Can You Move Away From Your Mental Illness?

When I started university I didn’t know anyone. That sounds scary, and it was, but I was mostly excited because that also meant that no one knew me. I wasn’t the girl who didn’t speak. I wasn’t the girl who didn’t eat. I wasn’t the girl who cried and fainted and hyperventilated and didn’t shower or look people in the eye. I was determined to become ‘normal’.

I had somehow convinced myself that my mental illnesses were simply a product of the environment I had been in. Not that the environment was particularly terrible but I thought that if nobody expected me to display symptoms then I wouldn’t.

Of course, this isn’t how life works. You can’t run away from your problems, especially when they are in your brain.

“Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.”
-Glenda Millard

Being surrounded by people who had seen me at my worst made me feel like that is what everyone expected me to be like and I have this need to fulfil expectations, even if they are negative. But what I didn’t prepare for was how being away from those people could also be difficult.

I told myself that I was going to talk to people but I forgot that when I do talk to people I use safety behaviours and I forgot that people who aren’t used to them may mistake them for rudeness.

When I didn’t speak or avoided eye contact, people thought that I was intentionally being rude. When I didn’t go out or walk to class with someone, they thought it was because I hated them. And it’s hard to make friends when everything you do is mistakenly interpreted as a reflection of dislike or disinterest. It’s hard to make friends when everything you do pushes people away.

I was so focused on trying to put myself out there and stop avoiding life and people that I forgot to consider how I was approaching them.

I was so convinced that moving to a place where nobody knew me would solve all of my problems that when I realised that wasn’t the case my symptoms came back in full force. I didn’t see the point in trying to get better because I convinced myself that if moving didn’t help then nothing could. But I was wrong.

Your illness isn’t in your surroundings. Mental illnesses are illnesses. If you had heart disease you wouldn’t expect to be cured simply because you moved across the country. You can’t fix a broken leg by moving house.

A change of scenery won’t cure a sick body so you can’t expect it to cure a sick mind.

Yes, your environment can affect your mental health but if you have a mental illness changing your surroundings alone is not enough. The mind is incredibly complex, you can’t expect something so simple to cure it.

 “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
-Henry David Thoreau

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