What do you do to occupy yourself in the moments you wish would simply go by faster?
I am sitting with my boyfriend watching some TV show Netflix recommended. I’ve spent the majority of the last 24 hours asleep, yet still feel exhausted. I pitched this piece ages ago. Now it’s due in two days and I’m only just starting. I have a pervasive sinking feeling that I have nothing worth saying at all.
I have no intention of wallowing in this feeling. I am instead trying to address the reason behind it — something some of us will connect with and understand and others will never be able to quite comprehend without the knowledge gained from experience.
I am diagnosed with bipolar type 1. I have been in a depressive episode for months. Although I recently started a mood stabilizer to hopefully help reduce said symptoms, it has been having the opposite effect. I am irritable, disinterested, and simple daily tasks are becoming difficult. Emotions are spilling out in ways they shouldn’t. I’m trying my best, but frankly, it’s hard. Really hard.
Everyone experiences difficulties as part of their lives. I know this is unavoidable. We all inevitably have disappointment, shame, loneliness, and all other kinds of uniquely human experiences that are not pleasant but are character-building. Illness is a different beast entirely, though. There are no lessons to be learned from needless suffering. There is no hint of personal responsibility to be taken.
People can empathize with physical illness because there is a reason they can easily point to for the change in behaviour. A person with cancer lying in bed all day seems self-explanatory. Yet, when I did it — when my mood was so low I couldn’t move — I was a lazy teenager who needed to get their life together.
This is not to say the suffering of the former is lesser at all. I am not trying to quantify that. I am simply pointing out there is a distinct difference in the patience people are afforded based on whether others understand why they are acting in a certain way.
While I am guessing anyone who has experienced mental illness themselves knows this, there is an added level of suffering when the people around you blame you for the symptoms that you’re trying so hard not to give in to. Hating yourself for not accomplishing much and then getting yelled at for exactly that is incredibly deflating. It makes maintaining successful relationships seem impossible — an incredibly important aspect of recovery.
There is a bizarre dichotomy in how mental health is presented in popular culture. Until now, I have focused on the paradigm which reduces it to personal choices and overindulgence in negative, however normal human emotions. Education and reducing stigma have thankfully reduced the prevalence of this viewpoint. However, this has birthed a different, equally toxic paradigm: romanticizing mental illness and the lives of those who experience it.
Depressive disorders, especially bipolar disorder, are frequently used as character tropes to add audience intrigue. Characters like Rue Bennett from Euphoria are presented as having mysterious interesting lives, presenting their illness as almost poetic.
What teenager secretly wouldn’t want to be Rue? She lives independent of responsibility, partying and doing drugs with little concern for the future. Her mental illness makes her unique, something many teenagers are looking to establish for themselves. In the minds of those naïve to the experience, mental illness can seem more like an aesthetic to wear than a debilitating ailment making every aspect of life more difficult.
Media inevitably represents the best and most interesting moments of the lives of those it portrays because its purpose is to maintain audience interest. The writers of Euphoria operate with the end goal of making the show as popular as possible.
One key method of garnering audiences is creating relatable characters audiences are interested in — characters they can identify with and imagine themselves embodying. Characters who live interesting lives who deep down wish they could experience themselves. For this reason, portrayals of illness (and mental illness especially) will never be accurate.
While representation in media is incredibly important, how that representation occurs and the effects of the message are equally so. I am happy to see TV shows depicting the lives of those experiencing mental illness. However, leading naïve audiences to believe the illness is a net-positive experience that makes people live poetically, if potentially chaotic, lives is arguably even more problematic.