Time is a Healer and Healing is Pettiness

I remember sitting on the ferry with my dad around the time that I was leaving a psychiatric hospital. It wasn’t my first time being admitted, as I had been found ‘mentally unsound’ quite a few times during my early twenties. We were all hoping – my family more than me – and wishing that it would be my last stint at being institutionalised.

He asked me a simple question on that ferry that seemed the hardest for me to prove to him, at that time.

“Do you think you will ever get better?”

My reply was simple, truthful and effective enough –

“Time is the greatest healer, dad.”

That seemed to make him smile as he ruffled my hair, and reminded me that I would always be his daughter. No matter how the psychiatrists might label in me in their notes. I’ve been called all sorts of things by psychiatrists, such as ‘loner’. My family nearly burst with laughter at that statement, as nothing could be further than the truth.

“She’ll make your ears bleed, if you give her half the chance.”

See, I was a hypocrisy to the psychiatric world: I didn’t fit in with their personality tests and, although I isolated myself, I left the house. I refused to lock myself in. It begs the question – what are we are all being compared to in the DSM IV? Or simply a personality test online?

“Brave face,” as one psychiatrist would refer to me.

“I’m just dusting myself off and picking myself up again,” I curtly replied. I wish I had said that: ‘I am not a case study – I am a person – and people will always surprise you.’

Well it has been two years since then and five years since it all began. I know I have truly recovered since then, because I am petty. Oh, so petty. I no longer think that my life will suddenly come to an end, either by my own hand or that of the delusions in my head. I suppose it is dangerous to indulge pettiness but it is my sign that the wounds are not so exposed anymore. I have grown these petty barriers while I healed and I am alarmingly humouring them. I feel almost like any other person on the street now, as I pass by them gossiping about what their next door neighbour was up to the previous night. I used to walk by these people when I was unwell and wonder what their lives are like, and how simple their problems seem. Now, I am one of them.

What do I mean by pettiness? I have little patience and understanding for others, than I did when I was unwell. When I was suffering I seemed to take in peoples’ pain and channel it into my own. I now seem to have less respect for those who complain about minor ailments, as I am comparing it to my own experience, and judge them silently. Always silently. Although my pettiness has the tendency to shout out:

“You really have no idea what you are talking about.”

I know it is wrong, but I guess that is the nature of the beast that I should feel this way. As I received little patience, understanding and respect from others when I needed it most. It is my little defiant pettiness protesting:

“Hey! What about me?”

Yet, I still like my pettiness as it is a sign that I am forgetting at long last. I am forgetting my raw mind and pettiness convinces me I am free. Who knows? I may build a softer, kinder wall to guard that mind eventually, but in the meantime I shall pander to my petty side. I deserve it.