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No right to be 'me'

by

Marianne Broug

Some while ago I went to the hairdresser. There’s nothing particularly remarkable in that, and in fact, judging by the large number of women who no longer have any grey hair, I assume it’s actually a very common occurrence. But for me it was the first time in over fifteen years that I had been able to sit in a hair salon and have my hair cut. Just like anyone else.

'So you’ve cut your own hair'. It was a statement of fact that contained absolutely no judgement in it whatsoever and I liked the directness of it immediately. I had planned all sorts of stories in my mind to explain what I undoubtedly knew would look like a butchery job to any trained eye - 'busy at work', 'travelling far from any hair salon', 'some sort of desperate illness' even. But I also knew that it would be hard work to keep up with one of my tall tales. And frankly I was heartily sick of them. I had gone down that road often enough, trying to weasel my way into normality and acceptance by transplanting what I imagined to be the stories of other people’s lives into my own. But now with the hairdresser’s complete candour the words that I had planned simply vanished. 'Well I’ve been cutting my own hair for over fifteen years. I suffered from panic attacks, depression and anxiety and that sort of thing and it was just too hard for me to do lots of things. Going to the hairdresser was one of the worst.'

Going to the hairdresser had indeed been excruciating. People have begun to use 'panic attack' for any old flicker of anxiety and so the words have begun to lose their power. 'Oh, when I saw my make-up in the mirror I almost had a panic attack!' 'I have a panic attack just thinking about my phone bill!'. 'I had a panic attack for days on end!' But these aren’t real panic attacks. They’re just words used by people who don’t have a clue what they’re actually saying.

When I sat at the hairdresser, it would usually start with the smells. I believed that they were poisoning me and that I could easily pass out or die. Or I believed that someone might be pumping poisons that smelled like hair perming solution through the air conditioning system. Other times I was even convinced that the sharp points of the scissors might find their way into a vulnerable spot in my neck, perhaps my aorta, and so I would bleed to death on the polished linoleum without anyone coming to my aid. But despite all these fears I could never walk out. It was not in my repertoire to have freedom of volition or movement like everyone else. I would have to stay because I was meant to stay. That’s just how it was. I had to do everything in my power to look normal.

I would take fewer breaths, timing them carefully, not inhaling the air too deeply into my lungs. I would occasionally pull my sleeve over my nose hoping to filter out at least some of the toxins. In taking these stringent measures, I hoped that by the time everyone else was lying comatose on the floor I would still be conscious enough to walk out. Soon however, I would find it hard to breathe. The hairdresser would talk to me and although I could see her lips moving and hear sounds, I could not put the two together into any coherent order. If I spoke I could only barely keep track of the words that were coming out of my mouth. I would place them carefully one after the other, making sure that they fit together. A metallic taste of fear would rise on my tongue and I would know that I was about to panic. My head would fill with red and black and the room would start to swim. My body would slowly disappear from my legs up, until it seemed as though I no longer existed. I would pinch my arm as hard as I possibly could, sometimes even going through the skin and drawing blood, just so somewhere in my body there was a sharp point of focus that might remind me that I was alive. Everything in front of me assumed strange shapes and movements. Nothing could be relied upon. I was totally at the mercy of a terrifying world. And still I would sit there sweating, panting and dying. And pretend none of it was happening.

But now I was uttering the words and I wasn’t pretending any more. And that felt good. 'So are you okay sitting here now?' she asked. 'Just fine,' I replied, looking at myself in the mirror. And yet as I uttered those two words I knew I was tempting fate just a little. My head started to swim, my eyes blurred, the reflected face in front me was no longer mine. But it was momentary. I was in my body and I knew it was solid.

'My best friend suffers from really severe panic attacks, and they’re just getting worse. I don’t know how to help her any more. What do you think causes them?' She was asking my advice. Lately, as I had begun to look at the world with eyes that do not falter, lots of people have begun to ask my advice. And I feel so inadequate in the face of their questions. And of course, she was asking the million-dollar question, the question that I’d spent the last twenty years or more trying to answer. And I wasn’t sure that the answers I had found could even remotely begin to fit into the ten minutes or so that it would take to cut my hair.

I felt myself beginning to stumble over words. Which explanation did she want? Did she want to hear about my fears of being poisoned? Or murdered? Did she want to hear when those fears started? Did she want to hear about the meaning of those fears in my life? Or did she want the physiological explanation? The biological? The psychological? The psychiatric? The psychoanalytical? The New Age? The philosophical? The metaphysical? I could have given them all.

'She’s been to lots of psychiatrists but they don’t seem to help. She feels like they’re telling her she’s doing something wrong, and she doesn’t feel like she’s doing anything wrong.' I mumbled a brief acknowledgment of what she had said. Yes, I’d been to enough psychiatrists to know exactly how that felt. And I’d had enough diagnoses foisted upon me to know just how infantilising they were. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Bi-polar disorder. Depression. Panic Disorder. Anxiety Disorder. Paranoia. Schizoaffective Disorder. With a little bit of Autism thrown in. Or an occasional brush of psychosis. Even Catatonia. (That last one was when I didn’t dare to open my mouth in case something else I said would be magically explained away with one more sticky label).

I looked at the hairdresser. She had the scissors out. She had begun to cut my hair and I had no doubt whatsoever that my neck was quite safe. 'You’ve cut it very short here at the front', she said. I smiled at her. I had tried to pretend the short bit looked trendy, but I knew that it didn’t. It looked awful. But I could see that she was still waiting for an answer to her last question.

'I guess the main thing is that I felt I had no right to be me. I had no sense deep inside of what it was to be myself.' The hairdresser looked at me, slightly puzzled by my response. I knew she wanted a formula, something easy that she could wrap up in a neat little package and pass onto her friend: 'I saw someone in the salon today and she said that all you have to do is to be yourself.' If only it were that easy. Although I inwardly kicked myself at the inadequacy of my words, I still knew that those words carried within them the answer. Or at least my answer.

'When you look at people on the outside you don’t realise what they’re going through on the inside, do you? There must be lots of people suffering but you’d never know. It’s not really acceptable to talk about it, is it?' She was speaking in slightly hushed tones now, glancing occasionally at the other women in the hair salon, aware suddenly that beneath the curlers and cotton wool, behind the magazines, there might be hotbeds of suffering we might never be privy too. I looked at the woman sitting a few chairs away. Was she suffering? Behind the innocuous exterior was there a lifetime of pain that others might choose to label 'mental illness'?

I was trying to think of a reply, but in her growing discomfort she wasn’t waiting for one any more. 'But I think we treat those sort of people a lot better than we used to, don’t we? Like it’s all on the news or on TV ads now, isn’t it?' I heard the kindness in her voice. I heard an intent that carried no malice whatsoever, yet she was now talking about 'those sort of people'. She was talking about other people who needed to be treated differently somehow. It was about Us and Them. I wondered where she put me. Was I an Us now? Or was I still a Them?

I remembered lying on a bed in the Emergency Department of Alice Springs Hospital. I had come to the centre of Australia with the dream that in the centre of my country I might also find the centre of myself. But as I had walked the land I had only come further and further adrift. I was going crazy with the pain, crazy with the loss of my last-ditch dream. I hadn’t slept for many nights. 'I can’t walk any more. On the land. I can’t walk any more. Please help me. Please help me.' I repeated the phrases over and over. A young doctor looked at me. She had to give me a physical examination, 'to exclude any physical causes'. I could see the reticence in her eyes as she prodded my stomach and tested my reflexes. There was a mixture of fear and pity and detachment. I wish I could have provided her with a broken leg to fix instead, rather than feel her discomfort. I was the unknown. I was Them.

'I’m not sure we really do treat people who are suffering any better. I think we only treat them differently, and we think that that difference is better. We still want them to disappear. We give them drugs and hope that they will be just like everyone else, but the drugs are just like the modern day version of asylums.' Society cannot bear to hear the screaming of those in pain. 'You’ll get a slap if you keep crying.' 'I’ll talk to you when you stop that rot.' 'Smile and be happy.' 'I don’t want to see your face with that frown on it.' They were my parents’ catchphrases, but in a broader sense they had been playing to me through society’s loudspeakers all my life. If I carried a smile on my face there was no need for them to bear the pain that they so desperately tried to hide in themselves. Everyone wanted to fix me.

I could see that our conversation was coming to an end. I was saying things that I shouldn’t have been saying. I knew I was meant to offer assurances, 'All is well. 'The Crazy Ones', 'The Mentally Ill' are being taken care of. Go to your home and live your life. Look at me, for I am living proof that you are safe.' But I just couldn’t say it. I couldn’t hide any more.

'Have you ever thought of putting some colour through your hair?' she asked.