Struck by Lightning.

I watched this film. Yes, I like this quote from it. But, I have learnt something more about myself.

Always, these kind of discovery, coming of age things appeal to me. Because I am a stuck person. I am, no matter my chronological age, or what I spend my time doing, stuck, at the point of being NEARLY a formed person, but somehow stuck in the one day phase.

I think this is interesting, and I wonder whether it is partly a response to living with the change in life that comes when adolescence is spent in the psych ward. When, from, “when I grow up, I will…” is replaced with just fighting to rediscover normal.

Where all the things you think life is about stop, and something new comes in, and you are just carried backwards down the river of life. Fighting to breathe, and never knowing what is the reality and what is expected.

it’s funny, because, you can do a whole range of “normal” things, but you lose that sense of achieving, of being part of the same life.

But, this film, like so many coming of age films caught me. because, I STILL wonder why my real life would be and will be like. Which is dangerous, because, this is it. There is no rehearsal, there is no, absolutely no chance that I will wake up one day back in my original life, before the hospital, or before the house move, or before any of those pivotal things. So, I am not sure how to unstick. I mean, I keep doing things, but, I never really feel right. I wonder if this happens to lots of people in the same circumstances (of which there must be many)

In this film, however, when the hero loses everything despite his best, most underhanded and concerted efforts, and despite the challenges he faces, everything lacking in his life, he gets to know how badly he has been treated by the one person who he was supposed to rely on, but never could, and then he gets to die.

This is what I wished. And, I am not sure that there isn’t actually a level of mercy in the outcome. But, I suppose, that having been given a chance to do more, doing more must be what happens. But how to reassimilate the ongoing life with the pre schism existence?

This, I suppose is something that everyone must come to terms with?

A Teenaged War Hero

 

Yes, there are are child soldiers in the world. They are suffering and dying. People are. All over the world. But this does not make anything you endure less. There is no correlation between their suffering and yours. You can suffer. They can suffer. It is different, but one is not validating, or reducing the other.

To insist one is more or worse or has more value dismisses the struggles. To fight, alone, though a world where reality is not to be trusted, where people can lie about you, and no one will believe you because, you are the person with mental health problems. Where people who were friends leave you as if you were dead, where nothing you used to be able to aim for is there anymore. Through an internal landscape either so deeply destroyed and pitted and dangerous and dark, OR so sharp and sparkling and fractured and invincible. To survive every day with that as your internal world, and a lot of your external world, is to fight in a war.

The “help” you can receive does not understand this. And they talk about adjusting expectations, and stopping wanting the things you wanted. They ask you to not be you, so that they can pretend that this new version of something resembling a person like you is well and can at least be in the world, even though you are not well, you are irreparably stolen from and damaged. And they let you go, like that, because, their parameters are not set such to rescue YOU, but simply to prevent you hurting anyone. Physically, that INcludes you, psychologically, no one but you knows or cares.

They want to make sure you are not hurting your body. Even if you hurt your body to remind yourself that you ARE actually a person, who is capable of hurting – because the system expects you not to be, to not care the things you have given up. They expect you to NOT be a teenager, to suddenly NOT need family, or friends or fun or ambitions, and just to sink to a level where being alive is enough. If you can’t believe that, then you are failing, and they won’t help because, that is all they can offer.

It is war. To come out of the other side is HARD. To find a person who can see this, and who can hold on and see you through this and see that you have value and CAN do at least SOME of the things that drove you initially, those dreams that are part of you. You need someone to tell you you are allowed MOST of those, and someone to help you rebuild those you can’t have.

To come so far out the other side to have built a career and a family is wondrous, but, every step is precarious. To place your trust in that relationship you have CHOSEN, than family you have built, is to risk someone ridiculing that, and making that even less possible.

To those people, those teenagers who have fought and fought and succeeded against the professionals, and the medications, and the stigma, and prejudice and are now successful adults, this is to be a war hero. TO have made it through, and achieved and not to have been wasted by the mental health machine, either the monster of the illness, or the insidious cruelty of the system and society.

Those in the midst of such a journey. It CAN be won. it IS possible. Do NOT give up.

You cannot know whether you will be the one to succeed. So you have to fight as if you will be.

And you have to celebrate every step. And know that no matter what anyone else thinks, it is hard won, and worth celebrating.