Ups and downs
I want to thank everyone who took the time to write in response to last week’s column. The greatest response I get is when I write about mental health, so what does that tell you? It tells me that people want to talk about it and are really glad when someone opens the conversation, and especially when that someone is talking from experience.
One regular reader who says she’s always enjoyed my columns back to the “Definitely Not Martha Stewart” days went so far as to suggest maybe I should be writing a column on mental health. Another wrote “You always seem to make us smile even when the topic is more serious”.
I could write a personal column on mental health (which I don’t think is necessarily the same as mental illness) but keeping up making people smile would be a challenge. In fact, writing a column about anything when you’re low enough to crawl under a snake’s belly is very hard. When I’ve written from a very black place, I’ve hoped, as Older Sister says, “you wouldn’t know but I was in my right mind.”
In some contexts, the snake’s belly thing is a witty expression but when I say to my sisters “the snake is back” they know I am in the grip of something horrible and debilitating. It was easier for me than to say I was severely depressed and I haven’t said it for a while now, but anything that makes it easier to talk about it and puts other people more at ease is a good thing.
For example, I have a friend who has known she is bi-polar for decades and has been taking the appropriate medication for it. She has been stable for decades, and jokes about “being in her manic phase” sometimes when she gets really enthusiastic about something. She’s joking but she’s very understanding about mental health and knows better than most that there is a big difference between manic and enthusiasm,
I am relatively enthusiastic about Christmas decorating this year, but if I start baking I won’t have to joke about being in a manic phase because Newman will say “Who are you and what have you done with Janice?” Baking is like housekeeping; now I have no excuse not to do it, but that doesn’t make me want to do it. But who knows; sometime between now and Christmas I may do both. Well, I’ll have to do some of one of them, but I won’t enjoy it, even if I am in my right mind.
I have one breast, due to cancer (which I’d rather have than depression, by the way) so when I tumble over while gardening on my knees I use the expression t-t up instead of t—s up. I use my lop-sidedness as an excuse for my poor balance, falsely, because technically my body is balanced by the hernia in my abdomen on the breastless side, common apparently after the abdominal surgeries I’ve had for a colostomy and getting the colostomy reversed. I think I managed to make a few jokes about the colostomy but for the life of me I can’t remember them now.
It’s not funny to have arthritis in your knee but you can tell someone “I might get down but I’d never get up’ with a laughing face or a sad face.
Somehow making a joke about something normalizes it. A therapist would probably tell you it is also a defence tool; draw attention to your shortcomings or laugh at yourself before someone else has a chance to. That can be overdone and hide a lot of pain, but as my mother used to say “it’s better to laugh than to cry.
My “uninviting” people has become a great joke. I’d invite them when I was feeling well and then crash and un-invite them. One time I uninvited Janine before I had actually invited her. I wanted her to know I had been planning to invite her so I called and told her. We had a laugh in spite of the snake.
I’m not making light of it; some people never have good days. Society has a long way to go.