Flailing is a healthy reaction
Last Spring, I attended an immersive play, Retail Therapy: 700 Years of Mental Health "Care," written and directed by Kathleen Coudle-King, Playwright, Director, Actor, Producer and University of North Dakota Associate Professor of English.
My friendship with Kathy has taught me a thing or two about a thing or two, including writing from the heart (and gut), and the art of being a human who follows their curiosity all the way to the darkest corners when necessary. Next: finding a way to share the fruits of that dark exploration that makes it bearable for the recipients, so it can be brought back to light through conversation and new awareness.
Here's an interview with Kathy featured on public radio about the process of the research and effort behind Retail Therapy. It's well worth a listen.
The play was about the difficult (and often gruesome) history of our world's (and specifically, the United States') views and responses to mental illness over the centuries, and how "mental health" has been used against countless humans throughout the ages.
When the ways and being of these humans did not fit neatly within the confines of what was considered "Normal and Right" in the times and society in which they lived, they were singled out for such punishments as execution, sterilization, institutionalization/imprisonment, and torture by various "treatments" and surgeries concocted as "curatives" to restore the patient victim to acceptable social functioning.
Dark indeed. Is it any wonder, with this history, that so many of us feel incredibly vulnerable talking openly about our mental health?
But we must talk about it.
Thankfully, much about mental health has reached light; yet stigmatization is still there.
It's still there.
Although "hysteria" is no longer (as it was for centuries) considered an affliction of the uterus (for a humorous and rather hair-raising etymology of the word, check this out), our female bodies are still synonymous with some pretty formidable issues of mental health. Understanding the roles hormones play in the holistic health and experience of women: good. Having our physiology and biology scapegoated and reduced: not good.
Also be wary of over-simplified definitions and social catch-phrases that divide us and them and carry implications that if we aren't pointing this way, we're pointing the wrong way. It's good here to really notice the influence that external voices - even those purportedly for good - has over our experience of our own mental wellness (not to mention worthiness).
The more we speak to mental health to dispel stigma around it, the more we free ourselves and others from the killing shadow of shame.
To close out this Muse, I want to share a couple of quotes from the book Making the Gods Work for You - the Astrological Language of the Psyche by Caroline W. Casey.
One is, "The word idiot comes from the Greek word idiotis, which means, 'One who blindly abdicates personal well-being to the public domain.'"
The other is, "A therapeutic colleague once described hysteria as occurring when one enters a world that is not of one's own definition. The process begins with detachment, which becomes loneliness, which becomes hungry yearning. Hungry yearning tilts us off balance so that we easily fall into someone else's game, where we then thrash crazily like a hooked fish. (...) But flailing is actually a healthy reaction to an unhealthy situation, as when a fish attempts to become unhooked."
I offer both of these fully owning the fact that I've fallen into both of them more than once or twice. Keeping it real.
Whatever you make of any of this, bless and honor your impulse to thrash like crazy against any attempts to make an idiot of you by hooking you to a life that is not of your own definition.