Silver Linings

I know this isn't my first post about silver linings, but I just got done watching the movie Silver Linings Playbook with my husband, and there are a few things that need to be said.

When you watch the interviews and extras after the movie, it becomes clear that part of the reason the movie was so powerful and connectingly real is because the people who made the film had a driving need to tell an honest, raw story about struggling with mental illness.  It had to have the gritty truth about the yelling and the delusions and the heartache of family members who just don't know how to help, but it also had to have the hope too.  The promise that with hard work and perseverance we can stop hiding the truth of our weakness from ourselves and start working on getting better.  

It was a concept that resonated with me powerfully because I have lived that struggle.  And make no mistake, it is a war.  A war which we can't even begin to start fighting until we have the strength to even realize we're on a battlefield, and that the stakes can be life or death serious.  So much of mental illness begins with denial and rationalization and while we have that, we can't have healing.  The filmmakers and Mr. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz pointed out that until we have dialog about mental illness we will never have acceptance, understanding, and fair treatment.  Too many people suffer in shame, feeling alone, when what they need most to survive and overcome is to connect with someone.  To make that connection, we have to admit that we need it, and that's very hard to do.  It starts with doing away with secrets and being honest.

I never finished college.  After a stellar high school career of extra curricular activities, a 4.14 GPA and Advanced Placement courses under my belt, I dropped out of college in my sophomore year with a failing GPA, a lost scholarship, and a huge weight of self disappointment.  My husband likes to explain, if people ask, that I dropped out of school when I got sick with mono, and that's the kinder way to tell it, but it's not the honest way.  The truth is I was already plummeting over that cliff with my foot on the gas pedal, and getting mono was just the last thing, like taking off of my seat belt on the way down.  Getting knocked on my ass by an illness that sucked the strength out of me allowed me to give in and acknowledge that I was overwhelmed by depression and didn't know how to get back up again.

I came home from college after reaching out to a suicide hotline in my dorm room all alone.  I didn't want to kill myself, I told them, and that was the truth, but I was having visions of myself dying in a variety of ways, throughout the day, every day, and I was afraid.  How many times can you watch a movie in your head where you die, either by your own hand or by some tragic accident, before you someday discover you're actually living out the movie?  Er, dying out the movie I guess.  Either way I didn't want to wait and find out.   I needed help.  I was given a choice between having myself committed or trusting myself to stay "on the outside" but get the treatment I needed.  I chose to talk to my parents and go home for treatment.

In 28 Days, Sandra Bullock's character is made to wear a sign that says something like, "Confront me if I do not ask for help."  Boy, there's another movie that I could identify with.  Asking for help is so damned hard, and I needed it badly.  But I took the first step, admitting it (how could I not, with my world falling apart around me?), and that was the beginning of getting better.  Like anything else I've faced, I learned about it in order to fight it.  So I came to realize that I had been depressed a lot longer than just those couple of college years.  All those growing up years in family counseling had not just been for my other family members, because I was not the only happy exception to the dysfunction that I had painted myself to be in my head.  (I don't need counseling because I'm so happy and successful!  I mean come on, have you seen my report card?  Plus I smile a lot and have plenty of friends, so I'm fine, but I'll sit here and listen if it helps the others.)  Right.  We were in there because we all needed it.

I did even more therapy when I got home from giving up on school.  Group therapy, and individual therapy.  And I took the medications that made you feel listless and sleepy and killed your sex drive but also helped keep you from snapping at people over the tiniest (nonexistent) provocations and elevated your brain chemicals enough to try to take control of your thoughts and stop thinking the ones about death.  I wrote a lot, and I listened to a lot of music, and I studied the patterns that revealed where my depression had been hiding and covering itself up and I learned how to change them.

When I was ready, I stopped the therapy.  I stopped the medications.  And I moved on.  I had embarked on a new adventure with a new love, in a new town, with a new job.  I would say I am a successfully recovered  mental illness patient, not because I have always been happy since then, because I have certainly had down times.  But I have recognized the early warning signs, and turned it around every time it tried to come back.  And I know now that it doesn't have to be a secret I don't like to talk about. 

I talked to my husband tonight about how personally I related to Silver Linings Playbook.  This was not news to him, of course.  I may not have told everyone else my mental history, but I have no secrets from him.  Hell, he was the biggest strand in the lifeline that pulled me up from the bottom of that cliff.  He has a way of spinning things so they don't get too darkly serious, so he jokingly asked if I related to the movie because I'd taken dance classes.  I told him no, not dancing, but there was this one time I took a modeling class with a friend, where we strutted around on a wooden floor in a dance studio, beside a mirrored wall, wearing high heels.  It was exactly the kind of risque, adventurous situation my friend was so good at getting me into, where I was terrified and thrilled all at the same time.  Twenty years have gone by and I have never told her this, but I will say it now:  those adventures we had, where I had to come out of my shell, even if only for an hour or two, I have carried with me my entire life, and I remember them when I need the courage to be something more than just a wallflower, when I need to use my voice or stand out.  Like now, writing this.  Thanks S.G.G.  I love you.

This turned out to be more than just a few things about silver linings, but the point is this:  mental illness should not be something that we hide from or cover up.  And it is definitely something that can be beaten.  Like everything else in this blog, I hope people read this and realize they aren't alone, and see the beautiful possibilities they have.  Whatever it is you face, you have within you so much potential, so much promise, if you just grab it and refuse to let go.  Your silver linings are waiting.