Eight Months since you left

In this post I want to talk about love and the mental health stigma…. Two things that probably don’t naturally go together, but bear with me.

I’ve wanted to write this post for a while, but as I’ve found with all my posts so far, I don’t really have a choice about when I can write them. They come from nowhere, mainly when I’m unable to sleep, like now. It’s 525am and I’ve been lay here for an hour wide awake, but totally shattered, because yesterday evening the grief monster tackled me to the floor, once again and we had a little scrap. He won, again.

A few weeks, or months, I don’t know any more as time is going so fast, yet so slow at the same time…. I shared on my social media a video that Ben had sent me a couple of years ago.

In this video he was the most romantic, loving, thoughtful, amazing man that he was. It was a video he sent my friends and I when I was away, and it was him literally showing how much he loved me with his amazing humour and ridiculously romantic side. It’s one of my favourite videos.

After I shared it a friend sent me a private message… and what she said really stuck with me hence being the topic for this post… she said:

Oh Kirsty watching this made me laugh and cry.. I didn’t know Ben but wow how caring and thoughtful! All girls dream of having someone so “into us”!

Luckily, I’ve never known anyone with mental illness and I find it hard to understand. I’ll be honest even more so watching these lovely videos he’s done for you.. He loved you so much, it’s so clear.

Thinking of you xx

My response was this:

I understand what you mean - I get that if you’ve never lived with it or someone with it [mental health struggles] it’s hard to understand and get your head around it. I think that’s why I share this stuff to try and show that just because someone has depression or ptsd or any other mental illness, it doesn’t mean they are sad all the time or that they don't feel - in fact, I think it’s that they feel more - every emotion- not just sadness.

And this is why I want to talk in this post about love (or feelings) and the stigma of mental health.

People will have heard me say a million times (and probably in every post I’ve written) that Ben’s illness made up 10% of our relationship. The rest was made up of love, laughter, fun and happiness - all the words that people don’t relate to having a mental illness. I’ve never known anyone feel as much as Ben did – and more so be able to articulate it in the most beautiful way. A way that nobody would have thought, looking at Ben with his tough exterior. But being able to feel as much as he did was a blessing and a curse. He felt everything. Good and bad. It was just that the bad, in his final days won.

I remember speaking to a member of Ben’s family after he passed, and they were so worried that he had been in a horrible, sad hell hole in the months before he went. I shared a photo book that showed our memories and that proved that theory to be wrong and thankfully that offered great comfort. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sitting here saying there wasn’t bad days. There really was - and on those days I surrounded him with all the love I had to get him through them. But what I’m saying is that this stigma and belief that everybody with a mental illness is walking around with a black cloud over their head isn’t true. Just look at Chester Bennington from Linkin Park who was seen in a video hours before he took his life, laughing and having fun with his family tasting jelly beans. He didn’t ‘look like someone with a mental illness or like someone who was hours away from ending his life’ yet hours later, he was gone. Final Video Of Linkin Park's Chester Bennington

To be able to help people and understand, society needs to move away from this thought. People need to start opening their eyes and minds and see that mental illness isn’t as simple as someone being sad. It’s probably the opposite because they fight harder than most to be happy (See Robin Williams), so not to be a burden… and they feel more than most… Every. Single. Emotion! And for my Ben, love was an overriding one, that if I’m honest, was the reason he went in the end. His love for those around him and feeling, incorrectly, that we were better off without him.

At Ben’s funeral I read one of the many beautiful pieces of writing that he wrote to me (he wrote to me a lot via text and good old fashioned paper). He had such an amazing way with words (that’s actually a COMPLETE understatement – I’ve never met anybody who could write like him). He blew me away regularly with what he wrote. I didn’t know it was possible to feel and articulate what he did. Like with the videos I have, people just didn’t expect ‘big, hard Ben’ to feel, never mind share feelings like he did. But I was lucky - his love and those feelings were directed at me - and all the love I possessed was directed straight back at him. And whilst I believe nobody will ever love me like Ben did, I hope that one day someone can try and that I will learn to love again too. Because there is no greater feeling and it’s a feeling that even ‘sad people’ with mental health problems feel, more than people realise. But sometimes, more often than not, they just can’t find it for themselves.

Those words/memes you see all the time ‘be kind, because you never know what battles people are fighting’ should be read and thought, every single day. Because you don’t know. It’s impossible to know and more often than not, especially in these times, more people than ever are fighting a battle you know nothing about.