We’re encouraged to get more in touch with our mental well-being. It’s a task made easier by the How is Australia Feeling? smartphone app, developed by non-profit Spur Projects to whack a barometer into the heads of Australians to survey how we’re feeling. The app comes pre-loaded with moods to choose from – happy, sad, powerful, peaceful, anxious or angry, and a key feature is being able to share our selection on social media with all our friends. Gulp.
It’s all part of Mental Health Week and I’m relieved that we’re talking more about mental health, even if it is via an over-simplified modern-day mood ring.
We need to be talking more openly about mental health. Photo: iStock
The results of the survey between October 5-12 will be tallied, with data distributed via Beyond Blue to find the happiest or most depressed states, cities, professions, age groups and genders in the country. It’s a novel idea, but it’ll be interesting to see how many of the estimated 2 million Australians suffering from anxiety ‘fess up. For the record, I’m one of them.
I was a neurotic child. I don’t think they use that term any more though – today it would be called “adjustment disorder” or anxiety. It manifested in me believing, at age seven, that I had Parkinson’s disease. I’d approach my mother and say, “My hand is shaking. Can you see my hand shaking?” I was absolutely convinced. I once begged her to ask her friend, a nurse who was coming to dinner, if I could show her my trembling hand and see if she thought it was Parkinson’s. Thankfully, she didn’t oblige.
Next came my unwavering belief that I had diabetes, which I’d learned about while watching one of those daytime movies, where the teenage son was diagnosed after drinking four cans of soft drink and needing to pee all the time.
My school reports were heavy on adjectives, diluting my academic achievements with hints at an underlying dysfunction. Highly sensitive. Extremely introverted. Keeps in her shell. Only it wasn’t a shell, which is typically hard and impermeable. My exterior was more like a too-tight layer of cling wrap, struggling to contain the jelly inside. Over time, it became punctured with tiny slights, slashed by acts of greater rejection, more often perceived than real.
The only time I felt insulated from the world was when I had my nose buried deep in a book. I naturally gravitated to novels written in the first person, so I could fully immerse myself in the context and the character. I’d read in great lengthy gulps, sometimes finishing entire books meant for a beach holiday on the first day of a three-day car trip to get there. When I’d finish the last page I was often irritable and overcome with melancholy. I couldn’t understand this inexplicable sadness at the time, but years later, I recognise it as a form of grief – the ending of a cherished fictionalised world. The crushing realisation that the story, like life, is finite.
I was drawn to Charlie Brown comics. Even back then, I recognised in Charlie the seeds of my own discontent. When I was 10, I read a Charlie quote from a Peanuts strip, “Winning isn’t everything, but losing isn’t anything,” and I thought it was the funniest and saddest line I’d ever heard. I showed it to my best friend. “That’s dumb,” she said.
I became easily lost in the rich dreamscape of my inner world, unable to focus in real time. Thoughts, often negative about myself, ricocheted around my head. Like a ball in a pinball machine, they picked up speed and ferocity as they knocked around in there. It’s exhausting and futile and thoroughly exasperating to anyone who may try to mainline into the ever-present feedback loop in my head (still thinking this sharing-how-we’re-feeling week is a good thing, right?).
I remember watching Annie Hall and being immensely relieved that a person could be as neurotic as Annie and still be attractive to a man, although it did help that Dianne Keaton wore man pants well and umm, it was Woody Allen.
A childhood friend and I caught up recently, and he told me about his introspective six-year-old daughter who had wet her pants because a girl in her class was finally talking to her, and she didn’t want to end the chat by going to the bathroom. My eyes stung with empathy for his little girl – the recognition of another painfully shy soul for whom the extreme physical discomfort of an overflowing bladder is less than the torture of loneliness and rejection.
Nowadays, I often find myself balancing on a tightrope – steering and steeling myself, pretending I’m not neurotic at all. It usually seems to work, but every now and then, a little fleck of jelly will poke through my cling wrap, and I’ll retreat to patch up the hole.
Therapy has helped, not in making me any less of an over-thinker, but in learning to accept, and even embrace it as a defining part of myself. It’s about finding ways to turn the inside out, allowing a space for the searing emotion and agony of a thousand thoughts to be expunged. Or as Charlie Brown puts it, “I think I’ve discovered the secret of life – you just hang around until you get used to it.”
Now excuse me, while I tap all that into the app.
Diana Elliott is a freelance writer.