Keep Quiet and Carry On

I wrote/drew this in art therapy in Russell Clinic in 2018. It is a perennial and pervasive problem, one that I am well familiar with, but one that others cannot seen, and seemingly don't even want to know or acknowledge.

I wrote:

Essentially what I was describing here is what I now call Notching and Pruning, then end result of which is my Facade: the outer manifestation of my being which those on the Exterior see and interact with. As I'll say ad nauseum, who I am on the outside is very different than who I am on the inside.

Now I avoid serious lies, but this nature makes me naturally very evasive: you have to pin me down. This is not by choice: I don't want to be so hard to pin down, I don't want there to be a massive gulf between the life I live on the Interior and how my outer life is on the Exterior. Often however, something that someone asks me will meet the Notching phenomena caused by my Anxiety Avoidance (which I'll write about elsewhere).

The thing with Anxiety Avoidance is that anything which my brain/mind perceives as a route to potential anxiety, is masked out from what my brain/mind permits me to say, and I have to choose from what possibilities remain. With my brain damped by medications, I have very little capacity to work against this: far more than when off medication, though the instability and risk of mania when off medication is too serious for me to try that route again.

Even then, when trying to communicate things which are Notched, or even to get close to them, there is much anxiety involved, and so even with the capacity to express them, what gets communicate is perceived as manic, attributed to my 'illness', and discarded. People would rather go with the 'medical' narrative that anything I am saying which is discomforting is a symptom of mania and my bipolar disorder, and that 'if I am good and take my medication', then this discomforting language will cease. The trouble is, sufficiently medicated, my capacity to express such things does disappear, so appearing to confirm the 'medical' narrative. The reality, however, is more akin to someone disconnecting a warning light because it makes them uneasy, and then, with the warning light disabled, the warning light no longer appears, and the problem appears solved.

The other trouble with this Anxiety Avoidance and Notching is that, given that they have the capabilities of a human brain to work with, they patterns of no-go areas they crate is incomprehensibly complex, and often quite surgical: often I can skirt around something Notched so precisely that others will not perceive that I am avoiding anything at all. Their mind will fill the gaps, and what my brain Notches, they believe isn't even there. So faced with something I should say, or need to say, often I don't say, and I simply Keep Quiet And Carry On.