Mental Illness: The Boogeyman in My Writing

I am mentally ill. I’m very up-front with this. I am an abuse survivor and inherited mental illness from both sides of my family, and as a result, I ended up with the “alphabet soup” problem: I have a little bit of everything. This makes everything in my life a struggle: parenting, working, social interactions, day-to-day living, and of course, writing. It looms large over everything I do, requiring me to carefully decide what I can do piece by piece. It’s quite common that I trade off one thing for another. Dishes may bow to social obligations, social obligations may give way to reading those five books on my stack, and reading may devolve into mindlessly watching the Weather Channel or playing escape games on the computer.

Of course, that’s not so different from most people. No one can do everything, and anyone can ditch regular obligations for doing something trivial that gives them a respite from constant work or interactions. Part of the difference is that when I do have social interactions, they’re often followed with days of self-recriminations for offending or upsetting people, or saying the wrong things, even when I know I did nothing of the sort. After finishing a piece of writing, I am certain it is awful and I will never, ever be any good. When I don’t get things done around the house, I feel like I am useless. I have panic attacks before going in to work. And parenting is something I constantly feel I am not doing right, especially when my children have problems.

So how does this interact with my writing (other than the previously mentioned fear that I can’t do it well, and will never achieve the level I want, no matter how hard I try)?

When I started writing – no, let’s start further back than that. When I started inventing worlds in creative play, my characters would reflect my personal state of mind, and also a great deal of my environment. Works that I read, and experiences I had, influenced my writing as they do for everyone. And as I became more ill, that illness was also reflected in my writing. I was tipped over the edge into full-out mental illness when I was targeted by a professional child pornographer, and a lot of my life went out of control after that. I started a massive spate of writing that went from junior high through a remission of mental illness during and just after college, producing reams of work and five different (and awful) novels and a multitude of short stories.

And that was when I noticed it.

Every time I had a main character, they had aspects of mental illness. Sometimes they had a history of trauma as well. It didn’t seem to matter what I intended to start with, it happened nonetheless. If I didn’t give them a history of trauma, they reacted as if they did.

Figuring that, if I was going to be writing mental illness whatever my conscious intentions, I decided that I would write it deliberately. I was struggling with understanding and dealing with my own issues at the same time, and incorporated a lot of what I was learning into my work. I also started to do research to complement my unfolding understanding, both of how my heredity and experiences interacted to create the kind of mental illness that disables me, and how to properly incorporate those elements into my writing. I can’t say how well I succeed, because I can’t be that objective, but I can tackle it consciously rather than unconsciously.

It’s not as if mental illness has never been addressed in literature. I’ve read plenty of it. But much of the time, it involves that mental illness being an element of a character, rather than the central focus of the story. (I will make a caveat that the brilliant Zenna Henderson wrote about mental illness in ways that made me alternately adore her work and find it too intense to read, without ever referring to psychiatric disorders once.) And while trauma is now a popular topic, I find that the long-term effects of trauma are often ignored, or the story is crafted for limited consequences which are then “solved” during the course of the story.

This is less true now than it used to be now that mental illness is becoming more understood in our society, but I still see it quite a bit. It’s often a plot device rather than a theme, a meme rather than a topic. I confess, I laugh at the joke about “I have CDO because all the letters are in the right order.” What I find less than funny are the jokes such as, “If I just had a little more OCD it would be a good thing,” or dismissal of experiences such as anxiety and depression as being “emo”. I don’t choose to come home after a delightful social experience and segue into such extreme panic that I seriously think about cutting myself. And I don’t have the luxury of “getting over” my illness in the space between the front and back covers of my story.

In reality, trauma is never solved. It may be worked through, if one is lucky enough to have a fairly healthy mind to start with. Or it may cause a cascading waterfall of effects, eroding parts of the personality, and causing other parts to become prominent and either stronger or more vulnerable. Possibly both.

“Etched in Fire” involves my character being stripped of everything: love, relationships, self-image, basic human dignity. Such things are not done without consequence, and I’m working with this in “A Gift of Flame”. Full-out PTSD is the natural consequence of such experiences, and that often means doing things against one’s self-interest, or reacting in ways that are extremely unhealthy. I’m not sure whether people who enjoyed “Etched in Fire” are going to like how Maelen evolves in the story, but I need to remain true to her growth, change, and reaction to experience.

As a result, my stories and books tend to be hard reads. But what I am committed to is showing, not how people get over trauma, but how people get through it. I want my stories to be about hope, not about despair. I want to contrast the darkest of experiences with the light that illuminates the best people have to give. And I want to do it in such a way that I do not trivialize the illnesses that affect my own life so profoundly.