always manage this as well as I would like.  There are too many cracks, you see.  On the whole days I pour my heart and soul into everything I do, and on the cracked days I watch it all leak on through and dissolve into thin air.  It is a process.  It is a test.  And I hope I am passing.  I keep doing the right things to the best of my ability in hope that some day that will be enough.  The cracks get wider.  But so does my resilience.