My Mental Health Won’t Make Me Interesting

I can only speak one language. I don't know how to fold a fitted sheet, and I hate parties. You could suppose that these things alone could & would potentially be a part of one's personal traits that make them seem cool and interesting, and I would suppose that that's right. However, I can't do these things. There's actually quite a lot of things that I can't do, or struggle to do, and in that ineptitude, I have often found myself using my illnesses as a crutch to deem me as the manic pixie dream girl trope.

In film and literature and everything in between, we are bombarded with this ideology that the manic & miserable young woman, who is misunderstood by all, sits alone in her studio NYC apartment that she can somehow afford on a waitresses wage and flips through her copies of Plath and Hemingway, is a vessel of aspiration. She is effortless and chic, and her tendencies of narcotic use and eating disorders are deemed desirable and romantic.

I am ashamed to say that it's a guise that I have fallen victim to before. I would sit and read The Bell Jar and inwardly exclaim, "I understand her! I am also deep and suicidal and totally get it!!" I once spent an entire summer lying on my bedroom floor, listening to The Slits and Aphex Twin, chain smoking and pretending to be brooding. When you are vulnerable and presented with imagery of rock n' roll chicks with scars and issues similar to your own, it's very easy to become absorbed into that persona. Something that mental illness does in it's entirety is steal your identity, and thus makes you cling onto snippets of people you idolise and want to be like. Ultimately, I had created a Frankenstein-like identity out of bits & pieces of lies the media had told me that I had succumbed to. I left my hair ratty like Courtney Love, I took up smoking like Susanna Kaysen, and in these actions I lost elements of me that were strong and virile. It was as though I were a dying plant, and I knew that I must prune my dead leaves to allow myself to bloom, but instead I hacked away at my roots.

Another absolute deceit is that men will lust for you when you’re emotionally unstable. I myself have never experienced this personally. I’ve never had a man scoop me up off the bathroom floor & tuck me into bed, nor kiss my ripped arms and assure me he’d love me endlessly. The reason this hasn’t happened to me is because it is utter, utter bullshit. The depiction of a woman being an unavailable conquest, and a man knocking down her walls and softening her in order to adore her only serves in allowing women to believe that they are either insane and unloveable, or are in need of saving, neither of which is true.

The element of added helplessness and damsel in distress-age only contributes to the continuous issue of not allowing people to think of mental health as serious & important in it's own right. It mocks the concept and romanticises unhealthy idiosyncrasies that endow the stigma.

I'm beginning to challenge myself and think of who & what I am without my illnesses, because then I think you can begin to realise yourself as a separate entity to it entirely, resulting in less dependence on it. Of course it's also monumentally difficult and exhausting to attempt, but I will get there eventually.

I'm going to name my anxiety, and I'm going to use a really bland, middle class name that's not romantic and easy to be pissed off at. I'm thinking maybe *Sandra because no pixie dream girl could ever be called *Sandra. *Sandra is the self sabotaging, self righteous arsehole who sets herself up for massive failure and then drinks wine with her cats because everybody is sick of her bullshit. Then I might be able to dismiss everything I've imprinted onto myself via television and moody literature and realise that I am interesting all on my own. Fuck *Sandra.

*Apologies to anyone named Sandra.