When I spoke at Mental Health Camp last year, I was surrounded by a table of social media types, sermonizing about how mommy blogging has served to reduce stigma of mental illness, depression and the like. How women poking keys late at night gave a voice and created a supportive hug to anyone who was scared to admit that they might need some help.
Women admitting their medications, their dirty dishes and their daydreams to get away from children that they might have wanted with every essence of their being until post-partum set in is a reason why some others can admit those things – on or off the Internet.
Crazy is the new sane, so to speak, and it’s okay. Because women spoke out.
I also talked about how not everyone needed to speak out.
I used homosexuality as an example, citing that just because some people felt freer and comforted to know they were accepted completely transparently by their friends and family (when that occurs), it didn’t mean that it was a requirement. Or even 100% that people who didn’t speak out were ashamed of themselves. I said: Just because my truth is being said loudly doesn’t mean that I expect someone else to march in a parade. Our visions of happiness and necessity all differ, just as we do. Not all of them include flying a rainbow flag or shaking our Lithium in other’s faces.
Last week, I said that I was growing up, right from the almost beginning. Part of that is the discovery that I have my very own ingrained passions – things I never knew existed since I always felt like a shell of a human. Turns out that I have a lot of them.
I want to see a place where an employer, friend, family member or lover doesn’t judge someone by their mental health label; where their health is what bears judgment. When a boss doesn’t hear bipolar and assume instable and ends the conversation. When a loved one doesn’t see broken or burden when synapses don’t fire properly without some help.
I want to live in a city where people living on the street are respected. Because frankly, even if every homeless person in the world was a drug addict and brought their lifestyle upon themselves – an opinion I disagree with hugely – that person has learned to live and struggle and remain alive without the benefit of things and amenities you and I might have, and with more challenges standing in their way.
I want to belong to a community where differences are nourished, shared and enmeshed. Where debate doesn’t devolve into insults and judgments of character. Where liking a different presidential candidate doesn’t make you a moron, not breastfeeding doesn’t make you selfish, and not vaccinating doesn’t mean you’re ignorant. I want this community to continue to affect changes, in stigma, in charity, in economics and ethics.
I want my daughter to be happy. Whether she can read at four, fit into a size 2 at 20, marry her lesbian lover, flip burgers, or pray.
I want to find personal peace, wholly. To continue the stitching of the gashes in my psyche and soul. I want to lose the guilt and persecution complexes and become as logical about my own roles as I can be about anyone else’s. I want to be able to see my life through the same rosy glasses that anyone gets afforded.
I want to see the world and to blow Zoë’s mind doing it. I want to remove us from the comforts of Western Living, to living non-affluently, rurally, organically.
I want to live naturally. To eat whole foods that came from plants, not ones that were made in a plant. To use products that I know no one will pay a price for – environmentally, or through the loss of their childhood or land. To find health and beauty in the everyday normal things, and to find simplicity as romantic as spontaneity.
I want to help create a world where being able to breathe doesn’t mean having to be quiet. I want a place where it’s okay to say and read and celebrate that people have spoken out. I’m proud to have been part of the first year of that world’s life.
Happy first birthday to Violence Unsilenced, everyone who scrubbed their truth from under their fingernails and got even a glimmer of cleanliness from it, and everyone who has visited and opened their own eyes to the unjustness, righted by support.
