I know, I know -- I've done this before. "I'll start a blog!" I say, clutching pen and paper to my chest*. "I will reveal my soul to the world paragraph by paragraph! There will be universal in the specific, and also my cats will be famous." And for a minute there, do you know what, I really believe it with the whole corn husk where my heart should be.
In theatre -- and especially as playwrights -- we often ask the question, "why this, why now?"
Here's my answer tonight, this sixth day of January: because I am writing a survival guide for my life. because I want to survive it.
I don't quite know where to begin (though I hear it is a very good place to start). Until, oh, four years ago, I suffered from mental illness silently -- because I had no idea that crying oneself to sleep wasn't normal. That a burning, all-consuming desire to die wasn't just, like, a thing that happened to everybody. That most people can remember their childhoods and didn't spend them hiding in the laundry room out of a crippling though at the time unnameable anxiety.
After that -- and I don't remember why, except that one day it just became a little too obvious, a little too painful, a little too something -- I came out of the mental illness closet with fire and glitter rainbows. Immediately thereafter, I was (mis)diagnosed with bipolar II and given a cocktail of pharmaceutical medication big enough to choke a horse. Lithium, Seroquel, Welbutrin, Trazadone, Prozac -- all these and more. Not all at the same time, but various and sundry throughout the next four years of my life.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am being hyperbolic here (you'll get used to it). If I hadn't finally admitted to myself (and others) that something was capital W wrong with me, and I hadn't taken the steps to get medication and so on and so forth, I would be dead.
Sorry to be so brutal, but it is true. That is not hyperbole. Note that that is the last time I will apologize for myself here. I am not here to apologize for anything, merely to document.
Here I am, though, four years later and living to joke about it on the internet. I saw roughly a million therapists til I found one that fit (and that I could afford), have been on and off medication, read some self-help books (I recommend Augusten Burrough's This is How), filled A LOT of journals with some real sad shit, meditated, yoga'd, got acupuncture done til I couldn't afford it anymore, had one really weird session of energy work, and even a brief little stint in a psych ward.
What will this blog be? A safe space (hopefully, and also I originally wrote "space space", so it shall be that too) for me to memoir-as-I-go. Radical transparency, especially regarding invisible conditions like mental illness, is important to me, so there will be plenty of that. I used to want to run a style blog, so fuck, that too.
I'll also post pictures of my cats because they really should be famous, to be quite honest.
We'll see what comes next.
*I realize blogs are on the internet, but this is my mental image, okay?
In theatre -- and especially as playwrights -- we often ask the question, "why this, why now?"
Here's my answer tonight, this sixth day of January: because I am writing a survival guide for my life. because I want to survive it.
I don't quite know where to begin (though I hear it is a very good place to start). Until, oh, four years ago, I suffered from mental illness silently -- because I had no idea that crying oneself to sleep wasn't normal. That a burning, all-consuming desire to die wasn't just, like, a thing that happened to everybody. That most people can remember their childhoods and didn't spend them hiding in the laundry room out of a crippling though at the time unnameable anxiety.
After that -- and I don't remember why, except that one day it just became a little too obvious, a little too painful, a little too something -- I came out of the mental illness closet with fire and glitter rainbows. Immediately thereafter, I was (mis)diagnosed with bipolar II and given a cocktail of pharmaceutical medication big enough to choke a horse. Lithium, Seroquel, Welbutrin, Trazadone, Prozac -- all these and more. Not all at the same time, but various and sundry throughout the next four years of my life.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am being hyperbolic here (you'll get used to it). If I hadn't finally admitted to myself (and others) that something was capital W wrong with me, and I hadn't taken the steps to get medication and so on and so forth, I would be dead.
Sorry to be so brutal, but it is true. That is not hyperbole. Note that that is the last time I will apologize for myself here. I am not here to apologize for anything, merely to document.
Here I am, though, four years later and living to joke about it on the internet. I saw roughly a million therapists til I found one that fit (and that I could afford), have been on and off medication, read some self-help books (I recommend Augusten Burrough's This is How), filled A LOT of journals with some real sad shit, meditated, yoga'd, got acupuncture done til I couldn't afford it anymore, had one really weird session of energy work, and even a brief little stint in a psych ward.
What will this blog be? A safe space (hopefully, and also I originally wrote "space space", so it shall be that too) for me to memoir-as-I-go. Radical transparency, especially regarding invisible conditions like mental illness, is important to me, so there will be plenty of that. I used to want to run a style blog, so fuck, that too.
I'll also post pictures of my cats because they really should be famous, to be quite honest.
We'll see what comes next.
*I realize blogs are on the internet, but this is my mental image, okay?
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