Angel in the Mirror: Road to Recovery

ANGEL

IN THE

MIRROR

ROAD TO RECOVERY

LUMI WINTERSON

Copyright © 2020 by Lumi Winterson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/16/2020

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Prelude

My Youth

Inside My Head

The Illness Explained

Help is on The Way

Spiral Down

Therapies

The Other Side of White

Relationships

My Wish for The Dark

Hello, Good Bye

The Next Step

Will She Ever Learn?

Mother and Carer

This Part is from Me to You

The End (For Now)

Once upon a time there was an angel who had no wings. She had no way to fly home to heaven and she was sad. Some of the other angels laughed at her, but they did not know why she had no wings or what she had been through to make her so sad. She had danced with the devil and had her skin burnt with pokers by the demons. It hurt a lot. But the flower fairies loved her, for she had always been kind to them. They let her stay in their flower world until she was feeling happy again.

FOREWORD

Mental illness affects almost everyone in some form or other. Whether it be as a patient or client, a carer, health care or other professional, loved one, co-worker or friend, it needs to be addressed. Mental illness is more mainstreamed now. We see famous people on TV and in the news, being admitted to rehabs for drug and alcohol issues, or private clinics for mood and anxiety problems. Mental illness does not discriminate, it affects people from all walks of life. It is however primarily depression, anxiety and similar mood and addiction disorders that are featured. There is still a huge stigma attached to psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. Perhaps this is due to society’s ignorance, there is fear in the unknown and the misunderstood. We need to strip down the black curtains that hide us from the world. Mentally ill people are not necessarily stupid, or dangerous, they are not to be defined by their illness. We need to be unashamed and proud of what we are able to do as human beings, not only for ourselves, but for those around us who are suffering. I have been told that my story is intense, but please bear in mind that it is my life and what I have been through. Despite the bad times, there have also been good times, pearls of happy memories scattered along the path behind me. Pick them up and smile knowing that I came out the other side and so can you.

PRELUDE

Most days I wake up feeling tired. Every day I take my medications. I turn on the TV and watch Sunrise. I lie on the couch and try to snooze off my tiredness. It takes about half an hour before the Ritalin kicks in and I finally have enough energy to get up properly, have a shower and get dressed.

I’m sick of hearing the term Mental Illness, I have stood under that umbrella for far too long. All I ever wanted was to be normal. But what is normal really? Just a setting on the washing machine.

I tried so hard to shake that label, but you know what? All it did was make me stronger. I’m a fighter and I’m alive. I’m here to share what I’ve been through, in hopes that it might help those that are struggling, either personally or vicariously through their loved ones. I am lucky, I am safe. But I know how difficult it can be. Especially if you have no hope. I want to share my hope with others around me, like a candle flame that can be passed on. I am not unique, there are many other people living lives just like mine. But this is my story.

I will share with you how I got to be where I am now, from growing up in the 80s and 90s, to being hospitalised as a young adult. The ins and outs of living with a severe mental illness, the different types of treatments I have tried, what worked and what did not. I will share my opinions on how the system needs to change, and how to help those struggling around you.

MY YOUTH

CHILDHOOD

My memories are fragmented, much like my life. Throughout my story, there are chunks of time that barely belong to me, my memory so shattered. Yet further down the track, there are times that I remember clearly. I write about those times in more detail, and as the story progresses, so does my writing. I invite you to take this journey with me with a smile on your face.

There are a few things from my childhood that I remember well, some good, some not so good. I will share with you some of these now.

I remember going to the forests outside of Melbourne with Mum and her friends to do bushwalking and mushroom picking in the pine forests. I used to hate those mushrooms - big orange ones that stunk to high heaven when they were being cleaned and cooked. Mum and her friends would collect boxes and boxes of them and spend days on the patio cleaning them and cooking them into salads, dips and steaks. It made the whole house reek. I really hated those mushrooms; the actual time spent picking them though was quite enjoyable.

I remember once asking my dad how dinosaurs became extinct; he said that the men got their guns and killed them all, and I believed this for a long time.

I remember the kind old man that lived down the road from us who gave us neighborhood kids lollies. We lived across the road from a train line, and back then there was no fence to stop kids from running onto the tracks, and so we did, we played with the rocks. Running under the track was a large storm water drain where we also used to play. We’d pretend it was a little river and that we were fishing there. One day Mum looked out at the street and saw three of us kids playing right on the tracks. She almost had a heart attack, ran out and got us. We got in big trouble, but after Mum complained to the council, a fence was put up next to the train line to keep us from playing there any further.

I remember my phobia of fire growing up. It was all consuming as a child. Anything to do with fire scared me, every time I heard a siren I would cry. Once when it was my best friend Sharon’s birthday, they wanted to put sparklers on the cake. I was so scared that the house would explode. I begged them not to use them. When they insisted, I ran into the garden in tears. I crouched there in the backyard waiting for the house to explode. Needless to say, it didn’t, but it scared the shit out of me. Another time when I was 6, we went on a school excursion to the local fire station. We were shown how the hoses worked and shown the protective clothing that the firemen had to wear. Everyone had a great time, besides me. I managed to hold it together until the very end when their alarms went off and they left in their fire trucks. I cried all the way back to school, certain that the fire engines had gone to rescue my mum and dad who were burning alive.

Most of my childhood I spent with Sharon. We called each other god-sisters, as her parents were my godparents and vice versa. We did things together with the family, spending Christmases and birthdays together. We used to play witches in the backyard or play with the doll’s house when we were indoors. We used to brush each other’s hair with our Mason Pierson hairbrushes and listened to records - she introduced me to ABBA and Michael Jackson. Sharon was 5 years older than me, but she was my very best friend, or more like an older sister. Although the paths of our lives have gone in different directions, I still think of her most days.

All my life, I was close to my neighbours, Mary and Gordon. They had known me since they moved next door when I was 4 and had their first child when I was 8. They named the child May, and I spent a lot of my time with her. They later had another girl called Carrie and finally a boy named Joey. They were like my siblings and as I was an only child I enjoyed playing big sister to them. Because my family consisted of just my mother and father, Mary and Gordon played an important role in my life as part of my extended family. It was them that I often turned to when I was in a crisis. The kids and I used to do a lot of things together, like going to the pool in summer, or just hanging out at home. They had a red cubby house that we played in and a sandpit. In spring we would concoct perfumes using the flowers that we found in the yard. They didn’t often smell nice, but it was fun none-the-less.

Smells were always very important to me. I used to sit with a bottle of perfume or a moist hand towelette and just smell them. Mum and her friend Maggie used to worry that I would become a drug sniffer when I got older. Instead I just became obsessed with perfumes.

Most of my childhood was good; at least I have good memories of it. Bad things happened, I experienced significant childhood trauma which I effectively blocked out of my memory for half of my life. They are still hurtful memories which I will go into later. There were little things that were out of the ordinary for me as a child, but without knowing any different, my childhood days are remembered quite fondly. I didn’t really have problems with my mental health until I was about 14, and for the sake of this book, that is where I will really begin my story.

PUBERTY BLUES

It was hard growing up in adolescence when my symptoms slowly began to surface. It was the early to mid 1990’s and although mental illness was not unknown, it was certainly not spoken of openly in most situations or social circles.

My moods became erratic, changing from elation, to sadness, from anger to love. I didn’t know how to handle these rapid mood swings, and I thought that everyone was suffering in exactly the same way, each wearing their own masks. I would go to the toilets at school and cry for no apparent reason. Then when I went home, I would cry some more. How could I have known any different, when nobody spoke of it? It was taboo back then. The high school had a counsellor, but I never went to see her. How could I trust someone like that when it was common knowledge that she would talk to the teachers about you in the staff room at lunchtime. I see young people in hospital these days and my heart breaks for them. But they are getting help when they need it, so may be their lives will turn around before they even reach 21. I feel a bit like a mother hen now, wrapping my feathered wings around the young ones, trying to impart some of my knowledge to them. I feel protective and when I see myself in them, I want to hold them safe. The help when I was young was not entirely beneficial. In fact, it didn’t seem to be available at all. There was limited literature that spoke of mental illness from the writer’s point of view. Books such as The Bell Jar, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Catcher in the Rye gave some insight, as did the poetry of Leonard Cohen, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, but there was very little help openly available for young adults struggling with their own demons.

I developed crushes and fixated on some of the teachers in high school, I longed for just one of them to reach out to me, to make the effort, to believe the signs that I was becoming unwell.

It must be hard as a teacher, parent or family friend to see a young person spiraling out of control, but I tell you, you are in a position where you can make an incredible difference in a young person’s life. I guarantee that even if the person says they don’t want to speak, inside they are screaming, inside they are hurting and inside is where you need to delve. In my opinion, teenagers are not fully equipped emotionally to handle their mental health, however that is where we need to focus our attention, to bring help to young people suffering in silence. Symptoms such as erratic mood swings, unstable relationships, black and white thinking and impulsive behaviours, including self-harm and substance abuse, are prominent in people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I’ve found that mental health professionals tend to hand out this diagnosis readily with young people who fit the ‘too hard’ basket. It is this basket however that holds so many young people, and it is here, at the very beginning where we need to direct our help. I think to myself, that BPD might often be a ‘gateway diagnosis’ that may develop into more concrete mental illnesses further in life. Having said that, I believe it is also a promising diagnosis to be given, as young people are sometimes able to grow out of it as they get older. If they receive the appropriate help as early on as possible, mood swings can lessen in intensity and duration, unhelpful coping mechanisms such as self-harming, can lessen. As the young person learns to cope with life’s challenges in a constructive manner, using skills such as those taught in Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), they may be able to function in a more healthy and happy way and go on to live their best lives possible.

When I was 14 I got a new pair of ice skates for my birthday, and I took up ice skating lessons on a Thursday night. I made friends with a girl my age named Shay and we met twice a week to practice skating. I loved it, and still do. I met my first crush at the skating rink. His name was Conrad