I am staring at an icon of the Raising of Lazarus when the world begins to spin around me. It is a sunny Saturday afternoon and I am wandering around the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, alone. Despite the outstanding beauty of the gardens—the entrance is lined with bright pink Bougainvillea—I am in a bad place, mentally. I am not entirely sure why I have spent the last week in the throes of fear and despair; there is no identifiable precipitating event. Such is life with a chronic mental health problem. Such is life sometimes anyway.
Dizziness is the latest manifestation of the panic attacks I’ve had for years. I used to do the classic full-on hyperventilation, but over the years I’ve acquired such an iron grip over my breathing that my brain has been forced to resort to new tricks. As author and neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan highlights in her new book, The Age of Diagnosis, the dizziness that people like me with anxiety disorders experience is very real, even though its origin is psychosomatic. Because I understand the physiology of what is happening to me, the occasional dizzy spell doesn’t usually bother me much.
But today, as I cower next to an early templon, I feel exhausted and defeated. I have been trying so hard to stay sane, with daily mindfulness exercises, sport and socialising, but nothing is working. I have fallen back into familiar patterns, struggling to sleep, forgetting to eat meals. Bloody mental illness, I think, I’ve had enough. I begin to cry—not in great heaves, but a couple of (hopefully) subtle tears trickle down my cheeks as I pretend to read the templon’s accompanying text. A middle-aged American couple next to me are also reading the sign, rather more earnestly. I’m crying in the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, I think. This is tragic.
And then, I take a deep breath, see the situation from the outside and realise it’s also hilarious. I grab my phone and pull up the chat I have with my wonderful friend Andy, who longtime readers of this column may recognise as the spontaneous pal who joined me on a feral Taylor Swift club night last year. I’m crying in the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, thought you might it find it chic; I text him. Howling, he replies.
I’m a huge advocate for crying in inappropriate places, and not only because it provides joke fodder for friends who share your gallows humour. I’m a fan because my highly qualified former therapist all but recommended it to me as a coping mechanism. While she may not have advocated sobbing in museums specifically, she would have approved of me “taking my anxiety for a walk to the museum” as she would coin it.
When I was at my most unwell, spending vast swathes of time in bed, my therapist would often urge me to “take my anxiety for a walk” or “take my depression into the living room”. At the time, I found this irritating. There’s nothing a depressed person hates more than being gently reminded that they would feel better out of bed. But it was an important part of my road to recovery.
Sometimes in life, mentally ill or not, for all your best efforts, you have days or weeks or even months where you just feel really shit. And it is far better to feel shit in a museum, or park, or on a metro, or in a swimming pool (I once had a really good hour-long sob into my goggles in an outdoor heated lido in Germany) than inside your own bedroom, where the walls close in and smother you in your distress.
Crying in public has wrongly been cast as a sign of weakness. In fact, it is a sign of enormous strength. Someone crying in a public place has done the hardest thing there is to do: they have forced themselves into the world at the moment they are struggling most. So next time you find yourself shedding a tear in a deeply incongruent setting, know that you are courageous. And if you’re in an iconic location like the Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens, you’re also incredibly chic.
