Alone in the World

The other day I saw the cover of a magazine with Britney Spears splattered across the front, under headlines, “Britney’s Mental Illness.” To preface, this article isn’t another one about Britney Spears, perhaps only peripherally. It’s about the other people out there with a mental illness. There are an estimated two million and more people in the U.S. alone that suffer from a mental illness. Britney may be one of them, but that isn’t the point. The fact is that there are others out there, who must battle the stigma and pain, and cannot readily explain it, just as this magazine cover couldn’t. My brother and I are just two of the people in the world with a mental illness. Our contrasting experiences with mental illness show just how diverse all of these conditions can be and just how alone someone with an illness may feel.

My mental illness came earlier than my brother’s and also was accompanied by varying diagnoses and medications. I was hospitalized as a teenager because of extreme depression and anxiety and I was twenty-one when I finally was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and things began to make sense. My glorified moods and mood swings, my ability to stay up all day and night, and my sensitivity to the slightest remark from someone all were clarified by this diagnosis. I was able to get on better medication and started to slowly feel comfortable with who I was.

My brother, on the other hand, was a popular teenager that had all the promise in the world. While I was the “messed-up” older sister, he was the attractive, athletic, and social alter-ego of me. Once drugs entered his life, he became a different person to us all. He became moody, irrational, and manipulative. Drugs seemed to interrupt his life, twist and push him away from us all, until we couldn’t recognize this boy anymore. While I struggled to understand my own mental struggles, I felt angry and resentful of my brother because he was messing up his life and acting completely selfish about it.

Somewhere along the way we collided. Our experiences intersected. My popular, fun brother became socially awkward and lost friends. I finally got on good medications and was able to reach out to more people and trust more people with my pain. I’m far from a witty, fun individual, but I was able to join the world, while my brother seemed to retreat from it.

I think of the saying, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone.” I may understand the validity to this statement and I respect its premise, yet it misses the mark on empathy and friendship.