"Bringing Ballet to the Masses" - New Poetry and Mental Health Blog from the Dharma Farmer.

Hi everyone, wow, I can't believe how long it has been since I lasted posted! The fact is, I haven't written anything for months. The factors which have lead to this being the case will be covered more thoroughly later as part of this blog, which I hope to update regularly. The aim of this new column is to raise awareness and try to de-stigmatise mental health problems. I myself have battled (that word always grates on me; do I deserve a medal or something?) depression for over 20 years and only now am I able to write about it publicly. Even as I type, my hands are shaking and I can feel my heart beating in my eardrums,  throat and arse-hole simultaneously, which is a trifle disconcerting to say the least, and nowhere near as much fun as you might expect...

How did I get here? Are the hows and whys of a breakdown important? Or should we forget about attributing blame and focus on what we can do now in order to seize the initiative and rebuild our shattered lives? I don't know if there is a right answer, or indeed any answer. We are all so different, and what I find helpful, others may not. 

Be that as it may, I hope that in writing HONESTLY and without undue over-dramatisation, I can at least resist the urge to step out in front of an oncoming train for another day. I'm not even fucking about here. It's been THAT BAD recently, and I am scared. This illness wants me dead. I don't know how, but I'm still here. For how long, I don't know, so I thought I'd share my thoughts, feelings, concerns and experiences with others, both in verse and prose. I'm not trying to glamorise suicidal or destructive thoughts, far from it, but I'm not going to water it down either. If any of these issues affect you, please share with me and others in the comments box below. You are never alone. Never.

The fact of the matter is that I am not well. Some people on here know me personally, many are fellow writers, readers and People of Letters from all over the world. Wherever you are, my confession is that I live with both Depression and an acute Anxiety Disorder. It feels weird and painful just to admit it, and I still can't believe it's me I am writing about. But there you have it; I live with mental health issues.

Crazy, mad, loco, insane in the membrane, at half mast, psycho, 'schitzo, half-cocked, missing a few pieces of the jigsaw, loopy, crackers, not all there, not the full deck of cards, a few cents short of a dollar, potty, mental, fucked, poorly, unwell, going through the wringer - the list of euphemisms is long and inexhaustive. Yet with so many ways of conveying the notion that one is tapped in the head, lying zapped in bed or otherwise just plain nuts, isn't it weird that there is still such a stigma to mental illnesses? There might be two-hundred ways to say it, but so few seem willing to go first and step forward and say "yes, I am mentally ill - so what?" Online, under anonymity, perhaps, but not in the 'real world' of everyday "Joe-Public" society anyway.

That's not to pretend that I have never spoken to friends about it or that my peers haven't had their own plates of undulating bullshit to chow down from time to time, but I know of very few people who will admit to living with a mental illness in an ongoing way. Most people I know people, in their own words, go through phases of "being a bit down" or "feeling pretty low", but very few people concede that there are any patterns which suggest a chronic condition. For me it feels like an admission of a failure on my part to "deal with it properly", a stance as counter-intuitive as it gets. Before we can reach out and ask others for help, we have to concede that right now, we could do with some help. Yet in coming out like this, it feels like I am admitting defeat, so deeply ingrained in us is the stigmatism and taboo of metal illness. If your kidneys suddenly ceased functioning properly you would undoubtedly become very aware of it, very quickly, and you would be unlikely to hesitate to enquire of a doctor as to the sudden and alarming quantities of blood in your urine. Yet so it goes with mental health. In this day and age, are we still rooted in that primitive perspective of only believing in others that which we experience ourselves directly?

I wish to ask of all of us some pretty searching questions over the coming months; How do we name the elephant in the room without fixating on it? Moreover, how  do we subsequently adjust the furniture of our lives without being crushed by it's ponderous hulking mass? Is there a sad beauty in it's eyes, and if so, what is it trying to tell us? Thoughts for another time perhaps, but you get the picture...

I am not a mental health nurse, but equally, neither am I mental illness itself. It is something which is simply part of my experience, and constantly subject to change as much as the air in my lungs. I can catch 'flu, but I don't become influenza. Why is it that when the pancreas fails us and we develop diabetes, we are still considered socially acceptable, but when an infinitely more complex bit of gear like the brain gets it's synoptical wires crossed, suddenly we become (and often made to feel like) a liability to society? In a similar fashion, are sufferers of depression the victims, or co-conspirators  and wherein lies the demarcation 'twixt the two? 

I feel strongly that we need to start looking at the world around us and how we live our lives when it comes to cerebral equanimity and a heart at peace. My aim for this blog is to try and connect with others in a meaningful way, and by sharing my inner-most trials and tribulation, I hope that this "Diary of the Demented" will serve to remind me that this can happen to any of us, at any time, and in years to come, I wish to be able to look back and understand more deeply and compassionately my fractured sense of self.

A week or two ago, I was forced to keep a diary of my ups and downs over a given week, and reading it back some time later really shocked me - it was like it had been written by someone else. Anger, bitterness, destructive thoughts, hopelessness - all flowed out in place of the tears that so often refuse to fall. Our moods, minds and motivations change from moment to moment, minute by minute, and by tracing the arc of my own free falls, maybe others can find comfort or solace knowing that they too have equally fucked up trajectories. 

Please let me reiterate my salient point here: In spite of how lonely we may feel at times, none of us ever have to face this alone...

May we all be able, someday, to see the ballet in the bullshit, the method in the madness, the beauty in the beasts of our own minds and lives. Is it better to be going slightly mad and know it? They say that if you know that your grip on reality is of a disconcertingly loosened nature, then you can't be truly mad or beyond hope. Then again, 'they' say a lot of things, some of it utter bollocks, so who knows...

Allow me to finish with an anecdote, a true story. The setting is Wessex Studios, in the scorching Summer of 1977. Queen are hard at work on their sixth album, 'News of the World', from which was bestowed upon our grateful ears the timeless classics of "We are the Champions" and "We Will Rock You" to name but a few. In a neighbouring part of the building, the Sex Pistols are putting together their now-ubiquitous 'Never Mind The Bollocks'.... 

"So you're the bloke that's supposed to be bringing ballet to the masses?" asks a sneering Sid Vicious during a brief encounter in the conjoining corridor. 

"Ah, Mr Ferocious!" pipes back Freddie Mercury, "well, we're trying our best, my dear!"

I can't promise that my verse and prose will have the sublime grace of Swan Lake, but hopefully it will at the very least allow me to feel like something positive is coming out off all this, and for the twitching, anxious, scared or numb ones out there I want you to know that you are not going through this alone. I think that in some cases it can be very useful to remind oneself that all things must pass, and to understand that it won't always be this bad; if your condition is not actually 'curable' then at least may we be able to develop our own coping mechanisms which allow us to feel truly and authentically alive, and not just breathing.

Neither waving nor drowning, your ever-faithful servant,

The Dharma-Farmer xx