[Don't] Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health

by Kelly Jensen

And while all those words might be useful for cataloging my behavior in one given circumstance, they would not and could not define me completely. Because we define words, not people.

Depression is a thing I carry with me. It is a shadow that lurks inside me. Depression is the smoke that ebbs and flows within my body. Depression is the result of chemical changes within my brain. Depression is the parasite. It is the foreign invader. An unwelcome guest. Depression is the voice that whispers in the back of my head. It is the rain that falls and the thunder that shakes the windows and the lightning that strikes the earth. It is the ghost that haunts me.

I define “depression,” but depression does not define me because you cannot define a person. Not with a single word, not with an entire book. Human beings defy definition. Yet the stigma surrounding mental illness makes some believe we can use it to define others, and it often deceives us into believing we must use it to define ourselves.

And the most fucked-up part is that once someone has defined you by your mental illness enough times, you begin to define yourself by it.

To my mother, I am not the Doctor or a computer or my books or depression or even simply her son. I am a whole person: complex and unique and loved. She doesn’t define me; she accepts me.

You may know someone who has a mental illness, but that person is not that mental illness. Don’t try to tell them they are. You may have depression, but you are not depression. Stop telling yourself you are. Wake up every day and tell yourself that your thoughts and your words belong to you. No one is allowed to undermine who you are by defining you on their terms. Depression is a disease, a collection of symptoms. It is not a human being. It is not a person. It may live in your skin, but it does not control you. It may whisper in your ear, but it doesn’t speak for you. It may be the smoke in your body, but it cannot suffocate you. It may be the result of chemical changes in your brain, but so is hunger. It may haunt you, but it will never drive you away.

Define words, not people. Define “depression,” but don’t define others by it. Because we are pe...

Trichotillomania. Compulsive hair pulling. Its sister, dermatillomania, is compulsive skin picking. They fall under the umbrella of body-focused repetitive behaviors, a group of disorders that causes people to touch their hair, skin, and nails in ways that (usually) cause physical damage.

Some people go for the hair on their head; others go for eyebrows, eyelashes, pubic hair, arm hair, leg hair, nose hair, facial hair, any hair. Sometimes the urge is brought on by stress; other times, it’s simply a relaxation method that’s used while doing something mindless: reading, driving, watching TV, doing homework, scrolling through the internet for hours on end.

The cycle never ends.

“Is it an anxiety thing?” That’s what people think, but it’s not, really. It’s a mindless compulsion. “Isn’t it a form of self-harm?” I guess. “Don’t you hate it?” Every. Single. Day.

For the first time in so long, I had full eyebrows—two whole eyebrows.

Mental illness doesn’t always make sense.

Even though trichotillomania is a daily struggle, I find ways to laugh at it. Hairstylists get a kick out of when I say, “Hey, whoa, hey, be careful with the shampoo—I don’t have eyebrows. Please don’t wipe them off.” My guy rolls his eyes when he kisses my forehead and I say to be very, very careful with my eyebrows. Because I don’t have any. In case he didn’t know. When a delivery person rings the buzzer and I only have one brow drawn on, I can’t go down to get the package because I won’t let my face with only one bangin’ brow be seen by anyone. I’m still pulling. If I’m not pulling, I’m twirling my hair. Or fidgeting with something. I probably will pull and fidget my whole life.

Trichotillomania used to control me, but now it’s just a part of my existence. I can battle the effect, but the cause will always hang out in my brain somewhere. I’m still dealing with not being ashamed, but I’m getting there.

To me, impostor syndrome is excelling at something or having good things happen in my career, paired with the sneaking suspicion that my good fortune will end because, ultimately, I don’t deserve it. I can’t revel in accolades or achievements because I feel I never truly deserve them. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and sooner or later everyone will realize that.

With the new diagnosis, I started researching everything I could about BPD. Most of what I found was extremely disparaging: I remember reading somewhere that people who have BPD fall between annoying and crazy and dangerous. I also read that those with BPD were broken down into types, and one group was witch/warlock. I found a Facebook post in which a woman said that she would rather work with ten people with schizophrenia than one person with BPD. I fell into a spiral of negativity. The information I found, compounded with the ever-present impostor syndrome, fed into what I’ve been good at doing for so long: treating myself like shit.

While I allowed other people room to be who they were—messy, flawed, and complex—I didn’t give myself that same leeway. Everything about me was in simple black and white.

I only wish someone had told me not that I was “crazy” but that I was sick, and there was a way to get better.

When there are things about yourself you can’t change—no matter how much you might want to and no matter how hard you try—it sort of throws your ideas about free will and agency into chaos.

Acceptance, I’ve come to believe, is an act of free will. An expression of my personal agency.

I never understood what exactly about me was impossible. Perhaps it was because I was a Real Girl and not a paper doll. Perhaps it was because I was a jumbled up Rubik’s Cube of a human, all my sides and interests and passions mixed up and without order. Or perhaps it was because my mania made me sparkling, erratic, unpredictable. Mysterious. Magical. I liked the idea of being magical. It fit with the idea of being a fantasy. I liked looking at the world like it was an unfolding flower of possibility, the most amazing Instagram filter mental illness could make. I liked making people laugh, I liked surprising them with spontaneity, I liked seeing their eyes light up with delight—I liked it, I liked it, I liked it.

But mania didn’t make me magical; it made me reckless. It made me capricious, contradictory, and cruel. It made me incoherent. It didn’t just make me dangerous, it made me a danger—to my family, to my friends, to myself.

Sometimes I wonder if having a mental illness is supposed to be visible. Am I supposed to bear the scars—both physical and metaphorical—of my disorder like a flag, like a warning? Do I wear a sign about my neck that reads: Here Be a Real-Life Crazy Person—Tread Carefully? What do people expect of me, once they know?

Mental illness is a part of me. Living with bipolar disorder is like being the Goldilocks of your own brain, always in search of the state of Just Right. Just Right is when I’m Me—generally sanguine, frivolous, whimsical, with a touch of grumpy old lady. When I’m manic, I’m Too Much Me. When I’m depressed, I’m Not Enough Me.

But I’m not noble. I’m not tragic. I don’t suffer. I don’t struggle with a mental illness monster; I am the motherfucking monster.

I have needed that string, that tether, to know that I matter. Matter. Mass. I have weight and depth and dimension. I have significance, for I am a human being, entire.

I was real enough on my own.

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s dopamine.

It felt like someone snuck inside my brain, poked around, tangled up the wiring, made a mess, and suddenly it was my responsibility to clean it up. Maybe it was all those drugs I did. Maybe it was all that less-than-ideal parenting and trauma. Maybe it was the history of mental illness on my dad’s side. Maybe it was thetans or demonic possession or karmic punishment for past-life transgressions.

But of course it is more complicated than that. There is that whole thing about addiction being a disease that never quite goes away. There is that whole thing about my entire existence being a series of cravings and attachments and aversions and seeking pleasure and trying to avoid pain. There is my depression to consider. My anxiety. My nervous attachment style. My inability to communicate. My trauma. The countless shadows that trail me wherever I go, picking up debris, making a mess.

Maybe that is the point of all writing—to communicate, to connect, to forge compassion and understanding between writer and reader. Not to impress some elitist writing professor. And sometimes that communication comes out as a confession. And maybe that’s okay. Because maybe confessing is better than keeping it all in. Maybe telling secrets is better than letting those secrets fester and poison us and make us sick. Even when they’re cries for help. Maybe especially when they’re cries for help.

Who was not obsessively anxious about loss, even in the middle of

abundance.

I was repeatedly rewarded with compliments for making myself less. For disappearing a little more every day.

My story is beautiful. I can’t skip to the ending, but I believe that my story looks amazing—all of it! And it’s not finished yet. I’ll be okay.

Hurtful words usually belong to those who haven’t yet healed from the pain inflicted by their own demons.

Laugh as much as possible. Don’t take yourself, and your appearance, too seriously. Life is beautiful—as are you—and you’re just getting started.

ANXIETY: Thanks! (bites nails) Careful with the compliments, though. Makes me nervous. I’ll feel like I can’t live up to the hype. Like I’m just waiting to disappoint you. (staring, wide-eyed) I’m a fraud. Everyone knows it. I shouldn’t even be going to this conference.

From up in the sky, the shiny, isolated pinpoints seem to bend toward each other, light seeking light, as if desperate for companionship in those vast fields of nighttime loneliness.)

My brain is kind of a douche.

So, no, I do not especially want to be at the Van Gogh exhibit. But then, I do not particularly want to be anywhere. And looking at paintings seems healthier than staring at nothing in my bedroom, vaguely wishing a small, specific asteroid would descend through the ceiling. Besides, going to the art museum is experimental, like pushing a bruise. Will I feel anything? Or will I, surrounded by famed artistry, feel a continual and pressing blankness?

And, if I get a daylong migraine while already depressed, that nexus can really make me wish to be excused from the dinner table of mortal existence.

People do not tend to know when I am pretty freakin’ unwell. For a lot of reasons. I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable or burdened or—often, I just don’t want to talk about it. But also because, frankly, most of the wrestling matches between my health and me happen in a dark bedroom.

Standing there, I wonder—as I sometimes do—if people think of suicidal ideation as thoughts that are obviously sinister. If they assume the voice comes in a snake hiss or a demon’s warped bass. Does it occur to them that it could sound like the friend who nudges you at a bad, crowded party and whispers, conspiratorially, “Hey, let’s get out of here.” Do these women consider how well you have to know yourself to see that moment for what it is and whisper back, “You are not my real friend.”

I have always gotten stuck. A thought kicks off inside my head, and goes around and around until it has its own mass and gravity, a force strong enough that I can’t seem to pull free. I started to think of this dangerous mental landscape as quicksand, but in truth, it’s the opposite—because you have to pull yourself free. The less you fight against it—or the less you know how to fight against it—the deeper you sink.

I obsess over anything out of my control. I take a potential—and potentially innocuous—event, conversation, action, and obsess over its size, scope, every way in which it can go right or wrong depending on my actions and reactions. It’s a game of chess played out with me on one side and the world on the other.

I was beginning to feel a dangerous level of control. Dangerous, because I knew it was a fallacy, knew that every victory was not a guarantee of those to come. And so vigilance became hypervigilance. Attention became obsession. Once lodged in my mind, “Be careful” became Be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful be careful . . .

I am always one foot away from the black hole inside my head. I still get stuck. No matter how vigilant I try to be, how wary of my mental footing, I can’t seem to avoid that inevitable wayward step. It’s only a matter of time before I slip, one leg plunging into the dark.

There is a black hole at the center of my mind.