Choosing Kindness
TW: Trauma, medical imagery
A few days ago, I was on my way to visit a friend in his new apartment when he texted me that our mutual acquaintance Adam (name changed for privacy) would also be there.
I’m going to be honest - I almost turned around and went back to my place. I almost found some excuse to get me out of seeing someone who I had once been close friends with, but after a series of remarks where he belittled people living with mental illness and said that the reason I was able to have friends is because I “trained” myself (almost like an unruly dog), I distanced myself from him.
And yet, I couldn’t say, on the stairs of my friend’s building, that something had come up. It would be too fishy, too offensive to my friend who has been nothing but kind to me. There was nothing I could do besides finish my trek upstairs and reunite with two people who I hadn’t seen in a very long time - my friend and Adam.
I was hardly inside the doorframe when Adam, who was sitting on the couch, said, “Ellie, we’re blood thinners buddies now.”
I was surprised to hear this - after all, it was a long time since we’d been close enough for me to share any details of my past with him, let alone something so private and personal. I would especially be wary with someone who seemed to disrespect people with any mental illness whatsoever. But my curiosity won me over as I remembered how, immediately after my blood clot (and if I’m being honest, for months afterwards), I felt the irresistible need to bring what I’d experienced into every conversation. It was as if there could never be anything more important in the entire world.
“Tell me about it,” I said, sitting down across from him on a squishy chair with a lovely pillow. And he did - he launched into his story immediately, and from the way the words flew out of his mouth and yet sounded extremely rehearsed, I could tell I was far from the first person he’d told every sordid detail of his story to. His story was different from mine - a heart attack and a single stent in the heart rather than a blood clot and three stents in the leg - but he said that he, like me, is now on blood thinners for life. He was disappointed when he asked me which medication I was on and the exact medicine didn’t match.
I recognized exactly what he was doing right away. In the days and weeks after my blood clot, I tried to think of some way - any way - to connect with people again. I felt like I was seeing life through a different lens, seeing an underbelly to my world that I never knew, and I, more than anything, wanted to find someone who could share my world with me.
But what really sealed the deal that we had shared more than a physical experience was the way he ended his story: Ever since then, he’d been feeling heart palpitations without medical reasons, extreme anxiety, and dizziness.
And just like that, we could have been talking about September 19 of my junior year of college - a date I remember because it was Talk Like A Pirate Day and everyone was going to dress up in one of my classes. But I didn’t think I’d make it to class, because I was so dizzy and anxious and my heart was fluttering so fast I thought it would pop right out of my chest.
His words flew out of him in a rush, just like mine did then, and in the long days and weeks and months after. It took me almost a year to finish my cognitive behavioral therapy and start to feel like myself again. And he looked exactly like I had felt - pale, skittish, and most telling of all, checking his heart rhythm on his smartwatch a little too regularly.
I almost forgot that I was coming to my friend’s apartment to trade pokemon when Adam and I really got talking. He explained that he didn’t have good pokemon to trade because he had barely left his apartment in months, and not for COVID reasons. He was afraid of things he’d never been afraid of before. He wasn’t eating or sleeping well. And whenever he talked about anything at all, he kept going back to the three days he’d spent in the hospital and how close he’d come to dying.
For me, it was five days plus part of a sixth (a detail I’m proud to say I had to check my Facebook posts from 2012 to remember). I, too, felt very close to dying, especially the first night, and remember that when I came out of the hospital and everyone was acting normally, it felt like I was in the wrong world.
Adam looked to me then - the only person he knew with a similar experience - for what to do. And right away, I remembered what he had said to me shortly before the pandemic started, when I had asked why it was okay to bully someone who showed more overt symptoms of mental illness than me. I remembered him telling me that I was a “good example” because I had issues but kept them hidden. I remember he gave me “feedback” about which things I talked about too much that stayed in my head for far too long.
Part of me, right away, wanted to leave him in that headspace. Wanted him to realize that, like it or not, he is one of those people now, seeing a therapist and taking medication and learning how to live in a world that feels entirely different. Part of me wanted to leave him in that place of being mentally ill and not knowing what to do about it because he had scorned what I and a close friend of mine had gone through before.
But I couldn’t do it. No matter what he had said or done in the past, I looked into his eyes as he took a rapid-acting anxiety pill and saw the exact same pain I’d been in and the way so many people had turned away from me.
For me, the pain took two years to fully manifest. I tried to shove every emotion I was feeling as far away from me as possible. I knelt on my injured knee in a college dance festival two weeks after I got out of the hospital, when I still had a lot of pain, because I was going to force my world to be normal even if I couldn’t actually make it feel that way.
But when I finally faced it, I was just like Adam - afraid, unsure, and wishing more than anything for a friend. I’d done a pretty good job of making friends in college, I thought, until I started displaying overt symptoms of mental illness. And then my friends dwindled down to one person who helped me get out of bed in the mornings, coached me through eating when I couldn’t stand the thought of it, and was there for me when I went through the months of therapy and medication changes that got me back to normal.
It’s been seven years since then, but I still remember how alone I felt. How I just needed a little understanding and sympathy from people. How I needed them to believe that, even though I wasn’t acting or feeling like myself, that there was a good life out there for me if I fought hard enough for it. And I needed their help to fight.
And so, I decided to be kind. I told him about the different medications I’d tried and the therapeutic techniques I learned. I told him that I had a nervous breakdown after my blood clot - something I admit to as few people as possible - and that, seven years later, I’m doing better than I could ever have imagined. I told him how I used to jump at every twinge of any feeling in my left leg and wiggled my toes until they ached to prevent more blood clots. I told him about the panic attacks, the fear of nothing ever being normal again, and my misheld belief that living on blood thinners could never be a good life. I told him everything.
And even though it is a sordid tale, he perked up. He engaged more fully with my friend and I. We traded some pokemon, and he started to make jokes. I’ve never particularly liked his jokes - I find them distasteful - but he was out of his apartment, with two friends, and managed to make a couple of jokes. I’d learned the hard way that it was those tiny stepping stones that paved the road to feeling whole again.
After he made those remarks to me almost a year and a half ago, I never imagined that we would be able to have an honest conversation like this about mental illness. I’d written him off as someone who would never care. But now that he was in the position to see things all too clearly, he was in a prime position to understand.
Now is not the time to bring up past hurts, to say that he treated people how he absolutely would not want to be treated. After all, his symptoms are extremely overt, from the way he talks to the way he looks to the way he takes his pills right out in the open. Now, when he is in an immediate crisis, is not the time for learning.
But I wonder if, sometime in the future, when his world is starting to feel normal again, if he will reconsider the way he thought about people with overtly-displayed mental illnesses. If he’ll remember the kindness he needed and got, and will pass it on to other people in what I believe is the best way to change the stigma against mental illness for good.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.