Drawing Imaginary Lines

I have been invisible.  Hidden in the folds of other people's dirty laundry, undetected, unremarkable, fading into denim, left without a ladder on a second story grape arbor in the rain with no way down and no comfort for the gripping fear of heights while thought of me did not exist in anyone's mind, and I have sat in a room and been discussed as though I was not there.  I have been invisible in my time.

My curse is my blessing is my curse.

That is what comes to mind right now.  Sometimes the thing that keeps us alive comes close to killing us and later in our life we see this poison as the chalk outline around our existence that instructs others where we have been, who we were, what skin we shed, why we ended up on the god damned floor of the bus to hell.

My friend Sid would like to blur the line that separates people with mental illness from those who don't have it.  I couldn't agree.  I couldn't wrap my head around blurring a line that has finally, in my middle age, given me the exquisite feeling of belonging.  Take away that line and I'm just a nobody in a huge sea of somebodies.  With the line tightly drawn the pool is so much smaller and the other beings I share it with know who I am.  They see into my heart as though it were made of glass.  When I am certain of where the line is drawn I can navigate challenges keeping clear about where they put me on a spectrum and I claim kin.

I have felt so damnably alone for most of my life.  I feel so much less alone with the line drawn across the threshold of what I know and what others don't know, across the threshold of those with mental illness and those without.

There is this too (and it's important): my greatest fear is complete invisibility- that no one will see me, hear me, or know that I am going to implode and I will be completely alone again and I will talk against a blank universe with no one seeing the arteries bursting open, there will be no one to see me, no one to comfort me, and no one to mourn because no one will ever know I have gone.

What I fight against constantly in myself is knowing that I will make it through all difficulties and challenges life can dish out, and I will mostly make it through alone, and because I am so capable, responsible, and scrappy, people will always see what a strong person I am.  They will see that I am getting through, that I am wonderfully able to deal with everything and they will turn their faces and they will cease to expend a single concern or waste a thought of worry on me because there are plenty of people out there that aren't handling their challenges and require attention.  My strength makes me invisible to people.  It gives them permission to never worry about me, to never wonder what getting through my day costs me, to never doubt that I will be fine.

This is the black hole of my soul. 

But wait!  How many times have I admitted on this blog that I use subterfuge to fool everyone into believing I'm fine when I'm not?  What deep dirty game am I playing?  I have to say that I have made an impossible situation.   My strengths make me feel invisible and I am using subterfuge to actually fool people into not seeing my pain, my fear, and my hell...and then I feel anger because I'm feeling alone and miserable?

Jesus christ. 

Sid asks me, late at night while I am tearing up and drinking my millionth beer, what the hell it is I want?  What do I want from people?

I say, through my welled up eyes, that I don't want to be invisible.

She points out that I'm not invisible now. 

This exposes the naked truth.  I'm not invisible now.  People see me.  I have effectively made it impossible to be ignored.  I am open, I am honest, and I share it all in public.  So what the hell is it I want?

I don't want anyone to ever forget how hard I've worked.  I want everyone to know how I've suffered.  How I've almost not made it a hundred times.  How I've bled, literally and figuratively for my sanity.

And there it is. 

I see it suddenly in all it's nastiness: my desire that everyone see not my strength but my weakness.  What the fuck is wrong with me?!

So I am harboring the bitter needs of a four year old.  My desires are immature and sick.

I am so afraid of my strengths because they have always obscured my needs. 

Which I have further complicated by engineering my own secret identity, a situation which, I am realizing as I write this all out, I have created for more than one reason:

Self preservation + Shame + Resentment + Distrust = Impossible No Win Situation.

There is no way to win against this black hole because it doesn't matter how much anyone sees me in all my vulnerability because it can never be enough, the pain is so great, the pain is so infinite.  It is also from the past, not the present.  It is an ancient cape splitting at the seams, shredding at the fastenings, and disintegrating at all the most touched points.  It is old ghosts, old fears, four year old huddling in the dark.  It no longer fits.  I didn't even realize, until this discussion with Sid, that I was still wearing it.  That I was still constantly touching it, hiding behind it, and when necessary flashing it out in the light to astonish and frighten unwary people.

As it always does, it comes down to letting go.  Letting go again.  Letting go of the siren of my soul.  Letting go of the fear of invisibility.  I'm not invisible.  I have made it impossible to be invisible.  Why is my hunger insatiable?  Why does the pain still smart?

Because I keep on touching it.

Once more it all comes down to myself.  It doesn't actually matter whether anyone sees me or not.  It doesn't matter how much people understand the pain I felt, the problem is that I'm still feeling it.  I'm still holding it close to me.  I need to unclench my fists and throw it out into the world where it may reincarnate as something prettier like English daisies dotting grassy hillsides.  I need to let it go now.

I will always know what I have been through.  I will always know what it's taken to become the person I am.  I will always know the truth.

What do I want from people?

I want respect and I don't want to be told that everyone is exactly like me and that everyone goes through what I go through.  That's not the truth.  I want people to stop trying to make it seem like there is no average, that there is no middle, that there is no such thing as normal. 

I want the truth.

Sid is right that there isn't really a line and we shouldn't keep painting it in our imaginations separating "us" from "them", or "me" from "you".  We are all on a continuum, we are degrees of each other.  However, without those lines, people like me never measure up.  The diagnosis of "persistent mental illness" allows me to understand that not everyone thinks about death as much as I do and that there is a reason for why I do and having that line drawn allows others to understand that my problem is physiological and doesn't deserve a value judgment. 

The diagnosis is the line.  I don't want the diagnosis to disappear because it turned so much around for me and has been deeply instrumental in how much progress I've made on myself in the last few years. 

Obviously I have a lot more to make.

What I want from people is in the middle of being rewritten.

What I want from myself is to embrace my own strengths and let the damn cape of old pain be composted with the chicken shit in my back yard.  Ashes to ashes.

What I want from myself is to get out of my own damn way.

As always, it starts right now.

Carpe Diem.