Let’s Talk About Mental Illness, Baby
Every morning from ages nine through twelve, along with mini muffins and a multivitamin, I took mouthfuls of Prozac through a dropper like an injured baby bird, chasing with grape Juicey Juice to rid my tongue of its bitter tang. I left sleepovers early to swallow my secret; my biggest fear was that someone would know I wasn’t normal.
Once a week, Thursdays I think, I’d be dropped off at a strange woman’s house after elementary school, sit in her living room and avoid eye contact. I’d ask to use the bathroom, I’d ask for a snack, I’d pet her little white dog named Lady, anything to stop her from asking the prying questions that I simply had no answers to: what made you cry today? why does your stomach hurt all the time? do you feel happy?
This was my biggest secret from third through seventh grade: something was so deeply wrong, something so visibly broken inside of me that I had to ingest mouth-puckering chemicals in order to be palatable to others.
We don’t talk about mental health and we definitely don’t talk about the horrors of being so visibly mentally ill, so obviously crazy that Everyone Knows Something Is Wrong. My classmates asked questions about me when I’d sit and silently cry and my teachers would be at a loss for how to explain. I wanted to be invisible, I didn’t want to be crying, but hot wet salty tears poured down behind my thick glasses regardless, splattering against my Limited Too shirts emblazoned with logos like Daddy’s Little Angel and Monkey Business.
I was too young to know what was wrong with me! I was too young to know why only I had to take these medications! It took me years to come to terms with the cold hard fact that while I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at the tender age of nine, I had been symptomatic for much longer.
Being diagnosed and medicated at such a young age, I had no idea how to contextualize my life. Why was everything so much harder for me, from talking to adults to eating new foods? Why couldn’t I just be normal? The embarrassment was taking over my life until I decided to start telling people. I told my best friends first, Isabelle and Julia, before becoming more open with my mental illnesses. As I got older, my diagnoses shifted and changed, but anxiety and depression were and are a constant in my life that I’ve learned to live with. I’m now extremely honest (some might say too honest) about where I am in my fluctuations. Not only does this help my relationships with others, but I can also be a sounding board for people who are not as familiar with therapy, medication, and being mentally ill. Knowing now what my medications actually do has given me more agency about how I’d like to feel, and now the cocktail of drugs I’m on are (usually) doing what they’re supposed to: giving me a relatively normal life.
Horror gives us a place to explore and understand the embarrassing, less aesthetically pleasing aspects of our lives. To know that we are not alone in the uncomfortable parts of being human. Mental illness and horror have been linked since the insanity described in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein all the way to the depression conveyed in Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation published almost exactly two hundred years later. Women have been trying to describe our pain forever, and flowery words simply aren’t cutting it. Like, I’m not having a bout of melancholia than can be cured with a season by the ocean, I just need Zoloft.
I didn’t have the words to talk about what was going on in my brain when I was so young. Had I had resources that allowed me to know why I cried when boys talked to me (or when I got a haircut, or when jeans felt Wrong, or when I needed to eat lunch with Nurse Lucas instead of in the cavernous cafeteria), understanding my need for medication might have been easier. But we didn’t want to discuss it! And I get it! But with horror, it’s different! We can be honest with how weird and gross we are. I love horror because it doesn’t try to make the bad things beautiful. Not everything is beautiful, but everything we endure is worth writing about.