Only one is a mutant

I am aware of when my mental illness is about to become symptomatic. When I am debilitated in my bed, when my head races with thoughts that are hateful to me, I know at the moment that it is ludicrous. I don't truly believe any of it. I am inside the illness, watching myself act this way and trying to expedite or obviate the lousy behavior my chemicals are demanding.

I can name antecedents preceding a bout. One could even chart in my writing that my mental health takes a hit around this time of year when the days are getting shorter, and I have returned to the chaos of work (though more chaotic this year, one must agree). A cold, a bad night's sleep, and I must tiptoe on eggshells to try to avoid a bump that will trip me into a depressive spiral. Sometimes, a trigger appears before me, and I have resilience enough that my expression doesn't even flicker. I inhale, expecting a sword through my lungs, and I don't even feel a pinprick. I will my thoughts past it, and everything is kosher. Other times, my mental illness will grab the most tenuous connection and make me miserable for days. I cannot always predict which response I will get, but I regard them as unrelated to my core self.

Over the last several years, I have learned to detach more from the overreaction of my psychic immune system, acting as though I am okay until I distract the mental illness enough that it dissipates.

I am not enjoying mood swings. I am not excited by them but annoyed. I have better things to do, but the craziness will not let me go. It is something I wait through. I partly write about it because Hollywood's portrayal of mental illness as shorthand for erratic creativity frustrates me. They want manic depression to be sexy, schizoaffective disorder equating with seeing the gods. They do not film scenes of the afflicted, from ample practice, acting as though everything is fine while a tempest roils within. They leave the diagnosed coping by not drawing attention to something painful but temporary on the cutting room floor. I write about my issues because they are dull -- for me more than readers, I suspect -- and I want to contradict the flashy lies.

Yet, I also soothe myself by thinking about it in terms of superpowers.

My psych nurse practitioner, who tries to have as little to do with me as she can manage, squinted at me during our last appointment. "It's too bad you can't figure out a way to turn your sensitivity on and off. Be sensitive when you are writing and not feel much the rest of the time."

I laughed because there is no point or penalty not to. She diagnosed me as "hypersensitive" within the first ten minutes of meeting me, and that was just about where she stopped learning about me, aside from giving me terrible advice and decent suggestions of what to watch on Netflix.

My sensitivity is why I am a writer, beyond a trained literary flair and some innate linguistic talent.

For a few years (ten in our reality, two within the comics), Kitty Pryde's mutant ability was not that she could phase through solid material, but that she could not. She naturally existed in a phased state and had to focus on becoming tangible again.

Is it wrong to think of my mental illness as a power over which I must consciously focus my will? Owing to the quirks of my brain, I can create intricate stories on the fly with characters that border on being independent of me. If I do not discipline this ability, it spins out and tortures me. As such, I will occasionally bring myself out of the branching panicked stories by whispering to myself, "That isn't happening" and "No one is talking to you," neither of which makes me sound as though I am the pinnacle of sanity.

Amber sometimes hesitates in my presence because, even ten years in, she is conditioned to indecision. I ask her always to tell me her needs because I can't tolerate the idea that I am not meeting them. Similarly, I am getting better about telling her exactly what I need her to do or say when my mental issues get away with me. "I am experiencing a depressive spiral, and I can't find my way out. Can you come down here and help me?" "I am anxious because [something]. Please tell me it isn't a problem." With my mind, blessed and cursed, I need my interactions this overt. No one can read minds, but I certainly try.

Most people are not habituated this way. Everything is couched in this false politeness, these supposedly kindly lies, this bowing and deflecting. I know why they do this. They think it spares feelings, but it causes me to feel distrustful. It is the little sister of a woman breaking up with you by telling you she needs to find herself while reeking of the cologne of her new lover. It only makes things worse out of cowardice of the natural consequences. This deflecting person will never allow me to relax around them, who will always have a possible subtext, what they mean and expect me to know but which they do not trust me or our relationship to say plainly. I don't want to have to run everything through a translator. That makes me want to leave, to stop contacting them when it is a chess game where they are trying to achieve some goal other than honesty. I don't have time or motivation to constantly second guess. My mental health cannot take it.

I am more aware of it, and its disconnection from the experiences those around me are having. I can stop myself from having long, stressful, entirely imaginary conversations that are unlikely to be had in reality, so I do not need to rehearse them. If people want to say something to me, they will, and I should not be so paranoid. I should not ruin my day, assuming they are concealing things and dropping hints that I will uncover if only I overthink everything they say or do. (Amber asked to skip a song. My mental illness assured me that the lyrics contained some clue I was missing rather than that she didn't feel like listening to it.)

With practice and medication that slows down my brain (realizing that I had to slow down to go farther was alien at first), I have been able not to follow branching paths of possibilities and focus on what is going on. It was occupied too much of my mental resources. No matter where I was, I was never really there. There is nothing like having sex and thinking about groceries one needs to buy or why one isn't going back to school for another degree! You came, but were you there to start with?

There was a time when my writing talent was not intimately coupled with the product of my anxiety and mood imbalance. I was less skilled then. Perhaps because I was younger and less practiced, but it feels more than the two domains overlap. Under control, I have such force behind my pen. If I relax my discipline when an episode begins, I will end up unable to write anything through my misery. Hiding in my room, messily weeping, does not contribute to my publishing credits.

But it is an ability most people do not have. I average between 15 and 20 thousand words in a given week without feeling a strain, most of which I publish or post. I've made thousands of dollars from my writing this year. It may not have been possible without channeling the force of my neurodivergence toward productive obsession rather than the crumbling it makes me want.

It is often still there, intrusive thoughts and the desire to collapse into anxiety. All I can do is tell it to get working on fiction or shut up. Having deadlines and being quoted widely gives me less time for self-pity and doubt. How can I think I am an imposter when I am paying off a car with my writing? Yes, my books are unpopular -- undeservedly so -- but my writing isn't by a long stretch.

It isn't the trade of "would I sacrifice my writing to cure my mental illness?" No demon is offering that bargain. I would laugh in the scrunched, red face of any who tried. My mental health will be a persistent -- one hopes low intensity -- struggle though my life. I might as well put it to work.

I read random internet advice where someone complained that they have awful thoughts when encountering some types of people (e.g., "She is disgustingly fat. What a slob.") but that they didn't want to think that way. Another person said, "Your first thought is how you are raised. Your second thought is who you are."

To that, I would append "The Call of the Void." People have some horrifying thoughts -- "What would happen if I tossed this baby off the roof?" -- but what that demonstrates is what they wouldn't do and most fear. It is their brain overreacting, and, knowing this better, one can calm it rather than feel guilty for thoughts.

To my now former therapist, I personified (caninified?) my illness as a dog. The dog barks and growls at nothing, but I can tell him to sit on the carpet and be quiet. I am the authority, and he has to listen. She thought this was brilliant, but it seemed basic to me. "Here is this thing. It is not me. It is something happening. He can shut his mouth now before I swat his nose with a rolled-up newspaper." (Though don't hit non-metaphorical dogs.)

A few years ago, I came to embrace benevolent nihilism. Nothing is going to matter ultimately. The universe is going to suffer its heat-death one day, long after we are gone. (Most species last about as long as we have and not a bit longer.) What sense does it make being anxious over some social foible everyone else forgot moments after it happened? I will die. I might as well enjoy the ride until I do. Until it drifts into an eternal cold, the universe will persist in being so unfathomably vast that our dinky planet can never matter, despite evolving life and then sapient beings to spend their lifetimes being neurotic.

Not all mutations are beneficial. How would you like to defecate ice cream like Soft Serve or look like a plucked chicken like Beak? What is in one is inherited, likely more nature than nurture (though I was raised by people who struggled, often untreated; it would have an effect). My brothers do not have what I do, but they are not bereft of complications. They also cannot write anything like I do (nor am I technical like Dan or able to deal with bodily fluids and death like Bryan). Mutants breed further mutants, whose powers are not an aggregation or reaction of their parents'.

Seeing it not as a disability but the other side of my superpower is a better phrasing. Not everyone gets flight or invulnerability. Graphomania and divine inspiration are not the worst burdens out there. I have guided so much of my life toward writing (ask me about my $400 fountain pen collection, marvel at my ottoman full of notebooks, delight at the expensive tablet mainly used to edit text files!). Why shouldn't I have enlisted my shadow to pick up a pen? Why not vent my chattering mind on the page rather than exhausting my loved ones with my unedited stream of agitated consciousness? If the mental illness one day conquers me, let the suicide note be ten million words long. Let my archnemesis have to fight their way through an impossible labyrinth of sentences.

last watched: American Horror Story
reading: Waypoint Kangaroo