[emory_]

I think one of the most frustrating parts of talking about my mental illness is really only feeling like I know the answers from two ends of a spectrum, like a binary of "health", feeling like there’s so much gray area you can’t really see while some people around you frolic freely in it.

It feels like standing 100 feet from a beautiful house outside in the dark, in the cold without a jacket, and you’re scared, but there’s a light on in the house, and you can see inside. But all that area in the yard between you and the window is so unknown, dark and foggy, no matter how much you try to adjust your eyes. And you know what it’s like to be in that house. You’re in there sometimes, and it’s really beautiful and you aren’t worried when you're there. And if you’re inside the house, you aren’t even thinking about the yard because if you look at the window from the inside, all you see is your own reflection against the dark outside, and you look happy, your eyes look happy, and that’s all you need right now. And staring in from the darkness outside, you decide to take steps to get into the house. One foot in front of the other. But every step, the yard stretches so that you’re losing two steps for every one you force yourself to take. And sometimes, you just become so exhausted that you fall asleep in the yard. Sometimes you wake up in the same spot you dropped at. Sometimes you wake up in the house, wondering how you got there, but knowing that you need to warm up as much as you can before you accidentally close your eyes and wake up back outside.
There are neighbors and friends who come over when you’re in the house, and they’re wonderful. They fill your ears with sounds and make your head light with laughter. When you’re asked how you’re doing, you genuinely say that you’re okay, because at that moment, you really are, and it’s only so great because you’ve got the last five days of being outside to compare it to. You’re wrapped in a blanket on the couch and your favorite movie is on, you’re speaking with such grace and you can’t wait until tomorrow so you can do it again.
And then you wake up in the dark yard. You can see through the window, and your favorite movie is still on but it’s just the title page playing that horrible 15 second clip of that song you hate like a broken record on the DVD player. All of those neighbors and friends are still inside, you can hear their laughter and it makes you smile sometimes to know that they’re so happy, but if they asked you to speak, you’d lose your words. They know you’re there, in the yard, and they’re shouting to you, “Why did you go outside?!” and you try to shout back that you didn’t try to, and you really don’t know why’re you’re there, but it isn’t quite loud enough for them to hear. After asking, “What?!” twice because they can't hear you from the yard, they give up on understanding your answer, thinking that you’re fine out there and can come back inside if you want and you probably just went outside to take a walk because you’re having a rough day, and they move on to the next thing with the ones they don’t have to raise their voice to speak to.
And it isn’t that you lose hope in ever going inside again. You know that you’ll probably have more time with those neighbors, you’ll feel that blanket on your skin, you’ll be able to hear your favorite movie in surround-sound in your recliner instead of lip-reading through a foggy window while you sit on the grass. It’s that you get so tired, so damn tired, of knowing that when some other people look out the window from the inside, they see a sunny day, they see flowers, they see trees, and when you try to, again, shout to them from the yard that it’s really different for you, that you’re scared, that there’s something out here that you need help escaping, that you think you see different things than they do, they remind you that the biggest threat out there is just the pollen in the air from all the damn flowers they swear are there, and to trust them when they say they understand how hard it is to be outside, because they also have allergies.

[healingme4me]