How much is too much?

Despite well-meant refrains such as "Time to Talk" and "It’s OK not to be OK" increasingly permeating the cultural consciousness and signifying a very hopeful and positive shift towards a society more understanding of mental health, the co-option of such messaging by corporations and brands can sometimes make them ring hollow. And the neatly packaged campaigns can smother the reality of what it is they’re talking about. 

For me, someone who suffers from generalised anxiety disorder and depression, and an OCD-related disorder called dermatillomania (more commonly known as skin picking disorder, thought to impact approximately one in 20 people) I’ve always found such efforts, however well-intentioned, somewhat alienating. The neatly packaged campaigns and posters, on first glance, looked like they were talking to me, but on closer inspection actually turned out to be looking past me, speaking to someone else somewhere over my shoulder. 

The neatly packaged campaigns and posters, on first glance, looked like they were talking to me, but on closer inspection actually turned out to be looking past me, speaking to someone else somewhere over my shoulder. 

I craved something more real, something which spoke more pertinently to my lived experience. But then I’d think — why should they be more specific? People didn’t have to share their stories. Especially in the age of social media, there’s a pressure sometimes to disclose more and more, as if failing to showcase the most personal aspects of our lives is a failure to be “authentic”. 

As a young female writer, too, there’s more of a pressure to write personal, harrowing stories of one’s own traumas as a way of establishing oneself in a way arguably less forceful for men. 

These are some of the issues and questions and concerns that churned away in the back of my mind as I wrote my first book, a memoir entitled HANDS: An Anxious Mind Unpicked, for Harper North. I’d write certain passages and stop short, thinking “Oh god, is that too much?” (an authorly reimagining of the phrase too many of us women are either told or tell ourselves — “I’m too much”/“you’re too much”) or “is this embarrassing? I’ve always wanted to be an author, but do I really want to be spilling my soul so earnestly for the world to see?” 

The question of why, especially as I was working on later drafts and the actual publication became more real, was one I mulled over a lot. 

I never actually wrote a "pros" and "cons" list, it existed entirely and messily in my head, but if I had, it would’ve gone a little something like this:

Pros (some of which will sound like the self-soothing talk they most definitely are)

• Teachers always used to say “ask the question you’re dying to ask because someone else will be thinking the same thing”; writing about my mental health is the same — if I can do it then maybe I’ll be helping someone else. 
• I’ll be an author, a real writer. 
• I’ll come out the other side of the experience changed for the better (writing about anything, I think, not necessarily personal experience, does this) — I’ll have learned something about myself, and maybe even healed in the process.
• I’ll have hopefully created something people will enjoy. 

Cons

• Being very aware that l have written about my mental health in a very personal and brutally honest way rankles and tugs at the voice in my head that’s always whispering “are we being too much, Lauren?”). 
• What if people read it and think I’m weird?
• Am I adding to the commodification of mental health by creating a product out of my own?

But what these competing thoughts were clouding was the sheer and utter enjoyment, the joy I felt when writing the thing. Arising out of the quagmire of imperfect this and "am I making the right choice that" was the joy and elation and freedom I’d felt writing it. The feeling I got was almost like that which my destructive habit of skin picking gave me, oddly enough — an unexpected respite from my thoughts; I’d focus completely, the rest of the world shut perfectly out, anxieties quieted. 

Sometimes I’d reread a passage or sentence having “snapped out of it”, having let my subconscious take the steering wheel, and reread it in disbelief that I’d been able to write it. I surprised myself, made myself laugh and sometimes cry. It was the truth, and a story only I out of everyone in the world could have told. As much as for anyone else, writing it was for me. 

The thought gave/gives me strength, and tells me in an assured voice that despite the cons still niggling at me (in a way perhaps only someone with crippling anxiety can be niggled at), sharing this journey with others is what I want to do. 

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a terrifying prospect that strangers will soon be reading such intimate details about my life. And I’ve no doubt some people will think it’s “too much” or far too personal. But if anyone reads it and feels held for even a moment, that they’re not alone, or even can just tell how much fun I had writing it and enjoys my words, then it will, I think, have been worth it. 

Lauren Brown is an author. Her book, HANDS: An Anxious Mind Unpicked, will be published by Harper North on 20th January. You can find Lauren on Twitter at @Laurenrbrown95.