Chapter Fifteen: What Mental Health Looks Like

Chapter Fifteen: What Mental Health Looks Like

From the Inside I need to be precise about this because the imprecise versions are dangerous. I did not stop functioning. I want to say this clearly. I continued to attend college. I continued to perform adequately, then well, in my examinations. I continued to participate in conversations and maintain the social architecture of a life that looked, from the outside, like the life of someone who was doing fine. This is the particular cruelty of the kind of deterioration I am describing: it is invisible. It produces no obvious symptoms. There is no fever, no physical absence from the normal locations. There is only the interior — the increasingly unreliable interior — and the growing distance between what the interior actually contains and what it is performing. The panic attacks became more frequent. Not dramatically more frequent — we are not talking about daily collapses. We are talking about a shift in the background radiation of my experience, from baseline anxiety to something slightly elevated, a constant low-level noise that occasionally spiked into the acute kind. The acute kind arrived, as it always had, without warning. In lectures. On the bus home. Once, memorably, in the middle of a dinner with family where I excused myself and went to the bathroom and sat on the floor with my back against the wall and counted my own breaths until the thing passed. you are sitting on a bathroom floor. there is no emergency. there is nothing wrong.

that is not what this feels like. I know. breathe.

I am breathing.

count the breaths. one.

two. someone might knock on the door. three.

you need to be normal when you go back out. four. you are always normal when you go back out.

five. this is true. this is not comforting. six.

seven. okay. okay.

I went back to the table. My grandmother asked if I was alright. I said something had not agreed with me. She accepted this. She passed me more food. The dinner continued. What I am trying to describe is the specific texture of managing something invisible in the presence of people who love you and would help you if they knew and who don't know because you have made the decision, thousands of small times, not to tell them. The weight of this management is its own tax on the system. You are running the original problem and the management of the original problem simultaneously, and neither of them is consuming fewer resources than the other, and the sum of their consumption is beginning to exceed what the system was built to supply. *** Sleep became the main theater of war. I would lie down with the body exhausted and find the mind had not received the memo — the mind was awake and intended to stay awake and had a list of things it wished to review. The list was long. The list included: everything I had done that I could not undo, everyone I had treated as a

function of my own narrative rather than a person with their own, the specific silence of Sana saying "okay, Hur", the specific sound of Layla's breathing on the phone call from Karbala, the specific question that Nadia had asked that I had declined to answer. The list also included things that were not memories but fears dressed as memories — future failures wearing the costume of past ones, worst-case scenarios arriving in the grammar of the inevitable. The mind at three in the morning is not a reliable narrator. It presents its inventory with the authority of fact and the selection bias of a prosecution. three forty-seven AM. the fan turns. I am going to fail the examination. I am not going to fail the examination. Layla is awake right now. maybe. probably not. she is probably asleep. she is probably fine. people are fine. I am going to be fine. this is not what fine feels like. what does fine feel like. I don't remember. that is not true. I remember. I remember exactly what it felt like. it felt like talking to Layla after an exam. it felt like Sana figuring out the problem before the teacher did. it felt like the café on a Sunday. it felt like things I ended. the fan turns. four fifteen AM.

In the morning I would be functional. This is not a small thing — I want to credit it without making it into something it was not. The functionality was real. I was not performing; I was actually doing the things. I was actually thinking in lectures, actually engaging, actually producing the work. But the cost of the functionality had shifted. It had cost nothing before. Now it cost something, and the something was being drawn from a reserve I was not replenishing because replenishment would have required sitting still with the interior, which the interior was making it very difficult to sit still with.