She Must Be Mad Read online

  When you were no longer there.

  You see his limbs half in and half out, snaked around his duvet weeks from now. His finger pinching to zoom, swiping furiously through months. Looking at all these moments that at the time you thought were nothing of note but now are all that remain.

  The tears slowly start to lessen, he gives you a lost stare and you offer a half smile. Dimples that suggest you know you’re being silly. Silly for crying over ‘a song’.

  But in reality, there was not an ounce of silliness or stupidity to your reaction. You’d planned tomorrow’s walk, you’d planned the lunch you’d attempt to eat, you’d planned the words you’d say to him, to explain this wasn’t working any more, you had planned the whole damn thing and suddenly in a wisp of an unexpected thought, all those plans unravelled and you won’t stomach it for weeks.

  Even now, looking back, thinking on the countless photos taken after that night, you wished you’d taken some too. You wished you’d smiled in a few. You wished you’d had half the heart you had that night to have made an effort or, at least, to have been honest sooner.

  Love is also continued frustration. It’s anger. It’s hurting. It’s denying it for months and only seeing its presence, for the first time, in a memory. It is not always just the butterfly chase that you expected. Sometimes it’s also resentment. It’s embarrassment. It’s putting all of your dreams on hold, totally swept in not realising. It’s endurance. It’s anguish. It’s not what you wanted, not what you went looking for in your absent search for the next thing. It’s intoxicating, it’s routine, it’s hard goddamn work. But they don’t tell you that. Or maybe they do. Maybe you weren’t listening. Maybe you were hanging off the end of a feeling late night WhatsApps gave you. Hanging off the end of movies, of prematurely-written poetry you’d penned in hope of one day arriving there with a person. It’s horrid. It’s gross. It’s real and it stinks in a romantic putrid parma violet sweetness. So today you hate yourself for thinking you knew what love was but when it arrived you couldn’t send it back quick enough. Laying in your pants on the sofa with last night’s curry reheated screaming to no one but the ceiling.

  ‘I DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS. THIS ISN’T IT. HOW DO I RESIGN?’

  But no matter how many times you swipe with wool-gathered ease through Tinder praying to erase it, no matter how many times you tweet your soul is a dark expanse and your heart is a gothic black cave in as many self-depreciating retweet-worthy characters, it isn’t. Your heart is filled with chest banging love and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and that is it. Love is ‘that is it’ even when you feel like it isn’t.

  she must be mad

  mind part 1

  You remember, quite explicitly, the moments all of the weight first felt tangible. Your best girlfriend from school blimps in on MSN, ‘I love you but I don’t think I can help you anymore.’ Each word sinks and anchors ground to the pit of your stomach and steadies your defences. She is right. A week later your best male friend bikes in the snow to your house at two-thirty in the morning and you let him cradle you as your apologies splutter out with a stench of lavender bleach. Weeks before, scissor scores sloped around the shapes of the tips of your fingers so you could no longer hold a pen on exam day. You lay, heavy in limbs and mind, cursing that no one else had ever felt this way. No one could understand. There wasn’t a name for you, so you create a face instead. Bright and brash, loud and lovely – you walk into every room with conversation, jokes, anecdotes, bold red lipstick, and funny styled hair. You swig from bottles of wine and ring in every party as the go-to girl for a good time. It is much easier this way. Nobody has to know. MSN has long folded, your teeth cleansed from bathroom cleaner, the hard skin on your hands now, just simply, interesting. It’s a charade that becomes so well-scripted, lovingly rehearsed, articulated in mirrors of bars before re-entering, that often it is hard to decipher which part of you is acting. You forget so quickly in those performances, of the excruciating pain, the sobbing, the fast heart racing to leap from out your chest via your mouth and spluttered in bile before you can leave the house. You deny yourself that those moments were true and that they ever happened. You attend doctors’ appointments, pop pills, dutifully research a Wikipedia file of celebrities with ‘bipolar II’, scream at your friends, scream at the chemist, scream at the man in the bloody corner shop, scream at yourself that even though the weight still feels tangible, it can’t be real. You are solemnly bored of pity, of being bedridden … of performing. Advisors come and go, all wearing different masks, some lovers, some friends, some professionals, your costume remains the same until one day you sit in front of a girl with deep purple hair and pink lipstick. She orders you a bowl of mash potato and a side of broccoli, an espresso and a Bloody Mary. She holds your hand and tells you the one thing that everybody else had given you with guilt but this time gives it to you as a gift. It feels warm, it’s cosy cuddled relief. It’s the truth and this time it isn’t lonely.

  ‘You’re not well. You’re ill. You’re suffering. It’s all real, all of this. I’m here to help you see it through.’

  ‘she must be mad’

  They called me many things

  In many places

  All well-intentioned

  Muffled nouns spluttered from kind faces

  Adjectives

  Then descriptors

  Ushering packets of pills and tales of other strong victors

  Sympathetic sighs and brushed smiles

  With trying advice to dissolve difficult enmeshed vices

  They all said things would get better

  To treat this thing as a workable quirk and not an evil personal personality vendetta

  That I had in for myself

  Try loving yourself

  And when you do tell others how

  The journey you’ve been on is another girl’s now

  Another kid just like you pressing their brain shouting owwww

  The honesty will hurt a bit, it might make you sad

  But ignite a spark that burns brighter

  Than all of the times you heard

  ‘She must be mad’,

  Ignite a spark that burns brighter

  Than all of the hurt

  To smile

  ‘Yeah, I guess I am, but it isn’t all bad.’

  Ignite a spark that burns brightest

  From all of the dirt

  The dribbling tear-sodden thirst

  To drink to the girl you knew

  She must be mad but my god she’s brave too.

  @saintrecords

  When sanity seems so far

  And guarded by gates made of worries

  I thank a god

  I wish were true

  For Solange’s Instagram stories.

  doctor, doctor, don’t help me

  (written aged 15)

  I think I crave rejection

  And self-sabotage days

  I like the way they taste

  In their smokey beer cross haze

  I like to feel this empty

  To make some time for pain

  Nothing drives me more crazy

  Than the breaks of feeling sane.

  selective feeling

  Sometimes I forget I’m totally insane

  But then I’ll start to hear voices

  And remember again

  I don’t want to be crazy

  But sometimes there’s comfort

  In that’s my word for lazy

  Or sad

  Or defeated

  Or bouncing off walls

  And I think if I wasn’t

  I’d find myself bored.

  I wish I’d not spent so long crying in bed

  I fear too much

  To quantify the rest

  To feel the beat

  With flat palms on my chest

  I fear too much

  To think back to

  When I wanted less

  I fear too much

  To see the m
ess

  Of how much time I wasted

  When I had plenty left.

  rapid cycling

  You put stars in my shoes

  And clouds in my head

  I’d chase the moon

  If I could get out of bed

  If I could slap my feet flat

  On the floor

  And walk towards

  What you allotted yesterday

  You hand me my fleeting allowance

  Of disgruntled energy

  So I can feel the thick winter air

  Like a cold second skin

  That blows through the splinters in the trees

  And the cracks you’ve chiseled within

  The fluctuating curves of bowing branches

  Are the sunken eyes nestled under furrowed arches

  You gift a still minute

  And then gallop off with it

  Always a step ahead

  And just a scant visit.

  funny

  I feel funny.

  Not like when – the light bounces from the sky

  And you feel heat stroke from the sunny

  Days of closing in on jokes

  That girl is intelligently witty she’s so funny

  I feel done in

  Funny ‘ha ha’s speak no fun

  In the language I have learnt

  Funny feelings aren’t the taste of a jovial summer’s eve descending burn

  A funny feeling is a feeling of a leaf I’m scared to turn

  A funny feeling is me seething at a friend

  Who didn’t mean to hurt

  Me, I’m a bit funny that way

  Funny isn’t laughing at a joke I heard you say

  Funny is me cramping in the lungs and wincing

  I’m okay

  Funny is the last thought before I sleep

  Funny is the impression of me that you’ll keep

  Funny is the unexplained, self-contained

  Anxiety of breathing

  Grabbing my coat before closing

  Because I feel funny as I’m leaving

  That’s why I’m leaving

  I feel strange

  A finger couldn’t pinpoint it and words cannot explain

  The curse of feeling funny

  And knowing you’ve got yourself to blame

  And still being unaware.

  I took my pills this morning, I promise you I swear

  The capsules grin at you in blister packs

  And eyeless they still stare

  They laugh at you

  Like you’ve said something funny

  There’s no lies that you can throw at them

  There’s no amount of money

  No words you can scream

  Out

  Bluntly.

  I’ve tried

  Feeling so funny that funny isn’t hysterical

  So why am I crying hysterical tears?

  Funny was something I’d always liked

  So why does this funny feeling punch me with spite?

  A funny feeling used to be the swig of a third pint

  So why does feeling funny swing the last throw in my own fight?

  If I stopped feeling funny maybe I’d get some sleep at night

  I wish someone had shown me left when funny started to feel right

  And I suppose the funny thing is that in life

  First we laugh

  And then we cope

  First we mould aching into satire

  And then claw our way into a hope

  That the lumps in our throats, the inhalers tucked in pockets of coats

  The fraying yarns on the tether of our metaphorical ropes

  Don’t really exist

  But they do, I know they do.

  And I think they deserve a more raucous applause

  Than the monotonous bang of therapists’ doors

  Or the bedlam screams on bedroom floors

  Or the wincing pinches of scissor scores

  Funny no longer feels right

  Because there is no comedy show in sight

  This is real life

  And the word is depression

  The medical phrases should be shouted in succession

  Because for all the days they’ve made my face nameless

  It would help in abundance for them to be shamed less

  For me to call them out for who they are

  And I know it’s wonderful that we’ve come this far

  Forgive me

  But

  It’s unhealthy for us to stick with

  Dancing around a denial that nicks its

  Legitimacy from camouflaging its pain

  Even though I’m the one who picked it

  Saying ‘I feel Funny’ just isn’t the same

  But I didn’t pick this

  I was my own brain before this

  And that, as a human, I deserve to reclaim

  In whatever funny sort of way I can.

  I prescribe you this

  The best sort of revenge is to be kind to yourself

  To burden yourself with living another day

  With nourishing yourself when it feels like you’re not worthy

  Sabotage the saboteur

  Poison the punisher

  With positivity

  I try and anger unhappy me

  With good thoughts

  With slow breathing

  I cut my teeth on seething

  Searing hot flash panics

  It’s become so familiar

  I feel uncomfortable when things aren’t bad

  It’s

  Complex

  I want the darkness to know it’s wanted

  But I want my soul to feel less haunted

  So I open up

  And double bluff

  Until synapses sizzle

  And confuse self-harm

  With self-love.

  I know that truth is always beautiful

  But this is something else

  These are the chronicles

  Written out from hell

  These are the minutes we keep secret

  The times we wished we were someone else

  I know that truth is always beautiful

  But this is something else

  These are the smudged wings of angels

  That we’d erase with second chances

  These are the fleeting second glances

  That led to the stale and baneful

  Excuses for not feeling the same

  I know that truth is always beautiful

  But this is something else

  This is a slice of honest living

  I wish I could have dressed up for myself.

  all I wanted was some toast

  I got a fork stuck in the dishwasher

  And now I can’t stop crying

  Whoever said depression was glamorous

  Had clearly never considered dying

  Over a peanut butter covered utensil

  And that’s not the worst of all

  The wet clothes hanger fell over

  So I punched my fist into a wall

  I’d rather smell than have a shower

  The thought of socialising is scary

  I can’t even binge on chocolate

  Because ‘happy me’ cut out dairy

  This is boring, I feel knackered,

  All I wanted was some toast

  But if I can’t even handle that

  I’m obviously going to die alone.

  a voice I know

  My thoughts run through unpredictable themes

  Sometimes it’s two conscious streams at once

  Sounds fun, huh?

  Sounds a bit like drugs, no?

  Sounds like in a predominantly losing game of tapping in on our own brains

  I’ve accidentally genetically placed my bets and won

  Sometimes I don’t shun

  It

  Sometimes there’s some fun in it

  S
ometimes it’s nice to look in from the outside

  And still stay warm

  But other times it’s like being one in a team of screaming aggressors

  And trying to bat away the swarm

  That I’ve assembled

  Sometimes it’s like punching confidently bare-knuckled

  And still being the one that falls down and trembles

  Sometimes I don’t know who I am

  Most of the time I don’t know where I stand

  And it’s in that exact spotlight

  It all comes rushing in:

  ‘You don’t deserve him!’

  ‘… Wait no, you’re cooler!’

  ‘What is this fatty casing around your limbs?’

  ‘… Stop prodding it, you’re much smaller

  Than you believe!’

  ‘You’ve got no point in this world!’

  ‘… Shut up, that’s your confidence thief!’

  ‘You should stay in bed!’

  ‘… You should take on the world!’

  ‘You look silly in this dress!’

  ‘… When did I become this beautiful girl?’

  ‘You don’t know your facts!’

  ‘… Oh my god, you’re on fire!’

  ‘He was looking at her not you.’