This is another personal post: one that explains why The Perks of Being a Wallflower (TPOBAW) matters to me. I should trigger warning this as it talks of my own hospitalisation and mental breakdowns.
If you don’t already know Stephen Chbosky’s work The Perks of Being a Wallflower, it is written in the form of letters, written by the young boy Charlie who has just lost his friend Michael to suicide. As the story progresses Charlie slowly begins to lose his sanity after a distressing family secret resurfaces which later causes him to suffer a severe mental breakdown and his hospitalisation. At the end, when he is eventually released from hospital, he closes the book with a final letter telling of how he hopes to get out of his head and into the real world: participating in life instead of just watching it fly by.
I avoided the film for years and years, knowing I would inevitably hate it and indeed I did. Turning mental illness, yet again, into a quirky “rom-com”. Tell me: what about this film was funny? There was not one thing funny about this situation or storyline.
So we are talking about the book here: which admittedly was far from perfect in its handling too…
TPOBAW was the last book that I read before I was hospitalised (on September 27th 2013). I had just finished reading of Charlie’s breakdown, relating so much to the poignant story despite our differences in mental illnesses, when I myself was rushed into the world of clinical white, being fattened up from my skeletal state while I was wheeled around, monitored 24/7 and restrained (admittedly never officially but I have came very close and would have been if the nurses had known what I had been doing on a few occasions… Ahem.)
I devoured the pages, completing the book in record time between my bedrest and compulsive secret exercise.
And I read through those poetic sentences, feeling my mind floating in the abyss just as Charlie’s was: as a wallflower. A real wallflower may I add, not a plastic hipster version that is fogging over Tumblr; laughing at the fact that a person couldn’t answer the door or phone for a pizza.
I don’t know what the medical definition of a complete mental breakdown is but I definitely believe I have came close.
My Anorexia was clouding my mind so much that as I was tricked into hospital that day, I fully believed I’d be out right away. I manipulated my way through, eating everything and smiling as long as I could, to prove I was fine and “sane” and I could go home to starve myself in a slow suicide. When I began to realise that I wasn’t coming out of that general hospital: that I was having to beg to be wheeled to the toilet rather than use a bedpan, that I hadn’t walked, or been outside in over three weeks, that I was getting fatter and being force fed while I was surrounded by toddlers and their staring, judging parents: that was it. I would scream. I would throw things. I would cry and cry and cry, until I was dried up completely, staring achingly at the children who could walk out, run around and play, while I was scolded for playing with my monitors checking my failing breathing and heart palpitations.
I spent those achingly long 5 months in a secure inpatient centre: throwing myself into recovery again thinking I could come home early (I was painfully far away from home: close to two hours each way). And I broke down frequently. But there was something deep inside that kept me going, when all I wanted was to attempt suicide or stop eating until I was sectioned and NG fed. I still believed deep down I could manipulate my way out of there, so long as I wasn’t sectioned, I would be let out.
And now that I’m out, and have been for just over two years, I have no one there in my breakdowns. I recognise they are lapses in sanity, when I am clawing at myself and whimpering, when I am running towards the towering embankment above the train line near my house, when I am screaming and screaming, fighting the walls and my own wilting body. I have had to be locked in the car by my parents to stop me from killing myself. I have had to be held by the nurses as they searched my room for the blades that I stole in desperation after I flushed away my others.
And this is the devastating truth of having my 4 severe mental illnesses, with their endless subtypes and symptoms.
This post took an unexpected turn but I am not sorry for it (that is one thing I am training myself). I need people to realise the severity of mental illnesses, even the ones you wouldn’t particularly expect to cause people to lose their minds and need restraining in order to keep their life. This book raised a lot of awareness, and one that I personally loved, but it must NOT to be glamorised. It is not the black and white gifs on my favourite website Tumblr (overwhelming sarcasm here, please see my other posts on this). It isn’t those “funny” remarks of people “going crazy” or “having a breakdown”. Nor is it the derogatory “oh they’re on A ward again” or “oh they’ve tried to kill themselves again”.
It is endless pain.
And if you relate to any of it, I am so sorry. No one should suffer like this. Ever.
The Glitter Fight 