Praying for the night

“Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in.

As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement…

We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.

Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes.”

                                                                                       S. E. Smith

_______________________________

we are everywhere

the people with flaws

or so the world judges us

the sad people

the anxious ones

the dysregulated ones

we are everywhere

those “crazy” people,

hearing things that aren’t there

believing things that are true (or so we are told0

we cannot be who we are

it is not allowed

at any level

we cannot be needy

we cannot be impulsive

we cannot share those perceptions we know cannot be shared

so we live in our quiet torment,

we are the artful dodgers,

never letting others know of the chaos within

sadly it sneaks out once in a while

that insecurity, that fear, that impulsiveness

and we behave in ways that give us away

we are revealed

and judged

and shamed

there are (of course) those who cannot front

or who hold up the shields until one day they break

crumble

beam me up Scotty

they cannot hide

and are cast out

pushed to the fringe of society

disposable people

judged for the severity of their illness

offered little mercy

by a society that rejects them

as for the rest of us

we keep up the front

each day we use way more energy than most people

for we must live two lives

the one out there, that everyone sees

and the one inside

and so we put one weary foot in front of the other

sometimes dreading the dawn

sometimes praying for the night