A Letter to Forgotten Warriors

to those left behind by the annual “Mental Health Inspiration Porn Month”

Dear Warriors,

I have a long history, and it would take far too many paragraphs to go into now.

I think it all started when I was fifteen. Around then, I think I first started the depressive thoughts which would later come to dominate my life, or at least to serve as a catalyst for some of the things that I experienced, that happened to me.

My folks are what you could call “well-to-do people.” They make good money. I am incredibly proud of them. And I can’t say I was mistreated, or dismissed, throughout my life.

But it’s around that time that I was fifteen years old that shit started to get real. I started having thoughts. That I wasn’t good enough. That maybe my life should have been taking a different direction. That maybe I was doing everything wrong, and perhaps I should have been doing something different.

It was about when I was 16 when I experienced my first hospitalization. I can’t find a way to describe this experience, other than the fact that there was this one ritual they did, where they had all the patients assemble in a classroom, and they handed out newspapers, and that was how I heard about the death of Fred Rogers. Now, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was something I grew up with, I rarely was allowed to watch anything other than the children’s programming on PBS. Can you imagine, an icon of your entire childhood, reduced to a headline on a newspaper, and hearing your fellow patients talking about how “creepy” he was?

I remember that hospitalization, too, in that I was so stubborn about this one thing that I wound up being led to my room by large muscular men in rubber gloves, and it was at that point that I let out a little sigh and resigned myself completely, utterly to the situation in which I found myself. I had a lovely doctor, his name was Dr. John. He told me all about the medication he was going to prescribe me, asked me if I was sexually active (the answer being an obvious “No” at this point), and I think it was he who first suggested that I was showing obvious signs of Aspergers Syndrome and reported it to God-Knows-Who. I think I spent a total of four days in this place, and I know now that I was probably observed very carefully and systematically. There were a couple of group facilitators, one of whom had actually attended the college in which my town is located (and boy, he had some great stories, stories which now I am able to verify are not that uncommon here!), and I heard tales from girls who had finally been definitively diagnosed with bipolar disorder, who had been raped, who had spent more than one stint here and described herself as “I disappear from time to time and don’t tell anyone about it.”

I guess it would be relevant to say that at one point I was pulled from my high school. I don’t think any of my teachers, or, for that matter, administrators, were able to handle someone as fucked up as me. It’s not like I stopped trying; I think at this point, I read all I could, and by the time I re-entered high school my junior year, it seemed almost as if no time had passed at all, and I was there, a High School Junior, Ready to Succeed! Of course, my problems with executive functioning, no doubt a result of the Nonverbal Learning Disorder with which I had recently been diagnosed, proved a severe impediment to my academic achievements; but, through the help of a great tutor (the tutoring program at this school has recently been scrapped, just as an FYI…not all private schools are very good at dealing with Special Ed cases), I was somehow able to pass my grade and make it to Senior Year.

I don’t want to talk much about Senior Year. It was completed at a very well-regarded private school, and I got the best education one could hope for. It was a school for the arts, and I have no regrets as to my attendance.

It’s later in life that I started to develop serious problems. My NLD flared up, as did my Bipolar-II and Seasonal Affective Disorder and whatever the fuck else I might have been suffering from. I was in and out of college, and my most recent college experience ended badly, with me dropping out completely without even telling anyone and even leaving my home state entirely for an awesome place out west.

Lots of things have happened since then, but here I am now, typing up these experiences for you to either read, or breeze over and say “Fuck off,” but here I am. Just me, living reasonably comfortably, with my laptop and a pretty shitty Internet connection. I am lucky in that my parents have done very well for themselves, and are quite well off.

I just wish I could be as successful as them. Everyone else in my family? They can take care of themselves perfectly fine. I have no worries about my brothers, and as far as I am aware all of my cousins are leading full lives and completely independent. So here I am, just an atypical piece of shit who can’t take care of himself.

I know now, though, that I am not alone. Maybe you have lost job after job. Maybe you can’t muster up the energy to pour a bowl of cereal so you just eat a little bit from the Nutella jar for your one meal of the day. Maybe your life has been thrown into chaos because you Just Can’t Even when it comes to other people. Maybe you’ve never been to Hawaii because all your “vacation savings” go into having a bed in the Wacko Basket a few times a year. You’ve faced the Mental Illness version of the Walk of Shame by going back to loved ones you’d thought you were free of, tail between your legs, hoping for a bit of food and shelter for a whole so you can “recharge your batteries” and “figure shit out.”

Such a state inevitably leads to feeling so very, very alone.

But you aren’t. We’re here, in bubbles of our own, grasping for a hand that isn’t there, wishing we could share something, anything with somebody other than the therapist we keep cancelling on.

I don’t know if that’s worth anything, but if everyone really did have it in them to succeed, if the American Dream weren’t an empty promise, then we wouldn’t be here. But we are, and maybe, during a brief moment of relative lucidity, we can remember that. We may not know each other, but our shared existence is not worth nothing.

So much love.

-t

This post originally appeared on Medium. I've moved it here because, well, fuck Medium.