Twenty-Four
The very first melancholy episode I can remember experiencing occurred when I was ten. It was a simple moment of darkness, of feeling inexplicably down. Given it arrived with little surprise, things must’ve been happening earlier that normalised this for me, although I don’t recall anything specific. These episodes got worse through my teens, along with periods of agitation, punctuated by the occasional manic burst of energy. But I learned to mask it all as best as I could, although that wasn’t always easy. These things made it hard to fit in, hard to connect, hard to be like everybody else. Everything was an act. I looked like one of…
Twenty
Back in the 1980s when I was just a teen, I had a lot of mental health issues before I even knew what they were. They were my normal – being agitated, or having unexplainable bouts of melancholy, or feeling a disconnect from everybody else. It wasn’t until they exploded into panic attacks that the public hospital psychiatrist was able to give me some muddy clarity. But the worst of those mental health issues, the meltdowns, came at important times developmentally – when I should’ve been making my way out into the world, I was dealing with anxiety, cluster panic attacks, and OCD; when friends were marrying and working steadily,…