Not My Fault

I had been an inner-city teacher for two years when the gates of anxiety and depression came crashing down.  One day I just couldn't do it anymore.  I resigned for "health reasons," though I didn't tell anyone that it was my mental health.  I honestly felt like I was lying at the time.  All I could think at that moment was, "I can't do this.  Something horrible is going to happen if I walk into that classroom again."  So I quit.  And my depression seized the moment – like it does – and beat the hell out of me for quitting.  For more than a year, I felt great shame about that.  At the same time I was trying to claw my way out of the pit through therapy, and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

After some CBT work on the subject, a light finally turned on in my head – a dim light hanging from the rafters and swinging in the dark, but a light nonetheless – that I was not lying when I quit my job by saying that I was resigning for health reasons.  I was sick with a fatal illness.  Not my fault.  Not a made-up story to get out of working.

If I'd had cancer, I would have walked into the head office upset and concerned for my life, but unashamed.  I would have told my principal and she would have understood that I needed to take care of my health.  She would have perhaps checked up on me later on to see how I was doing.  People at the school would pass around a card and maybe send flowers.  I would have visited when my chemo was over, wearing a bandana over my bald head, and been welcomed as a hero, "fighting" cancer.  Instead, I quit in ignominy, sent a letter via email and hated myself for it, which made it that much harder to get better.  

In Kay Redfield Jamison's book on suicide, Night Falls Fast, she tells the story of Drew, a student at the Air Force Academy, who'd excelled in school, but months before his graduation became mentally ill with manic depression.  Rather than receiving his commission and slot in flight school upon graduation, he was excused from the Air Force for mental illness.  While he was back home with his parents and recovering from his psychotic manic episode, the guilt and shame he felt for having a mental illness and being forced out of the Air Force held his recovery back and kept him from discussing his problems with friends and family.  Just a few days before his suicide, his psychiatrist noted that he was, "continuing to struggle with coming to grips with seeing himself as an individual with an illness."

While I am starting to accept that I have a serious mental illness, I still feel shame and guilt at my situation.  I wish I didn't, but if I'm totally honest, I do.  While my depression had slowed down my life's progress, like Drew, I was on the road to success.  I'd gotten straight A's and won awards in college.  I was in a rather selective graduate program when I was teaching that I just had to quit.  I came out to my mother (yes, it's a little like coming out), but I haven't said anything to my dad about it.  I'm selective with whom I share my experience.  – Except for this totally public (but anonymous) blog.  It's flippin' hard to feel like you're starting life over in your 40's, and you can't just drop the mental illness bomb every time someone asks you what you're up to.  Sigh.

But that light hanging from the rafters is a little brighter today.  It's not my fault I have a funny brain.  Just like it wouldn't be my fault if my kidneys were defective.  I'm not ashamed to know I have a mental illness, and I believe that that is what will get me through to the other side.