Just Come Back

Mental illness – to somewhat understate it – is a controversial concept.

I accept there are biological conditions that throw the brain and body seriously out of whack. I accept that anxiety and depression are real. I know. I spent a lot of my life there.

But looking back, the source of my mental distress was completely traceable. I was carrying around so much emotional pain that it squeezed out everything in me that was valuable. I didn’t have engaged parents. For their part, as long as I “appeared” to be doing well, their job was done.

And while dragging my pain around, I still had to create a life. First, I had to scramble to learn enough to get a job. Later it was imperative to make a living. I had babies to raise.

If I ever had a clear vision of what I wanted in life, I wasn’t sure what it was. My mother had soured me on marriage. I would say she was pathologically afraid of marriage given how hers had worked out. Worked out being a euphemism for disastrous long-lasting personal consequences. For Mom and for her children.

For Mom and many of her peers in the Fifites, marriage was a trap that heavily benefitted men. For women then – especially the bright and ambitious – it was often a prison. Conforming to the social expectations of the day, marriage often not only eroded a woman’s self-worth but subjugated her own dreams and needs in service to her husband and family.

Selfishness was akin to murder, rape, and incest for Fifties housewives.

The tragedy of women’s repressed dreams was explored in the movie Revolutionary Road. Starring Leo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet, they play a nice, young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s. Kate hates where they have landed in life. The lingering memories of the adventurous and freewheeling life they once lived and planned to again is lost. She pushes Leo to move to Paris while they still have time. Plans are well underway when he gets a promotion and pay raise. Paris gets shelved.

Moving to Paris is a prison break for Kate’s character. They struggle in their marriage to come to terms with the disconnect between them in their hopes and dreams. For Leo’s character, it was good enough for his Dad – a career long company man – so it is good enough for him. As was common for men in that decade, his avenues for relief and distraction were far greater and readily available than for her.

By times, the scenes in Revolutionary Road play on the nerves like fingernails scratching on a blackboard. The low-key struggle of the cookie-cutter lives of Fifties suburbia suffocated so many. The show achingly shows the emotional roller-coaster and internal torture Winslet goes through. She effectively goes mad.

And her type of insanity was a normal response to a tortuous situation from which she had no acceptable avenue for escape. She was not the first trapped woman who had to fight for her freedom and sanity. She was also not the first victim who didn’t make it out.

As people are regularly pushed to their boundaries of pain tolerance, life is deemed not only miserable but devoid of value. The message they must hear is to hold on. Find something bigger outside yourself to believe in. Never give up.

“It’s alright to go insane. Just come back.”