Millennials, Misconceptions, and Mental Health: My Cassandra Jardine Prize Entry
I originally wrote this piece for the Telegraph's Cassandra Jardine Memorial Prize and although it did not place, I really liked this bit of work and the feelings it helped me to work through. It was edited and published by the lovely people at Mental Health Today magazine, but I wanted the raw, unedited version to be here on my blog. It's a longer piece due to the required word count of the competition, but I hope if you stick with it until the end you'll enjoy it.
TW: mentions of self harm and suicidal ideation.
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I’d like you to imagine two women. Picture their lives, their surroundings and their motivations – picture what makes them them.
The first is a young professional; what do you see when you picture her? Undoubtedly a millennial, perhaps glued to a phone or a laptop in an ultra-modern office full of bright, vibrant colours. A morning run squeezed in before a breakfast of smashed avocado on toast (shared on Instagram with perfectly curated hashtags) in a sleek minimalist kitchen in a flat she’ll never own.
The second is a young woman with a mental illness; what do you see when you picture her? Do you see anything? Can you conjure up an image? Are the colours drab and grey, does she stare blankly ahead, eating a breakfast of cold toast in a messy room? Is she sharing the highlights of her day on social media or does she scroll silently through the perfect lives presented to her by people she hasn't talked to in years? Do you see someone sad or someone dangerous? Do you see a person at all?
Do you imagine the two could ever exist in the same space? Could those two people occupy the same person? Could one simultaneously be the young professional and be mentally ill? In your imagination are the women separated by laughter and privilege, walls that keep them in defined sections of life never to meet?
Does society intentionally keep these stereotypes in play because it's easier to process people in their neat little boxes, or because we are accustomed to seeing uncandid snapshots of the best of people's lives and it's disconcerting to see the sometimes-harsh reality?
Whilst I happily confess that I prefer my avocado-based mush on the side of Mexican fast food and there is more chance me piloting a rocket than getting up for a run before work, I am the first woman in the above scenario - the young professional.
I'm also the young woman with mental illness.
The reminders to that fact are jarring; the averted gazes and the cardigans donned in meetings to hide self-inflicted scars. The nurse from the hospital I volunteered in at university calling because I had disclosed self harm on my volunteer form and my emphatic response that I had “grown out of it”, a myth I desperately wanted to believe. The denial of health and life insurance when I bought my house and they asked how many times I had self harmed or attempted suicide since the age of 13. They're disconcerting reminders that I don't quite belong on that side of the wall. The side of the wall with social media-ready lives and the tick boxes of modern “success”. After all, successful young professionals don't struggle; they share motivational quotes, drink fancy green smoothies with spirulina and kale, and go to spin class twice a week. They don't lose nights to lying in bed hoping sleep will come or obsess over whether the front door they checked three times is really locked.
It seems that I am at all times two opposing versions of me, and like oil and water they never truly mix. I'm left to try and bridge the gap and find out where each part of me fits into my overall being. The truth is that if you couldn't imagine the professional and the woman with the mental illness as the same person then you're not alone because as it transpires, neither can I.
Yet in me they both exist, strikingly juxtaposed. Beside the generationally appropriate 4000 nearly identical selfies and photos of my dog exists a goodbye note on my phone from a few nights after Christmas when, after a nice night with friends, I casually decided my life was going to end. Perhaps not that night, but on any given night in the future. A note I can't seem to part with but don't know why I'm saving. Maybe I was pleasantly surprised with the eloquence my prosecco-soaked brain managed to produce, or maybe it runs deeper than that.
Granted, my temperamental mental health has served me in some respects. My deafening perfectionism although cruel at times has always driven me on to improve. I graduated top of my class at university, already in full time employment in my field having volunteered and interned my way through summers and studying fastidiously for every test, exam and slightly scrutinised seminar. My personal life too paints the right idea - I'm in a long-term relationship and we travel as often as we can. Condescending millennial stereotypes aside I am the picture of the young professional, and I've built my sense of self around that.
It doesn't change the fact that there are nights where the darkness spans out endlessly in front of me. There's a chasm inside of me created by years of perfectionism that no amount of validation can fill. There are visible and invisible scars that never seem to fade. I spend time obsessing over any mistake I make, and the pillars on which I have precariously placed my sense of self and my recovery threaten to topple down. Where and how does this fit in the life of the young professional?
On the other side of the wall, I am as similarly displaced. I don't seem to fully belong there either. I'm reminded that I'm too “high functioning” and my symptoms often fail to meet diagnostic criteria. I've never needed time off work or university - in fact my attendance is generally fantastic even on the days where eating lunch was a nigh impossible task. I even doubt myself: can I even be ill if my life is this fulfilled? Did I really do well in work or was that hypomania masquerading as talent? Where do these versions of me overlap and where do they swap over entirely?
How can I expect society to accept that mental illness wears many faces, some just like mine, if even I can't marry up the two parts of me to form a whole person? If I sit on the wall that divides these two people, belonging fully to neither? Do I perpetuate this myth that one cannot be both or am I a victim to the idea? Is it simply both?
No other kind of illness demands that the sum total of our being is synonymous with our symptoms or diagnosis. Yet with mental health it's sometimes hard to distinguish where we begin and end, separate from our illness. Society has clear lines on what is and isn't okay to share, to be, to feel, and it has clear lines on what a person with a mental illness is or isn't. With 1 in 4 people in the UK struggling with poor mental health in their lifetime I think it's time for those lines to blur. I think it's time that the walls, self-imposed or otherwise, come down and we start talking openly about mental health. There is no one way to experience or cope with a mental illness. There are many days where I am genuinely happy and fulfilled, many months where I love my life - I am not the stock image of the person clad in grey clutching their head in concentrated despair. I am not what you imagine.
I'm telling you this because I can't be alone, and there are people out there slipping through the net. My inability - society's inability - to accept these two sides as being able to co-exist meant that I didn't reach out to anyone for help until my symptoms were debilitating again. Until I went three days without eating, taking late working “lunch” breaks and seeing nothing but fog around me. I thought that I couldn't be both these people, that I could choose which one to be. So I buried it deep and was devastated when it crept back to the surface, like I hadn't worked hard enough to suppress it.
We think of mental illness as one thing when really, it's many stories, each as important as the last. We call those we see as successful "troubled" when their lives seem to go awry - when they self-medicate, burnout or die by suicide - but we reserve "mentally ill" for those whom we consider to be truly "other" in society. The people that we can't and don't try to understand; but we are not "other" - we are your friends, and family, and colleagues. We are even your bosses. Until we start to accept that mental illness is as personal and complicated as people themselves are, and that it doesn't discriminate, we will continue to lose people. We will continue to mourn the “greats” like Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell, Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, Kate Spade… (the list is gut-wrenchingly long) and brush the “others” off to the side with dangerously stigmatising language like “deranged”, “difficult”, “psycho” and “crazy”. It's a scenario that isn't working for anyone, and together as a society we need to start working through our prejudices towards mental illness.
I’d like you to picture two women.
The first is a young professional; what do you see when you picture her? Do you see the moments she doesn't share on social media? Do you see the self doubt or the guilt or the shame?
The second is a young woman with a mental illness; what do you see when you picture her? Do you see the smiles and the laughter? Do you see her grateful eyes drink in a sunset or the love she shares with friends, the happiness she surrounds herself with?
Do you imagine the two could ever exist in the same space?
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If you are struggling right now and feel like you need to talk to someone, The Samaritans can be reached at 116 123.
Interested in more content related to mental health? Click here to view more posts on this blog about mental health.
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