Secrets for the Mad

by Dodie Clark

  I had read that the cause of my condition stemmed from deeply rooted trauma, and so I went on therapeutic journeys, processing losses and exploring my pain, desperately searching for where the source of the off switch for my brain was. I found out a lot, and I dealt with a lot. I became able to manage my depressive episodes a lot better, I healed over open wounds of broken friendships and insecurities, and I improved the way I dealt with being spaced out – but I still was, and am, very much, spaced out, all of the time.

  Sometimes there isn’t an obvious reason for something, and there isn’t a simple solution, and that’s okay. I will always keep looking for a way to feel awake again.

  I’m currently undergoing TMS treatment (transcranial magnetic stimulation – google it!) and I have appointments booked to talk about medication and all my other options. Despite it being the third most commonly experienced psychological symptom, depersonalisation isn’t talked about anywhere near enough.

  It took me five years to get an official diagnosis, after multiple patronising doctors’ appointments and a lot of confusion and pain. Since I found the name and I opened up about my experiences, I have had friend after friend reach out to me saying they know someone who’s been feeling like they’re dreaming all the time, or that during conversations they find their souls up on the ceiling rather than in their own body.

  I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel present again, but until I find that out, there’s not a lot I can do about it except look after myself and share my experiences to empathise with people who are also in the am-I-really-here? club.

  And there are bright sides to it, if you look hard enough.

  It helped me to write a great song. I made a wonderful friend through bonding over our mutual spaced-out-ness. And perhaps the most cool, DPD is a coping mechanism for high levels of stress. On a windy day in September I was booked to jump out of a plane as part of a presenting job, and I’d told the whole team that I’d never do it; but because I was so numbed to reality that day, I didn’t feel anxiety to the overwhelming, restricting amount I usually would have if I felt present. Spacing out was my Dutch courage, and although I experienced skydiving differently as to how I would have if I wasn’t depersonalised, at least I experienced it!

  TRAVELLING AND DEPERSONALISATION

  As I’ve mentioned, my DPD tends to worsen whenever I travel. I start to truly understand the meaning of depersonalisation; it is as if I am losing myself.

  Here are two things I have written on my travels, during times when the feeling was overwhelming.

  THAILAND

  A twenty-year-old girl wearing polka-dot pyjama shorts, her damp hair in a tight yet messy bun, and a floaty, striped cropped top, leans out of her balcony in Thailand and looks up at the stars.

  Her view of the world currently is a deep navy, almost black, sprinkled with silver, and a forest-green mountain of palm trees and leaves. The air is wet, thick, warm. A fan provides a constant breathy drone. Crickets boast to each other; light chatter from hotel staff is occasionally present, but mostly drowned out by a warm breeze.

  The world is so beautiful. And her brain is not ugly, but just chilly. It aches, a little. She is unable to drink in the gorgeousness of her surroundings, despite her throat closing up with thirst for enlightenment. Her phone is full of snapshots as her eyes are unable to take any. Her notebook is stuffed with thoughts as her head is full of holes and they usually spill out.

  She has been here before; not here, in Thailand, but far from ‘home’, in the dark, while other souls rest in blissful sleep. And, she has accepted, she will be here again.

  Alive, but not alive.

  Content, but not content.

  The stars watch her sigh on her balcony.

  MIRROR

  It’s 2.49 a.m. in the UK but goodness knows what time it is wherever we are in the world now. I managed to sleep for about two hours, but Evan’s crackly snore woke me up so I put on Bridget Jones’s Baby (wouldn’t recommend, it’s horribly cheesy) and tried to rehydrate my body from the many glasses of free wine I drank. How is the air in planes so dry?! I feel like my nostrils are trying to inhale sand.

  Anyway, I just scared the heck out of myself. After chugging two bottles of water I naturally needed the toilet, so I squeezed past seats, through the tiny door, locked it, and sat on the loo. There’s a mirror right next to where you sit, so I turned and studied my face for a bit.

  Because of my depersonalisation, it’s always weird to look in a mirror. I don’t usually look at it too much, because it can get strange.

  But I was curious, so I stared, up close, into a puffy-eyed, blotchy-skinned familiar face.

  I stared a bit too long, actually.

  Panic climbed up my back as I realised I was staring into the face of a possibly angry, wide-eyed, weird version of my brother. Or maybe my sister. The face was so familiar, yet completely foreign, and my mind screamed danger.

  Now, as I’m sober, and not completely mad (yet), I obviously know that this was my face. And it is quite comical to imagine a jetlagged girl sitting on a plane loo, staring up close at herself in a mirror and murmuring ‘what the fuck’.

  But that was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. I felt as though there was another person inches away from my eyes.

  It’s okay. I know it was just a combination of my DPD/DR, two hours of confusing sleep and a very clean mirror. But holy heck – I almost want to go back and look again.

  (The person in the mirror did not look great – they needed some ice on their eyes or something.)

  MANAGING AND MANAGING (BY MANAGER JOSH)

  ‘Snap out of it’, ‘It’s going to be okay’, ‘Trust me, you’ll be fine’ – these are all the things you want to say but you simply can’t. You’re not relatable, you just don’t understand.

  The usual metaphor that people perceive life as is either ‘Is the glass half empty or is it half full?’ As an optimist I would go with the latter, but I can imagine Dodie’s answer being something along the lines of ‘The glass is on the floor; there’s water everywhere’, and it’s with that unpredictable thought process that every day is a new challenge for me when considering her emotions and still getting the work completed.

  Every day we pick up that glass, we clean the floor dry, and we do the best thing we can do to start us off. We talk. We talk deep. ‘How are you feeling?’ A general question that can be said so frivolously and carefree. However, we don’t speak like that. We couldn’t speak like that. Since working with Dodie I’ve come to realise just how important emotions and empathy really are.

  Funny to think that, in a world of business, she’s cynically seen as a ‘product’, yet I consider her more a ‘friend’. ‘How are you feeling?’ now feels so complex and a question best put away in that emotional drawer and to be replaced with just ‘MOR-NING’ and then followed by the tasks at hand.

  Depersonalisation was new to me, something I had never even heard of before I started working with Dodie. ‘It feels like being drunk all the time’ was one of the first things I remember her saying about it. This really stuck with me. How can something so sought after by the adults I see on the tube on a Friday night, or the friends out on a stag/hen-do be so awful to suffer from? Then I realised she said ‘ALL. THE. TIME’ and then it made sense. Those three words put directly at the end of that feeling sounded truly difficult and that’s when my empathy really began.

  Thinking through Dodie’s comparison of being drunk opened my eyes more to the low points. When being drunk, things come at you in random blinks and flashes, you don’t take things in like your sober self can, and your memory is the length and size of a garden pea. To know that someone who I’m close to has this feeling as part of their day-to-day life changed my whole ethos of how I would work as a manager.

  I looked at Dodie then with her glazed-over eyes and unperturbed look on her face and thought I saw someone who wasn’t paying attention; the information was going in but it wasn’t sticking. Like a
teenager in Latin class. What I realise now is that she’s there, she’s listening, she’s taking it in, my English was never Latin, but there’s something in the way in her brain and I need to work my way around it to help her in every way I can.

  ‘Take a minute/day/week out, put all the work things aside if you need to. We will get there and it’s still going to be brilliant, leave it with me,’ I find myself saying to Dodie. This is because I take my duty of care more seriously than ever. I’m not dealing with a ‘product’ or with a ‘cash cow’, I’m dealing with a person. An incredible one. One who I know will get better with time and with love.

  Joshua Edwards (Manager Josh), 2017

  WATERY MILK (SUICIDAL)

  I roll the idea around in my head like I would a boiled sweet in my mouth. It tastes of watery milk, and it numbs and coats my brain.

  How sad. What a sad thought to be consumed by. A sad thing to find a small amount of hope in.

  Of course I’m not feeling a lot, so my eyes do not well up. The heaviness of the idea tugs at the tissues in my chest, but not enough to rip them and cause me to bleed. There is no liquid. Perhaps it has all frozen inside.

  I push my glasses up to my scalp for the tenth time that night, wondering again if I might be able to see better without them in front of my eyes. As if it is that easy to fix, and that’s all I’ve been doing wrong this whole time. But it doesn’t matter if I can see or not, for I’m not even in the room. The sounds around me are from another time, a different place. I am dreaming, I am floating, and if I stop digging my nails into the backs of my arms I will close my eyes and drift into the grey. I look around to closer objects, my vision clinging on to the threads of reality like a cardshop ribbon tied to a giant helium balloon.

  My fingernails are familiar.

  I look up, and I am gone again. The cycle begins. I drag my glasses out of my hair, and set them back on my nose. I move my body in time and stretch my lips out and yell out the words that usually make my head spin, or my lungs swell, or my stomach tingle, or s o m e t h i n g.

  But all I taste is watery milk. The promise of sleep.

  DEAR HAPPY

  I missed you dearly,

  thought I was nearly

  there forever, at last together.

  Is our time fleeting?

  Is even meeting a healthy idea, or am I getting too near?

  Don’t try to fight it,

  I’m here for tonight,

  and I’ll be waiting for you

  until we meet again.

  I know it’s scary

  but don’t be wary,

  if we don’t have that long

  let’s not waste it feeling wrong.

  This isn’t the end,

  I’m your lifelong friend,

  sure it’s been a while

  but I’ll be here when you smile.

  So don’t try to fight it,

  I’m here for tonight,

  and I’ll be waiting for you

  until we meet again.

  Would you mind staying?

  It’s getting late, but I will visit you soon

  so try just to get through.

  And don’t try to fight it,

  I’m here for tonight,

  and I’ll be waiting for you

  until we meet again,

  I’ll be waiting for you

  until we meet again.

  HALF GOOD, HALF BAD

  My Bad Brain demands to be dramatic. It feeds on attention, lying down with its arms twisted up in the air, its legs sprawled out, and an upturned frown and tears in its eyes. ‘Oh, woe is me. Nothing will ever be good again.’

  My Good Brain can never relate. It scoffs – nothing is ever as bad as Bad Brain makes it out to be. You can laugh at anything; just choose to see the funny. It doesn’t understand why you would step into the dark place, wallow in it and not try to get out.

  But Bad Brain knows that when you’re okay, you’re just treading water. And it’s easier to just let go, and sink, down to where you belong; where you don’t have to struggle or try; you just exist, naturally, in depression.

  People experience their mental health problems in different ways, but for me, I flip back and forth between optimistic and utterly hopeless. Luckily I’ve got to a place now where I can recognise when I’m spiralling, and I know I should at least try to ignore the loud voice in my head that tells me this is all I am and will ever be. It’s difficult to write this chapter, because my view of the truth changes with my mental state. I am an unreliable narrator, like Nick from The Great Gatsby. But if I am to believe one of the voices, I’d much rather it be the one that tells me I’m going to be okay, right?

  * If you’re feeling hella dramatic and completely consumed by your bad thoughts, try to pretend to be positive at least. Allow yourself some dramatic episodes, but then practise laughing about it. My flatmate, Hazel, and I have spent many a night awake at 4 a.m., hunching over toilets, shuddering through a terrible state of panic and depression. But we still managed to banter with the paramedics after Hazel mistook a panic attack for a near-death experience. We make jokes about our ‘big trigs’ (triggers) for episodes of bad mental states. Brains are weird, and sometimes the lies they spew are so ridiculous you have to laugh.

  * Sometimes you’ve just got to ride these things out. You should be getting support from doctors, charities, therapy, medication and so on, but perhaps you’re waiting on help, or none of these things work this time – remember, you will be okay. You WILL BE OKAY. This will absolutely not last forever. Take it from someone who was 100% convinced it would. So while you wait, distract yourself and don’t feed it any more attention, even though it’s shouting at you.

  * Self-care, self-care, self-care. You will feel like there’s absolutely no point in doing anything, because nothing will give you joy. But there will be tiny things that help, and all of these little things will add up to help you feel better. Listen to your body – if you feel like you can’t handle a birthday meal at a restaurant tonight, then don’t. You are 100% allowed to take a sick day, just as you would if you were stuck at home with a tummy bug. Of course there comes a point when you make yourself worse by not going outside. Give yourself tiny tasks: take a bath with your favourite mango soap, make hot cups of sweet tea, and, gosh, don’t forget to eat reasonably. Your body won’t work properly if you don’t treat it well, and so you can’t expect your brain to either. When you can’t find your purpose in a day, make it to look after yourself.

  * Have you been alone for the past few days? Or have you constantly been around people all week? You might recognise yourself sinking when you haven’t had the company or the space you personally need to feel okay. I also tend to feel a lot worse when I haven’t slept properly, maybe from jetlag, or when I haven’t had a break from working and stress for a long while. Your mental health problems can kick in any time, but sometimes there is an obvious reason to them, and you have to cut your brain some slack and give it what it needs.

  * Don’t give up hope! There’s always another pathway you can take. You are learning and growing every day; think of the difference between you now and yourself from a few years ago. There is so much time for you to find out ways of helping yourself and techniques to deal with problems. Every time you hit rock bottom, you bring with you everything you’ve picked up from the last time you climbed up.

  * As I have mentioned, for a long time I mourned the past because that was the only time I saw myself as happy. I knew it was pointless to hurt over that so much, because that’s the one place you can’t revisit; but nevertheless I wasted a lot of my late teens obsessing about how nothing would ever be as good as it was before. But through all of that, I learned that brains have a tendency to glorify memories. I still look back on all my experiences with a pang of sadness and a longing to return, even the times I know to have been awful. If you are like me, remember that one day you will look back on the time you are in right now with that same sensation of yearning. Try to zoo
m out and view the situation for what it is, not for the terrible filter of unhappiness you might be looking through currently. Meditation and mindfulness can help you with this, to help ground you and notice each second you experience. Indulge in nostalgia now and again if you wish, but remember that the present moment will become the past, so you might as well enjoy it while you’re in it.

  ADORED BY HIM

  Pretty girl, with the butterscotch hair,

  your eyes and the sunshine smile you wear,

  I can see how you make his soul glow.

  Pretty girl, with the adventurous mind,

  you envision so much you make me look blind.

  You spark his life in ways I’ll never know.

  I won’t hate you

  but oh, it stings.

  How does it feel

  to be adored by him?

  Pretty girl, there’s no need to fret,

  cause it’s midnight, he’s drunk and you’re the one in his head.

  You don’t even have to try at all.

  Pretty girl, oh, he looks at you

  as if life is perfect and the world is new –

  in those moments I just feel so small.

  I won’t hate you

  but oh, it stings.

  How does it feel

  to be adored by him?

  How stupid to think

  that I could compare

  to the pretty girl

  with the butterscotch hair.

  SCROLL. DRINK. SHRINK

  I wrote this six months ago about a friend I once knew. There was a boy involved, and it all got a bit strange and uncomfortable, so we kindly cut ties and said goodbye and good luck. We were smart about it and treated each other with care, but breaking contact with a soul I enjoy to know is never something I have done well.