I’m learning a hard lesson: shame about being mentally ill is not something I can just fix and then forget about. The shame lingers, waiting for a chance to reattach itself to my back. At the blink of an eye it jumps on me, making me heavy and slow. It sticks on the bottom of my shoes like gum, willing me to stop moving forward, to stay stuck and hide instead.
Bummer. I thought I’d outgrown my shame! Me and my mental health superhero underpants that maybe don’t fit me as well as I’d hoped. Today my mom repeated to me a question she’d heard on the radio: If you knew you only had one day left to live, would you go to a nudist beach? Talk about a serious question. Maybe what I ask myself is whether or not I’d be willing to take off my mental health superhero underpants and show up on the internet nude.
Wait, that didn’t come out right.
