Conflict

12-6-15

She wondered why she was so different on the inside, well, inside her mind at least. Her organs would be the same colour, density, and general size to those of people her age, but her mind was so different, always had been. There was always a conflict going on within her; sometimes it was visible on the outside in scars and burns. For years she had been conflicted over mental illness – hers to be specific – and what this meant to her, what it labelled her as.

Was she defective?
Her brain worked on an intelligence level on par with someone of her age or higher. She could speak, although actually talking to people was difficult due to chronic shyness, and communicate with others around her. She was logical, sometimes too much so, and loved jigsaw puzzles; she found them soothing. So she wasn’t defective in that case – she had a brain and it worked.

Was she mental?
She had bipolar, depression and anxiety. Add to that some strains of social phobia and the ‘ability’ to take an idea or theme and obsess over it to the extreme, or so her counsellor said, and you had her brain. No psychosis, no need for anti-psychotics. She had a mood disorder, needed mood stabilisers and anti-depressants and then things to help her sleep – sleep had always been tricky. But none of what she had equated to a real mental instability. Why then was this happening?

Why, when she had finally come to accept the diagnoses of bipolar, depression and anxiety, did this have to come and cause more conflict. It was already a difficult task mixing her religion with the mental disorders – there was the whole argument over whether she should be taking medication or ‘going by faith’ – why then did sexuality have to stick its ugly head in to the mix?

Was she bisexual?
She didn’t know. She was Demisexual, she had discovered that much – knowing why she never felt any urges towards anyone made her feel a heck of a lot better about herself – but that left her powerless to figure out her actual sexuality. Because if you can’t feel anything, towards anyone, how do you know what you could feel if a relationship developed? How could you know whether you liked someone, loved them even, if you initially felt nothing towards them? And then to align her religion with sexuality, in a religion that preached homosexuality was a sin, made it impossible for her to work that out without defying one or the other.

So much conflict in one 28-year-old girl.