In A Week I Will Be Dead

Chapter Twenty-Three: Cyclone

!!!TW!!!

Suicide, mentions of SH, unkind thoughts

IF YOU ARE STRUGGLING, CALL THE SAMARITANS ON 116 123 <3 <3 <3

Myself

Will Stigma Ever Be Gone?:

Stigma is a set of negative and often unfair beliefs that a society or group of people have about something. To be depressed is like being branded with a hot iron of society's stigma. It's not allowed, we must all live in a world full of pink fluffy bunny rabbits and discuss the rising milk price crisis. We must nervously laugh off anything which is considered 'abnormal' and 'not allowed'.

'You, yes you, over there with the weird expression. Stop it. Smile. Feel happy otherwise the world can't function. You can't? Okay well let's put you over here in the corner. No, no, we won't put a dunce hat on your head, we'll just assign you to another part of the globe to live on when we've solved the whole war problem. Yes, we must sort that out. Here, shove this prescription down your throat. Ah, much better right? Don't worry about the fact that you can't see, it's a side effect of isolation. Try talking about milk prices, you might feel more involved. That's it, you are now an official member of society. Right, I'll have to leave you now because there's a person wanting independence and it's interrupting the session. No not the "how to stop the terrorists" session, the "brainwashing" one. Oh, and if you decide to die, please do so quietly, because we're on a tight schedule and don't want the rest of the world to become distracted. Oh, and there's OAP's sleeping in the other room.'

We should not be embarrassed about the way we are. We shouldn't have to walk into a room, sit our parents down and say, 'I'm gay.' We should just be allowed to bring home our partner and introduce them without any time put aside for the 'big reveal'. It's the same if we have a mental illness. We shouldn't have to twiddle out thumbs as we awkwardly tell our family why you look like you fell in a rose bush. We were hunting for the flowers, and got captured by the thorns. It's as simple as that. Life throws many problems our way, so why should we categorise them into socially acceptable and socially unacceptable? You may say, 'it's just embarrassing; I have the seemingly perfect life, why am I not thankful?' I may have a great life now, but the past has a way of intervening with the present.

What I am trying to say is to just accept the fact that you have an illness. It is part of you, but it is not you. You are not defined by your depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, anorexia. You are defined by the other parts of your being which are shrouded by this aspect of you. It is part of you, you are not part of it. We are all writers, painters, sportsmen, musicians, academic stars, archaeologists, and policemen, hell, we could all be unicorns for all I care. There should be no label which defines the whole you. We are covered in labels, dangerous and beautiful ones. We just have to be careful that we don't cover up the whole jar so we can't see its contents.

Noah

Have you ever been so panicked to be somewhere that the world looks different? Like when you swim to the bottom of a swimming pool and then look up at the world around you. Or when you take the 3D glasses off your face in a cinema, so you see blue and the red lines everywhere. Or when you and your English teacher are breaking the speed limit in a little red mini. 

That's me. Right now. I see the trees whizz past us as I whack my head against the headrest over and over again. The thing about Patiens is that he is always having parties every weekend. Although it's a boarding school, people always find a way of making it there. But out of all those thousands of faceless people, trawling in various states of consciousness through his front door at 3:00am, noticed his isolation? Where are his parents? I remember the very first day of school, and we all had to give a fun fact about ourselves. Mine was that I hate giving fun facts about myself. His was that his parents work for an international law firm. Which means they are never home.