Fighting Back

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. 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’d 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 believe 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 hopes that any of you that are having or have had similar struggles might 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 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 prerequisite 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 you can’t just switch off a broken leg. Healing is an ongoing process and when your neurological afflictions run as deep and as long as mine do it’s arguable that this process never ends. I at least have accepted that it never will. I’ve made peace with this in the same way that a diabetic or an asthmatic must make peace with their affliction. Like these afflictions mental illness and its 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 do I wish 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 podcast 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’ve 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 situation 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 abores 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 or the HD 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 Alex’s suffer things get really bad for gestalt Alex. The changes of the past 10 months and the various requirements placed on me have been very hard indeed on the autistic Alex who’d been the comfortably dominant half of me for the prior three to four years. This has led to a string of acute and intense mental health episodes the first of which hit full tilt in February this year. I clawed myself out of that one by immersing myself in my art accepting the help of various incredible people around me and exercising my demons through writing which led to my book The Fall and starting a podcast. Also exercise gardening and burying my head in the sand for better or for worse as to what was happening around me. However life didn’t stop. The world kept turning. The clock kept ticking and money kept getting spent. Despite dramatically reducing our outgoings 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 stroke studio. Thank heaven for small or in this case huge mercies. But mercies accepted. Trauma is trauma. Autistic Alex was freaking out. So I decided I need something to focus on. Actually I’m not sure I did decide that. I just threw myself into a project that absorbed me for two or three 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 it 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. It 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 the show is 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 my 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 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 process now process then practically speaking it didn’t make a whole lot of difference maybe anyway but I 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 the equivalent of trying to drink or gamble or snort my problems away not just delaying but exacerbating. When did I recognize this? When did I figure out that I was unhealthily delaying facing up to my situation while 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 an act of processing is an act of love. Thinking about it now I suspect that 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 kind of 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 rationalizations aside I fell apart I’m not going to go into all the yucky details but suffice to say this was a weeping snotty crisis rather than a screaming breaking stuff one. I just felt so desperately sorry for myself so apoplectically angry at the world. My behavior came erratic I started saying stupid stuff to people who deserve better from me. I put my family and particularly my wife through a 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 I suppose and probably some other stuff too. Definitely some 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 a mother of all sense of humor failures and he was perfectly justified in doing so. When this happens ADHD Alex freaks out and runs around 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 into 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 with these two. 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 rationalizations are worse than helpful. They’re massively counterproductive. They can be fatal so we’ll not go there. But until a few events whose advent I have very little control over resolved themselves I’m stuck in a bit of limbo. And if there’s one state that massively traumatizes both ADHD Alex and autistic 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 who’s listening who has a brain like mind knows that this is not frivolous it’s literally deadly serious. And it brings me to where I am today recording this feeling slightly annoyed at myself for letting things get this bad another unhelpful rationalization I should note. I want to be better I want to feel better but recovery is complicated delicate and most importantly an ongoing process. It’s all very well me saying I’m going to get better now but I can’t simply will wellness into reality recovery takes self-care honesty with oneself and help from others it needs communication thoughtful action and humility. You’re asking the organ that’s stressed or damaged the brain to heal itself not only that 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 a space to get on with it otherwise known as rest. The brain is the same with a 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 give you tips on running posture training regimes nutrition all that and that’s very helpful providing you got good advice but it’s really your body that figures out how to do it all. All you’re doing is giving it general directions 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 though. 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 of meditation despite what most people think but meditation 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 practice of meditation is really only useful when I’m already relatively calm if I’m in a tiz or as is the case now total tail spin something else is required two things tend to help me one 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 the 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 shoveling 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 I started sinking what happened after that was a state of self-fueling psychological spiral I don’t want to go into the details they are for those who support me it wasn’t fun and mostly happened inside my brain no one including my family was aware that this was happening until I could mask it no longer when it all came leaking out both in the literal and the metaphorical sense when did I decide that this all had to stop I recall the conversation with a friend I had 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 were real and justified and valid but there comes a point when your reaction becomes a problem you’re freaking out because you’re freaking out distress breathes distress and every level of distress amplifies the original problem the original problem has usually not really changed but over time it starts to seem so much worse but it’s not worse really you’ve just zoomed into it like you’ve looked down at it for an increasingly powerful microscope but the magnification is an illusion brought on by the distress perpetuating itself at some point you need to realize that regardless of your problem if you don’t get a handle on 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 fight back I choose to recognize distress itself as my enemy and to face it down to do this I need to accept the fact while recognizing my situation on its face values it is what it is nothing more nothing less then I need to do the things I need to do to 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 and I acknowledge that there will be peaks and troughs but I choose to keep fighting there’s another reason why I’m telling you this let me tell you another story five or so years ago for reasons I can’t quite recall I decided that I wanted to run an ultramarathon not just a normal gruelingly arduous marathon but an ultramarathon which is always longer and usually on more challenging terrain up until that point the most I’d ever run was 5k or thereabouts 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 a rather boring but also very effective plan I entered a local ultra and pledged my sponsorship money to a local cause the custodians of which I knew very well something else you might not know about me I hate disappointing people and nine months later I ran a 50 kilometer off-road 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 the one that goes through death valley or anything like that but from zero to 50k in nine months isn’t bound 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 during my fun little episode was writing the second part of my how to be creative series I promised to get onto that and I’ll try not to take so long but 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 out a little less regular so be it I hope you understand and stick with me I did actually record another episode of me rambling about something or other just before my solo exhibition 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’d go back and listen to that and see if it’s worth releasing watch this space that’s all for now if you want to support me what I need more than anything else at the moment is money so please go to my patreon account at patreon.com forward slash Alex Loveless and where you can donate money for as little as one dollar a month otherwise please follow my podcast share it tell your friends tell your family tell anyone else and I’ll see you soon