Oh Chaotic Dust,
Remember all the habits you picked up along the way? Not the cliche habits, like taking sleeping pills or other drugs, but the more subtle ones; habits people didn’t realise were coping mechanisms.
People laughed at you as you became pseudo-addicted to mobile games. And you’d play music all the time, not because you particularly wanted to, but because the music acted as a moderate distraction. You stopped reading articles for your course in silence and kept headphones on instead. That was a difficult skill to learn, but learn it you did. All other reading, of course, had to stop. Sitting alone with a book is not in the intrusive thought OCD sufferer’s comfort zone.
When you did return to university after the Summer break, distractions came easier. At first, you were still recovering from your stint in the hospital (probably a good thing considering how much easier it is to sleep when you’re shattered – another habit you’d pick up; ensuring you were overtired as a way of being able to sleep), but you quickly threw yourself into the life of a university student again.
Reading, as mentioned, was tricky, but you figured it out. Seminars were hard but, in a way, you got better at them. The awkward silences after the lecturer asked a question were no longer just awkward for you, they were genuinely unbearable: the ticking of the clock, the anxiety of answering in a group of peers, alongside the anxiety of the intrusive thoughts and the general social anxiety too. What a concoction. A concoction that led to you becoming more vocal and involved (or else it was the insufferable silence); an indirect consequence of your condition that stands in contradiction to how society views mental illness as a wholly negative force. But mental health is as complex and, at times, paradoxical as the intricate humans who experience it.
So, in some ways you did better at university. The silence before sleep remained a bone-chilling terror, but late nights overworking in the library helped to fix that – “Wow! You’re really taking final year seriously! Good on you.” Good on you. Good on you. Oh how misread many of the habits you picked up were. They weren’t classic cries for help, they were just what you needed to do to survive.
Six years on and many therapists and conversations and life events later, you’ll still have some of those habits. You’ll still struggle to watch a film without playing on your phone. You’ll still automatically put music on as soon as you wake up or start walking somewhere. You’ll still work really hard.
Sometimes the habits picked up to survive an illness outlast the illness itself. The jury is still out on that one for you. So many of the actions you perform can be traced back to your mental illness. Even you’ll come to misunderstand them, or sever them from their origin and have them as part of you, free from the illness they once combated.
Sometimes you’ll think about someone you know and their habits – innocent habits just as you have – and you’ll wonder how and why they picked them up. The girl on the bus with headphones in, staring at her phone. Your friend who’s always late. The man humming to himself as he shops. The colleague who keeps themselves perpetually busy.
It’s not just scars that remain after mental illness but habits too. Or perhaps the habits are scars: marks left on our lives by a time we’d rather forget.
Of all the extra habits you picked up though, there is one you’ll kick. Again, it’s a little thing that, held onto, is hope incarnate. You will read again, Chaotic Dust, and not with music blaring in the background, but in the quiet of your room, in the comfort of your chair, in the peace of your own mind.