Mental Illness in a Brave New World

I started writing the following piece as a way to explicate to the people in my life just how severe my depression has gotten. I’ve struggled with clinical depression, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and various anxiety disorders my whole life and, although, among other troubles, it’s gotten me into debt, I’ve managed to stay functional with medication and therapy and the support of loved ones. However current events have sunk me into a place I didn’t even know I could go. As I wrote, I realized how badly I need help staying afloat and keeping myself housed, insured, and medicated until I come out on the other side of this and return to functioning again.

If you can afford to donate, thank you. If you can’t, I hope you’ll read anyway and pass it along to someone else. We are living in a time of constant violent uncertainty and it’s affecting us in different ways, but one of the most difficult parts of any kind of depression is being unable to voice what is going on inside our heads. I’ve tried to put my own experience into words in the hope of explaining to friends and strangers alike what life is like for people like me right now.

I know this is unconventional, asking for montetary help for my mental illness; I have tried many, many solutions before getting to this point but what it comes down to is I am sick and I need help paying my bills. Thank you so much for your time, your generosity, and your compassion. Even as we stare down all the horrors this government is spawning, I try to remain optimistic about humanity and the moral inclination of society to care for its members who need it. Any money raised beyond what I need will be given away to help others with their basic life necessities. I want us to survive together.

xoxo EL

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It is almost as though you never really wake up. You open your eyes and you feel nothing but an empty pain - no excitement, no hope, no yearning. You stumble through the day until you are too tired to think about the world’s wretchedness, and then you fall asleep with the TV on. Always with the TV on to distract from those creeping, insidious worm thoughts that might keep you up any longer. You have bad dreams.

You have not had a good dream in half a year. The effects of these mundane nightmares is cumulative; the half memories pile up like snowdrifts, the residue of uncontrolled, inescapable trauma. You sleep now because you have to, because it is a way of marking time. Sleep, like so many other things, is no longer a respite.

The ceiling fan above your bed clanks rhythmically when it’s kept on too long. It is too hot not to have it on and you cannot afford air conditioning. Last summer it woke you up, bothered you, a metronome of poverty. Now you simply wonder if one day it will crash and fall, the still-whirring blades slicing through your feet, plaster rained upon your pillows. You wonder this with a straight face, as there is nothing to be done about it. The fan rocks and clanks, falls silent, and begins again.

You are still in bed. You could get up, make a cup of tea, move to the living room, but you will not leave the house. It’s just a different surface, a different screen, a different window to look out of with different light coming through it. Moving to the living room does not change anything. It does not provide money or health insurance or pay back your student loans. It might be cooler out there, it might not, depending on if there’s a breeze. It is too hot for tea.

You have always been a person who loves wholeheartedly - loves scented baths and Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, television that is both funny and emotionally real, red candy, medium-sized dogs, and a well-stocked tea cupboard. And oh, you still love people, your family and friends, yes, you do have friends despite current circumstances having rendered you boring to be around and sad as hell. But Atwood has become too real and now loose-leaf Darjeeling and pad thai and even your love for your own hard-won beauty can’t lift your spirits anymore. Now food has become a chore. You eat because it hurts not to, because there’s no point in being miserable as well as achingly hungry. You are not losing weight because your poor person’s diet is full of starch; lean protein is expensive and fresh produce goes bad very quickly. Sometimes you can’t cook the vegetables until it’s too late.

It comes down to not caring. Subsided is the anxiety that has shadowed your life for so many years, but in its place is a dull, hopeless apathy. You do not care if your food is pleasurable. You do not care if your bills go unpaid or that your credit is sinking like a weighted corpse. You do not care about taking photographs or making art or getting likes or gaining followers. A year ago you were helping produce a comedy show and you loved it until you stopped being able to care about anyone’s comedy career. You do not care about gossip or fitting into the social scene or knowing all the things you used to want to know. You do not care about having sex, at least not like you cared before, though sometimes you do have sex because you love your partner and that is still one grain of beauty you can clutch. You care, a little, about the news. But only a little, only a sliver, a crack. To care any more about the horrors of the current world is to succumb completely. You float between despair and apathy, and right now apathy keeps you alive.

There are so many things you used to care about. You want to care again but every day seems to bring worse news, pushing you farther down the darkest path in the most ominous direction, more hate and murder and destruction than you ever thought possible. How to care about the future as the world is burning? Everything you know is already charcoal.

You have a graduate degree in cinema studies because you wanted to make television better, more inclusive, more radically modern, yet you no longer care about cinema. You do not care about award shows or your favorite premieres or gowns or art or thinkpieces or whatever is being said about whatever. You see people you know continuing to work in television the same way they always have and you simply do not understand how. How to care about ratings or budgets or plotlines while humanity tumbles into a greedy chasm from which you can see no return. Our society has been irreparably altered and yet life continues on, the bills still arrive, the rent is still due, as though fascism and genocide are not now American actualities. You ponder if you will be killed in a camp, or before.

You have gotten off track. You cannot think too much about if there will be camps because then your imagination spins off and it feels like you are already dead, buried in a mass grave where the Silver Lake Reservoir used to be. You remember that you owe both your old summer camp friend and your Jewish sister a phone call.

You cannot talk to people, not really, not like before. You have nothing to say, no arguments to make, and your jokes are all uncomfortably sad. You avoid going out, avoid having to answer for your silence and your sudden departures. Meeting new people is arduous, but seeing casual acquaintances is worse. “How are you?” they ask, “Feeling better?” and you are not good, you are not better, you are bad, you are worse, and yet you lack the words to adequately explain all this in a one sentence answer and even if you could, they would not want to hear it. People do not like the words “mentally ill”. You want to cry out in a crowded bar that you are dangerously depressed, your brain is malfunctioning and that is why you’re acting this way, but instead you leave and you don’t go back.

You wonder how many texts you can ignore and for how long before you will be abandoned.

People tell you to get off Twitter but it is the internet that brings you the most solace these days. Where you can be honest and tragic and friends and strangers can reach out and send you words of comfort without expecting anything in return. You do not have much to give in return. Besides, Twitter keeps you up on the news, and also has pictures of baby goats. Avoiding the news will not stop it from being real, and you do still love baby goats.

You remember when you used to be sexy and witty and wise and understanding, when you enjoyed sharing yourself with others. Perhaps you are still those things. Perhaps it matters, and perhaps it doesn’t. You know you are a good writer, great even, but your anima is fading. They told you you could never make money as a poet so you became other things. They told you if you worked hard and built a resume and got fancy degrees and kept your health insurance and paid your bills on time that everything would work out. You believed in capitalism and in return they promised you an adulthood. What you have now is a handful of ashes.

Your Obamacare health insurance premiums increased 140% in January and you can no longer pay them. You have three crucial medications and you don’t know what to do; without Prozac there’s no hope at all. You overdraft your bank account so much that the bank has threatened to close it. You sold your car last year because you couldn’t afford it and started working from home. Before moving to LA you worked with kids in public after-school programs, the same programs that are now being cut and gutted - no future for you there. You cannot imagine returning to a job in the entertainment industry in an office where rich men treat you like a ridiculous child and where the minimum wage work is meaningless at best and traumatic at worst.

But the freelance work started drying up months ago, and there are some days where you can’t work at all. Those are the days that scare you. Days when you wake up with tears welling in your eyes for no reason, crying for hours in silence with no purpose or control. Days when your job becomes trying not to think about the easiest way to die. When your job is simply staying alive.

It is difficult to put into words the complete inertia of depression. How it is possible to spend the longest afternoons doing nothing but staring into blankness, fighting with your brain to try to stand up, walk outside, go somewhere. Be someone. How there are times when no matter how hard you fight it, you cannot do anything at all or be anyone but yourself.

Despite everything you used to be an optimist. You used to harbor a belief that forces for good would come out on top, that in the fight for equality, for the earth, for love, for humanity, for rational thought, even, the right side would win. But now, as a mentally ill radical queer femme sexually liberal sexual assault survivor pacifist agnostic socialist humanist Californian who makes a living from their creative mind, who fears white men, the police, and the death of the earth and believes, above all else, in the truth, your very existence is under attack and is losing every battle. You are increasingly nihilistic about the state of the world and your own place in it; your future, if there is one, feels worthless - but dying would be unforgivably selfish. You are afraid to speak your darkest thoughts out loud; you are afraid, sometimes, to even think them at all.

You are smart enough to know that you are sick. This is a sickness. If you trusted the government in any capacity, you would go on disability - assuming disability benefits will still exist in a few months time. You are smart enough to not trust the government. You have considered residential mental health care but cannot afford it, either to pay for it or to take any respite from your life. You are smart enough to know that these depths should pass, but then again, nothing is certain in this new world. How do you claw your way up from the bottom of a pit when you’re not sure what will be waiting for you at the top?

Things have been bad before; for 20 years you’ve fought your illness and survived. This time it’s something new, worse, unknown. You try to reach out the only way you can right now, to connect, to be understood. Writing is the only resource you have left to contribute. You have worked weeks to get this all out.

It has always been your belief that those with more should help out those with less, and you have lived this principle in rare times of bounty. You do not want a lavish life - you do not dream of a fancy apartment, a new car, expensive clothes. You simply want a life, to be able to work and write and care about living and be healthy enough to join the fight, the resistance, the rebellion. But brains are tricksy, the world is changing at a breakneck pace, and who knows how any of this is gonna shake out?

Caring should not be a luxury. You think of those with more than enough and how different your existence is. Of how they could change so much for you without even feeling it. You are tired of friends and loved ones loaning you money even as they also struggle. You are asking for help to pay them back, to pay off the predatory loans you’ve been living on and the money you owe the government for your worthless degree, to get out of debt so whatever you do manage to earn will pay your rent and keep you Prozac’ed, to somehow have enough money to make it through the present and survive. If you had more than that you would give it away, give the people who need it money for food, for rent, for health, for art, for joy. You dream of a good part of humanity persevering in the face of this swelling, actual, honest-to-god evil.

You realize to ask for help in this way makes you embarrassingly vulnerable, admitting your sickness and your weakness and stretching out an open palm. You realize you will be mocked and scorned because others have it worse than you and because some people are cruel. You have thought long and hard about taking this step and realized that, like so many other things, you do not care. You are not ashamed of being ill, of needing this, of wanting to sleep, and wake, and be alive, and sleep more soundly. You have tried, and failed, and been failed. You ask kindly. I need help. Please, if you can, help me.