I’ve lived with relapse and recovery, the hospitalization of mental illness recurring every six months or so since my early twenties. I don’t talk very much about my nervous breakdown in my twenties. I don’t have the words. Perhaps they will come one day. I feel I have to write about mental illness now and I’m not just writing it for my dad who had his own uphill struggles or me, I am writing for millions.
Mental illness affects millions. Mental illness is relevant for millions and everyone out there has an opinion about it. The more we talk about the more the stigma of mental illness will be removed.
People say things. There is still injustice. How mental illness is portrayed in films, amongst family members who won’t accept you or love you. You’ll be labeled but I’ve come to understand that that is not the worst thing. The worst thing in the world is the stigma. The silence that surrounds the voice of mental illness. The voices of mental illness.
Azania, the African continent, every African exile and citizen, you are gifted beyond anything than you could ever imagine. There’s so much injustice in this world and so much evil. Let us think before we act, before we speak and then think and act with intelligence. The drugs, the chemicals give me a quality of life, a semblance of life.
Illness, any sickness, disease is a mere bridge between two worlds.
The links to health and ill health. How to overcome ill health, chronic ill health I have no answers for that if answers are what you are looking for but there is always hope and God and the writing keeps me sane. You have to find your own bridge, crossing over from relapse to recovery, health and ill health, find your own motion, you own motivation and movement across that bridge.
Risperdal, do you know it. Zopiclone, Pax, Ativan, Lithium (yes, the drug that has brought millions to their knees, that sent me reeling and flying into a coma, and nearly killed me). Do you know Epilim (the wonder drug of wonder drugs, the mood stabiliser), Centroforge (for the high blood pressure), Eltroxin (for the underactive thyroid). I think of the multi-vitamins when I can afford. The herbal teas that my sister gifts me with when she comes home from Johannesburg.
I have taken up raja yoga meditation (taught to me by my parents from a young age), read Chopra’s books, “The Anatomy of the Spirit”, and all I am doing is to hear the voice of God in that still moment.
Prayer has become important. In those moments I talk to God. There should be nothing embarrassing about someone who is mentally ill talking to God (in prayer). It is people who make it so. Having a mental illness is the sickness of our time. In this, a time of technological advancement and millennial-fever. When I use to be a child-adolescent I used to think that the church was a lie because it was filled with Sunday-Christians. The women wearing their meringue-like hats on top of their heads. Dad said I should be forgiving. He still tells me this to this day.
I have a love for other people now. Especially other people living in Africa in these times. Although I am shy I find people lovable now.
Everyone has a gift. Not everyone has a talent for finding what their gift is before they die. In sonic youth I had a profound self-confidence (because of bipolar). No longer, (because of the same reason, because of bipolar). The self-confidence (arrogance to most who knew me then in my early twenties in Johannesburg) has ebbed, ebbed, ebbed away-a-way out of me. I have become profoundly neurotic over the years. I cannot explain my neuroses away. They have helped me form this type of, kind of Khoi-personality, and then I think of Krotoa, and Saartjie Baartman. Ask myself, are they in my genes. They must be. They must, for my paternal family were slaves in some distant past. I think of St. Helena. The island of Napoleon’s exile. The island were my paternal grandfather was born.
