Mental illness, stretches across all colours, creeds, cultures and beliefs.
There is no ‘colour palette’ for mental illness, the mixer that adds colour to the paintings of humanity.
I look at people as I looked at chromatography as a kid. As a dot- their essential being, who they are, their genetic make-up and so on. And then, society adds a drop of water to that highly concentrated coloured dot in the middle of a piece of paper. Then the persons colours spread out, and we can make parallels with how a person develops over time in the same way.
Mostly, what I remember about the chemistry lessons when I did this, was just how beautiful the colours that came from a simple dot could be. Therein, how beautiful a person can become over the length and time of experience and other factors, such as the genesis of that small drop of water – perhaps the first breakdown, or first time something did not necessarily go according to plan.
WITHOUT that intervention, then perhaps a person would just remain a dot on a piece of paper. Would never know their colours, or spread further than their genesis. So in this way, I don’t regret what happened when I got diagnosed. Because, in some ways, I was just living like a dot made-up of different variations of colour (as in printing for example), but I never would have seen them, or stretched out into a radius of much more beautiful potential than had I not.
