Mental Hell - Spiritual Struggle

A mental crisis is as much spiritual as cognitive or emotional. When you lose access to what you were familiar with – the way your mind works (or does not); your connection to others, to society to the world, this comes to be about meaning.

And your search for sense, amidst the loss of the singular narrative that bounds the wreck of your former identity is spiritual. Spiritual, not in the sense of needing abstract conceptual frameworks, a religious ideology, the steadfastness of belief that once was a bedrock perhaps – the anchor of an all-loving god…. Not that. But to understand what the hell is happening, what the hell you can do to make the pain and suffering stop or come to allow for it.

Who you are is not who you were. What you can do is not what you could do. Who you will be is not based on a linear continuation of who you were – mental illness is a cosmic shift. A breakdown in self-communication; the battery of energy is also gone… the fuel that took you to who you thought you were.

All is lost, and it becomes a crying in the wilderness. The people around you might help a bit, but most of your friends and even your family fall away. In this desert, there is only courage. The will to move on one step at a bloody, sweaty, terrible time. Hope is not the sort of hope that others have – it is a thin thread, melting into the invisibility of consistent darkness and turmoil – night and day.

To remain alive is a feat of strength that nobody else can imagine (except perhaps you the reader who may have touched upon this incessant call to choose life, one second after another, doubt as to what you are doing snarling like a wolf by your side, at your throat).

To come to trust in the way you are wandering; to come to believe in how you are coping; to come to any sort of confidence about the meandering in the nothingness and chaos, demands a spiritual strength of a kind that few people know about – we activists cry about the semantics of mental hell; we argue against the shame and the stigma; we discuss ‘trauma-informed care’ or whatnot, but we don’t talk often enough about the sheer battle – one that turns and twists around you requiring a new meaning for who you are – that you are enough. This internal search is so full of an inexplicable percussive sense of loss, panic, confusion, pain.

And in the world: to be enough in this malodorous and toxic grifting ebb and flow; to be enough in the volatility all round and inside; to come to know that the search is on for something far more full of value than that which you once were certain of.. is a spiritual search above anything else.

Who am I? What are we here for? Why go on? All these questions rise from the emergent burning and within the crucible of a pain that lies even deeper sometimes than the cognitive mission to be ‘normal again’ (though that in itself would be a prize).

Resilience: How to live with this inner burning that takes you away from the normal world – how to live in two places at once – the daily acts of eating and breathing and the furnace or portal to infinity. You think yourself insane for struggling to balance your inner and outer worlds.

And yet I have come to believe that we are the ones who are sane. That people with mental conditions are the new shamans - it is insane not to question who you are, to remain in your little world of being knowledgable and righteousness, to rush, to exclaim, to gobble up your pastries and coffee in one bite and to be forever on your phone.

Those who question too much are caught up in the asylums, without recourse to signposts towards a different form of sanity. Those who are custodians of normality are insane. Those who continue to preach that they are right, rather than kind, will continue to fuel all war.

Those in the storm of our own self-gathering remain liminal. Yet the depth of our soul-searching will direct us one day. For now, we get glimmers of the truth, and then the fact of those glimmers disappear and we come to doubt again.

We are the spiritual truth seekers, those who have had life-changing illness, injury or disability. We are and should be the true leaders of our times. Humble through hurt. Formulating a strength that is unlike any other strength we used to conceive of.

I wish that all those struggling can conceive together of that different way, knowing there are others out there like us, gathering by an imaginary fire and telling the stories of how we can and will reach an infinite home. And through that to widen the circle of compassion - from oneself to others; from others to the world.

Be as kind to yourself to the degree that you can. Inch forward in the battle. You may be further on than you think.