Red

*Note to reader: This story, like everything I have or will publish here, was written twenty years ago. I want to reassure you that I'm not in that place anymore.

I'm not sure why I've chosen this as the third thing to upload, and I call it a thing because I can hardly call it a story.

I'm prepared to cop the zero stars for it, if they come. It's perhaps a self-indulgent thing to publish.*

There are several ways to tell if you've lost your mind.

Finding patterns, and significance in those patterns, in everyday life is a good one. You might suddenly notice the colour red being more prevalent than you'd first imagined. On discovering this, you look for the colour more closely, and of course you find even more. A can of Coke, a packet of Nurofen, a stop sign, traffic lights, a billboard, it's everywhere. How can you not have seen it before?

What does all this red mean?

Red means danger, everyone knows that. Not just general danger, but personal danger. Danger for you. You're the one who's noticed all this red, red, red, and no-one else has a clue, so obviously it's a message just for you. To believe anything else would be naïve.

The toaster, the oven, the digital alarm clock, the dvd player, the television, all watching with their single, unblinking red eyes.

Red is a warning.

Such a discovery is apt to make a person feel a little jumpy, even if they try to suppress it. It might make acquaintances ask if you're feeling okay, and those close to you, those who have some understanding of your condition, feel moved to reassure you, to tell you to relax, everything's okay.

But remember the red, red, red warning. Remember the red danger red. Everything is not okay.

Who are these people? These acquaintances, friends and family? What is their motive for telling you to relax when clearly you should be alert to the red danger red. Warning red warning: They are trying to trick you.

Your wife is concerned. She sees you're afraid and wants to comfort you, to hold you.

Here she comes, arms wide.

You don't want her to hold you.

You back away.

She follows.

Why does she follow?

You tell her to leave you alone, to get away, but she doesn't listen.

Can't she see she's making it worse? Unless she does see. Unless she knows. Unless she's trying to make it worse, but why would she do that unless she's red with them red. All the red is watching to see what you will do, this is the red danger red and she's wearing red, her lips are red her fingernails are red the knife is red the floor is red your hands are...

"Are you feeling okay?" She startles me. It doesn't take much to do that at the moment. "Hey! Calm down. You're not okay, are you?"

"I'm sorry. I'm feeling a bit anxious. I might have to see someone again."

"I'll make an appointment for you."

Here's a little secret. I invite the madness in. I indulge it. I let it run and play in my mind, and I think...'this is okay.'

I think I can control it. I think I'm using it, pushing it where I want it to go.

Why? Maybe that's something else that no-one ever says. It can be quite a kick to have these surreal thoughts to play with, to see things in a way that you know you couldn't if your head was straight.

Then it gets away from me, and I don't know if I'm using it or it's using me.

It's a self-discipline thing. Like drugs or alcohol, I guess.

The dirty, horrible confession is when it first starts kicking around in my brain, if I choose to, I can stop it. I can stop it dead and it won't come back for weeks, months, years.

In the beginning, I guess I had an excuse. I didn't know what it was, how powerful it could be or how to fight it. The first time was the worst time.

Now it only gets me when I'm not strict enough. It only gets me when the strange thoughts come and I don't say, 'No! That's insane. That's not real. I know what's real and what's not and that's not.'

So I'm culpable. I'm to blame, not the madness. The madness is a rabid dog. I'm the one who lets it off the leash.

"How long have you been feeling this way?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe a couple of weeks. You sort of don't notice it creeping up. I read something somewhere...'when the dynamite explodes, it's too late to wonder how long the fuse has been burning.'"

"I see. Have you been drinking?"

"Yes, but less than normal. It... takes away desire. Food, alcohol, seeing people, doing things..."

"Hmmm. I'm going to prescribe you something, and I want you to come back and see me in a fortnight. Can you see my secretary?"

I hate the drugs. They don't make me worse, they just make me sick in a different way.

Look, here's the thing with drugs.

I don't know why I start to feel this way, whether it's a chemical imbalance or whatever, but I do know this - the drugs don't stop it.

They don't fight it. They're not designed to. They're not some sort of mental antibiotic. They do something else.

So whatever was going on in my head continues as before, only now I've got the something else happening as well, something that takes me even further from reality. I have these drugs firing off extra shots of happiness in my brain.

There are side-effects. I get a feeling in my head like an electric shock, like a sharp sword being unsheathed. I can hear it even though I know there's no sound. It wakes me, makes me sit bolt-upright in the middle of the night.

I guess the theory is the drugs are supposed to balance the madness out, and maybe it does eventually. I've never gone far enough down that road to find out. But it doesn't, can't, kill the madness. And when it doesn't? Well now, I guess we'll just have to increase the dose... again.

That's where I got off the bus last time.

I saw my life getting further away, dimming in the distance like the nightlights of your hometown in the rearview mirror.

I managed my own withdrawal, taking the pills only when I needed them instead of every morning and night. Double-dosing sometimes, even though I wasn't supposed to do that, even on the program. Doctors hate this, by the way. I could be cynical and say it's because they want you to keep seeing them and keep buying the drugs, forever and ever and ever. Realistically, I know the drugs are dangerous, that they're meant to be taken as prescribed, and the dosage should be reduced over months, not days.

I wasn't that patient.

I stomped on my wrong thoughts. Crushed them underneath steel-soled boots.

Withdrawal was hard, but I was harder.

God, that sounds like an advertising slogan. It's not like that.

The strange thing was that while it was very difficult, so much about it was empowering. The withdrawal was the cure.

Firstly, when you're suffering anxiety and depression, making a decision about anything is difficult. Even deciding what to have for dinner can be soul-destroying. That's an actual example, by the way. If you're trying to stay safe in your little soft, pink cloud of disbelief, if you think I'm stretching the truth, then forget it. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I have broken down, standing with my feet glued to the floor in the middle of the kitchen, because I couldn't decide what to cook. So choosing to take responsibility for this condition without doctors, and without family support (because they would have killed me if they knew I was going off my meds), was absolutely huge. I got my confidence back. Things that overwhelmed me became manageable. I was okay for a long time.

By the way, I still get that brain shock thing once every couple of months, even though I kicked them two years ago. So yeah, thanks drugs.

The question is, am I hard enough to do it twice?

I don't know.

Right now the answer is no.

So I guess we're going to find out where this bus is headed.

I guess you're wondering if I'm dangerous.

Maybe, after reading the introduction, you've formed an opinion about that. It's a scary thing, which is why we (is there a we? Maybe there's just an I?) don't talk about it to anyone. Not even those who are paid to listen.

Perhaps you don't think it's as scary as all that?

Okay, put those thoughts in the mind of your husband or wife, your brother, your mother. You have no idea when they have them and there's nothing you can do to stop it. And that's not all of it, it's not even the worst of it. If you still don't find it frightening, then perhaps we share a secret, you and I.

I'm not trying to scare you here. I'm not trying to sensationalise it. I'm certainly not trying to out-crazy anyone else. I'm trying to be as honest as I possibly can.

I really don't know how common this is.

If the statistics on mental health the news trots out every now and then are to be believed, then one in three know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm suspicious about that.

This is probably something you're not allowed to say, but I think some people wear a faux mental-health problem as an accessory, something to make them appear more interesting.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe everyone feels this way and are just as good, or better, at hiding it. What would I find more worrying, that everyone feels like this but I'm the only one too mentally weak to rise above it, or that there's something seriously wrong with me?

(I've just taken a break from writing to shift my car and avoid a parking fine. My new park was next to a red car. Walking back I saw red everywhere and noticed how every other colour in the spectrum is a pale imitation of this one true colour. The sickness isn't in the noticing, it's in giving these random objects a common purpose, a meaning they don't have.)

Am I dangerous to myself or others?

It might surprise you to hear that my answer to that is a quite confident, no. Then you might think, well of course he'd say that, he's crazy. Which, again, is why we try to manage this illness ourselves.

Back to the introduction, these are thoughts, not real events. But they are real thoughts. They come unbidden, unwanted, all-consuming and, once they get past a certain point, unstoppable.

What happens if someone does precisely the wrong thing during one of these episodes? Would I actually knife them?

No. I wouldn't.

At worst I might give someone a bruise in trying to push them away, assuming they really were stupid enough to continue approaching an obviously frightened and unstable person.

However, I feel I must put a disclaimer on my otherwise definitive answer, and that is, 'at least not yet', because there's so much I just don't know.

I don't know how confused I could possibly get.

All I can say is that so far, in regards to how much control I sometimes lose over my own thoughts, I haven't even come close to hurting someone.

On reading this paragraph again, I feel I've been too kind to myself here. There have definitely been times when I have been a danger to myself and others, and not all of them far in the past. Every one of them includes a lot of alcohol and a car. Looking back, I've been ridiculously lucky. I guess I didn't make the connection initially because I was ashamed, as I should be. I would be aghast if someone I knew got too drunk to walk and then decided to drive, whether slowly through town or fast in the country, and I've done both.

There's no point saying how stupid and irresponsible that is. I know. Of course I know. When I say it feels like these thoughts and actions are happening to someone else, that's not a cop-out. I'm not trying to deny responsibility. I'm saying my thinking, my morals and standards and opinions, when I'm not well, have no connection at all to who I am normally.

That's still cloudy, I'm not saying this right.

I mean... I don't understand how I could do and think these things. I don't recognise or understand that part of me, I don't know where it is, or how it works.

To say 'that's wrong' would only have me completely agreeing with you and wondering how anyone could do it.

One of my therapists gave me a survey to find out how depressed I was. What a great idea that is: Tick, cross, tick, tick, cross... you're depressed! Must save them so much time.

One of the questions was; have you had any suicidal thoughts in the last three months.

Now, I really don't know how to answer this.

Does it mean, have you thought out a realistic plan to kill yourself, fully intending to go through with it, only to have changed your mind for some reason?

If that's the case, then the answer is no.

If it just means have you had thoughts about killing yourself, then yes. God, yes. Over the last three months? At least a hundred times, yes.

Do I want to kill myself? No.

Do I even want to die, ever? No. Absolutely not.

As far as I'm concerned this is our one crack at life, and afterwards is oblivion. No matter how bad things got, I could never choose nothingness, worse than that, not even the knowledge of nothingness.

So I wrote yes, but I don't know if I answered the question correctly.

Why do I have these thoughts and what do they mean?

I have no friggin' idea.

So that's most (not all... I'm still not that brave) of what happens mentally. What about physically? Well, this helps with that. The writing, actually probably just the typing. Because if I'm not doing something, my foot wants to tap and my fingers want to drum. I know that's gotta be annoying for everyone around me so I try not to. I don't always know I'm doing it, though.

I'm nervous, so... things startle me. A shadow falling across my desk, a car horn in the street... anything like that. I suppose it's reasonable to ask how other people don't notice this sort of behaviour. I wish I could answer that, because no-one ever mentions anything. Either I do a better job of controlling the physical stuff than I think, or people aren't very observant, or people just don't care that much. I know my eyes look shot, so I can only assume it's one of the last two.

All of this, the mental and physical stuff, makes me very, very tired. Sometimes (although rarely, I have responsibilities) I'll go to bed at 5.30pm and sleep straight through. Sometimes I'll go to bed at 7.30pm, wake at 10.30 and stay up 'til 1am. Sometimes I'll go to bed at 10pm but be half asleep the whole evening, being unresponsive and not remembering much of the evening the next day. In fact a lot of the time I'm on auto-pilot, mornings especially.

I've started forgetting simple, habitual things. Closing the front door when I leave for work, where I've put my smokes, keeping my phone with me, putting the car in park... I'm checking that I've turned the iron off several times. That last bit isn't OCD, given the things I've been forgetting lately, it's just not wanting my house to burn down.

Sometimes I feel nauseous in the mornings. That's not too bad this time though. It hasn't kept me from work yet. In fact that's probably the one thing that's gotten progressively less with each incidence. It's still unpleasant though.

The first time it happened, it was every single morning for.. what... two weeks? It got to the point where I so desperately wanted to go back to work that I made it half way to the train station before I couldn't hold it in anymore.

That was the day before my employers paid for me to see someone.

There's also mistrust of physical contact, self-loathing, old mistakes coming back over and over again, times I've hurt people, or messed something up that could have been great, lots of other things, but I guess that'll do.

It's a glimpse. I'm not going to put every single thing in there, especially bad experiences that have only happened once, because that would make it seem worse than it is.

I suppose I should also point out that's it's not always like this, all the time. The great majority of it is a dull fog of self-doubt.

The weird thing is that I get better.

And I don't know what pulls me out of it any more than I know what drags me down.

The first time, sure. There was so much going on then. But each time ever since... it's just happened... until it didn't.

That's not to say I snapped back to normal all of a sudden, it takes a few days... maybe more than that. But once it stops getting worse, I can feel it getting better.

And I don't know why it should work like that either.

I don't feel like I know anything about it at all.

I don't know why I feel the need to say this part, but I guess I haven't questioned or censored the rest of it (much).

Anyway, the thing is... I really hate this.

If anyone's under the illusion that I enjoy it in any way, yes, I know what I said earlier... despite that, I really hate it. I want it to stop, I wish it would stop.

The thought of it defining me upsets me.

Again, I want to say it's not who I am, but feel that's somehow... not owning up to it.

Perhaps it's better or more accurate to say it's a part of me that I despise.

So, I guess I hope you don't think I'm exaggerating anything here, because that would sort of suggest I'm somehow proud of it, that I'm showing off, when in fact I find it deeply shameful.