Mental Health Is A Practice, or Aren’t We All Just Keeping It Together?

Mental health is a practice, a rehearsal, and sometimes I feel like I turned up late and missed the first exercise.

Over the last few weeks and months I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that, beyond the recognisable sadness of grief that has been a part of my life for a long time now, in all uses of the word I’m probably depressed. Saying it out loud, or writing it down, makes me cringe. It feels like I’m whining or asking for sympathy. It feels like its not that big a deal, particularly when so many of my peers are in the same position. It feels like attention seeking, and maybe it is. But there we go; I’m depressed.

I’m aware of the complex ways in which I’m bound up in broader systems here. I’ve written in other places and at other times about being critically aware that these issues aren’t just within in me, but are part of much broader system. That, in many ways, I exist in a society that creates the conditions for depression and anxiety, names me broken, and places the onus of fixing myself at my own feet.

And I know that. But sometimes it’s very difficult to remember. And its very difficult to remember that, or even give a shit about that fact, when often getting up every morning and putting one foot in front of another takes most of the energy you have for that day.

Mental health is a practice, and there are times when I feel like I’ve turned up with the wrong equipment, like I’m trying to play chess wearing boxing gloves.

Amanda Palmer performed at our bar a few weeks ago. That’s a big deal and a name drop and I’m not apologising for it. The reason I brought it up, however, is because I was re-introduced to my slight obsession with her song “Bigger On The Inside”. The closing line, “trying is the point of life”, sticks in my brain. I return to it, again and again. I try to pay attention at times like this to the things that I stick to and that stick to me, that I come back to, return to, multiple times, because they often turn out to be significant, either about survival or injury or both at once.

It’s always about words. Whether its Eve Sedgwick or Neil Bartlett or Judith Butler or whoever else I’m reading. A good turn of phrase has always turned my head. I like to think, at times, that I write a sentence or two of my own that I would like if I read it. Those consequential arrangements of words and letters bypass my brain and hit me in the gut. I return to them again and again, each time anew, waiting to be hit again.

And I like this one. “Trying is the point of life”. I wonder if life is also trying? We have to try and it tries us. At the moment, however, I’m not sure if trying feels like it’s enough. Striving maybe. Battling. Some mornings feel like a battle. I’m currently winning; I’m getting up, aren’t I? But it does mean that once the battle to exist is finished, there’s not much energy left to live. And certainly not always enough to live well.

I wonder, more broadly, what this obsession with this particular line says about me? What it might do or mean for my mental health? Is it related at all or am I just trying to make my life more poetic? More coherent? If it all joins up neatly, then maybe I can untangle it. I think my biggest fear is that it doesn’t. Or rather, that my anxiety and depression, whilst being related to broader neoliberal and economic systems, are actually within me, are caused by me. For years, I located all of these feelings in a troubled childhood and a phenomenal death rate in my family. My anxiety and my sadness were all products of grief, and a complex and often injurious (although not exclusively so) upbringing with ill and loving, if at times difficult, parents.

But that’s all gone now and, whilst I’m still processing the complex modes of grief and loss that come with those experiences, these feelings persist. What if I’m not depressed because my parents died when I was still too young? What if I’m not anxious due to years of living with an addict? What if I’m not struggling to be happy because of the various modes of caring that I had to engage with at a young age? What if I’m just sad?

Mental health is a practice; it is something that we must practice. The problem with this repeated phrase is that, contrary to what we might be told, practice doesn’t always make perfect. I’ve sat for hours at a time at a piano, but had to admit that eventually I wasn’t going to get any better – there’s something about rhythm that just won’t stick. The same can be said for the accordion. I can do the keys and the buttons, but as soon as you ask my to squeeze in time I’m screwed. There’s something about the rhythms for me that just don’t compute; they won’t go in my body.

And maybe that’s just it. I know that mental health is a practice. And I know that my depression and anxiety are both within me and beyond, related to my history and a distinct feature of my present. All of that is clear in my brain; but truly understanding it in my body is the struggle. Getting the rhythm in my body just doesn’t seem to work. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance that I’m just not cut out for it; that I’ve finally reached my limit and no amount of practicing is going to make me get any better at it.

If that’s it, if this is life now, what strategies can I put in place to make mornings easier? To make existing easier and therefore make living better? To even, not to sound too grandiose, live well. If I don’t quite have the skillset (yet) to manage it on myself, then I inevitably turn outwards, to those systems and people and queers in and around which I find myself.

I’ve talked lots recently, probably overly romantically, about how the research community of which I’m a part (where I’m doing my PhD) is full of queers and feminists. Its something I find compelling and moving, particularly when I talk about standing side by side with them, like we’re lining up for some form of battle; even if the language of conflict feels a little uncomfortable. The idea of it is incredibly supportive, a sense of doing things together, even when we’re alone. We aren’t having the same experience as one another, but we are walking side by side, and if we slip on that steep slope, we know someone will catch that out of the corner of their eye and reach out a hand to steady us.

I wonder if I need to articulate more clearly for myself the beside-ness that also functions in relation to mental health. When I talk or think about mental health I often refer to others I know who are so much better at talking about it, or at managing it. I am, I would guess, surrounded by people who have difficult experiences of mental health, or know those who have. I am by no means alone, even if sometimes it feels that way.

Perhaps I should amend my statement, then: Mental health is a practice, but not something we have to practice alone. I’ve always thought that I work better with people; a fact I’ve had confirmed to me throughout the process of writing my PhD; if I never have to write alone again, I will be happy. Working on mental health, practicing it, trying it out alongside someone else already feels much less intimidating and much more manageable. Because if I stumble, I might fall, but I know that someone will notice, will clock it, and will come and give me a hand up, and we’ll carry on up the path together; side by side but not alone. And that, in turn, I’ll keep an eye on the periphery to make sure that no one gets left behind.

I don’t think this means we need to be constantly talking about our mental health to one another (although I know I certainly could be better at communicating). Rather I think this might mean learning how to be alongside one another in more complex and contingent ways, practicing being aware of who and what we see in our peripheral vision, out of the corner of our eyes. For me, it might mean recognising the ways in which I am implicated in lives beyond my own, and trying to allow myself more opportunities to be fragile, and to remember that I am beside a vast array of beautiful broken people and that, just as crucially, they are beside me.

I’m trying to refuse to give this piece a hopeful ending, because I’m not always hopeful at the moment and tying all this up neatly in a bow suggests an end point that isn’t even in sight yet, and might never be. It’s difficult because I think we are often future-oriented creatures, and I’ve always been a bit embarrassingly attached to hope. I’m trying to not round this off with a hopeful glance at tomorrow, however, but rather rest in what currently feels like a grim and uncomfortable present, whilst being aware that tomorrow isn’t ever finished even when it feels like it might already be fixed firmly in place.

Survival, I was reminded recently, is never finished. It’s a process, a doing; an infinite, discontinuous and complex set of acts and practices and gestures that exist both within us and beyond us, in moments of interaction, in moments of togetherness, as well as when we’re alone. I locate my survival, I think, in moments and processes of togetherness and beside-ness; working out, often slowly and awkwardly, what it means to be alongside others in both joy and pain, in both laughter and tears, and in all the complicated and sticky moments in, around and between.

Mental health is a practice, survival is a doing, and all I’m doing is keeping it together so I can take the next step.