“Please put your on mask on before helping others.” I hear this at least 6 times a year, usually while disassociating on a flight-losing two hours of my life to repetitive thoughts of inconveniencing fellow passengers and struggling for air. I never take it to heart. I’ve flown so much that I worry more that the women next to me are snoring too loudly to even realize the plane is shaking. I never use my inhaler, only losing it every few months to the constant shuffle of anxious life.
But I hear it again, on a warm Saturday afternoon, as my friend is asking me if someone’s okay. I can’t breathe. I can’t read. Who knows how someone else is feeling as I’m experiencing two years before, never having realized what I did was okay.
“Don’t you know how to defend yourself?” I was defending my attackers from myself. I was putting the mask on someone who was snatching mine away. But it didn’t matter now.
I hear it again as I pace the hallways, crying that I felt too alone. I had a meeting in five minutes, and I needed to make it. No matter that the leader dismissed me, saying that my feelings were more important. It didn’t matter now. I had to rely on schedule to carry me through.
I hear it again in the office, a soft buzz to drown out other’s woes. “Why do you think it’s your fault?” he asks. I have nothing to give him. If I attack those who attack me, I have always been the aggressor. To a no-tolerance policy, sexual assault only happens to complacent victims. To the world, fighting back is the only correct response. To myself, all the answers are wrong, too painfully sharp to reconsider.
I cry alone, fearing for my safety. I cry alone, fearing I will hurt others. But never do I bother to cry with someone, to say that they need to help me remember to put my mask on.
“Please put your own mask on before helping others.” I slam his body down. “Please put your own mask on before helping others.” I ask for an extension on my homework. “Please put your mask on before helping others.” I write out my feelings instead of dissociating under a warm shower of self-doubt. “Please put your mask on.”
I fall asleep. I am safe on their couch. They call me tired. They call me sick. They are quiet for hours. They speak softly of kind things when I awake.
He has one arm around my back, one below my head. He lets me lie there, complacent in my own pain. He doesn’t let me fall. He accepts that I want his company. He touches me, knowing I can’t see.
We are driving. He is talking to me of other places, other times. He knows to ground me in a reality I can’t imagine, a place I’ve never been, because home is what he’s feeling when he speaks. He knows to stop me from being brave, because it’s not the time now for covering up pain. He doesn’t joke that I am too afraid, only that I am the one who’s been taking care of him.
She texts me. She texts me again. She talks me off the infinite edge, the beautiful boundary of the universe as it is. She knows this will not be the last time I call for her, and yet she smiles when I see her. I wish for all the world that I could make her smile more.
He allows me inside his room. It is enough to know I am trying for my dream. He doesn’t complain when I am talking. He doesn’t complain when I am all too silent. He lets me ask before he touches me. He knows that I might need it.
He takes me off-campus when I have been absent from this place longer than I can remember.
He pulls my shoulders to get me to make eye contact, and promises we will stay who we are. We will do what we want, even when it is difficult.
I take a deep breath. “I am crying, but I’m not upset.” I check that my nose isn’t bleeding. I look around, alone in another hallway on another day when I haven’t looked deep enough into my schedule. “I can do this, just like I’ve done everything else.” I grab my laptop and move along.
“Please put on your own mask before assisting others.” I go to therapy. I listen to the voice inside me. I take to writing, playing games, staring into space again.
Every few months, I hear the message again. It washes away in my mind, like footprints on a beach, only to reappear. “Please secure your mask first before assisting others. Although the bag may not inflate, please be assured that oxygen is flowing.”
Maybe that’s the difference.
I can breathe.
Description:
I wrote this piece as an expression of my frustration with the way we often talk about mental illness and recovery, as if there’s one goal. Some of the experiences described in the poem were intense and frustrating. But I think they were important, albeit inelegant, steps in my coming to terms with how my mind works. They were important moments in learning to communicate my thoughts to others. Perhaps you will find them to be too intense, and I apologize if they make you uncomfortable, but these feelings were real, and were felt by someone who used to be me. I believe that what happens inside me is not completely separable from who I am, but it is not everything I am. In this piece, I hope to begin to communicate the complexity of experience going into my advice to others.