2006

That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life.

As I walk the street trying to burn away my nervous energy, the thoughts that whiz through my head explode like a range of fireworks fleetingly highlighting questions around my self-worth.

Why aren’t I where I should be in life?

Why has the past been so unfulfilled?

Is this all I am?

Is this all I’ll ever be?

What more is there?

There are more but I don’t want to see them. Just these are enough, and they invite scathing condemnations of who I am.

Others mightn’t see it about me. Others might see me as composed or moderately successful or functioning just fine in life. They won’t see the turbulence inside my head, won’t see how unnavigable it is to me, won’t see that it’s always precariously placed to detonate.

But now there’s a new doubt that’s illuminated: that everything I have known and believed to this point is either a lie, or an affectation.

There has always been a towering certainty that I will achieve the things I’ve pursued in life: success with writing; family; good mental health. They haven’t happened yet, but I’ve always believed in their inevitability. Through hard work, or serendipity, or a combination of both, these things will happen.

But that’s now incinerated, exposing there’s nothing but the abyss awaiting me, and if I fall I will either plummet endlessly into mental health oblivion, or want to ensure that won’t happen so I’ll end it all.

I keep walking.

Faster.

I can’t stop.

I can’t.

But some things there’s no escaping.

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