Today’s post is going to be more personal than it usually is.  That is because I’m going to deal with an issue that I’ve spent the last five years coming to terms with, which is my own mental illness.  Mental illness, while not necessarily taboo in Ireland, is still an issue that others  the person who lives with it.  What I mean by this is that mental illness makes the person who lives with it other to the “normal” people with whom they interact, (often) in the way in which others view them and (always) in the way in which they view themselves.  Of course, we all view ourselves as different to those around us -we wouldn’t be individuals if this wasn’t the case -but it’s in how we view ourselves, our own self-perception, that makes the difference.  In my case, I have viewed my mental illness (depression and anxiety) as a kind of evil twin, a me that isn’t me yet is, a monster that lives within me (perhaps this is why I am so interested in monsters).

Not all mental illnesses are easy to spot, and it is for this reason that we don’t necessarily other everyone who lives with mental illness.  Depression can be particularly hard to spot, as those who have it don’t necessarily talk about it and only those who are closest to them may feel its effects.  How we view ourselves is, as I have demonstrated, another matter altogether.  There were times when I could feel this monstrous me so acutely that I almost felt as if I was experiencing some form of split in my personality.  I literally made (not physically, but psychologically) an other of the part of me that I did not like.  What startled me when I finally started seeking help, was that I found that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

In fact, I’d like to think that the reason there are so many monsters, others, “evil” twins and haunting spirits in literature, is because we all feel this way on some level.  In an article on Elizabeth Bowen, Eibhear Walshe writes that “in Eva Trout [Bowen’s last novel] the self becomes monstrous” (Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Eibhear Walshe, 2009:150), pointing out that in The Death of the Heart, Portia, the novel’s protagonist remarks, “I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside of himself, a sort of lunatic giant – impossible socially, but full-scale – and it’s the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality” (qtd. in Walshe 50:310).  In a sense, this view of the monster within the self is almost positive, but the term “battened” reminds me of yet another monster –Tennyson‘s Kraken, from his poem “The Kraken”, thus bringing us back to a repressed monstrosity.  Tennyson’s Kraken is submerged in the sea, but Portia’s giant is submerged within her very subjectivity.