By Vienna //
I don’t have a diagnosed mental illness. But I almost stepped foot into the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) for an appointment. I was just short of returning their missed call to schedule an appointment date.
I don’t remember much of what I went through from around April 2018 to August 2019. But I knew it was a dark period. My life’s calendar felt like it was partially erased and blanked out. Like flipping through those old-school tear-off almanacs, the ones with red and green Chinese characters, and then finding chunks of missing pages.
Usually when you find missing pages of a calendar or one that doesn’t tell you today’s date, the calendar is deemed irrelevant; past. Those “extra” pages are crushed and torn away so that it reflects present day. But I choose to keep these incomplete calendars of the past and tell you about them.
During that period of time, I used Instagram stories to document a lot of my daily thoughts and emotions. Things like:
“Tipped over the highest point of the rollercoaster.”
–
“I fell into a hole.
I landed somewhere.
But after a while, the ground caved in and I fell again.
Landed somewhere and fell again.
And again.
And I just keep falling.”
–
“It’s a lift full of people.
No one got out, no one had wanted to go out at this level.
No one came in either. No one could go in.
I stood outside the lift and watched as the door closed. I waited for the next.”
–
“Hot showers don’t work anymore.”
–
“Yesterday was sitting in the middle of the road and watching cars zoom by. Or standing in the middle of the Shibuya crossing, or something, and watching people zoom past.
Today is sitting by my bedside, hugging my knees, in a dark quiet cold room. Staring out of the window at the moon in the sky, with faint moonlight streaming in the window as the only source of light.”
Perhaps some of you resonate with what I felt or have experienced some semblance of it.
Maybe you can’t relate, or think what I wrote was gibberish. Then, perhaps, this is a strong argument for how mental health is different for everyone.
Doesn’t breathing feel different, changing from one day to the next? It does at least for me.
So when someone comes to you and tells you about their bad days, listen. Listen attentively, like the way you had just read every syllable of this story, even if you may not be able to understand or relate to my experience.
For those of you who do stay on to read until the end, I’d like to leave you with a song lyric that I personally like: The sun will rise and we will try again.
I hope you might remember this tiny quote whenever you have a bad day. Indeed, the sun will rise and we will try again.
Vienna holds a Diploma in Psychology Studies and does not know how to read minds. However, she does enjoy listening to people very much. She believes in the power of one degree of change – that small actions can have immeasurable impact in the long run.
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