Nick Cave- stranger than kindness

Language is a complicated and multifarious creature. It occurs to me that, for all the superficial articulation, I have spent most of my life unable to use it, or at least unable to use it to say what I mean. I have said things I thought were clear, only to find myself mouthing in foreign.

I have never mastered the link between thoughts and words, but I found a way round it, something which I thought was close enough for people to decipher. I swear I never meant to mislead anyone. I thought it was all quite clear.

I beat the walls when I meant to say hug me.

I cut myself when what I meant to say was help me.

I have said I wanted to kill myself when what I meant to say was I love you.

I have refused to speak when what I meant to say was I don't know what to do.

I have said I was fine when what I meant to say was I'm sad.

I have become manic when what I meant to say was I'm scared of myself.

I have been agressive when what I meant to say was I'm glad you're home.

I have seen strange creatures when what I meant to say was is it going to be alright now.

I have been deluded and paranoid and fucked in the head when what I meant to say was I'm not very happy and I don't know what to do about it.

I have invented and elaborated as a way to represent the landscape I don't have words for in the reassuringly physical., the easily describable. I thought people would understand. I really did. I always thought they would see through me to what I was really trying to say, to what I didn't have the words for, and what I wasn't sure could be spoken. Forgive me, but I honestly thought people understood.

The litany of my sins is endless and peculiar.

All language is a cypher. It works as a code for thought and world, and as a result affects its subject, merges with it. If most things I have said and done were also cyphers, then my error was the hall of mirrors which results from encoding a code, and the isolation which results from not giving anyone else the key. From not having the key. Sometimes therapy seems like a process of dragging the key out from where ever it is you have buried it- the one original translation which makes sense of all the rest. Medication quietens the surrounding noise, it sends the heebie-jeebies and the clamouring beasties back to where ever it is the live when they aren't living inside my head. Then in the silence you find a way to use words everyone else understands just on, you know, a basic level of being a bit normal.

Sometimes mental illness feels like one whole big misunderstanding between two people, one of whom mis-spoke and one of whom mis-heard. I think I am speaking. Other people think they are listening. So how the fuck does it go so very enormously completely catastrophically wrong on a level of wrongness which is almost unparalleled in other realms of human experience? I think I am trying to render something unspeakable clearly and understandably through stories and mime. Other people find my stories and mime so unspeakable and incomprehensible that they label and diagnose and treat and medicate and therapise until I don't know whether I am coming or going anyway a lot of the time. Language just falls apart, like scales dropping from thine eyes, to reveal a terrifying new world in which nothing has a name, and that world is mental illness. I'd find it funny if it wasn't so sad. Or maybe I'd find it sad if it wasn't so funny.