If this blog is about any one thing, it’s mental health. Hashtag, mental health awareness, right?
Well, my mental health has been very poor, lately, and I cannot avoid being aware of it.
It’s not even easy to verbally pin down and describe. It’s just this nebulous feeling of not being really alive inside. I had a couple minutes today when I was listening to “MMMBop” by Hanson on Liberty Ave, and I was experiencing a little relief but the rest of it… not good.
I can’t even pin down exactly what it is, I just know it’s unpleasant. for instance I’m unable to access the part of my being that enjoys music. I know I have always had a deep appreciation for music, but I cant get there. Imagine the predicament of wanting to solve something that can’t even be understood firmly enough for apt verbal description.
At least I know what won’t solve it. I know from extensive research and development that drugs and alcohol are not at all viable solutions. I’ve traveled those particular roads about as far into that darkness as someone can go. I’ve traveled them so many times, that it’s honestly embarrassing. I’m not unintelligent, one would think i’d have figured it out sooner that all of those roads always go to the same place, no matter which vehicle you take.
The operative blessing, lately, is that I don’t let the depression stop me from taking actions that will prevent me from entertaining the idea that I will find a way to get high successfully, and that it will fix this thing that is indescribably wrong within me. I say it’s a blessing, because being willing to do things I don’t want to do, even if they are good for me is not in my nature.
There’s another thing going on: my severely schizophrenic roommate Robert is more symptomatic than ever and literally screaming at himself all of the time, and I can hear it at all hours. I think the fact that I’m not in the best mental spot is causing it to be more troubling to me than perhaps it normally would be.
I’m granted housing due to a NYC program designed to help people with metal illness diagnoses, and a history of homelessness become able to achieve and maintain a better life than we found on the street, or in the various institutions where tend we end up.
I first wrote that last sentence as “maintain a better life than THEY found on the street, or in the various institutions where THEY end up.”. I had to rewrite it, to say WE. Sure, I may not be yelling at myself, but i’m no stranger to being completely out of my mind, i’m no stranger to living on the street, or being in a psychiatric hospital. They are me.
I don’t know if you read every post I write, of course I hope you do, but a recent one was about how I hate how self centered I am. So, I find myself with the opportunity to be compassionate to another human being. My experiences with mental health struggles, and the institutions they can land you in make me perhaps less horrified by someone with symptomatic schizophrenia, than your average civilian would be.
Of course, I am talking to the staff that works with him. The conversations aren’t centered in the negative effects that proximity to this kind of thing are having on me though, not that the facet can be completely ignored, my mental health is important to me. I just think “this poor fucking guy”.
Robert is roughly my age, black, severely mentally ill and from Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. being around my age He came up in the 1990s New York that is not the city I’ve been living in since 2020: the pre-mass gentrification, gritty New York . I can’t imagine this environment was particularly kind and rosy to someone with a condition that still isn’t well understood by most. There are numerous marginalizing factors working in unison against him.
When I look at things this way, I don’t feel so bad for myself with my depression . When “they” becomes “we” I don’t feel like shit about myself for being self centered, because if I truly was, this kind of perception would not be possible.
I write about mental health.
