A haven for creative people living with mental illness. This is the place where you can tell it like it is, not yet another place where you have to pretend to be someone you've been told you should be.
I have rapid cycling type 2 bipolar disorder, which was misdiagnosed as all kinds of other things until I was 38 years old. There are three phases: hypomania, depression, and euthymia. However, it isn’t like these come in a given order. Sometimes I can be euthymic for a while, and then something will happen that will trigger either hypomania or depression. Hypomania is usually followed by a big crash. For added fun, I can sometimes enjoy a mixed state where I’m irritable and weirdly giddy and depressed alternating quickly or blending together because my brain is weird that way.
When I was first diagnosed, I finally understood that there was a pattern. Previously, I would start coming out of a depression and say to myself “I’m never going to go back there again! This is the last time!” Then I would end up becoming depressed again, because bipolar disorder, and I would hate myself even worse for not being able to just “stop that stinkin’ thinkin’!”
I wish I had understood this much earlier in my life. Instead I got such great advice as “just stop thinking/being like that” or “just stop looking for attention.”
My self esteem still isn’t great, but at least I’ve learned to respect myself a little even if I don’t necessarily like myself. It only took half a century. No thanks to the so called “health care system” in the United States, or the stigma on people who live with mental illness.
The tragic tale of Per Yngve Ohlin, vocalist for the Swedish death metal band Morbid and the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, evokes strong emotional responses. Per suffered from severe psychological disturbances. Reading about him in the chapters translated into English from Blod Eld Död, I have the feeling that he may have been autistic. He would become greatly upset if disturbed while performing a task. Despite his intelligence, evidenced in his thoughtful and provocative song lyrics and his clever though disturbing artwork, he did poorly in school.
After Per’s parents divorced, he changed schools. His previous classmates were used to his unusual behavior and were generally tolerant of him. His new schoolmates bullied him, and, on one occasion, beat him so severely that he ended up clinically dead. Following this event, he became obsessed with death and referred to himself as not being alive. The head trauma he incurred from the assault may have caused him to develop Cotard Syndrome, a rare condition in which a person believes their body is dead.
Although he has been gone from this world for twenty-seven years, Per continues to be exploited, both by those who insist on seeing him as some sort of icon for evil and those who look only at his physical appearance without seeing the very troubled human being behind the flowing blond hair and the striking, angular face.
Per was obsessed with occult imagery, but he wasn’t truly evil. He was angry at a world which had caused him grievous harm. Many of those who attacked him probably identified as “good Christians.” It’s no wonder that he wanted to be the opposite of his attackers or that he dreamed of being able to exact revenge against those who injured him.
As for the idea of Per being some sort of sex god, there is no evidence that he was ever sexually involved with anyone or that he even had any interest in sex. There have been fantasies written about him by a certain contingent of horny female fans, usually postulating him as some sort of vampire king or demon lord. I wish I could say these fictions were worthy of their subject. Most of them are poorly written and I wouldn’t feel right about quoting the explicit and ludicrous scenarios postulated therein.
Worst of all, there are still people who see fit to share the actual, post-suicide image photographed by Per’s former bandmate, Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth. My opinions of Aarseth are not exactly favorable, but I became somewhat more sympathetic to him after viewing interviews with his former bandmates and schoolmates, Kjetil Manheim and Jorn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud.
Regardless of my personal opinions of Euronymous, photographing the corpse of your housemate, even if you weren’t particularly kindly disposed to him, is unconscionable. As the surviving members of Morbid said on the liner of their 2011 release, The Year of the Goat, “No thanks to the distributors and buyers of the post-mortem pic. Fuck you.”
I have spent
the last ten minutes at work beneath my desk; it is somewhere dark to
collect my thoughts. I have been struggling to read through the edits
and feedback scribbled on an annual report I drafted. Usually I handle
feedback well and expect it, but every so often a voice rages at the
back of my head. I question my ability as a writer. My question for you
is this: how do you handle feeling discouraged?
Initially
I usually handle it by announcing gloomily that I can no longer write,
have never been any good at it, and anything I’ve managed to do so far
in the writing business was probably just sheer blind luck anyway.
Then
I mope a bit. I drink a lot of tea. Check with Amanda and find out if
she’d still love me if I never wrote anything again (she always says
yes). Call my agent to apologise because, obviously, she will have to
spend the rest of my life and hers getting me out of any existing
writing contracts.
And then, after a few days of that, I get
interested in something and start writing and get happy, and am usually
vaguely surprised when someone mentions how miserable I was a few weeks
before.
I
do not handle criticism of my writing well at all. I can receive ten,
even twenty positive comments, then get one negative one, and I cease to
understand statistics and go into a downward spiral for a week or two.
We
aren’t the only ones. Stephen King once said that he had to stop
reading reviews of his books because the negative ones would put him in a
three-week funk, and his wife semi-jokingly told him that he either had
to stop reading the reviews or she’d divorce him.
Recently I
received a criticism of a chapter I wrote for my main WIP and it put me
into a tail spin. On the scale of things, the criticism was pretty mild,
but it really got under my skin. The person making the criticism said
that my characters were just a couple of talking heads. I felt their
conversation served to illustrate the dynamic between them, and I was
proud of it.
I have been struggling financially and feeling pretty
insecure about myself due to losing the ability to work in my previous
profession because of my health issues, so I think I’m even more fragile
than usual. Going into my fictional Universe is kind of an escape from
the mess that is my life, and I saw this person’s criticism as an
attack. Not that I didn’t have reason to be miffed, but I definitely
overreacted.
This will be a long, rambling mess and probably shouldn't be read by anyone
It has been a while since I've worked on my stories. I may again, I don't know.
I used to have an organized plan, at least as organized as I can get, given that my brain works like a spider on drugs.
I think my thought patterns most closely resemble either the Peyote Spider or the LSD Spider. The web appears normal at first, but on closer examination, it really isn't.
My brain does not work like yours, oh, Nice Normal People who are so Nice and Normal. And it never will. I was fucked to start with.
Fuckd to Start Wit is the title of a book written by a friend of mine, the late Walt Cessna. He said I was the one who encouraged him to write his book. It is well worth looking for a copy.
Walt was an amazing photographer and a compelling writer. Problems with addiction tended to sideline him throughout his life. He was a gentle soul. He passed away from complications of AIDS two years ago. The world lost a good person, and, sadly, being the cesspool of horrible that the world is, it didn't know or care.
It will be no great loss when I go. I'm already aware of that.
For years, people tried to change me to make my brain weave normal spiderwebs, to be able to write nice, normal stories for nice, normal people instead of tangled webs of subplots guaranteed to make normal people wail and gnash their teeth and belittle and berate what spews from the hell-hole that is my imagination.
For years, I belittled and berated myself for being unable to be Normal: to work normally, write normally, think normally.
There Are Drugs. Drugs that can make you less "you," I have been told.
I tried the drugs, and they did not work the way I was told they would. They did not make the depression go away. They made me Manic and Psychotic. Instead of being a functioning weirdo, I was a fucked-up weirdo earning myself a one-way ticket to the Loony Hatch.
Fuck your fucking drugs.
I know it would be easier for the world if people like me would just play nice, if we would just pass for normal and keep our fucked-up thoughts and emotions to ourselves. Barring that, we could just agree to be permanent patients in a mental health facility or group home, compliantly attending meetings that do absolutely nothing, obeying our masters, completing the tasks they give us, staying out of the way of Normal Society and Nice People.
Fuck "normal society." These days, "normal" is a sociopathic bully who takes to Twitter to rail at his "haters." "Normal" is a monster who pulls the wings off flies. "Normal" is callous and uncaring. I want even less to be "normal" than I ever did before.
With my writing, I tried to remove all the subplots. My writing became boring to me.
When I write something, I am in the mindset of Dr. Frank N. Furter. I DIDN'T MAKE IT FOR YOU. I sometimes share my writing because I'm stupid enough that sometimes I want validation for my shit. That's stupid, and I know it's stupid, but I sometimes fall into that old trap. I'm 53 years old, and I still fall into that trap. I know how stupid and lame and pathetic that is. I know it, and it still happens. This makes me stupid, lame, and pathetic. I know that too.
With my main story, I used to be more "organized" with it, inasmuch as a peyote or LSD brained spider can ever be. I worked on it most days of the week. I had folders and documents for each of the subplots. Then my life went completely to hell, and what little semblance of organization there was went right out the window.
I decided that any writing is better than no writing, and, if I'm able to retire before I end up fucking dead, I might start organizing it then.
I was going to say "dead or in a nursing home," but that second one will not happen. If there is a real threat of it happening, I will off myself. I worked in long-term care for 25 years. I will not end up in one of those places. Like Stephen King said, sometimes dead is better. This is definitely a case where dead is better.
I am in a bad place right now. I earn about minimum wage, which is not enough to survive on. There is no "doing better." My physical and psychological problems insure that. I can do the work I do, but it takes a toll. I'm hungry a lot of the time. I can't eat regularly even though I should because I have diabetes. No, I don't qualify for aid because I won't liquidate my few assets. I want my son to get those when I go tits up. He's going to need them. I do get Medicaid.
A society that treats its working class like a steaming pile of shit is a failed society.
I may be a steaming pile of fail on a personal level, but our society is failing way harder than I am.
The point being, I don't give a flying fuck about anyone's "constructive" criticism to try and make my writing "better." I'm not trying to get this shit published into a book. I'm just trying to express it.
The recent criticism I received wasn't even particularly harsh. Honestly, a fuck I don't give. It was just poorly timed, one of those straws that broke the camel's back kind of thing.
People don't take into account that in a forum like this, people are writing for different reasons. Some are gunning to be TEH FAYMUS AUTHUR!!!!!11!!!!!!!!
I used to believe I wanted to be TEH FAYMUS AUTHUR!!!1!!!!!!!1
I found out that I really don't. What I wanted was affirmation and security. It's better to try and get those from something that I'm not emotionally attached to, because when someone takes pot shots at things I'm emotionally attached to, I tend to go into a tail spin because my life is such a steaming pile of crap in the first place. Because I'm fucked to start with.
Five years ago, I was in yet another really bad place, not so much financially but definitely on an emotional level. I couldn't work on anything featuring original characters. I just didn't have it in me. The only thing I could bring myself to write was Aliens fan fiction in my own weird style. No way I was trying to get that shit published. I was just sharing it with a select group of friends.
To show that you can't trust anybody to hold you up rather than kick you when you're down...
One of these friends told me that people write fan fiction because it's easier to work with "shell" characters than to try and come up with anything original, and that fan fiction tends to be the domain of "broken" people.
Well, she hit at least one nail on the head, but, other than that, she only succeeded in whacking me repeatedly.
I am broken. I was broken early on. I came into this life with a broken brain. When I leave, I will be entirely broken, body and soul.
I think every day about pulling the plug. I am accomplishing nothing. I will never be okay. I don't think anything will ever be good or right.
I think I stay around for a couple of reasons.
One is the fact that my son needs my help. He's broken too. He's high-functioning autistic and has problems with anxiety and depression. He has a degree of agoraphobia. He has never been able to work.
Like me, he "passes for normal." My mother always says there isn't anything "wrong" with him, implying that he needs to just needs to "pull himself up by his bootstraps," "man up," "put on his big boy pants," and all that sort of crap. No, Ma, there isn't anything "wrong" with my boy. He's just a big ole square peg, just like his damn worthless mother. Only he isn't worthless. He's very intelligent and has a desire to do good. He'd be an amazing employee, if there were an employer that was willing to work with his not-normal psyche.
I'm pretty hateful to myself a lot of the time because it is literally impossible for me to be normal.
Writing is an escape hatch for me. I sometimes think about not sharing my fictional works publicly anymore because I really can't stand having people taking pot shots at it when I'm hanging on by a fucking thread and it's my one very frayed life line. On the other hand, I do miss the times when people say nice things about my work. Sometimes that can quite literally mean the difference between a good and bad day.
Which makes me a complete and utter loser. I know.
I'm going to end this bloviated blather with a favorite song. This one's for you, Walt. I hope you're at peace on the other side. I love you.
There's no doubt that Chris Cornell was a very attractive man.
It's fine to acknowledge that.
It is not fine to behave as if his physical appearance was the only thing about him that mattered.
It is not fine to say lewd and lurid things about any person, but it is particularly distasteful when that person struggled with mental illness and ended up taking their own life.
Making anyone into a sex object is shallow and demeaning, and when the "object" is as talented and personable as Chris was, it's patently ridiculous.
Chris was born July 20, 1964. He committed suicide by hanging himself on May 18, 2017. He was 52 years old.
Chris is probably best known for his work with Soundgarden and Audioslave. He was also involved with numerous other side projects and collaborations.
Chris was a compassionate person. He and his wife Vicky formed a charity to assist homeless and needy children.
Chris had two daughters and a son. His daughter Toni joined One Republic to sing a combined tribute to her dad and his good friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Bennington committed suicide not long after Chris' death.
Chris struggled with addiction and depression. The autopsy revealed that there were multiple prescription medications in his system at the time of his suicide.
Chris is not a "sex object." He was a talented, troubled, multi-faceted human being. He deserves better than to be the object of lurid "locker room talk."
Recently, Gal Gadot expressed this sentiment regarding the death of physicist Stephen Hawking:
"Rest in peace Dr. Hawking. Now you're free of any physical constraints.. Your brilliance and wisdom will be cherished forever."
Ms. Gadot was then taken to task as if she'd said "fucken cripples shud ride the lightnin lol."
There is some lack of awareness in Ms. Gadot's comment, but she was not implying that having handicaps/disabilities/whatever the fuck you want to call it made a person lesser in any way.
I am a person with disabilities, and I was once taken to task for using the term "handicapped" to describe myself.
Could we all please just stop looking for reasons to be offended? It makes us look like "special snowflakes" and makes people less inclined to listen to the serious concerns we have.
For an able-bodied person like Gal Gadot, the idea of being severely physically constrained is a frightening one. Although Dr. Hawking expressed acceptance of his condition, it is hard for a person without severe physical limitations to imagine that a person with such limitations might not be wishing that they could be able-bodied, that perhaps they are truly okay just as they are.
Again, Ms. Gadot was not stating that Dr. Hawking wasn't worthwhile exactly as he was. She was expressing a wish for him to be able to move about freely, an attribute which she sees as precious. There was no malice intended in her words, and people need to back the fuck off. In our current call-out culture where a person can be viciously attacked for not expressing their thoughts in a very exacting way, it's no wonder people are afraid to speak at all.
Every person with disabilities views their particular disability (or disabilities) differently as well, and there are some disabilities that are so truly heinous that I feel it would be cruel not to wish that the person could be free of said disability--not because the person isn't worthwhile as they are, but because the disability is SO FUCKING HEINOUS. I don't believe this is a hard concept to grasp, but I will not be surprised if there are those who tell me I have "internalized ableism."
Other than a bit of a limp and a slow gait, my disabilities are invisible. I am prone to activity intolerance due to my endocrine problems. I used to be able to work strenuous physical jobs. I lost a reasonably well-paying job due to these issues, and I now live in poverty. I also have problems with urinary retention and have to use incontinence pads. I generally don't have fecal incontinence, but sometimes that happens too. It's miserable and embarrassing. I am prone to infections in my "plumbing." Most of the time I only eat one or two meals a day because I can't afford food, thanks to the fact that it's hard for me to work.
Would I give up my physical disabilities if there were a way to repair them?
Fuck yes I would, in a heartbeat.
This in no way means that I think people with physical disabilities don't deserve to be treated with the same respect and dignity that able-bodied people receive. Society as a whole has a problem with treating disabled people as lesser, and that needs to stop.
People with disabilities should not be forced to live in poverty. My situation often makes me extremely depressed and, yes, suicidal. I currently have self-inflicted cuts and bruises because I am so frustrated and disgusted at my situation and at myself. When I express frustration or upset over my situation, I get told that I should "just focus on the positives," "chin up," and "try harder." All of which is bullshit and is not resolving the problem of people with disabilities being treated as if they are a burden.
This is not what Gal Gadot was doing.
I am far more offended by those who act like people with disabilities are lesser and a burden who should just sink into squalor and die than I am by someone like Gal Gadot, whose statement may have been a tad uninformed, but who was, in fact, hoping that a person who lived with physical constraints unimaginable to a young, healthy, able-bodied person would be free of those constraints. Her statement was without malice. She does not deserve to be attacked.
Save your ire for those who really deserve it: the people who make laws to take away what little those of us who can't work "normal" jobs are afforded.
