I got to spend some time with my mother yesterday for an early Mother’s Day celebration in New York City. Before then, I was in deep thought about something that happened to me about 23 years ago. It’s something I haven’t really talked about and it involved my mom to a huge degree.
I was once hospitalized because of my mental health issues and if it weren’t for my mom, I think my life would not be where it is right now for the better.
When I first got my diagnosis of clinical depression at the age of 17-18, I leaned into a bit too hard. Or more like I wanted to not do anything at all. One time at the first university I went to, I talked to a counselor and told them I heard voices. I mention this right now because now that I think about it, I don’t think I was really hearing them. I think it was just thoughts instead of voices.
But I leaned into the “hearing voices” motif a bit too hard. In 2001, a year after my diagnosis, I tried switching colleges and still felt out of it. I felt so depressed that I decided to get voluntarily hospitalized. I don’t know why I did it, but I was so worried I would kill myself. So off I went into a hospital. There I was surrounded by people much worse than me mentally. It also led to a pseudo-revelation - I don’t think I really had it that bad because I was actually optimistic during my time. I eventually was discharged after about a week as my mom fought to get me out with determination.
I thanked my mom yesterday for what she did in 2001. But the story didn’t end there. I found out that my mom fought hard because she personally saw what the hospital unit I was staying with was like. She saw the number of people with SMI (serious mental illness) and felt that I really shouldn’t be there. My mom told me she was horrified. She even told me that the doctors above were saying I was writing stuff that I wanted to kill/hurt others when that wasn’t true. My mom never believed what they said. She was worried that doctors would drug me and force me into bad treatment solutions. She said she signed a release form saying she would take full responsibility for me if things went south (spoiler alert: they didn’t, even though I did have a close call).
As some of you who follow this blog know, I’ve been more critical about what constitutes as mental health care. I’ve been listening to perspectives from people with mental health conditions who get hospitalized and end up worse after. People who are supposed to help didn’t/couldn’t do their jobs. We got a hotline number, great. But a lot of people don’t know the full truth about how broken the mental health system really is behind closed doors.
And I think about the statement “It’s okay to not be okay.” I dislike that statement because if that were the case, then we wouldn’t be throwing a lot of the mentally ill into jails, prisons, and/or the streets. Certain mental issues (bipolar disorder/schizophrenia/psychosis/etc.) sadly are ignored.
I could have been one of those people if it weren’t for my mom. I know I stressed her a lot and feel like I haven’t done enough. But she has seen how much I’ve grown mentally over the last few years. I strongly have been questioning my own response to my circumstances decades ago as a mental illness. I don’t want to pretend that ignoring trauma/vulnerability/dependency is going to make me stronger. My mom has noticed this.
I have a lot of empathy and good amount of compassion from my experiences, but I believe some of it came from my mother. I noticed how many friends she has and how she’s helped various people over the years.
I know some of you have all kinds of thoughts about Mother’s Day, but for me, I’m lucky to have the mother that I have. Someone who allowed me to be myself, stuck with me through my bullshit, and saved a naive version of me who didn’t know that they needed to be saved.
I hope you all have someone like that in your life because even as we get older and wiser (I’ll use recent events of My Hero Academia as an example), we’re still all children deep inside who need maternal love of some kind to truly make us flourish. Mothers are the real heroes we truly need.