Sharing the Holidays With A Mental Illness

A message from those afflicted with sadness this season

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

'Tis the season to be struggling...

There is no good time to have a mental illness.

I mean, it's never convenient to carry that invisible heaviness around with you; to have to marshal every bit of energy to keep the persistent demons at bay, to muster up enough functional positive momentum to attend to the menial tasks in front of you.

There simply isn't an ideal spot on the calendar for such things.

Most any time of the year on any nondescript day, depression and anxiety make you feel slightly out of step with the world around you. You sense that you're a bit of an oddity, a foreigner, an alien. You look in the eyes of people across the cafeteria or the cubicle or the living room or your social media feed and they all seem perfectly fine—
as if they aren't regularly sucker punched with sudden and debilitating bouts of irrational darkness,
as if they aren’t fully frustrated by a steady pain they feel but can't name,
as if a despair with no reasonable cause, isn't a frequent presence inside their heads.

Regardless of the date, with mental illness as an internal companion you're always aware that you're a bit different than most people—but this realization is never more clear or profound than in a season when everyone else seems to be singing; when effusive joy is the expected default response. More than any other time of the year, you feel the pressure to be well, to pull it together, to deck the halls and don now your gay apparel and let your heart be light and to be appropriately jolly.

Most people don't understand depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses, believing that they can be cured with tangible things, with measurable data, with accurate information. They think that you can simply choose to not be afflicted with sadness. They mistakenly imagine, that placed in the right exterior conditions you can just "cheer up." It makes sense to these well-meaning but unafflicted people, that with enough ugly sweaters, twinkling lights, tinsel strands, and yuletide carols, that you can catch happiness like you do a seasonal cold.

It would great be if that's how it worked.
It would be nice if mental illness took a break for the holidays.
It doesn't.

We who carry a mental illness try like hell to take a vacation from it though, I can promise you that.

We don't want to be the people who weigh down these days for those around us who easily revel in the lightness of the season. We put on the ugly sweaters and string the lights and do our best to "fake it 'till we make it"—and yes, sometimes the trappings of the season do help. Often they are a source of rest and can be a welcome distraction. Sometimes songs or rituals or smells, trigger the muscle memory of a day in the past when joy wasn't such work, when peace was easy to come by, when wonder was plentiful. Sometimes the holidays are medicinal.

Yet, just as often those songs and rituals and smells, become tethers tied around our waists, that without warning yank us back into the dark places, back into the persistent heaviness, back into the isolation of being sad and songless people in a crowd of willing carolers.

Those of us afflicted with depression and anxiety know that if you love us, you too are forced to spend the holidays with our mental illness. We know how difficult our unpredictability is, how draining our mood swings are, how tenuous your sense of calm is because of us. Just know how much we appreciate you working so hard to overcome our darkness with your brightness. Even if from the outside it doesn't seem to help, it matters. Even if it doesn't result in a visible change in us, we see what you're trying to do and we are grateful.

And know too that right now we are trying—as much as in April or August, we are trying to hold back the demons and kindle the flickering light inside us.

We are, in this season as in every season, seeking a joy that does not need to be manufactured and is not easily stolen.

We know how difficult it is for your to be spending your holidays with our mental illness.

Believe me, we know.

If you keep holding on through this season, we will too.