đ§ Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
What is mental health? I asked myself this question many times during my recovery from serious mental illness. For twenty-five years, doctors had medicalized my mental and emotional pain. Those diagnoses said I was sick, but how would I know when I was well? We donât talk about mental health recovery. Psychiatry doesnât have a manual for it. The media doesnât run segments about it. Journalists rarely write about it.
Like many people, I was trying to recover on my own. At first, I assumed it meant going off medication and leaving therapy. It turns out recovery requires neither.
Then I made another mistake. I confused mental health with meeting societal expectationsâspecifically, the pressure to be in a romantic relationship, a.k.a. amatonormativity. Heterosexual single women are often perceived as being somehow defective and probably mentally unstable if they arenât in one. In the dating world, the worst thing a woman can be is âpsycho.â The potentially âcrazy girlfriendâ must be dumped and returned to singledom where she belongs.
It wouldnât be till much later that Iâd learn that recovery looks different for each person, and being ânormalâ or socially acceptable isnât part of it.
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The plan is to spend the weekend at Mattâs farm. It seems like a good idea. Matt drove to Chicago to pick me up. Itâs one of the coldest Januarys on record.
Once weâre off the highway, Mattâs truck skids on the ice. Driving painfully slowly through this tiny town in Michigan (town is an overstatement; itâs more of a depot), we pass a seemingly vacant church, a closed feed store, and the Freedom Bar & Grill.
Iâm not in danger (Matt and I have been dating for a few weeks and Iâve known him for years), but when we pull into the driveway, I realize Iâm trapped. Thereâs no way out of here without a car.
His house is one story and has the feel of a storage unit. The kitchen and living room are one open space. Then thereâs a bedroom, Mattâs study, and a bathroom.
Thereâs no heat. Well, thereâs heat but only from the wood stove in Mattâs living room. He likes to keep his house cool, he says. To save money. And he likes the wood stove, likes the challenge of heating the entire house with it.
Even after an hour, itâs not see-your-breath cold but cold enough that my long underwear beneath my jeans, the camisole and turtleneck under my wool sweater, and the double pair of socks on my feet arenât enough. I put on my down coat.
He watches a football game on TV. Iâve never owned a TV. (Movies and streaming are beautiful things.) The sound of the commercials is like nails on a chalkboard to me.
I try to write. Iâm working on a novelâa thrillerâthatâs not particularly thrilling. I get nowhere, so I read workshop submissions from the Introduction to Creative Writing class Iâm teaching.
My mind races: I want out. I want to go home. Two days. How will I make it through the night and then a day and then another night? Why am I there? Iâm sick. Iâm a sick person. Thatâs why I feel this way. Iâm bipolar. Iâmâ
Or maybe this just sucks, and Iâm not interested.
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