The Absolute Heart

So I was sitting at the doctor’s office waiting to be seen for a muscle spasm in my long-suffering back (and I am now dosed up on a large quantity of muscle relaxants, which makes writing a bit of an adventure), and I had a copy of the New York Times Magazine. Specifically, the Ninth Annual Year in Ideas, which is a fairly entertaining feature in which they toss out all kinds of futuristic concepts that make me realize “oh, my God, I am going to get a flying car soon!”.

But I would not be blogging about this in my tiny forgotten attic-corner of the internet if it were a purely happy experience, because bloggers like to complain and I am no exception. I got through the A, B, Cs– no problem. H, I, K– perfectly cool, although I might have some scientific quibbles with the ‘Killer Earth’ proposition, but that is another topic for another space. And then L comes along and luckily I am in too much pain to freak, because, well, take a look at this:

In The British Journal of Psychiatry earlier this year, the neuropsychiatrist Takeshi Terao and other researchers showed that communities in Japan’s Oita Prefecture with higher levels of naturally occurring lithium in their water supplies had fewer suicides than those with lower levels.[...] Terao and his team contend that the lithium levels in their study are low enough not to cause significant side effects, and that in any case the benefits outweigh the risks. In a follow-up paper, they even posited that adding lithium to drinking water could “potentially offer an easy, cheap and substantial strategy for worldwide suicide prevention.”

I honestly did a double-take. The sciencey part of my brain went “ooh, shiny, niftycool”– I think because the part of my brain that cares about human rights and body autonomy and all that jazz just could not believe that they would actually be positing this. This. The idea that we should put lithium in the water to prevent suicides.

Now, before I deconstruct this, let me get a few things straight: First, I have no problem with fluoridation. Second, I am not a believer in mind/body dualism. Third, I agree that suicide in most cases is highly undesirable.
But I would never support or condone adding lithium to the water. In fact, I would consider it my latest injustice to fighting until can’t fucking fight any more (and then you may bury me, because I will likely be dead). The addition of mind-altering substances to public water is a violation of human rights. Even more than that– widespread coercive use of drugs to prevent suicide is an ethically bankrupt measure.

We do not know much about the psychopathology of suicide. We know that it is typically an impulsive act. We know that it is correlated with mental illness. We know that there are certain conditions, particularly mental ones, that drive people to suicide. Despair, particularly. Isolation. Feelings of being trapped.

The paths to suicidal ideation are many: I was not suicidal when I was repeatedly beaten for “being a lesbian” in middle school, though I know some who were; I was not suicidal when I was in an abusive relationship, though I know some who were; I was suicidal when I thought I would never recover, although I know some who were not. It is your own private journey into hell. We all take our own ways there, down to that cavernous echoing tomb, but we all get to that same destination. Alone. And the way out is just as individual as the way down- it is by our own meandering ways that we once more feel the sun. There are ways to help. For some of us they involve drugs. For some of us they involve talk therapy. For some of us they involve institutionalization. For some of us they involve recentering, finding one’s purpose, realizing the things we love. Just like recovery from mental illness, recovery from suicidal desire is a highly personalized affair.

Which is why this is so infuriating. It smacks of the consideration of mental health patients as a collective problem to be handled: drug ‘em up so they won’t do anything particularly upsetting, and don’t bother with anything else. Don’t investigate what got them there. Don’t invest in a mental health care system that actually takes care of people. Don’t personalize their care or get them what they need if it is anything besides what you think they should need. Don’t even examine what it is about our gross consumptive, alienating culture that feeds into suicide and illness and despair.

Just drug ‘em. Drug ‘em and hope for the best. Drug ‘em and watch your statistics ’cause if your suicides drop, who cares if you’re not handling the real problem? Who cares if the sheer number of suicides is indicative of some broader social rot?

Drug ‘em up to shut ‘em up.

That is the problem here, from the perspective of a mental health advocate. Not just a violation of consent, which is also horrendous, but also the treatment of people as statistics and the denial of our fundamental humanity– treating us, instead, as some public health puzzle to be solved.

This is intolerable.


…back to bed. Got some painkillers to sleep off.

This morning, and it is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States, I was going through my old books and journals. In between all of my old adventure novels and wild rambling manifestos and journals about how I got out of an abusive relationship and how I got myself sane, I found one old worn-down red book with a heart stamped on the cover. It is identical to many of the journals I have used in the past; my grandfather once had a tradition of giving me the same journal every Christmas.


This one I did not complete. It is from fall 2007. It details my feelings around a relationship with a man who would end up trying to kill me, my adjustment to college, and the sparking insanity that nearly had me institutionalized. That fall, I had the worst psychotic episodes of my mad history; I was manic going in, hearing the voice of God telling me I was a prophet, and I came out drowning and convinced there were maggots nestled down among my viscera, eating me alive. That fall, my diagnosis was altered and I was put on an antipsychotic to go with the mood stabilizer. It worked. It probably saved my life, for a time. But like everything else, it failed after a while (and this trend is what has me dwelling in a state of constant insecurity with myself and my perceptions– but that is another story for another day). And when it failed, I hit the lowest of the low, a rock bottom I wasn’t even sure existed until then.


Holidays have never been easy for me. Rampant consumerism sickens me, and my extended family has been less than sympathetic of my idiosyncracies throughout my life. I can’t remember a happy Christmas, but this Christmas was by far the worst. The medication I was on had driven me to emotional death. I was flatlining. I sat in church on Christmas eve and I could not feel anything; while I had never believed in Jesus the Savior, I had always appreciated the theme of hope in dark times and I could not find even that guiding star. Nothing. Not even a coherent thought.


I had, prior to this, been threatened with lithium or hospitalization if I would not take my medication. It hit me then, two years ago, that I would never be better; that I would spend my entire life ricocheting between destroying everything I cared about with my wild moods and too strung out to care about anything. There was no option. There was no way out. It was this, and this was forever, because I was fundamentally too different from the world. Because I did not fit and my attempts to fit had me clawing at the fabric of reality.


It was my second real decision to attempt suicide. The first was in the depths of a mixed episode; I had visions of everyone I loved dying horribly because of me, and, terrified, I tried to hang myself. But this one… this one, I chose death by falling. Because I was always afraid of heights and it seemed so fitting that when I was too dead to feel fear I should actually die. And there were no ropes to snap, either.


The red journal ends halfway through with my suicide note from that night.

No one is to blame for my doing this. It’s just that I could never become reconciled with life itself.



Because, in my mind, it was a simple fact of life itself that had me feeling bizarre and out-of-place and so wrong that I would never be normal and I would rather die. That I sat in the middle of a teeming city and felt like the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust– that was an eternal truth. I was too weak to survive, and too different to ever come into alignment with the rest of the world.


Obviously, I did not kill myself. That was my last serious consideration of suicide. I made it to my jumping-point and I had the note ready in my pocket and I looked out over the void and I stopped. Because I realized that in the end when I wanted to die I wanted to stop this from being so wrong. I wanted to stop myself from sticking out like a nail and always, always getting hammered down. I wanted to change everything so it didn’t hurt anymore and I didn’t hurt people anymore. Perched right there breathing in my death I had the sudden slicing realization that if I was willing to sacrifice everything to make it all stop, I had to be willing to tease out the parts of me that weren’t working. Death was one solution; the other was possibly more terrifying and involved picking myself apart consciously and rebuilding myself. Cutting myself down and finding that burning plasma star-core that I could build around as me, as a [Samson] so true to herself that I would not allow things to break me again and again.


I gave myself that chance.


I will write about that experience later, I think. But looking back on that night, and on that note… things haven’t changed. Somewhat obviously I am happy now, and even when I am sad I am not suicidal. I am no longer on medication, and I’m managing fine without. But I’m still not quite in line with the world. I have been told I am arrogant; I have also been told that I have an unwavering notion of how the world ought to work and that I project it onto everything I touch. I am still unsatisfied with what I am offered, but now I can see that gleaming beautiful future out there and I know I’m not the only one unsatisfied. I’m not alone, and I’m not broken. I am a dreamer and things coarse and incongruent with my vision hurt on some instinctive level. I am not only all right with that, but I’m thankful for it, for that damn restlessness and eternal fiery optimism pounding in my head. It gives my life meaning: to speak for myself and on behalf of those who desire that I speak for them. To work not tirelessly but without despair for a better place.


I think it is extraordinarily powerful that the feelings that drove me to death are now my inspiration. Living is about life, and life is about not-dying, about not going gentle, about rage and redemption and salvation.


On this Thanksgiving, I am thankful to live.

I am a cisgender woman who presents as a “fuckable” female. I ‘pass’ with flying colors, you might say. I am also primarily heterosexual, which means that I have a habit of dating male-identified individuals. It is an unfortunate truth of our society that men are more likely to view me as a girl than as a person, however, and I have given up on society-sanctioned dating rituals.


One key source of frustration for me is the refusal by both society (the macrocosm) and individuals (the microcosm) to see me as a person. I am insane, female, and beautiful, therefore Fragile, a sugar-spun girl meant to be kept in five layers of bubble wrap, laid out on cushions, locked in a display case. I am, in effect, reduced to a decorative spectacle. I am a statue of a muse.


The M-word. I’m now bound to discuss it. We know that artists– particularly male artists– have all drawn inspiration from wispy, large-eyed troubled women. Troubled and somehow carefree, like they are on an entirely different level of reality.


Levels of reality, perhaps, that I too often frequent.


Men who are manic-depressive are poets and artists, drug addicts, Byronic heroes. Women who are manic-depressive are flighty saints burning with our own absurd desires. We exist so that men can gaze upon us and use us as their inspiration. It is not for us to create our own art and futures; we live ephemerally but for our fossilized imprints in men’s work.


Let me be frank: this is not enough. It’s not enough for those of us who have loftier ambitions than dying for another’s art– which, I’d argue, is most of us. It’s not enough for those of us who aspire to accomplish things on our own, who do not want to be pixie-mad blithe spirits floating through the world and stirring it up for some men who have all the creative energy but nowhere to channel it.


It’s not enough for me, especially, not when I have goals and hopes and dreams of my own. It’s not enough for me because I am not a glass figurine and I am not entirely transparent. And ultimately when I fall in with artists who stay up for days contemplating canvases and notebooks of half-finished poems and new and daring perspectives on life, they fail to see beyond my sometimes-madness to the real person inside. I am not Samson, I am their God-given Muse here to burn out in fiery glory so they can write poems and songs and movies about what a tragically beautiful love we had.


And in order for them to do that, I have to self-destruct– not only that, but I must follow a certain perfect trajectory as I fall. But life is not an Oscar-winning movie; I am not here to be stuffed into the refrigerator of gorgeous insanity so that others may rise from my ashes. I fall and I rise and I fall and I get back up and I fall and I break and I put myself back together. Life is messy. It is sloppy and imperfect and wrong and it does not follow the rules of character foils and, really, nobody is the protagonist of my life but me.


Which means I reserve the right to break down in an entirely ugly way. I reserve the right to pick myself up, dust myself off, and not be given anyone’s cooing sympathy, which is exactly what people want to give the liquid-eyed broken bird they try to see in me.


People seem to have a hard time understanding that, sometimes. It’s not that people think I complete them, no; it’s that I apparently exist for the purpose of breaking down irrevocably so that they can turn it into brilliant art. I am not content to be hanged in a museum as a ghost of what I once was. I am here to move and shake and possibly save the world, whatever that might mean– and that automatically precludes a maudlin downward spiral.


Regardless of whether I get into the inevitable arguments that result from my patent refusal to lay there and shatter, the fact that there are caring people in my life who expect me to play such a role is devastating. When someone perches ghoulishly by your side waiting for that one chink in your armor to inevitably widen, you second-guess every moment of sanity. You doubt who you are supposed to be, or who you are.


No love can coexist with expectations of failure, and I desire in my personal relationships what everyone has always wanted: to be loved, not just possessed.

Or, “crazy people should be locked up… oh, I don’t mean you!”


There’s an astounding unwillingness to believe that I am crazy. Crazy people, the meme goes, are fractured and useless. I am not useless– I contribute to my classes, stay abreast of my work, and run several student organizations– therefore, I am not crazy. Or so the logic goes. That is another topic for another day, though.


It is another beast entirely once someone has come to terms with the fact that I am mentally ill. Sometimes this happens when they are forced into dealing with it because they find me in crisis; other times I repeat it to them so often that they finally understand. But for people who harbor mentalist/ableist feelings, this results in a strange cognitive dissonance in which I become the exception to everything hateful or frustrating they say.


I have a friend who I have known for over two years now. Within these two years, she has seen me at my most helplessly mad and she has seen me slowly fight my way up to functional sanity. She has heard my struggles with my school’s mental health system, but I learned quite early on that I could not go to her for understanding of mental health issues. It bothered me when she told me that the school was right in threatening to institutionalize me because I constituted a threat to “the delicate social fabric” of the college. It bothered me when she would rant about her abusive, insane mother’s mental illness, all the while ignoring the fact that the first qualifier bears more relevance to her situation than the second.


Recently, we were chatting quite idly over sodas, and we mentioned how we have political beliefs that nobody agrees with. “Eugenics,” she said.


“Eugenics? What, you’re for it?”


“I think we should round up all the crazy people and ban them from reproducing and put them all somewhere they can’t bother anyone.”


“Um, I’m crazy.”


“Well, I mean, not your kind of crazy. I mean the crazy people who don’t do anything about their illness. People like my mother.”


I did not call her on this. I did not call her on her compartmentalizing me, her friend, into “one type” of crazy person and every crazy person she did not like into another type. I may still, at some point, but I am viscerally afraid of being put in that second box, the box of people who do not deserve full humanity.
This is the bargain I have regretfully struck. I have internalized these ideas of how to deserve my freedom even as I know how wrong they are.


This is the truth: we are all deserving of rights, or none of us are.


I cannot condone abuse. I cannot speak for my friend’s mother, nor can I support the idea that her mother was dealing with her problems in a constructive way. But there have been times when i do not. There have been times when I fall apart gleefully and wildly, where I surrender. Sometimes it hurts the people around me. Sometimes I feel guilty, later. But even more frequently, I am assisted in my search for stability by my position in society.


I am white. I am currently middle-class, although my family has not always been well-off. We have been able to afford medications. We have no issues with drug abuse. My parents have dealt with my mother’s mental illness for years. I have money to afford therapy sessions, most of the time. I am not society’s chosen one by virtue of being both female and mad, but I am not too far from our ideal.


I do not have to worry about working to put food on the table; I attend school full-time and work undemanding retail or laboratory jobs on breaks. I do not have a family to take care of; I have a family who takes care of me. I do not have to worry about whether I need to sell the house, whether I can afford to fix the car, or whether I can pay off my doctor’s bill from when I got pneumonia.


All of this boils down to privilege. I have the privilege of being able to take two months of my life and use it for the sole purpose of getting my shit together. I have the privilege of being able to afford therapy through my family’s health insurance. I have the privilege of being able to experiment with medications when I need them. I “do something” about my illness in a visual way only because I have access to a visual coping mechanism.


Not everyone has these privileges. I have a frank skepticism that people, given a clear choice between sanity and madness, would choose madness– but people are not given a clear choice. You put yourself together with whatever tools you have available and those are not always, or even often, the tools that you need.


And in the end, it’s not even about being sane. For all my privilege I am still mad. I just confine it quietly to my weekends, or moments when I break down. It’s not about being sane– it’s about passing for sane, whatever that means to whoever is judging.


The sentiment that only people who pass as sane are human is monstrous.
If you express it while telling me that I pass, you are no less of a monster.


We are all deserving of rights, or none of us are.

I’m not updating as frequently this week because I’m in transition– I traveled halfway across the United States three days ago, and will do so again in another three days.


Recently, I did take the time out of my schedule of frenetic packing to attend a town hall meeting. It was pure chaos; even in a liberal county, there was a large population of what we colloquially refer to as ‘wingnuts’. There was quite a bit of shouting on both sides, but from the anti-reformers came a rabid incoherence I’ve never rivaled even in my least rational moments.


The district representative was speaking and said some pretty nifty things about how we need a public option because many people cannot get health care due to pre-existing conditions.


A man in a red button-up sitting three rows behind me stood up and screamed “THAT’S ONLY FOUR PERCENT OF PEOPLE!!!”


I didn’t even bother thinking; I turned around and shouted back, “THAT’S ME, YOU ASSHOLE!”.

States of decay.


I am poised on a bench downtown, leaning back, my face turned to the sun. Jimi Hendrix pouring through my head from my duct-taped earphones. Anesthetizing myself to everything but the music, man, the music.


I am curled dishevelled in one corner of the room. My heartbeat is the roar of an infinite ocean. I am talking to someone I love who is about a mile away across the highway, but at the same time here in my room, in my head.


I am scribbling madly on a notepad. Earlier I spent 2/3rds of my remaining money on art supplies. I have colored markers, glue, magazines, felt-tip pens. A dandelion emerges, surrounded by I AM NOT YOURS in screaming text. It ends with me sobbing and turning the page to the next expanse of blankness.


I am reciting the first lines of HOWL over and over and over again and writing them on everything I can find, from a park bench to a table in a mall to my arms and legs. I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed…


I am out in the earth digging my toes in and picking green beans. I trust myself enough right now to cook things without lighting on fire, and I eat greenness and garlic and leaves. It stokes that central flicker in me even through the haze.


I am asleep for hours or days keeping myself on basic life-support.


I am sitting in a chair with a friend kneeling before me, my fists enveloped in his. I am talking to him or maybe I am talking to angels, the line is fuzzy, I am in good hands.


These are scenes and images from my life while crazy. But there is something running through all of them: every single image has a current of self-preservation, of holding the center. You find, after a while, your own set of tools for handling episodes. It’s true.


I don’t understand it, but there is this determination to stereotype people with mental illnesses as innocents. We are helpless, tossed by a boundless ocean. Like all stereotypes, this is a two-faced coin: one side has us Too Good For This World, ready to die and prove to the sane that life is pain; the other side paints us as helpless infants who need protecting. They cannot exist without the other, of course, and cannot exist without the core stereotype that says we are starving hysterical naked and unable to find our way.


This is used to, of course, deny us our voices. Victims cannot speak except to complain; they are powerpoint images in front of professional audiences, women living in greyscale until they take a new drug, or Ophelia drowned. If we cannot tell our own stories and we are reduced to some inhuman lesson for others, and if we are seen as wayward children who need assistance and a guiding hand, we no longer belong to ourselves.


And none of this is actually true. I don’t spend my days in the wilderness of madness looking for God. I don’t spend them dying one inch at a time. I spend them talking to things that aren’t there, fighting to stay afloat, and reaching out for a life raft.


I am not anything more or less than human. Being human, I have a certain resilience of spirit– that which people might call the ‘human condition’ bestows upon us some level of damn contrariness– and that means I do not curl up and let myself fall away. If ultimate madness is the same as death, we are hard-wired to rage against the dying of the light.


I find ways of dealing. When I am sane and ‘normal’ I make a list of things I think might help for my next episode. Some of these have been tried and tested: if I eat fresh vegetables I have more sense of self than if I eat candy and chips. If I am reminded to go run around, I can clear some of the coming storm from my head. I have a list of things that are indicative of being dangerous to myself or others, and I have people who know that list well and are legally entitled to commit me if absolutely necessary. I find ways to survive, and I leave a trail of white pebbles that I can follow back out of the woods.


This is not to say I am completely in control. If I were, my illness would not be a problem; I am not. But I am not a martyr for the cause of mental health awareness. I am a human being in control of my own destiny, starving & hysterical and finding my own fix. I need help sometimes, even just understanding or someone to sit with me and make sure I can’t cut imaginary grubs out of my arms. But I’m human.


And as a human, I find ways to survive and I find ways to thrive.


Do not deny me this.

I would like to think that the days of locking madwomen in the attic are far behind us. I would like to think that we are no longer the secret family members kept hidden/imprisoned in order to preserve the good name of our patriarchal lineage. And that much is true: my parents have never denied having two daughters, the younger golden and full of sweetness; the elder stubborn and alight with a superb rage. I am in no danger of being seized late one night and shoved impersonally into the filthy space at the crown of my house, left to recite my story to the gathering dust where it can do no harm*.


Instead I am, on my best days, told that being quiet is the best thing I can do for myself. People do not want to hear about the revelation I had in a psychotic break two nights ago, or the story of how I pulled myself back together. People do not even want to hear about my defining moment, that one solid night I decided that if I had the strength of mind to kill myself, I also had the strength to bring everything back under control and make my life my own. This makes folks uncomfortable, as though I might break at any moment into pieces too small to fit back together– even the stories about recovery prompt people to bring out the kid gloves.


I have heard that the creation and sharing of stories is a fundamental human quality, one of those things that sets us apart from every other species we know.  If this is true, if to deny the power to tell stories is to deny a basic humanity, no wonder it is hard to be told that everything we have experienced is not worth saying. From time to time, we experience journeys to the subterranean chasms and vaulted cathedrals of our own mind, but eventually we come back to our surroundings and in our lucid moments we want nothing more than to explain where we have been. We are Odysseus, struggling to find home despite the wrath of the gods; we are Orpheus, having lost everything on the cusp of success; we are Johnny with our saddlebags empty from spreading apple seeds up and down strange shores– and, most fundamentally of all, we are human.


Humans tell stories to comprehend the breadth and depth of human experience. We do it for connection and for understanding, because each person’s story is another beam of light into that vague miasma called “the human condition”. Yes, I wander down strange roads, sobbing and cutting up my skin so I can remove imaginary parasites; yes, I fly uncharted skies with no plane. And yet, somewhere, in the heart of my travels there is that seed of human mythos. When I resurface, bloody but unbowed, and my feet touch familiar ground, I am tracing the path of the hero to the underworld and back; I am following that very human tradition of losing everything and finding it all over again.


To deny that story is to deny a fundamental portion of humanity. It locks me, metaphorically, in a silent attic; my guard is my own tongue and all the promises that I can live normally if I just shut up and look sane. Periodically, I rise from the ashes as Lady Lazarus and I am told in no uncertain terms that society has no place for me if I cannot maintain the facade of eternal constancy.


Those of us who have stories to tell, raw and real and naked stories, are betrayed by our doctors, spouses, mentors, and parents who say that we will not be allowed anything, not some semblance of life, if we let our words spill out. So we hold them in, we put a big padlock on our attic door and they flit like ghosts around our head. And you, you who have denied us our right as humans to be out and proud and vocal, you lose out too because you will never hear what we have to say.


I started this blog because I used to be a creative writer and I can’t do it anymore. I haven’t been able to do it since I went mad, came full circle, and was told I could not reveal what I had found in my madness. I am full of my story and there is no room for anyone else, anything else, any other truth I may have like a shadow on my inner walls.


So I will tell it, before some wild attempt at the freedom to be results in a mad dash for my own perfect ending, a house lost to fire. And you, you who may be reading this who have things to say that you can’t admit because it makes you look “crazy”, you reading this who also wander halls of alien angles and angels and everything in-between and beautiful, do not let them lock you in your own head. Tell your stories, too.


Because they make you human, and because they matter.


*I may be in danger now and then of being tossed into white-walled rooms to avoid inconveniencing my surroundings, but that is a topic for another day.

too high towards that wild yearning; drawn on knowing it can burn you clean

into a thousand pieces you fall, spiraling, a wiser man


All the little ways I have of coping with my illness are still experimental. People relapse after years of normalcy, I learned when I fixed myself up, and so I have no real scientific framework for my own caretaking. I have no map, no compass to even tell me if I am headed the right way.


The ways I have of keeping myself sane are almost entirely invisible, even to people who know me very well. I get seven to eight hours of sleep a night. I try to get regular exercise. I eat many vegetables. I involve myself in many, possibly too many, activities, because that means I have a reason to get up in the morning. I make terrible art in private and throw it away before anyone else can see it. I expend small bits of energy over the course of the day to keep myself afloat.



It is highly tempting to try and keep oneself in a state of perpetual hypomania. Actual mania can be quite terrifying, because you go so fast you can’t see anything around you, but hypomania is that sparkle that makes others love us, that gives us a stunning brilliance, a quick tongue and a vivid sociality. Falling out of hypomania triggers questions about whether people will still care for us if we are no longer as engaging, and questions about how competent we really are.


But if you try to keep yourself in hypomania, if you keep catching updrafts while you’re falling, eventually it’ll all catch up to you. You can only defy gravity for so long, and the devil always knows where you are even if he’s a few steps behind.


Taking care of yourself means being normal sometimes. I made the mistake recently of going through a major emotional roller coaster– two ups, two crashes– in the space of a week and not taking time out to calm myself, check in with how I was feeling, and let myself feel upset. Instead I kept meeting new people, throwing myself into new projects, and creating constantly. It caught up to me a few days ago, and I became so agitated I couldn’t so much as walk in a straight line. I have spent the last couple of days sleeping, eating good food when I can trust myself to cook without burning the house down, and getting my life back in order. This is time I could have spent doing amazing things before I leave this city in a week, and I am profoundly regretful that I did not allow myself to come down earlier.


I am not– we are not superhumans. That is something difficult to understand when the world lights up and I feel intoxicating, or when I think I can make a difference, or when I find a new project that could really save the world this time, I promise. We are not superhumans. We have our gifts, including an incredible desire to fly as high as we can, but we cannot do so without risking a great fall. Even on the path to recovery, even after a long period of recovery and ‘normalcy’, we can only fly so high for so long.


This means, sometimes, giving up on projects. It means being able to say “No, I can’t do that right now, I have to take care of myself”– even if it’s a project that has great relevance to whatever cause I believe in with all my heart. It means not staying up until 3 a.m. wheatpasting across the city, or doing it once and realizing it was a very bad idea. It means making sure I eat balanced meals, taking the time to make balanced meals, and asking for the help I need when I need it. It means taking the lower path of far less grandiosity to get me where I need to go.


Half the time I am extraordinary, and half the time I am not, but some of my energy and effort is always spent keeping myself in check, looking after myself, taking care of myself. Accepting limitations means giving up my freedom to be a wild radical/typical college student/spontaneous pixie, but it also means keeping my mind a good place to be. I have no road map for how to do this; it is all done by feel and experimentation and learning from my mistakes.


Knowing my limits, even if they mean I must clip my wings.

Mad Pride started out, according to some, in the 1990s. A budding struggle for liberation, it focuses on the personal journey of the mentally ill to find their own ideal of stability.

.

It’s about believing that different and strange are not dangerous.

It’s about the idea that being differently wired, brain-wise, isn’t always bad.

It’s about giving people with mental illnesses control over their own treatment.

It’s about supporting each other and valuing our unique paths that sometimes take us beyond the realm of typical consciousness.

It’s about acceptance of mental illness as a “dangerous gift”, and taking responsibility for our skills and struggles.

It’s about finding that delicate tightrope over the abyss on your own and walking it every goddamn day and expecting people to notice your success.

It’s about speaking out, about refusing to be silenced in a world that wishes we’d just go away.

It’s about calling out people who view a survivor of a severe mental illness with suspicion, fear, and distrust while lauding the mental fortitude of a cancer survivor.

It’s about fighting stigma wherever we see it: in our personal relationships, our professional lives, our treatment options, and our society.

It’s about understanding how mentalism works with all other systems of oppression to keep down anyone who acts, looks, or talks the least bit different.

.

Mad Pride is fundamentally anarchic. We are a community of lovers, dreamers, helpers, and friends. We have no masters and we respect no authority but ourselves and our compatriots. We refuse to bow down to drug companies, psychiatrists, alternative medicine peddlers, and Scientologists; we build our own treatment and find our own way. We see connections between shamans, prophets, saints, and madmen; we cherish the moments of complete celerity that help us to understand our insane world. We speak for ourselves, and we do not let our voices be usurped by those with outside agendas.

.

Mad Pride is by us and for us. We cannot fetishize ourselves; we created this from the ashes of our temporary sanity. We built it with our hands and our love, with our eyes to the unknowable future. Our concept of self is just that: ours. We are not the sane artist deliberating on his wild-eyed muse. We are not the creators of those movies about wonderful girls who hit men’s lives like a bullet train and shake everything up only to off themselves, dramatically, over some mercurial fantasy. We don’t need to fetishize ourselves; you have done that enough already.

.

Mad Pride allows for individual journeys. We do not frown on medication here at Ruderal. We see it as one tool in a world of them. We understand that chemistry is an amazing art, but we know as well as anyone that there are many paths to personal truth. Consider us Unitarian in our philosophy of health; we make no claims that what worked for us will work for others, we make no demands that our brothers and sisters abandon their lifeboats to drown; we make no judgments of those who need medication or of those who resort to long hours drumming in the forest to control their illness. We also don’t judge those who channel it into the arts; this is a time-honored tradition and we celebrate it as such.

.

*****

.

If you find this overview maddeningly rhetorical, generalized, and philosophical, that suits us well. We make no allowances for journalists and those whose science transcends the laboratory. Rather, consider Mad Pride one wild flag under which thousands march for a hundred connected purposes.

.

And welcome.