My friend Jane opened my eyes to my life in a way, we often talked on the phone and we met once in a while. We both suffered from mental illness – me from anxiety, her from depression – and we both joked often about being crazy. It kept us from going crazy.
When she lay dying from ovarian cancer, I went to see her, she said she wanted to say goodbye, and I sat with her awhile. We were always honest with one another – there are few people who know how to be honest or can stand it. She looked over towards me just as I got up to leave, and she said, “you know, I envy you in many ways for being crazy.”
“Really?,” I replied, “how so?”
Because, she said, you get to recover every day, she said, leaving he rest of her sentence unfinished. And I get to die.
“We are all children who lose our parents,” writes the author Moshin Hamid (Exit West), “all us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this…it might be possible…to believe in humanity’s potential to build a better world..”
Mental illness is at the core of my relationship with Maria, aside from the fact I have always thought she must be crazy to love me.
it brought us together in so many ways, and our understanding and support for one another sustains us and nourishes our love for one another. How curious that something I was so ashamed of for so long and hid for so long has brought me so much love and happiness and healing.
Being crazy shapes everything in my life – where I live, my writing, my friendships, my love, my politics, my photography, this blog, my connection to the animals. It is often the prism through which I see the world.
When I watch Donald Trump, I don’t think of him as a politician to hate on the left or the right, I see a gifted and driven man who is ill in many of the ways in which I have been ill, the insecurity, rage, obsessions, cruelty and domination, a man who cannot ask for help or acknowledge the true sources of his suffering.
He lacks the one thing mental illness teaches us and a President sorely needs – empathy, and thus he becomes frightening to so many people. One day I looked in the mirror and said, “I am crazy, I have suffered, I need help,” and my world began to turn around, to heal, almost like one of those Disney movies where the prince or princess suddenly comes back to life.
I learned to stand in the shoes of other people, just as I desperately needed someone to stand in mine.
Our way of being political – a very male way – promotes cruelty and argument, we are insecure, and cannot acknowledge the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge. Washington feels like a Monster Men’s Locker Room to me, and I hope enough women get there to save it.
And empathy is important in a leader. If you deny it in yourself, how can you possibly see it in others and help them?
Maria and I see this so clearly in one another, and the India trip has brought all of this back home to us.
She agreed to go to India last summer, and neither of us realized how difficult and exhausting and important a trip it would be for her, or how much it would trigger so many of the issues that have so challenged her in her life and me in mine – the abuse, fear and voicelessness she has worked so hard overcome.
She went to India for three weeks, but it turns out the trip was much longer than that, its shadows and echoes continue now. It has brought up a lot of the old fear and uncertainty, affected her sleep, her body, her sense of well-being. She’s had some rough weeks, we both have, the trip was a great thing for her to do, but it also brought her back, it was so intense, challenging and jarring.
I am seeing the trip was jarring for me too, in a number of ways I didn’t expect. I experienced aloneness again, saw clearly the limits of what I can do on the farm by myself, it upended the careful equilibrium crazy people learn how to bring to their lives to stay grounded.
The crazy people do not ever quite heal, their suffering is embedded in their bodies and souls. It comes and goes, rises and falls, and what you hope for – what we have done – is to move ahead, get help when necessary, bring it into the open, do what we have learned to do to help ourselves. And yes, make sure to find people who are sympathetic and nourishing.
We know a lot about our illnesses now, we have been working on them for years together, and I admire Maria for the forthright way in which she has seen these problems, acknowledged them, talked about them, and is getting help in the right places.
Her body began to hurt in new ways after she got back – she is very hardy and healthy – and she went to see a healing chiropractor and yesterday, she went to see an acupuncturist in Vermont, she came home in a state of calm and exhaustion that was almost frightening, and slept for 12 hours.
Something, she said, was be released. She will talk to me, walk in the woods, do her yoga, meditate, some good PSTD books are on the way from Amazon, we will read them and talk about them. She will recover. Me too. We recover every day. She wrote about this experience today on her blog, “Finding My Way To The Expanded Me.”
Her body was changed this morning, her spirit too.
She is calmer, it feels as if something in her body was discharged.
She is going back for more acupuncture next week. She has been researching and exploring the effects of PTSD, figuring out what belongs to the body and what to the mind, and how the trip has triggered the demons once more. Neither of us foresaw that this is often the consequence of a journey like the one to India.
Maria and I both suffer from PTSD, we talk often about its triggers and symptoms, red books and articles.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a disorder that develops in some people, it is triggered by an abuse or terrifying event or events, it causes flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety. It affects the mind and the body in separate and different ways.
For both of us, one of the hardest things is owning the abuse we have suffered in different ways and at different points in our lives. We just don’t wish to see ourselves in that way, but if you don’t see yourself that way and speak up about it, you cannot really heal.
I deal with this in my writing, Maria in her art. That is sometimes not enough.
We now know what we didn’t know when we met. We can handle it. We love our lives and our work and our time together.
We both know she will come to understand it and transcend this, that is what she does. For the mentally ill, every trauma is a gift, we are moved to heal and learn and return to life. We learn again and again not that we are weak and disturbed, but that we are strong and resilient.
That is what her and my life are really about in many ways.
Mental illness offers perspective, we shed drama and argument, and people who do not nourish and understand us.
We learn how to protect ourselves and how to heal. I think I will call the acupuncturist myself, after watching Maria last night I see once again that it is impressive and for real.
The difference for Maria and I both is that we recover now, every day, just as my very good friend Jane predicted before she died. We don’t have to die, at least not yet. That is perspective.
And that is also the gift of being crazy, and its unique virtue. Recovery is the gift that keeps on giving. Every day get we get better, we learn more, we know how to live peacefully and happily in the world.
There is help. And help helps.