Lots of people said Carrie Fisher was wonderful. Lots of them said she was wonderful not because of the achievements in her career, but because she used her fame to talk and campaign about how she managed her bipolar disorder, and about mental illness generally. I agree. Yet, while I’m no Carrie Fisher, all this makes me feel guilty about my own silence. Feelings of guilt are one of my symptoms.
I started being treated in October for a mental illness I hadn’t even heard of: complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I realise now that it’s been there, thickening, worsening, for many years. Essentially, it comes about when you suppress traumas and carry on regardless, failing properly to address emotional distress, which you also suppress.
I have trouble remembering. Even after I’ve looked it up, which I often do, I have trouble remembering the year my father was first diagnosed with cancer, or the year he died; the year I was diagnosed with cancer; the year a huge chunk of masonry fell off our terrace of houses; the year my mother was first diagnosed with cancer, or the second time, or the year she died; the year my first son crashed out of school; the year my second one did; the years when I got them back into education; the year my then-husband was diagnosed with a chronic blood disorder. Basically, I barely remember the last decade. I’d thought my perfidious memory was the result of chemotherapy, or just of ageing. But it’s another symptom.
People tell me I’m “intimidating”. I’ve been told that for all my adult life. I’ve accepted it without understanding it, sometimes explaining what a shy child I was, how endlessly susceptible to bullying, in every context I ever found myself in. I’ve always been too scared really to question how it could be that other people saw me so differently to how I really felt (I even intimidated myself). I told myself it was just because I was someone from a working-class background in an upper-middle-class milieu. Anything to protect me from my secret shame – that I found everything intimidating.
I kept that shame entirely hidden, especially from myself, by pretending that I found nothing intimidating. I even called it “pride”. That “pride” has stopped me throwing up my hands, and truly admitting I’m beaten.
The illness can make you appear to other people as someone who is tough, who can cope with anything. You take on responsibilities you struggle with, and look after other people without looking after yourself. But when you suggest you can’t take it, people often don’t even hear you. They think you’ll cope because you always cope. That’s who you are. That’s what you’re for. Which is not to put blame on others: it’s a natural and rational reaction, the logical thing to say to the person they want to see and think they know.
So you carry on coping, and somehow you get through. You thrum with stress, take your anger out on the random dude who does the tiny thing that makes you crack; or become listless, unable to focus, panicked every time the phone rings, every time a letter arrives, a letter you instantly recognise as pertaining to the hellish, complex negotiation that no one but you knows the intricacies of.
You look like you’re managing things that would floor other people, sensible people. Though nothing could be further from the truth. You become a person for whom it is second nature to find courage or aggression in yourself because you are frightened and vulnerable. Or you resort to passive-aggression, which is often my miserable chosen defence. Anything to avoid addressing the fact that you are terrified.
Generally, the psychological vulnerability starts in childhood, not necessarily with dreadful abuse or neglect. I was not an abused or neglected child except in the usual, Larkinesque way. (My parents were neurotic and moralistic: I think of my childhood as like growing up in a religious cult without the religion.) But I was a sensitive child, in a pretty rough-and-ready, rust-belt culture. Early memories, recounted in therapy, have taken on a significance quite different to the meaning they had for me.
They include seemingly small things, such as being sent out to play on my own for the first time, aged three. A bigger girl asked to see my gold christening bracelet, then ran off with it. When my dad went round to confront her mother and get it back, the woman said the bracelet was her daughter’s and refused to return it. This was my first solo encounter with the outside world, and I see now that, rather than accepting it and learning from it, I defied it, even then.
I stride boldly into situations for which I am ill-prepared. I trust people very easily and very completely. I find it hard to show that I’m hurting. Another memory, aged about seven: I stood on a platform while other kids threw bricks at me. One struck me on the temple, but I wouldn’t show them it hurt. It’s a habit that gets me into trouble, again and again. Anything rather than acknowledge my debilitating fear, of the world and the people in it. I’m an idiot. Or I was.
It’s hard, at 54, to find the time and energy to reassess your whole life, take responsibility for all the mistakes, and still embrace the part of you that did OK, even if it betrayed the part of you that actually needed the attention.
It’s hard to see that you’re interested in, and opinionated about, the world outside yourself because it distracts you from the churning insecurity inside – the anxiety that eventually shoots up and convulses you with the shakes and hammers at your heart, the dissociation that has you stepping out in front of cars – unless you bang your chest to bring yourself back. That, you thought, was normal. Feeling these things is good (kind of). They are manifestations of stuff you didn’t even know was there, because it was all stuffed down so deep inside. They tell you you’re in trouble.
It’s also hard not to start sounding like a victim: and that’s why people such as Carrie Fisher, Ruby Wax or Stephen Fry are so important. They reassure you that you feel worse before you feel better. They help you understand that while all the emotions you suppressed – the fear, the guilt, the grief, the shame, the anger, the self-loathing – now feel overwhelming, this too will pass.
The guilt is especially hard: guilt that you soldiered on and didn’t sort matters out sooner. But with courage you can let it go. Because you still have the courage you always found, even if you acknowledge at last that it always had a lot of competition from other emotions.
For me, I know, 2017 is going to be the most fruitful and honest year I’ve had for a long, long time. I’m going to be spending it getting to know myself at last and maybe even learning that I’m actually not so awful. And I’m going to carry on saying what I feel, and writing about it. I think there are a lot of people out there, struggling with emotional trauma that they don’t acknowledge. England calls it the stiff upper lip. But it’s your whole being that ends up getting stiffed. Enough.
Carrie Fisher showed the way. I want to acknowledge my own mental struggles | Deborah Orr
