The Insect

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What is having a mental illness like?

Recently, I was watching Shutter Island, one of my favorite movies, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s character described mental illness in a way that hit the nail on the head:

“After she tried to kill herself the first time, Dolores told me she... she had an insect living inside her brain. She could feel it clicking across her skull, just... pulling the wires, just for fun. She told me that.”

And I thought to myself, “That’s exactly it.” That’s exactly what having a mental illness feels like. Like there’s two people inhabiting my brain: me and the insect.

There are some mornings that I wake up and I look in the mirror, and I can that there’s feel two people inside me. Do you know how scary that is, to feel another force at work inside your brain? And heaven forbid you tell someone that you feel like you’re not alone inside you’re head—that’s a fast track to people reacting badly.

And the insect “pulls the wires” and makes me do things I don’t want to.

For example, I’ll be having a good day at work, then the insect whispers a niggling doubt into my inner ear. What if something goes wrong? My logical side answers, “Then we will deal with the results as they happen.” But what if? the insect whispers back as it slowly sinks its pincers into my heart, squeezing until it races and I can’t breathe. YOU CAN’T DO THIS! YOU CAN’T DO THIS! YOU CAN’T DO THIS! It screams a bloody mantra into my mind. My logical side tries to combat the mantra, to talk the insect down, but her words are whipped away in the winds of the swirling storm. I run to the bathroom and slam the stall door, leaning against the wall breathing heavily. A single tear slips down my cheek, the only manifestation of the screaming within.

Do you know what it is to try to talk yourself down, when one side of you is screaming and the other can’t find the words to stop it? Do you know how scary it is when the insect takes control and you are helpless to stop it? Do you know how helpless you feel when you realize that THE INSECT IS YOU and that you are your own worst enemy? Do you know how guilty it makes you feel when you have to cancel on someone or miss a meeting or turn in an incomplete assignment and the only explanation you can offer is that it’s YOUR fault, when in reality it’s the insect’s?

Other mornings, I will wake up in the morning and lay in the darkness, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. As I lay in this moment of silence, the insect skitters across my mind, breathing its foul breath into my brain and settling me in a fog of despair and carelessness. “It’s time to get up,” my logical side announces. You can’t, the insect hisses back. As I try to move my limbs, the insect traps me, making them heavy and immovable. My logical brain wins this argument: “If you don’t get up now, you’ll lose your job and then you’ll have no income to live on.” However, as I begin dragging my stone-like limbs out of bed, the insect floods my consciousness with gray. I see the day before me like a vast, dead plain covered in scraggly underbrush. You have to walk that entire plain today, and you know what you’ll find when you reach the end? Nothing. Does that sound worth it to you? “I have to,” comes my weak response. Suit yourself, crows the insect, and I spend the rest of the day dragging a boulder’s worth of weight across that plain. Someone asks me how I am, and I respond, “Tired.”

Living with a mental illness is fighting a battle in your head all day, every day. Sometimes you win the battle, and sometimes you lose. And it is extremely exhausting. So please, never tell someone with a mental illness to “get over it” or to “just pray about it” or “think more positively.” Though you are trying to help, you essentially just told someone with an illness to make themselves well. It doesn’t work for physical illness, and it certainly doesn’t work for mental illness.

I think these words from the musical Next to Normal really sum things up well:

"Do you wake up in the morning and need help to lift your head?

Do you read obituaries and feel jealous of the dead?

It's like living on a cliff-side, not knowing when you'll dive

Do you know, do you know, what it's like to die alive?

When the world that once had color

Fades to white and gray and black

When tomorrow terrifies you

But you'll die if you look back

You don't know

I know you don't know

You say that you're hurting, it sure doesn't show

You don't know

It lays me so low

When you say let go, and I say you don't know

The sensation that you're screaming, but you never make a sound

Or the feeling that you're falling, but you never hit the ground

It just keeps on rushing at you, day-by-day-by-day-by-day

You don't know, you don't know, what it's like to live that way

Like a refugee, a fugitive, forever on the run

If it gets me it will kill me, but I don't know what I've done"

The insect is real, and it’s fucking scary.