#visible

Why I Support #visible @LucyFace

@LucyFace

A lot of my high school experience is a blur.

The odd incident has stuck with me, like the time our science teacher sent a fireball down the lab bench, or when our Chemistry teacher decided we would make--and eat--mayonnaise as a lesson in emulsions.

However, most of high school--like I said--is a haze of uncomfortable chairs, countless hours spent in the library and playing cards with my friends at lunch time... and occasionally during Chemistry, too.

There is one lunchtime in particular, however, that I will never forget.

I was sitting with my friends, laughing and chatting as we did, when something shifted inside of me. Suddenly I was looking at myself from a distance. The best way to describe it, I guess, is as an out of body experience. As I watched myself, I realised that the person that I felt inside my head, inside my heart and soul, was not the girl sitting there with her friends.

It was then that I began to see myself the way everyone else must. The struggles, the pain, the fear, the sense of invalidity, of unworthiness, of failure-my friends never saw these things, and I certainly did my best not to show them.

Since I was a toddler, I have been plagued by fear, anxiety and panic.

Since primary school, I have cycled in and out of depressive episodes, sometimes struggling with impulse control and often engaging in self-harmful behaviours.

In high school, I began to fight my visible self, trying to find ways to hide and escape and just, not be here.

We all have mental and emotional health, just like we all have physical health, and arguably spiritual health too.

My mental and emotional health, aren't so great; I live with disordered mental health.

I live in a constant battle with my own head-fighting to keep control over my mood, over my thought patterns, over my behavioural choices.

I have to constantly be aware of an infinite number of triggers, always ready to figure out whether I'm going to be able to cope, or whether it's worth even trying. Sometimes, none of those preparations and safeguards, none of the tools or skills I've learned, matter; biochemistry just does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and it sucks.

I only launched into writing a few short years ago, but it has been the voice I've been craving: in the real world, we have to live as our visible selves, but online or on paper, I can live my invisible self. Writing and literature is how I can make the invisible, visible.

For me, this has become an integral part of my recovery. It is through writing, through reading, through connecting with communities like Wattpad that I can begin to piece together the frayed threads that will take me to see all layers of who I am.

I want, too, for other people to know what I now know: that your invisible self doesn't have to be a secret, it's not something that needs to be hidden, or to feel ashamed of.

Those feelings and negative associations are what we call stigma. Stigma is why our society and culture don't and/or won't talk about some issues, or at least not with any level of comfort or wisdom.

I want to fight the lies and ignorance we hold on to about our invisible selves.

I want you to see me, the whole me, just as I see the whole you.