Stages

Blogging can be very scary.

The internet is so unknown, so anonymous, so large and far-reaching, that writing a blog often feels like standing on a stage, shouting lines to a one-person play with your eyes totally shut and the lights out. You don't know who is out there, or what they're hearing, or what they think. You don't know what they turned up for, or why they came back. You don't know what they want from you, or what will make them happy. And sometimes you don't know if there is anybody there at all, because often - on the nights when your eyes are squeezed shut, and the audience feels so quiet - all those unlit faces could just as well be nobody.

As my readership has very slowly grown, therefore, so my scared little eyes have gradually screwed themselves shut more firmly. Where it was once just my grandad - stumbling upon this site by accident, eighteen months ago - pieces of the whole world now sit silently in my dark theatre: all watching, all frowning or smiling or laughing in silence. And it is so hard not to let my writing change because of it. It's hard not to get frightened, and just write what will be easy to write, and easy to read. It's hard not to just stop talking entirely, out of fear of saying something wrong. Out of fear or saying too much, or saying too little.

And it is at that point - the point where honesty totally dies - where writing of any kind becomes absolutely and totally fucking pointless. So here it is: the honesty I am holding out to the dark audience, just because if I don't... I might as well get off the stage entirely.

I am struggling to write. And I am finding it harder to write because I am finding it harder to feel. And I am finding it harder to feel, because I am taking huge amounts of medication that have been designed specifically to stop me doing just that. Anti-depressants that do what they promise to do: anti-depress. And make me completely and utterly numb in the process.

I am bi-polar. I have always been so - was a strange, weird little girl - and I will always be so, because the doctor says it will never go away. And I am utterly ashamed of it. The patches of uncontrollable mania: the trembling, the bouncing, the inability to think straight or see straight or feel anything but nauseous over-excitement and the conviction that I am unstoppable, possibly immortal. Followed, inevitably, by patches of overwhelming, core-cutting, invisible darkness that tells me I am unstartable and ready to die. The ups where I don't know how to feel or what to do, and the lows where I don't know how to feel or what to do. The constant, exhausting flinging between one state and another, with - thank God - a gap in between of relative peace where I regret all I did and said before, and fear intensely all I may say and do afterwards. The wolf that comes and steals me away from all normal, healthy relationships, because I don't know what is right and what is usual, and I don't know when or how to walk away from what is not. Because "normality" is just a word, to me, and means nothing. It's just the space between the two states that I cling to because it doesn't hurt so much.

And, as sick as I have been in my life, nothing has ever made me as sick as heartbreak. Nothing has ever pulled apart my sanity as far as those eighteen months of loving, and questioning, and believing, and unbelieving: of not knowing what is real and what is lies, of trusting, and losing, and having the essence of myself taken apart every day and chewed up by someone else. Nothing has ever broken me apart as much as being told that I am loved for everything I am, and then being told that I never could be. That I am unloveable, and unlikeable. That I am "mental", by a man I only ever wanted to be sane for. By a man who was also on medication for the way his mind worked.

And so, to survive - so  that I would eat again, so that my periods would start again - I went back on medication. On the highest dose I have ever been on. And I have taken it every single day, now, since the breakup. And the hurt has slowly, slowly stopped. And while the thought of all of it hasn't stopped, the pain has. I feel nothing anymore. Not for him, not for her, not for love, and not for the past. Not for anything. At all. Nothing.

But I can't write. The numbness has gotten into the corners of me: curled into the creases of my mind, and around my toes and my fingers. My brain is thinking nothing; my heart is feeling nothing. When I laugh, I can't feel it; when I cry, I can't feel it. And while the future has come back for me - the belief that perhaps I am worth something, that I can do something - it is in a vague, unbothered kind of way. A yeah, I guess, but does it really matter? kind of way. A stoned kind of way. And while happiness has come back, it is in a faded, hey dude, whatever, you know? kind of way. A medically enhanced kind of  way.

And I don't know what to do. Whether to be at peace for a while, and unable to do the thing that matters most to me, or to be in pain, and able to write. Or hang on, and hope that something changes: that my emotions come back, but only the good ones. I don't know which me to choose. I don't know whether to use this as an emotional holiday to piece myself back together, or to stop so that whatever piecing I do is permanent. Whether to risk going back there - to the scariest place I have ever been - or to risk never really feeling life again. Or to give myself enough time to be myself again and take the help I have been given.

But I know one thing for certain. For better or worse, I have built this stage and I am standing on it. I am still speaking. And without honesty, I am letting everyone else who is ever sick, or ever unhappy, or ever mental - who struggles against the dark, and against the light, and against themselves - do it on their own. I am saying with my silence that they should be ashamed of who they are, and what they feel, and what they could be. I am saying that not being perfect is something to hide, when it isn't. And I am doing that to myself as well.

My eyes are still shut, and the audience is still dark. But I'm not going to be frightened anymore, and I'm not going to be scared. Because it's a big stage, and honesty should be the only reason that any of us are up here.

It should be the only reason any of us are writing at all.