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

by Kelly Jensen

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.

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.

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.

When I was eighteen, my mom sat me down and said, “If there ever comes a time where you feel like a dark cloud is following you, you can get help. You can talk to me, talk to a therapist, talk to doctor. I want you to know that there are options.”

Mental illnesses make good liars. Depression told me how worthless life was. Anxiety told me it wouldn’t get better without tremendous energy, and that wasn’t something I had the capacity to give. Together that cocktail of insecurity and exhaustion swirled inside my mind and wreaked havoc on my body for years.

what makes us human is that we have emotions, some good and some bad, some comfortable and some not. If we didn’t, we’d be robots and nothing in life would have meaning. It’s when we go in the wrong direction for too long and can’t course correct on our own that we need to find what helps us do just that.

how interrupting everyone’s (seemingly) happy lives with my own unhappiness only made me regret sharing all this with them in the first place;