Friday Flurry #13: You can't read the label from inside the jar
Mental health, funny walking-sticks, and jars with fading labels.
Welcome to Friday Flurry, my weekly round-up. These posts, which are a mixed bag of what I’m doing, reading and thinking about, are exclusively for paid subscribers. If you’re a regular reader, and you enjoy my writing, become a paid subscriber.
I’ve gone back and forth over whether to publish this article, but ultimately decided that:
Sometimes it’s not helpful to read about mental health struggles from someone who’s already overcome them. Mid-struggle is a useful entry point
My paid subscribers are a small group of people I care about, and this will limit my ‘exposure’ in a way that I feel OK with
If I freak out about it later, I can always delete the article, and then you’ve only got an email as record. Given you probably have tens of thousands of archived emails you’ll never look at again, I can handle that.
Like many people, I struggle with my mental health. I used to think my brand of it was abnormal - how can you be a public performer, a public voice, or someone who talks about how to get shit done, be broken and scared?
Turns out, that’s more common than not. I read once that over 70% of performers (musicians, actors, writers, speakers, et al) suffer from stage anxiety. As soon as I read that, it made perfect sense. If you’re a creative, you see and feel the world in a way that helps you to name and interpret experiences usefully. The price of that is the way it feels along the way. It’s hard to have one without the other.
My mental health is a peaks-and-troughs kind of experience. Sometimes I’m up, and other times, I’m down. The ups and downs are challenging, and I always notice them. I can tell when I’m deep in the pit, or high on an upswing.
What I don’t always notice is the more insidious creep of a new normal. A malaise setting in. A quiet normalising of dysfunction. Small changes, sneaking in bit by bit, until something has been lost, and you don’t know where to find it.
It’s a bit like the Funny Walking Stick in The Twits, a Roald Dahl book I read with my 8 year old recently: