I’ve been getting some really lovely, thoughtful comments recently on my brain weasels post. One comment particularly struck me, from someone who is being treated for their own brain weasels for the first time in their life. I’m scared, they said. I don’t remember ever being any other way.
I recognise that fear. When I began taking medication for my mental health, I was nervous too about how it might change me. What if I became a completely different person?
It wasn’t just concern about side effects, although that was part of it. But on a fundamental level, it was acknowledging that this person with all her worries, her relentless thinking and planning for possible outcomes, her bursts of intense creative energy and her inevitable burn-out – this was the person I saw as me.
This was the person I was used to being, the only person I had any experience of being. How much could I change without becoming essentially someone else?
The answer to that, as it turns out, is both more complicated and simpler than I could have imagined.
Continue reading “Does mental health treatment change who you are?”
(I got to watch them read it live in my living room, and it was an absolute treat).