About seven and a half years ago, I had just
graduated from college with a business degree and I was working my first (and
last) marketing job, which was a very stressful experience. Lots of stress.
Constant stress. Fresh out of college, I was overwhelmed and hated waking up
every day to go do this stuff.
And so I began to fall apart. My downfall
commenced with a nagging worry, of the sort that I’d been troubled with many
times in the past and somehow managed to swat away after weeks or months. This current
fear, however, was a little stronger, just a bit more intense—making it more
believable and convincing that it was the truth. And so this worry persisted and
festered, very quickly snowballing into another fear as I rushed to judgment
and made a false connection that resulted in another, even more debilitating delusion.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, I sunk further and further down into this
void of delusion until I’d lost control of my mind, my body, and my life. Every
basic comprehension—about myself and the world—fell away; everything became horribly
confusing, and every experience became quite humiliating and thoroughly
devastating.
Nothing made sense anymore; I had no idea
what was going on. Everything in my life was terrifying. My mind had unraveled
seemingly overnight. For a general clarification of about this malaise, let
this suffice: what had once been “down” was now “up” and vice versa. To
survive, I was grasping at straws, grasping at anything that made sense or could make sense. I became more and more
scared as fear and doubt spread into all aspects of my life until I became unsure
of the reality of any little thing. Amid the wreckage, I didn’t know where to
turn or what to do. Peace had been taken from me, and I couldn’t find it again.
I went through a great deal of trauma, and I was in a lot of emotional /
spiritual pain with no idea of what was going on. Very quickly I went from
being a fairly outgoing person to someone who could no longer function socially
or in any way whatsoever.
Through a constant pounding of humiliation and
trauma, I was humbled until I felt lower than the dust and the worms beneath. I
couldn’t stand to be around people or friends because I was so scared of myself
and of them. I couldn’t do my job; I humiliated myself, my employers, my
friends. What good was I? What did I have to live for? Why would I want to live
like this?
Throughout my life, I had put off the urge to
write since I considered it to be pointless; I didn’t have the confidence to
start and would rather spend my free time playing video games to help deter the
constant nagging, the pain, and turmoil of OCD. (Yeah, I can be quite the
video-gameaholic. Noveling has been my 12 Step Program.) This time, the urge to
write came back stronger, and I was finally ready to follow-through and obey: I
was desperate for any outlet to vent my frustration and terror and
self-loathing. I had been made to listen at last.
When I lost my job (How could I work when I
couldn’t concentrate or contribute?), I was forced to move in with my parents and
proceeded to live as a virtual recluse for two years. I didn’t get help because
I didn’t think there was any help to be had. I didn’t consider the possibility
that I could be mentally ill, thinking that what I was going through was just
some sort of personal crisis that was a little more intense than the crises I’d
had many times before.
Throughout all this distress and change (trying
to work while extremely ill, losing my job, and moving), I turned to noveling as
a drowning man would turn to a life raft or preserver and hold onto it tightly.
Noveling was the only thing that could keep me afloat. The art of piecing
together a novel made perfect sense to me when nothing else did. I could
comprehend it when I wasn’t able to keep a firm grasp of the most mundane, basic
concepts.
Noveling gave me peace, made me feel good
about myself. It just felt right from the start, like it was something I should
have been doing all along. A perfect fit. It was as though I’d slipped on a
nice party dress that accentuated my curves. . . .
(Uh, please forget you read that. This is
supposed to be a serious post. Focus, Josh. Focus!)
I novelled for my own salvation I suppose. I
novelled before I was diagnosed, before I had therapy and learned mindfulness
techniques to help me hang onto inner tranquility. It provided relief when
nothing else could. A novel was something I could dive into and lose myself in.
For stretches of time, I could forget myself and find safety from my own brain
in realms of fantasy, where I was free to let everything go. There I could work
through my demons, express what I was feeling, and show how I hurt. I could
offload every dark emotion I was enduring and throw it on the back of something
/ someone else. For a time, I could be free of pain, and that meant everything
to me.
This immense passion for noveling has only
grown over the last seven years or so as I’ve gone from total recluse to
struggling to rejoin society—a process and prospect I’m still not comfortable
with and never will be. It’s much easier for me to sit at my computer for hours
at a time and write rather than get out and be social. Considering how
uncomfortable I am even around family members, going to a party and sitting there
with strangers isn’t easy—it’s torture really. Needless to say, torture is not
my idea of fun.
If I wasn’t able to novel, I’d have nothing;
I would feel like I was less than nothing. The crafting of a high-quality piece
of work has given me self-esteem, which has helped me in turn to have the
needed courage when facing OCD obsessions / compulsions and social anxiety fears.
Just finishing a novel showed me that I can do it, that I can make something of
myself, that I don’t have to be a drain on others. There is something I am really
good at, something I can do for a living at a time when I can’t hang onto
employment or find work.
Because of mental illness, each day of my
life finds a new way to provide me with fresh misery. For me, living isn’t fun,
but writing is. When I’m able to sit in front of a computer every day and
launch myself into the shoes of another character and live and breathe in their
world, I am able to forget all about my own and my existence; I’m free to
create whatever I wish. In those moments, I am liberated from my own brain, and
it is wonderful. The experience is rather magical, transformative, as I become
this other person: I can see right through them and understand everything there
is to understand. I am able to see them for who they truly are, and this
relieves some of my loneliness.
This will sound hokey or cheesy, but writing
is my soul, and my soul is writing. Everything
I have goes into my novels. I agonize over individual words and sentence
structure. If something doesn’t “sound” right, I can’t leave it alone until
it’s perfect. Writing is everything to
me, for I have nothing else to live for. I don’t want anything else to live for. I will never get married or have a
family of my own, and that is fantastic. I am thrilled about that. I may never
have a lot of money, and that is also fantastic. I could care less about any of
this. All I care about is my writing and my spiritual progress (just trying to be
a good person and improving myself). That’s as simple as I can make my life,
and I am grateful for it. I am grateful that I am so ill that my perspective
has been forcibly shifted from the temporal to the eternal, to what’s really important
in life, to what life is about. It is a blessing that I am afforded an eternal
perspective that career-mongers so often miss as they chase advancement and a
dollar.
The art of scribbling down my thoughts and
creating works of art called novels has quite literally saved my life. I can’t
overemphasize that enough, and I don’t spout that out glibly. I mean it. Noveling
is everything to me. It is the only
way I can have any happiness in this dreadful life of mine. It has given me a
purpose when there wouldn’t be one otherwise. Without the sweet beauty found in
this work, I’d have no motivation to live, nothing to push me to be healthy.
I’d be obsessed with the desire to die because it is extremely hard living like
this. I have no dignity, and I am either pitied or ridiculed; I have nothing to
be proud of except for that which I have created. In general, the life I lead is
an embarrassment, a failure.
Lest you misunderstand me, I don’t talk about
being mentally ill or talk about this desolate life of mine for pity or sympathy.
I don’t ever want to get those sorts of comments or hear such words from
people: it embarrasses me to earn this sort of attention when suffering on a
much grander scale is rampant throughout the world. I just want to talk openly
about mental illness and my experience with it so others don’t feel like they
have to hide in the shadows or be ashamed of their struggle. We are too often embarrassed
by our symptoms, and we are afraid of those being noticed or seen because we
fear the judgments of others and of being shunned from society. So, we work
really hard to hide all the evidence and all traces leading to the evidence. That’s
why so many around me for so many years had no idea or didn’t suspect I was
sick until the illnesses reached their breaking point and came to the forefront
to dominate my life in a dramatic way. I speak about my experiences with these
disorders because I don’t want anyone to feel as alone as I have throughout
this ordeal, and I want to show others who suffer that our lives can still be
worth something, that we can still accomplish much of great value, that our
suffering isn’t meaningless.
