Rhian Crockett

I think I saw someone tweet or post about tools you use as a writer, and I wondered if I had any specific to my current theme of talking about mental illness. Turns out, I do. See, my day-to-day peace of mind relies very heavily on two meds which have both good and bad sides. I take fluoxetine (commonly known as Prozac) for my depression, and pregabalin (Lyrica) for my anxiety.

Whatever Robin Hobb has to say about it, I couldn't be me without medication (right now). Screw that "will I ever be myself again" -- if you've ever had medication make a difference for you, you know it isn't a case of it "damping down" the real you. It can give you yourself back. Nearly a year after starting on pregabalin, and I'm doing things I wasn't able to do from being very small. And it's not because pregabalin muscles on in here and takes over for me -- it's still me, it's just a me without the adrenalin kicking in over the stupidest of things.

But sometimes to get this stuff you do have to pay, and sometimes I get worried that I'll pay with my abilities as a writer (such as they are). I always had a very good memory, but now I'll put my pen down and be completely unable to find it when I come back five minutes later, because I just cannot remember where it went. Or I'll be looking for a quotation to use in an essay, but I can't find it, because I can't even remember the title of the book it's from.

And words -- ugh! Don't get me started. I did it in yesterday's post: it wasn't a typo, it was a "Lyrica moment" (as I put it). I typed "angle" instead of "ankle", and didn't notice at all. Typing is a matter of muscle memory for me; I simply wouldn't get it wrong by that many keys over. So it was something in my brain that substituted the word 'angle' for 'ankle'. I think that happens to everyone sometimes, but it happens to me appreciably more since I started taking pregabalin.

And from the combination of fluoxetine and pregabalin, I am simply so dopey sometimes. It takes me a long time to wake up, I zone out in the middle of conversations, I need things to be explained to me multiple times...

And my tool for fighting all that, and therefore the most important tool in my kit as a writer, has been crosswords. I've noticed that when I start the day by helping with the crossword in the paper, I continue the day much quicker on my mental feet. So now I don't even wait for the newspaper. As soon as my alarm goes, I'm opening the app on my phone and pulling up a random crossword. I've done it with strategy games, too: Kingdom Rush proved quite useful.

Actually, I guess you could call fluoxetine, pregabalin, and the apps I use to counteract their side effects tools I use for writing. Take out any side of the equation and I suck at life, and therefore at writing.

Moral of the story, if you need one, is not to let your writing be an excuse to avoid medication or some kind of treatment. You could be driving yourself into a brick wall. Maybe it'll take some false starts and you won't be as lucky as me in finding two medications right off the bat that help so much without cutting down your ability to do whatever's most important to you. Maybe you will.

You hear a lot about rules for writing, and what makes someone a real writer. I haven't anything better for today's post, so here's a write-up of my day's brainstorming session on those.

Always watch other people, keep a notebook about things you see and think about: Try having interest in other people when you feel completely dead inside yourself. Just try, I dare you. If you're like me, at best, you won't feel anything. At worst, you'll spiral either into a long self-pity party in which you think about how they're probably so much more successful and happy than you, or you start imagining all the reasons they must hate you. Even if they're a bunch of complete strangers.

Write every day: You think I can write when I can't get dressed?

Write even if it's shit: But... in that state, everything is shit. Even if it isn't. Why waste my time and give my brain reasons to beat me up some more?

Use your depression as inspiration!: This brings to mind Hyperbole and a Half. It's "like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back". You're trying to use your total lack of any positive feeling to create a positive result. Does that really make any sense to you?

If you want to be a real writer, read a lot: I refer you to my own poem, Non-Fiction Mood. Read it, it'll do your writing good.

I'm sure there's more, but these are the ones that annoyed me. The rules annoy me because they're saying, "you have to do things like me or you're not really a writer". They're saying that because I "let" my mental illness keep me from writing, I just don't want it enough.

Well, that's true. In the depths of anxiety and depression, all I want is for the feeling to stop. When you're so frightened that you wish you didn't exist anymore, writing is just about the last thing on your mind. So hey, my criteria for being a real writer, for me, is "keep coming out the other side and starting again".

I had a story idea yesterday. I'm excited.

I haven't been paying much attention to this blog at all and I'm sorry about that, for however many of you are actually reading! Life takes over. In particular, it's amazing how completely a mental illness can take over your life. I have GAD and depression (also pretty generalised!), and sometimes it's all I can do in a week to keep staggering out of bed. Sometimes it's all I can do to make myself get into bed in the first place.

The fact is, I'm never sure how much of my identity to reveal here and how much to hold back; ideally, I don't want to hold back, but if that's the case, then why use a pen name? But I've decided, at least, that my mental illness is going to be out there. It doesn't want that -- these things hide from scrutiny, from consideration, and hate being held up to the light. And society doesn't really want that either, because we so often fall into thinking of Us vs. Them, and mentally ill people are usually among "Them". But I'm a normal person. I'm no stranger than any of you. That person you admire, who is always smiling, always perfectly put together? Maybe she cries as soon as she locks the door on the world at night. Maybe she's gone past knowing how to cry. That person who embarrasses you by talking to themselves in public might be CEO of a company in a few years time. There's no easy division.

So, I'm not willing to hide or let myself be hidden. For the next week, or as long as I can, I'm going to post every day about something related to mental illness. A book review, a personal piece, fiction, non-fiction. Links to other people's posts about the same.

All of it will be posted under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA: you're free to share or remix this work, with attribution.

The first post in this series is a poem. I'm not sure how much explanation-sauce you like with your poetry (and there's some pun on sauce and source in there, too...), so I've placed some thoughts on what I wrote under the cut at the bottom.

Non-Fiction Mood

You know what that means.
Things close in.
There's no world beyond the wardrobe,
no rainbow road to take me away,
no fairy ring in the woods.
Friends are blank,
incurious,
go on their adventures alone.
Simile, metaphor, a perfect adjective,
all dry as a shrivelled heart
of someone who has never loved.
Tell me about wars,
the methylation of DNA,
the long slow excavation of a single tomb.
In the wonders of this world,
let me glimpse another.

( Explanation )