Just Because You Don't See It

Even at my worst with my mental health, I was still able to get up, go to college, and keep up with my homework. I was still able to have fun on the weekends. Even now, I'm able to get my work done and be decently productive at home by making dinner, keeping up with my exercise, and keeping up with my household chores, even on my bad days.

I am a person with high-functioning mental illness. That means from the outside looking in, I don't appear to be a mentally ill person. From the outside looking in, I appear to be just a regular perfectionist, who is perceived as "normal" by many societal standards. People who aren't my mom, my therapist, or my cousin Amy typically don't see me struggling with my mental illness unless it's a REALLY bad day for me, or I'm exhausted to the point that I can no longer hide the fact that I'm struggling. 

The fact that people don't see me struggling and the fact that I am still able to be generally high functioning tends to make people think that my mental illness is much less significant than it actually is. They tend to assume that, because I do a good job of functioning "like a normal person," my mental illness doesn't interfere with my life. They think of it sort of like how people have high blood pressure. As in that the issue is there, but it doesn't stop a person from living their life the way they want to live it. 

This is another big misconception about high-functioning mental illness. (The top misconception is that high-functioning mental illness doesn't need treatment.) High-functioning mental illness absolutely interferes with people's lives. Many people with high-functioning mental illness struggle just as much as the people with mental illness that aren't considered high functioning. The only difference is that people with high-functioning mental illness are better at concealing the struggle.

Many people with high-functioning mental illness, like me, exert a tremendous amount of energy to appear normal in public settings and in front of people outside of our immediate comfort zone. There are often a lot of moments throughout the day when we "power through" symptoms for the sake of getting something done. There are also quite a few moments when we have to take a second to think, "How can I manage this symptom of my mental illness right now in the least noticeable way?" (A lot of times for me that looks getting up and moving around or taking a couple of seconds to focus on breathing or doing some grounding techniques quietly in my head. For others that's being busy all the time, which is actually ignoring your mental illness and not actually managing it, which is unhealthy.) Then we try to engage in better self-care and symptom management at home.

I think of people with high-functioning mental illness as ducks treading water. We see the duck's body, appearing to just sit or glide across the water, relaxed and serene. What we don't see are the duck's feet, paddling and kicking in a frenzy to keep the duck afloat underneath the calm surface of the water. That's what it's actually like living with high-functioning mental illness. All the struggling and the work to be high functioning with our mental illness is there, but most people don't see it.

I'll end with this: Many people live with high-functioning mental illness. This means that people outside of their immediate comfort zone or their therapist don't typically see them struggling with their mental illness, which can lead to the idea that their mental illness doesn't really impact their lives or that it's less severe. This isn't the case. People with high-functioning mental illness still struggle just as much as everyone else living with mental illness. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean someone isn't struggling.