I’ve spoken a few times about how valuable my support network is to me. I’ve talked about how lucky I am to be surrounded by the many caring, supportive, emotionally mature people I have in my life. I honestly couldn’t imagine how much harder it would be to live with PTSD without them. I am strong; and they give me strength. What I tend not to talk about so much is what I am missing; my mum.
Mum died when I was 19. She was 39. She was painfully, cruelly and suddenly ripped straight from this world and a part of me went with her. It brought on nights of drinking and dancing away my sorrows, days of frivolous spending and months of being somehow too sad to cry. Ultimately, it cost me my University degree, as I struggled to keep up with the day to day, and instead had to focus on something far bigger – keeping myself alive.
I vividly remember being stood in Brixton with my auntie one night, worrying about some argument with my then boyfriend, and her turning to me and saying “Your heart will never be broken again like it was when your mum died.” And boy was she right!
The weird thing is that it doesn’t make the other stuff less painful at all. My break ups stung like anyone’s would, the friendships that fell apart hurt like hell and walking away from my degree tore me in two. I was 19 and I had truly had my heart broken. Somehow I had to piece myself together again, unbreak my heart, rebuild my life. Bit by bit, I did.
When I think about mental illness, the first thing I think about is Mum. She was my introduction to it. My “welcome to just how brutal life can be” module. She had Borderline Personality Disorder. She told me about it when I was 11. I didn’t really understand it. I had looked over her shoulder and see her writing it in a letter to a friend. “What do you mean you’re mentally ill?” I had cried out in shock.
I had seen the mentally ill on TV. I had read about them in books. I had watched them fall apart in late night films that I should never have been watching in the first place. The mentally ill should be feared, I thought; they were twisted, unpredictable, violent and cruel. My mum wasn’t mentally ill; she was lovely!
And so I set out on a lifelong journey to understand. I wanted to understand so badly. I wanted to know the inside of her mind so much. I wanted to know how someone so kind, so gentle, so vulnerable and so creative could be so horribly misunderstood and misrepresented. How someone who took on the pain of the world as her own could be shunned and labeled. I set out to learn as much about her illness as I could.
Some things certainly clicked into place for me over the years. Her emotions were far more sudden and intense than those of the other people around me. When she was sad, she was sad to her very core. She could be so sad, it was overwhelming to look at; a deep, burning melancholy that seemed to consume her very being. For a while.
Then it would be happiness. The kind of happiness that is almost pure singing and laughter. She had a wicked sense of humour and the kind of playfulness that my friends wished their own mums had. She could lift the mood of the most sombre occasions with a well placed (and only slightly inappropriate) joke.
And then there was the sadness again. The paranoia. The self harm. The absolute certainty that nobody really loved her. The hours of listening to the same Evanescence song.
When she was happy, we had some of the best times of my life. Memories can still totally overwhelm me in an instant, years later. Some of them absolutely magical, some completely mundane; but all of them mine. Mine and hers. They lift me, they torture me and in many ways make me who I am. And no one remembers them but me. There’s something equally beautiful and hopeless about that.
Sometimes the emptiness she was feeling was a darkness that engulfed me too. The “alone” she could feel was confusing and overwhelming and profound and bitter and so much more. She was such a contradiction. There was so much immaturity in her behaviour, but I feel like there was a deep wisdom in her struggle that I’ll never fully understand.
It’s so so easy to dwell on the ending of a story. It’s easy to cry about the sadness and think about the losses and forget about all the love, beauty and trust that there was before that.
My mum had borderline personality disorder. Her life was sometimes chaotic and she was enchanting. She was my first lesson about mental health; that every person is so much more than their symptoms. Every person is an untold truth. Mum reminds me to shout up about my own struggles and to fight for others who’s stories and voices go unheard.
What a powerful tribute to your Mum. It made me cry. I am the same as your Mum with an 11 year old daughter who I love with every inch of my being. BUT sadness overwhelms me. I don’t want to continue living but my daughter anchors me to the here and now. I’m frightened of that anchor coming undone. I came across you as I follow Ellie on twitter and she’s just lost her dog. My heart goes out to her xx
Ah, thank you for your kind words and for being there for your daughter as I know you are. I’m glad you’re fighting for your life. Trust me when I tell you that you are valued and loved and that simply by being here and by loving your daughter, you are making the world a better place. I would give anything to have my Mum back, even just for an hour, please try to remember that whenever the doubts creep in. Mum thought that the people in her life would be better off without her, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.