Fighting Back

Show Notes

Summary

Alex talks candidly about his recent resurgence of mental illness, what happened to cause it, and how he intends to fight back with the help of, you guessed it, art!

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Transcript

This is where my fight back starts. Or perhaps it’s better to say continues.

I committed to myself that I would get an episode of this podcast out every week, which I had managed until a few weeks ago, at which point I lapsed. Initially this was because I was busy preparing for the solo art exhibition that I held a couple of weeks back. Then it was because my mental health completely collapsed. I want to talk a little about this today, partly because I think it’s important to talk, to be open about one’s struggles, as I believers it’s essential to the healing process. Partly because I think you, the listeners, might benefit from hearing about my struggles, and my nascent fight back, in the hopes that any of you that are having, or have had, similar struggles, may find some solace, that you are not alone. And partly as an explanation, not just of my inability to continue this podcast, but also to those around me who have experienced the rough end of my stumble, in the hopes it will help them to understand, and to beg their patience for a little longer. For recoveries take time, and I have been ill for a very long time.

It might seem like I’ve got it all figured out. It might seem a pre-requisite for someone who creates a podcast on healing mental illness through art, to have figured out how to do exactly that. But you don’t just “switch off” mental illness in the same way that you can’t just “switch off” a broken leg. Healing is an ongoing process, and when your neurological afflictions run and deep and long as mine do, it’s arguable that this process never ends. I, at least, have accepted that it never will. I have made peace with this in the same way that diabetic or asthmatic must make peace with their affliction. Like these afflictions, mental illness and it’s inverse, mental wellness, ebb and flow in presence and intensity. Constant management is required to prevent an increase in the intensity, and therefore destructiveness, of the affliction. I have various methods for achieving this, chief among them making art.

But I don’t live in a bubble, neither so I with to. My ability to maintain my mental health is tightly bound to my environment, and environments aren’t constant. Circumstances change, whether we want them to or not, and sometimes in ways that are dissatisfying, and perhaps even unsettling or even alarming. Life happens, and doesn’t much care about my psychological fragility.

And this is where I’m at - life happened.

I’m not going to talk in any great detail about how I got to where I am at the moment. I’ve covered this to one degree or another in earlier episodes. And quite frankly, I need to stop obsessing over the details of my situation, as that’s part of the problem. Suffice to say, since last October, I have had a set of unexpected, and not entirely positive changes in my life, most of which are linked and leave me in a somewhat precarious situations that, regardless of what happens, positive or negative, will yield more changes.

I frequently talk about myself as two people, ADHD Alex and Autistic Alex. These two sides of me are somewhat at odds - they have different, and often conflicting, needs. ADHD Alex generally likes change, he certainly likes novelty, Autistic Alex abhors change, he likes predictability and routine. When either side of me is significantly out of kilter, both suffer. It’s arguable that there is a third Alex in the mix - the gestalt being that is the combination of ADHD Alex and Autistic Alex, AuDHD Alex, Gestalt Alex, or perhaps just Alex. I’ll refer to him as Gestalt Alex from here on for the sake of clarity. When either Alex suffers, Gestalt Alex suffers, when both Alexes suffer, things get very bad for Gestalt Alex.

The changes of the past 10 months, and the various requirements placed on me, have been very hard indeed on Autistic Alex, who’d been the comfortably dominant half of me for the prior 3 or 4 years. This has lead to a string of acute and intense mental health episodes, the first of which hit full tilt in February this year. I clawed my way out of that by immersing myself in my art, accepting the help of various incredible people around me, exercising my demons through writing, which lead to my book, The Fall, and starting a podcast. Also exercise, gardening and burying my head in the sand, for better of for worse, as to what was happening around me.

However, life didn’t stop. The world kept on turning, the clock kept ticking, and money kept getting spent. Despite dramatically reducing our outgoings, and we found ourselves having to sell our house. The house that I love. My dream house. This was, and continues to be, devastating. However, through the generosity and grace of a good friend, we found a temporary solution to our housing problem, replete with a wonderful workshop/studio. Thank heaven for small (or in the case huge) mercies. But mercies accepted, trauma is trauma. Autistic Alex was freaking out.

So decided I needed something to focus on. Actually, I’m not sure I did decide that. I just threw myself into a project that absorbed me for 2 or 3 weeks - my solo art exhibition. This felt very positive, and allowed me to continue to ignore our precarious situation. Why is our situation precarious? Because the house we are now living in, is part of a major development that will kick off sometime mid-2025, which means whether we want to or not, we have to move again. More Autism nightmare fuel.

Anyway, fast forward a few weeks, to me mooching around a solo exhibition that looked amazing, and might well have been the best planned thing I’ve ever done, at least on my own. And mooch I did, mostly on my own. I’m not going to pontificate here on why my show was a bit of a damp squib. In every other way it was extremely positive, a fair few folk did turn up, not least lots of lovely friends and fellow artists, but I didn’t sell a lot, and ultimately made a financial loss, which I can barely afford right now.

The psychological collapse that afflicted me over the subsequent week might well have had nothing to do with the success, or lack thereof, of the show. That certainly didn’t help, but what I think really happened is that once I didn’t have something to focus on, the realities of my situation came flooding back in. Nothing had particularly changed, but I hadn’t been dealing with my response to my circumstances, I hadn’t been processing. I was just blocking it all out. Stalling. Head. In. Sand.

In some ways, this is neither here nor there. I process now, I process then. Practically speaking it didn’t make a whole lot of difference. Maybe, anyway. But I had convinced myself that I was processing, that I had processed. I wasn’t. I hadn’t. And in the meantime, I put a whole bunch of autism baiting stress on myself. It was equivalent of trying to drink or gamble or snort my problems away. Not just delaying, but exacerbating.

When did I recognise this? When did I figure out that I was unhealthily delaying facing up to my situation while w simultaneously exacerbating my psychological problems? When I wrote that last paragraph, that’s when. As I write this one. As I read this out to you. The act of creation, is an act of cleansing, is and act of processing is an act of love. Thinking about it now, I suspect others around me spotted this, probably a while ago, but felt powerless to do anything about it. Once I get an idea into my head, I’m kinda hard to stop. This is ADHD Alex in full flow, and more significantly, full control. And Autistic Alex was relegated to the sidelines to look on anxiously but powerless to do anything.

So was all that time immersed in my art in prep for the show actually doing me harm? Not at all, I think the only reason I was able to block all my problems out was because I find the act of creation so immersive. There’s a lesson there, I guess. Like any other treatment, or therapy, art is only truly effective when wielded properly. I’ll ponder that one, and maybe come back to it in a future episode,

Anyway, rationalisations aside, I fell apart. I’m not going to go into all the yucky details, but suffice to say that this was a weeping, snotty crisis, rather than screaming, breaking stuff one. I just felt so desperately sorry for myself. So apoplectically angry at the world. My behaviour became erratic. I started saying stupid stuff to people who deserve better from me. I put my family, and particularly my wife, through living hell. I decided my life wasn’t worth living.

Which, of course, is nonsense. But mental illness is not rational. And pain is pain, regardless of whether caused by a broken leg or a broken brain.

So what was, is, this? Depression? Autistic Burnout? Narcissistic, planet-sized self pity? A bit of all of these. And probably some other stuff too. Definitely some of other stuff too. Plus the fact that my situation is still far from optimal. Describe or diagnose it how you will. Ultimately it was Autistic Alex having the mother of all sense of humour failures. And he was perfectly justified in doing so. When this happens, ADHD Alex freaks out and runs round in circles.

The relationship between the two sides of my brain is pretty well described by Rick and Morty at their most self destructive. Rick drags them both on some crazy adventure, while Morty gets increasingly distressed and frequently goes in to full on meltdown. Rick and Morty’s co-creator, Dan Harmon, is autistic himself, so maybe he’s trying to tell us something about himself.

Anyway, the reality is that, at least in the short term, I’ve largely lost control of my life. Things could be a lot worse, but anyone who’s experienced this type of mental illness knows that such rationalisations are worse than unhelpful. They’re massively counterproductive. They can be fatal. So we’ll not go there.

But until a few events, whose advents I have very little control over, resolve themselves, I’m stuck in a bit of limbo. And if there’s one state that massively traumatises both Autistic Alex and ADHD Alex, and therefore, Gestalt Alex, it’s being in limbo. Autistic Alex hates the uncertainty and ADHD Alex finds the implicit lack of options unbearable. This may all sound a bit frivolous, but anyone listening who has a brain like mine, know that this is not frivolous. It’s literally deadly serious.

And so this brings me to where I am today, writing this, feeling slightly annoyed at myself for letting things get this bad. Another unhelpful rationalisation I should note. I want to be better. I want to feel better. But recovery is a complicated, delicate and, most importantly, an ongoing process. It’s all very well me saying “I’m gonna get better now”, but I can’t simply will wellness into reality, Recovery takes self-care, honesty with one’s self and help from others. It needs communication, thoughtful action, and humility.

You’re asking the organ that is stressed or damaged to heal itself. Not only that, but you’re asking it to figure out how to do that itself! This is not as strange as it might sound. When you have a broken leg your leg knows how to fix itself, it just needs the space to get on with it, otherwise known as rest. The brain is the same, with the somewhat frustrating twist that your brain can decide that it doesn’t want to do that! That’s a problem for another day.

The physical analogy is one that I come back to time and time again. If you want to run a 5k, and you’ve never run one before, the best thing to do is give your body regular and ongoing examples of what you expect of it, and let it do the rest. You can’t think your muscles into growing in the right ways, only they can do that. So you can read books or watch videos or whatever that gives you tips on running posture, training regimes, nutrition and all that, and that’s all very helpful (providing you got good advice), but it’s really your body that figures out how to actually do it all. All you’re doing is giving it general direction. A bit like a conductor for an orchestra. Her job is to make sure that everyone is doing the right thing when they’re supposed to. She doesn’t tell them how to play their instrument.

So how does this work with brains? Well, pretty much the same. If you’re stressed or anxious, you need to show your brain, your emotional brain, what you expect from it - which in this case is calm. So do something that makes you calm. This is actually not the purpose or meditation, despite what most people think, but mediation is an extremely useful method for cultivating calmness of mind. It’s almost like weight training for your brain’s calmness muscle. But, if you’re like me, the practise of meditation is really only useful when I’m already relatively calm. If I’m in a tizz or, as is the case now, total tailspin, something else is required. Two things help me 1) exercise - I’ve been walking and running a lot of late. But this is not a podcast about keeping fit. Well, it sort of is. It’s about keeping your brain fit, rather than your body. So we’ll move on to the second thing that I use to create moments of calm - you guessed it, making stuff. Not a whole lot of suspense there, soz. I’m not a thriller writer. Yet, anyway.

I make pictures with paint and pencils and anything else that comes to hand. This makes me calm. It’s what I’ve been doing for weeks. So why didn’t it help me, to actually make me calm? Well I think it did. I just spent a few weeks shovelling a bunch of extra stress on my plate, as well as not dealing with the stuff I was already dealing with. I used my creativity to stay afloat. When my sense of purpose faltered after the exhibition, I stopped floating.

What happened after that was a state of self-fuelling psychological spiral. I don’t want to go into the details. They are for me those who support me. It wasn’t fun and mostly happened inside my brain. No one, including my family, was aware this was happening until I could mask it no longer. Then it all came leaking out in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

When did I decide that this all had to stop? I recalled a conversation with a friend that I had a while ago. They were having a rolling meltdown triggered by a crappy situation a week or so earlier. What I told them was that their anxiety and pain and distress was real, and justified and valid. But there comes a point where your reaction becomes the problem. You’re freaking out because you’re freaking out. Distress breeds distress, and every level of distress amplifies the original problem. The original problem has usually not really changed, but over time starts to seem so much worse. But it’s not worse, really, you’ve just zoomed into it, like you looked down at it through an increasingly powerful microscope. But the magnification is an illusion brought on by distress perpetuating itself. At some point you need to realise that, regardless of your problems, if you don’t get a handle on the distress itself, which is caused by your reaction to the problem, then things are only going to get worse. At that point you need to treat the distress itself as the enemy.

So this is my fightback. I choose to recognise the distress itself as my enemy, and to face it down. To do this, I need to accept this fact, while recognising my situation on its face values. It is what it is, nothing more, nothing less. Then I need to do things that I need to do show my brain what I expect of it. I will keep taking on reality one day at a time. I will keep fighting. I will get better. I acknowledge that there will be peaks and troughs, but I choose to keep fighting.

[pause]

There’s another reason that I’m telling you all this. Let me tell you another story. 5 or so years ago, for reasons that I can’t quite recall, I decided that I wanted to run an ultramarathon. Not just a normal, gruellingly arduous marathon, But an _ultra_marathon, which is always longer and usually on more challenging terrain. Up until that point, the most I’d ever run was 5k or there abouts. I was overweight and unfit. Knowing my habitual capriciousness, I figured that, with the best intentions, I was unlikely to follow through. So I hatched are rather boring, but also very effective plan. I entered a local ultra, and I pledged my sponsorship money to a local cause, the custodians of which I knew well. Something else you might not know about me. I hate, hate disappointing people. And 9 months later, I ran a 50km, offroad marathon, I actually ran most of it, rather than walking or crawling, and I placed quite well. It wasn’t one of the hard ones, like that one that goes through death valley, but from zero to 50km in 9 months isn’t bad going, right?

My point is that if I tell enough people that I’m going to get better. If I commit to getting better, maybe I’ll actually do it. As I say, I hate to disappoint.

So there’s my confessional. I hope you found it helpful, and maybe even hopeful.

One of the things I was avoiding doing during my fun little episode was writing the second part in my “How to be creative” series. I promise to get on to that. And I’ll try not to take so long. One thing I need to be careful of is not loading myself up with too much stuff. So if that means these episodes have to come a little less regular, so be it. I hope that you understand and stick with me. I did actually record another episode of me rambling about something or another. When I went to try and edit it, listening to myself in that state put me in a state of pure horror. At some point I’ll go listen to that and see if it’s worth releasing. Watch this space.