Clown & I – A Bipolar Memoir (Excerpt) Dollface Books (2018)
If you’re an X-Percenter (being an immeasurable X-Percent of the global population) and it still isn’t clear what people with serious mental illnesses can contribute and achieve, then maybe it is worth pondering how you would manage if you lost partial or full control of your mind. If you were to lose in love and dreams because of an invisible illness that created voices and people in your head who told you lies. The most convincing lies, because they came from you. Or saw you destroy everything you worked for, for no good reason other than mindless, inexplicable self-destruction. You lost a career, your kids, your home, self-worth and self-confidence. Hope. The only solace you could find was annihilation at the end of a needle or a bottle or death. You were locked up in hospitals to stop you killing yourself.
And yet all the while, you knew, right in there, where your soul moves, that you had something to say, something to give, something beautiful to gift, as every single person does, but your head was stripping joy away in gashes seconds after it had just given the same joy to you. You could be homeless or forced to hand over power of attorney, not for your money, but for your life. When in fact, you were capable of genius. You had a trapped gift. A flightless, wing-clipped, starving bird, left in the clear windy day, staring up into your sky home. A home you forever feared you would never live in again. Meanwhile, no-one you knew had the first fucking clue what you were trying to come to terms with. You are alone. All by yourself. No you’re not. You are bipolar. There are lots of you. You’re just having a bad month.
I know that from the outside mental health can seem complicated and a little eerie. Spine-chilling even. It isn’t. And it is. But it really isn’t that difficult to understand. Most of us have experienced the loss of someone we love through a tragedy or something beyond our control. We’ve felt the terror that comes from losing our child in a busy public place. We may have watched the same child slip silently under the surface of the ocean when we had turned our heads just for a moment. We have been rejected by the boy we crushed on so hard we thought we’d never breathe love into our scarred heart ever again. We’ve watched dreams and opportunities slip away like a silk scarf in a headland wind. I also believe that, even if it was for a fleeting moment, most of us have questioned our own sanity. We have felt that frightening disconnection between ourselves and humanity and universal order, that threw everything we knew into question. That is paralysing. We understand loss and burning emotional pain.
For the mentally ill or unwell, it’s not that much different. It’s just that these sorts of emotions and soul defeats are always close by and they can have nothing to do with a terrible life event. But they also can. We still have to manage those tragedies and terrors too.
Mental illness is simply always there for many of us. Sometimes it sits in the back room of the cheap movie cinema in our mind and we forget she is there. She may throw a little popcorn at us from behind, but it’s nothing we can’t manage with grace and a compulsory sense of humour. At other times, she is the Beautiful Child who makes the wondrous stories that light up your world and light up the minds of the masses. She’s like a genie who grants a thousand wishes and lets you have them all at once, so you can get greedy on dreams and fall in love until you burst with purity. But then she can turn on you and walk arrogantly and menacingly across the screen, stealing the beauty of the silver story away, distracting us from where we are and where we need to be. When she gets her mean on she splits through the screen and screams into our life, breaking the fourth, fifth and sixth walls, bringing on an excruciating horror scene that seems to have no end. No final credits unless we choose to manually roll the film reel forward ourselves.
These are not once-in-a-lifetime experiences. They are the perennial. It’s like pain of all kinds. You could tie my hands behind my back and slap me in the face once, and I could smile at your insolence. Slap me five times and I will spit in your eye. Slap me 1000 times and I might just lose my mind, at the very least my fight. Short-term and long-term mental health challenges are not like domestic family fights. They are hostile campaigns of armed and unarmed combat. So, don’t expect us to be domesticated. We can’t be. We would never survive in our wilds with a leash around our necks, tied to a stump. We are Wildlings of the real kind, even when we’re losing. Especially when we are winning. We need to do what we need to do. Trust us in that.
All things considered, dumb luck means I’ve got it pretty good. I’m an educated white man in a rich country. For those dealing with precarious mental health, it doesn’t get any easier than that. With that in mind, the next time you see someone wasted on drugs sitting dirty in the street, or a teenager pulling tricks under street lamplight, never assume they are a failure. Never, ever. In my world success is relative. Perhaps it’s better to wonder where that person came from. Use your imagination to consider what cards they may have been dealt in their neurology and in their life. Maybe paint a colourful picture of their life right back into their mother’s womb. Much can happen in a couple decades and less. Much can happen in a day. The contents of a single second can break us or make us masters of magic. That person’s presence as an addict, or a streetworker, that person’s very survival, may represent more success than we could every dream of, much less enjoy. That street corner may well be their Mt. Suribachi and the smile on their face could just be them staking their victory flag in the ground. Besides, if you take a walk past them next week, you might just see a person you don’t recognise. They’ll be back in the sunlight zone. They’re the next Marilyn Monroe.
Rich, homeless, somewhere in the middle, people living with serious mental health conditions, deserve a hat tilt, a curtsy, a global bow and an earth-circuit standing ovation, just because they are still here and they keep on going. They deserve respect and dignity every day they are here. They also might need a job. Give them a job.
Give them an opportunity.
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Clown & I can be purchased from all major online booksellers in paperback and eBook, but Ryan requests that you buy directly from his website clownandi.com, because he is broke and tired of missing meals. He also reckons the big booksellers are rich enough.
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