lie
[lī]
VERB
lying (present participle)
1.
tell a lie or lies.
·
(lie one's way into/out of)
get oneself into or out of a situation by
lying.
"you lied your way on to this voyage by
implying you were an experienced sailor"
·
(of a thing) present a
false impression; be deceptive.
"the camera cannot lie"
I
believe that we’re at our most vulnerable when our mental health is suffering
so when you’re torn open like that… when you feel like your heart has been
exposed to the world, how can you tell a lie? People talk all the time about how
some people will fake poor mental health for the sake of state benefits or for
days off work, sympathy, attention…
Then
there’s the lying from those who are genuinely poorly with their mental health…
“I’m ok”
When
my moods became dictated by the hallucinations; I think I stumbled across the
belief that I couldn’t answer a question when I had no right to. How I felt
wasn’t up to me. I didn’t allow myself to feel something anything! I was
scared when they changed. I was happy when they were silent. I was angry when
they were shouting. I was sad when they were constant. It was something that
took me years to come to grips with and to understand so how could I explain it
to someone else. Because that’s what I felt the need to do – when I’d tell
someone how I felt. I felt the need to explain myself. To justify why I was feeling
the way I was.
"All it takes is a beautiful, fake smile to hide an injured soul and they will never notice how broken you really are"
- Robin Williams
People
always say that writing must help me as much as it helps my readers and I
always talk about how cathartic it is. It’s so cathartic that the last sentence
about feeling the need to justify my feelings? Well, that had me questioning
myself; wondering why I hold that belief. And I think… I think that like many
things, it stems from the abuse. It stems from going through months of feeling
like everything I did thought said felt was because of the
one, same, thing. Like everything was because of him. Every little thing was because
of him. And now I need to make sure they aren’t. I need to confirm that it isn’t
all down to one ‘person.’ That not everything has the same cause and
motivation. But do I think that a person asking, ‘how’re you?’ wants to hear
all of that?
One
of the many traits of Borderline Personality Disorder that I experienced were
emotions that were unrelenting, uncontrollable, and overwhelming. Often, this
meant that I couldn’t put a label on my feelings at any given time because it
felt that there was no word big enough to sum up an emotion. Would my anger be ‘unrelenting’
to another person? Or was it just unrelenting because I was poorly and couldn’t
cope with it? I mean who dictates the level of an emotion for it to be
labelled? There’s happy and then there’s elated. There’s angry and then there’s
furious. There’s sad and then there’s depressed. There’s fear and then there’s
terror. But who decides that one person can label their emotion something that
another person may label differently? Is my ‘happy’ your ‘elated’? Or is your ‘depressed’
my ‘sad’? Do I belittle emotions because I believe I’ve felt more powerful
ones? Would I deem your ‘depressed’ as ‘sad’ because I’ve felt ‘suicidal’? Or
when I felt ‘suicidal’ would you have thought me ‘sad’? How can we put a complicated
label on an answer to a simple question? I
guess that ‘ok’ is the easiest way to sum up our emotions – especially when
they’re confusing ones or ones you’re ashamed of.
But how can we ever be anything other than 'ok' if we're lying about it?