This was the July I wrote Summer Is…, sitting with what felt like a forest fire at the back of my head as I teetered on the brink of psychosis for the second time in my life in an office job where no one knew or could understand what was happening to me. I would pretend to be working as a receptionist but in reality, I would be off in a shattered imagination somewhere, creating prose poems that didn’t make sense, or did but only to me and so what was reflected back to me was my own fragmentation.
Back then, I didn’t even understand what was happening to me. It would be another month before ‘First Episode Psychosis’ was scribbled on my prescription for Olanzapine that my beloved partner took from me as we made our way back through the psychiatric ward of Ladywell Hospital.
I look at this picture and I see a girl who wasn’t all there. Or perhaps she was there, but too much. Too much feeling, too much pain, too much thinking, too many jagged thoughts, cracking and fizzing through my brain. Splintering like the sunlight on the canal we walked beside, shining just a little too sharply on the family of swans cutting through the algae that I was graced to look down on from above.
Even then, I was proud to be able to capture this picture. I cherish it to this day, this moment caught on film. It represents to me the creativity that has kept me going my entire life, my need to document, and a keen eye for beauty still shining through somehow the cracks of brokenness that were becoming too big for me to hold together anymore. It wouldn’t be until six years later that I would learn from Social Services documents found whilst clearing my dad’s flat that I didn’t have that great a chance of being all there to begin with. Or of being able to hold my brokenness when things went wrong.
My sister and I walked the length of the canal that leads off from Warwick Avenue tube station that scorching hot day when she was down visiting me from her home in Leeds. I was scattered, full of energy and not making any sense. She walked beside me, frowning, trying to process my mood. As we stood in the train station I was overwhelmed with blackness and my entire being plummeted, I couldn’t control it and felt myself lost in the pit. I reached for my sister, physically stretching out my hands and yelping like a dog, painfully aware I was ruining the mood, the weather, our relationship, all within the space of 30 seconds, pawing at her for help. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, gasping, apologising for this monster of myself. ‘I’m sorry Fra,’ she said, perplexed and slightly disturbed. ‘I don’t know what you want’. I wanted her to save me. We have finally had the conversation that this can never be the case.
My father (with the slightly shocking lucidness that his Schizo-Affective Disorder often gives him) would ask me that summer, quite rhetorically and with a wry, knowing smile, ‘You’re manic, aren’t you?’ It was the most insight he had had into me in years, although I was in no fit state to appreciate it at the time.
There was so much abundance, beauty, wealth, harmony… I couldn’t believe me and my cracked-open mind were allowed to walk among it. So I took pictures of the flaking yet regal red and gold paint of the boats, the tumbling flower baskets, the willow trees dipping their leaves into the water. It felt like nothing could ever really go wrong here. But it was too hot. The barges along the canal seemed to be baking. As my therapist recently reminded me, mental health does not care about social status, environment or aesthetics. It can attack us all. And it is always happening, to all of us, all the time. This observation came in response to my reluctance to attend a mental health group session here in Leeds, where I now live, for fear of being judged for my accent, my big faux leopard print coat that gives me both comfort and confidence and for my problems not being deemed ‘big’ enough.
I was in so much pain. And yet here I am in this picture. Smiling through it all. In my sundress. Trying to enjoy the summer. Ricocheting from one terrifying emotion to the next.
My advice from writing all of this is this:
1. Go to the support group. Even if you bottle it the first time and don’t go in. Go back. The right people will meet you at the door and welcome you there. You will be held. You will be supported. Remember that if you feel judgement this is more about their perception than it is about you. It is hardly, ever, actually about you. That is a lesson for life not just for support groups.
2. Use people’s love as a springboard, not a liferaft.
3. Don’t wait until you are in crisis to seek help. If you feel fragmentation, overwhelm, darkness, despair, find a trained professional to talk to. Psychotherapy saved my life. I will never downplay the power of a good therapist.
4. The threads of your true self, the threads of your survival, are always with you. They will always be the light that shines through the cracks. Go through the pictures on your phone and pick out the ones that make you happy. Put them in an album, and revisit it whenever you need to.
5. There are few things more powerful than a personal story.
6. Write what you mean. Not just the bits you aren’t scared to write. In the fear lies the medicine. This is the scariest fact of all.
To anyone going through mental health and suffering. Keep going. It gets better.
In Love & Light, FS X
A Daughter of Nyx 