Sharing Is Caring: Ruby's Monochrome Rainbows
- by Ruby Karkinos
- Aug 27, 2017
- 5 min read
Last month I started a series of posts called Sharing Is Caring (check it out)
Why? Because it is important for all of us with mental health issues to know we are not alone in our own struggles and there are others like us who need support too. We can learn so much from each other!
This month's Guest Posts is by one of my favorite bloggers - Ruby Karkinos from Lost Minds. Read her story, the story of her mind and her monochrome rainbows...
Monochrome Rainbows
Close your eyes, imagine you are standing in front of a door, it's so elegant, it appears to be a door made for a palace, with gold swirls engraved around the edge. Open the door. Before you read on, really think about what you see.
Was it like Alice in wonderland? A magical garden filled of mystery and beauty?
As you've maybe guessed, I am making a point about hidden illness. With this cliche shit. As much as its typical it IS true. I'm going to take you on a walk beyond this door into my secret world. The door is more like my guard, it's the hour I spend blending my £100 eye shadow out, its the precise application of my winged eyeliner. It is the most glamorous entrance to hell, the hell I call my mind.
So, behind this door is a bridge. As soon as you open the door immediately there is a gust of wind and you can hear water crashing beneath your feet. The bridge is scary and somehow you have to cross it, alone. This is only one of the many battles I face each and every day of my life. The beautiful thing is that this bridge changes - sometimes it looks safe and it is okay to cross but not always. I have slipped many many times. I went through a phase in my life where I was so defeated I jumped from the front door step before even attempting the first step. I overdosed. I wanted to die.
I have been taken to hospital for overdoes 3-4 times now. I remember stepping out of the ambulance and a little piece of paper fell from my bag which I clutched for the whole duration of my stay. On it were the words 'I'm sorry' written in this spaced out handwriting as though it had been written by a toddler holding a pen for the first time. In fact, when I wrote it I was hoping it would be the last thing I wrote. The paramedic (Mike) picked it up and passed it back to me without even reading it. To me this was the only time I was treated like a human, it was the only time where I was respected as a person.
Every time I went into hospital I was treated poorly. I was left crying on my own in a corridor. I had nurses put needles in me. The only way they could do any scan was for me to be passed out because I was shaking so frantically I couldn't keep still. I woke up on a hospital bed on another ward with wires attached to me. Each time a doctor would approach me with a blank expression and ask me if I felt depressed. Once I responded "if you were 17 and left in hospital alone 2 weeks before your first A-level exam, how would you feel?". He just ticked the box. That's all I was, another statistic and another filled out form. My identity was stripped from me when they wrapped that hospital band around my scarred wrists, just a number. I was discharged each time, somehow they were convinced that a teen with scars and blood up her arms and down her thighs, mascara down her face and over 10,000mg of pain killers in her stomach was safe to leave.
Anyway, eventually my GP noticed a pattern... Oh, she keeps trying to kill herself. WELL DONE. I was prescribed fluoxetine again, I was passed from GP to GP like crazy. CAMHS didn't want to take me on because I was soon to be 18, but the adults team didn't want me either because I wasn't 18. I felt quite defeated. Eventually I had a psychiatric assessment with the adults team. Immediately they discharged me from their care. I felt so stuck, defeated and invalid, I felt that this should be a norm and I should be able to cope! It made me feel unworthy of help and pathetic for not being able to cope.
I paid for private counselling and my counsellor Helen was everything to me. She is perhaps the only reason I am alive. I worked with Helen for over a year and it was one of the best experiences I have had. But then a community psychiatric nurse decided to challenge me on that, I had to fight for my truth, I had to fight for the fact that Helen was helping me but they had rejected me and ignored me for so long. It took 3 overdoses before anyone in the NHS would take me seriously. That is scary. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety when I was 16 but I didn't receive any help.
To me depression is a colourful darkness. Its a billion shades of black and everyday you wake up to something new but each one is just as dark. It is this feeling of emptiness you simply can't explain. The way you feel when you are suspended on a roller coaster or when your foot plummets through the air as you take an extra non existent step at night. I felt a constant fear of anxiety, I felt urges and compulsions to go into self-destruct; drugs, drinking, cutting, sex and overdosing. I pushed people away because I was too scared they'd leave me. Recently I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and to me that is like staring where the sky meets the ocean and not knowing how far it goes. It's driving a car with a sensitive accelerator and unreliable breaks, it's having the inability to comprehend anything good about yourself. Most of all it's part of me, but I am not my diagnosis.
The hell behind the door, my mind, is my hell. This is my hell, mine to own, mine to learn. Hating it would mean hating me. I have learnt that anxiety is a misuse of imagination, if you don't like your mental illness then create a sanctuary out of it and embrace it. You know your reality, you are stronger, you can both sympathise and empathise, everyday you are a warrior. Behind that door now, is a bridge made of an array of hopes and crushed dreams, a range of mi
sery and affection. Rather than worrying what you are going to fall into, look further than where you could go. Look up into the sky and you may see your own monochrome rainbow.
Now paint it.
Ruby Karkinos
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