Nah, I´m fine, terribly fine.

 

I like this cover a lot more.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.

It is a remarkable detail that a book tackling mental health can be so balanced. It is a messy business after all. At one point, Martha, the main character, reduces her husband Patrick´s, personality´s positive characteristics as being a symptom of a disorder, like intrinsically enabling herself to reduce her own problematic characteristics as symptomatic that way, to dissect and try to understand her own enigmatic mind. But it isn’t that simple and Martha is having a hard time. Some may wonder, where do I start? I am the sum of a preestablished character, choices, environment, symptoms? What about a misdiagnose? Martha was; going all her life with the notion that something is wrong with her, doctors naming her an ever distinct variety of disorders, medication, uselessly. So, she thinks herself wrong and bad and makes a mess all around her obviously. Maybe not a lot of people wonder these things, but surely there is someone close who does and this book lets you peek what feeling like that could be, what feeling like someone close to a person like that could be.

It gives a perspective of how damaging a misdiagnose can be. Being lost in a trail of doctors and medicine, pretending everything will be fine by herself and everybody around, and ultimately, how having a clear picture of what is wrong is just the start, that a lot of mistakes are result of the choices made.

Random mumbling.

The intricate web of a very complex situation is written with care, you can’t avoid feeling for her, for her family dynamics, a crazy ride among resentment, love, misunderstanding, support and a whole black cloud that hovers over them as Martha gives in deeper in despair. Is not that someone´s mental health affects the people around you, sometimes it becomes a messy system on its own.

Martha says: “I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn’t known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn’t explain it properly. I didn’t feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.”

I have feelings for this book. Some parts like this ring so clearly, it doesn’t matter if you have been through something similar, the point gets through, a concise, witty, funny, sad and touching delivery. The gods know that if one more person suggests fixing a disorder with breathing exercises or more time in the sun, the world would implode on itself, we should be talking more about metal health.

And then...

I can’t recommend this book enough, for everybody. Normality can be a very high hurdle to reach, I hope we all could be a little less judgmental and kinder, compassion can make such a difference, for everybody, for ourselves.