Nowadays, when mental health topics are starting to get destigmatized, it should feel easier to talk about struggles of the mind, but when I try to capture these issues in writing or artworks, I find them as elusive as ever. That leaves me with little choice but to dance around them endlessly, never giving up hope that I may touch upon something real about my experiences, even if I know that it’s a futile endeavor. Because no matter how deep you dive into the vastness of your own psyche, there’s only so little you can bring up to the surface, and it’s not always pretty finds.
“Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath famously asked, and it used to scare me so much to think of myself entrapped in this vast enclosure. All my life I’ve felt defined by the storms raging within me; the constant fear and feelings of displacement in the world, always verging on the brink of panic. A lot of times in my life I merely tried to survive, and I felt utterly small and helpless inside. Not long ago I had a dream where I was sitting in a bathtub that seemed very large, and something I dropped disappeared in the murky water that kept rising around me as I was struggling to get up, but I couldn’t. I woke up with a deep feeling of unease and it reminded me that I’ve always been both scared and fascinated by a sense of vastness that would swallow me whole. A book from my childhood about dinosaurs came to mind with an illustration depicting an underwater scene that filled me with discomfort, and also the incredible artworks of Jim Kay in Patrick Ness’s excellent young adult novel, A Monster Calls. Kay masterfully depicted the threatening enormousness of the monster character that symbolizes both death and healing in the story, while also making him seem invitingly familiar to us, in an uncanny way. A gigantic creature may be a fairly obvious symbol of mental health issues taking over our lives but it’s an effective one. In Ueda Fumito’s poetic video game, The Shadow of the Colossus, massive monsters represent the grief of the protagonist, while Anne Hathaway’s 2016 movie Colossal went for Japanese Kaiju culture to show the overwhelming power of addiction. I also often think about my life-long battle with anxiety as a struggle with a monstrous creature that invades my mind, and it has been hard to come to terms with the sheer power of that monster sometimes and my reluctance to accept it as part of me for a very long time.
The five stages of grief end in acceptance, and that is the beginning of healing. I know now where the powerless feeling stems from, standing alone in our sublime mindscapes. It’s the fear of disappearing and the urge to fight the elements that are unquestionably bigger than us, yet we still contain them. Overcoming the enormity of our emotions starts by learning to surrender to them. I always wanted to fight and that resulted in a lifetime of pretence and self-hatred that eventually broke me apart. It took me a long time to understand that surrendering doesn’t equal giving up. That accepting the monster inside doesn’t mean I identify with the monster. Most of my life, I have been controlled by anxiety as it decided what I am able to do and what I can be. I took that as a given, yet I waged a war within, as I desperately wanted to separate myself from the fear and pain it has been causing me, but that also meant trying to separate from myself.
I always felt envious of people feeling peace in their inner worlds and liberation in the natural world. As humans, we enjoy wide open spaces - they bring a sense of belonging to our surroundings. But they can also evoke a feeling of loneliness and desolation. In the book Lost Connections, Johann Hari writes about the significance of people reacting to empty spaces differently.
“Back on a mountain in Canada, Isabel Behncke had taught me about how our disconnection from nature is increasing our depression and anxiety. She told me that often, in the natural world, we realize how small we are. […] You experience a shrinking of your ego, and that sets a lot of people free. When she told me this, I recognized it as true, and I felt it happening on the mountainside - except I didn’t see it as liberating. I saw it as a threat. I wanted to resist it.”
Hari talks about how scary it can feel for some people to let go of their egos because it gives the sensation that a protective wall around them is crumbling down. I realized that both inner and outer landscapes provoke this feeling in me. You feel afraid of disappearing in the emptiness the same way you feel the monster is going to eat you up alive if you’re not resisting. Letting go of that tension can feel scary for people battling mental health issues. But I’m learning to surrender and I’ve found that I haven’t disappeared. In fact, I feel like I’m starting to see myself clearly for the very first time.