The Middle Ground

The binary between mental health and mental ill health is often painted as black and white. We’re fine or we’re not. There are episodes of darkness and coming out of it again is like switching on a light. There is no transitional period, that’s that until next time. We wake up one day, snap out of it and normal service is resumed.

That’s not my experience and I don’t think it’s anyone else’s when they suffer with a chronic mental health condition. There’s something in between the bad and the good and we don’t really talk about what happens when we’re there.

I’m on my way out of a pretty gnarly depressive episode that lasted a couple of weeks and people around me are really glad that I’m feeling so much better. And they’re right, I am feeling so much better. But there is a transitional period that feels like constantly being on a knife edge. In the immediate aftermath of an episode, it’s a constant fight to keep from falling back to square one.

Remember how on Pokemon Blue sometimes your Pokemon were on a meagre 20 HP because they’d been battered in a fight and you need to feed them elixir? I’m using an analogy I don’t have enough knowledge of to fully roll with, but I’ve committed now. Well anyway, the transitional period between being in mental health and in mental ill health is like that bit where you need to rest your Pokemon and give it treats. I was on a solid 0 HP a few weeks ago so I’m definitely going in the right direction, but I need to make sure I’m looking after myself and not picking fights with any of the big Pokemon.

This middle ground is like an inversion of a depressive episode- instead of being in a dark place with very limited glimpses of light, it’s a light place with brief plunges into darkness. I’ll be on the tube listening to my divas playlist and I’ll suddenly think “what the fuck am I even doing here? I might chuck my phone down a grate. I have no redeeming features. I don’t deserve this playlist. I don’t deserve Beyonce.” I have to almost trick myself out of falling down that hole and shift the tracks of my train of thought, send it in a totally different direction.

I’m keeping myself moving all the time so I don’t have time for the flashes of dark to take hold. And sure, you could see that as unhealthy, but I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I’ll do anything I need to do to keep moving towards a sustained period of mental health. When I think of the episode I’m coming out of, it feels like it’s in the past. I no longer feel like I’m in the eye of the storm. I lost just less than a stone in the space of three weeks, I was self-medicating every night, going to the gym too often and hurting myself because of it, I wouldn’t eat all day so my medication would work better and I could sleep, I’d turn my phone off and not speak to anyone, I’d write down lists of all the things I didn’t like about myself. It was really bad, and that person isn’t a reflection of who I am- it’s a reflection of an illness no one deserves.

Now I’m on my way out, but there are moments of self-punishment, temptation to fall back into those bad habits, things I need to still work on. Things aren’t back to normal by any stretch, but now I’m happy to talk to people, go out, do things. I’m not self-medicating, I’m not isolating myself and I’ve regained some ability to control where my thoughts go. I’m very lucky to have what one of my previous psychiatrists called my mental health toolkit, filled with techniques and understandings I have drawn from different doctors, books, films, friends. I think everyone should have something similar. Whether you have a mental health condition or not, everyone has mental health and my point with this post is that it’s a spectrum rather than a binary.

It’s definitely worth recognising the fragile transitional period when an episode appears to be coming to an end. It’s so much easier to fall back into it than it is to keep fighting to get back to where you want to be. I used to think I was either fine or not fine, which definitely meant that I didn’t look after myself as well as I should have when I was starting to feel better. There are grey areas and we need to give ourselves the respect of recognising them and learning how to navigate them. Treating something like depression as seriously as it should be means that we need to see the nuances and the fact that it isn’t as simple as well/unwell. Drink your elixir, don’t fight the big Pokemon. I promise that’s the last time I will ever mention Pokemon.