Living with bipolar disorder meant that I had spent years controlling every possible circumstance of my life – never living more than a half hour from home or my Toronto psychiatrist – just to ensure that I would make it through my 20s. My family tried to talk me out of the scholarship, knowing that the massive change in routine (and even the amount of sunlight I was exposed to) could trigger my worst manic episodes yet. My fiance, who had proposed only a few weeks before I received the acceptance letter, quietly urged me to take a chance on myself and, by extension, us. I knew the stakes were high as I boarded to plane to Heathrow, but I was tired of just surviving. I wanted to set the kind of goals that had seemed possible before my diagnosis, before I was constantly reminded of the limitations of my tumultuous brain.

I arrived at Goldsmiths College in London armed with a carry-on suitcase that contained my wardrobe for the entire summer and the determination to pen a hard-hitting memoir about mental illness while pretending I was completely over it. London-based poet and author Blake Morrison – who I immediately told everyone back home was played by Colin Firth in the movie of his life – took me under his wing and helped me confront the fact that every time I tried to write about my hospitalisation back home, I couldn’t seem to find the words to describe how my life had fallen apart. Lost in more ways than one, I carried his memoir on the Tube with me and read it in between frantic calls with my parents and my therapist, in which I maintained that I was healthy. So healthy, in fact, that I had taken up running.

Before I arrived in London, I had impulsively signed up for a 10K run through Green Park that finished right in front of Buckingham Palace. Sure, I had never even attempted to run that far in my life, but it seemed like the kind of goal that could supplant the disappointment of abandoning a book. After a particularly unsuccessful writing session, I figured I might as well make headway in some area of my life and met up with the London City Runners at the Marquis of Wellington in Bermondsey (back before they expanded into a clubhouse in a nearby archway). Much fitter runners than I leaned over picnic tables to stretch their hamstrings in neon spandex, and I wondered if they could tell that I didn’t belong here on multiple fronts.

Having not run properly in quite a few years, I nervously lined up with the first (and slowest) heat, hoping that the riverside route would help me stay on track. I huffed and puffed my way over uneven cobblestone in Butler’s Wharf, dodged throngs of tourists crossing the Tower Bridge and arrived on the other side of the Thames, past an eerily quiet Tower of London that had closed for the night. I’d visited some of these locations before, trying to get my footing in a city that seemed to weave itself through endless alleyways and piers. But by removing that greater purpose, the nagging itch for self-understanding that so many people bring to a vaulted city like London, I was able to focus on each step and each laboured breath instead. I still managed to get lost, but I found my way back to the pub eventually, feeling like I had finally gotten somewhere.

My fiance was in the midst of an internship that demanded 12-hour workdays in Toronto, so he called past midnight on his way back from the office as I was headed home from my run. “How are you feeling?” he asked, which was usually the first thing out of his mouth. He knew not to ask directly about my writing, which was kind, if not honest. But I was secretly pleased with my report for the day. “I’m building endurance,” I replied, which seemed to apply equally to the unpredictable wiring of my brain and my aptitude for running.

The next day, I visited CoolTan Arts, a now-bankrupt artists’ collective run by folks living with mental illness who believed arts education could help their peers re-establish their place in the world. CoolTan emerged in the early 90s, the name of their collective a nod to the abandoned Brixton suntan lotion factory that they first squatted inside. Despite having a new space and charitable registration years later, CoolTan still exuded a certain ‘by the people’ vibe that I appreciated as someone who had been in and out of the system myself. 

In Canada, I had begun teaching creative writing workshops for fellow psychiatric inpatients as a way of feeling like my experience had been more than just traumatic – but it had been harder to sustain than I’d thought. At CoolTan, I sat at a crowded table of folks living with a whole alphabet of diagnoses and patiently wrapped string around fabric to make a companion doll while feeling extra conscious of the way I often ‘passed’ as neurotypical. My new friends were curious as to why I had come, and I tried my best to explain: writing about my mental illness had started to recreate the loneliness of my initial diagnosis, but living it alongside a community gave me strength. While I wasn’t able to join them for the Largactyl shuffle – a historic walk past mad community landmarks, named for a common side effect of the world’s first anti-psychotic drug – I did go home and write the first good chapter of my entire trip.

A few weeks later, I found myself at a crowded starting line near the palace, still not having run a full 10K due to my impressive track record of getting lost every single Tuesday at run club. As I smoothed my racing number over my running jersey, I hoped the adrenaline of meeting one of two impossible goals might push me over the finish line. The race itself is a blur – I remember lining up between two massive rows of Union Jacks and I remember sprinting through the final kilometre to finish in under an hour, but what I’ll never forget is a friendly guy in a Mind charity running jersey coming up to me just after the finish line.

“We’re on the same team,” he said brightly, pointing at my shirt. I smiled. I had also decided to run in support of Mind, the first UK mental health organisation I had learned about upon my arrival. We sat down together in Green Park and offered our backstories to this run: mine, as a psychiatric survivor; his, as half of a failed reality TV marriage that had inspired him to do something good for himself and others. After he heard my tale, he told me about how he had recently talked a man out of suicide at a train station he was working at. After I heard this, I promised not to watch the TV show. We’ve been dear friends for six years now, and I still haven’t. 

This is the thing that doesn’t get covered in any mental health pamphlet that I’ve ever seen: mental illness is isolating, but the mad community is anything but. Weirdness is our superpower – we leap over social conventions and bypass polite boundaries to offer the kind of support that we never had ourselves. And that’s what I ended up choosing to write about during my summer in London – a comedic novel about three friends who meet in a mental health hospital and the incredible lives they stumble through afterwards. I think there are enough stories about how we suffer, and maybe that’s what readers are used to. But what if we made more room for mad people to laugh? To adventure? To fall in love? To embrace the beautiful spontaneity of our minds?

I defended my unconventional psych ward thesis the next summer and married the only person who had believed I could survive London on my own. I was still working through my memories of the hospital, and there were still days when I had screaming breakdowns and impossibly manic dreams. I was still running when I could find the time. But I was no longer running away from the most difficult parts of myself; in fact, I had come to realise that getting my life together meant embracing them. It meant learning to live and love with mental illness, rather than asking myself to overcome it. It meant writing with kindness towards myself and others who have been in my shoes. And the best part is, I know if I ever forget this lesson again, there’s a whole community out there who already hold this sacred knowledge in their hearts – and their stories are yet to come.  

Leanne Toshiko Simpson’s debut novel, Never Been Better, is out now. 

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

Images: courtesy of Leanne Toshiko Simpson