mental illness – Southwest Conference Blog

Beyond the Bell Jar: Reclaiming the Life and Art of Sylvia Plath

by Kathryn Andrews, Desert Palm United Church of Christ Council and W.I.S.E. Committee

For many years, I knew Sylvia Plath only as an author who ended her life at age 30 after producing an excellent but depressing book called The Bell Jar. That understanding changed after I read Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. This biography celebrates Plath as a disciplined and prolific artist who helped to reform modern poetry and posthumously earned the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. The book also contains a sobering history of Plath’s struggle with mental health issues.

Plath’s family was riddled with mental illness. Her immigrant father engaged in a slow-moving suicide by refusing treatment for diabetes for two years. He died in 1940 when Plath was eight. The book points out that young children who lose a parent run an increased risk of suicide later in life. Plath fit that pattern. Unknown to Plath, her paternal grandmother had died in an Oregon insane asylum years before. When Plath’s own depression surfaced at age 20, doctors repeatedly subjected her to a primitive form of electroshock therapy without anesthetic. According to Clark, Plath “was at the mercy of a patriarchal medical system that assumed that highly ambitious, strong-willed women were neurotic. As women, Plath and her mother had no power to defy the system.”

The absence of her father and family financial worries galvanized and haunted Plath. She was able to partially finance her education at Smith by selling her poems and stories to national magazines. Plath later won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge. There she met and married Ted Hughes, who eventually became England’s Poet Laureate. Each contributed to the other’s professional growth; both were working toward an “unliterary” poetry “composed as much for the ear as for the eye.” Their relationship was progressive for its time, but also volatile. Plath seethed over the patriarchy and male humanist tradition that frequently denied her recognition while celebrating her husband’s accomplishments. In Daddy, Plath rages against her lost father, who also personifies “a bankrupt culture” and “patriarchal tormentors.” Linking her father and husband, Plath writes, “I made a model of you . . .and I said I do, I do” but by the end of the poem Plath declares: “I’m through.”

Following the birth of their second child and her husband’s departure, Plath entered a new level of depression while also taking her art to a new level. Plath’s own mental health crisis and her father’s immigrant struggles gave her insights into the life of the outcast, and her writings from this period explore the viewpoints of marginalized mothers, refugees, and Jews. She became one of the first poets to write about miscarriage and post-partum anxiety. More generally, her poems “open up new aesthetic possibilities that would change the direction of modern poetry.” The darkness also came through, as in Sheep in Fog: “My bones hold a stillness, the far/Fields melt my heart./They threaten/To let me through to a heaven/Starless and fatherless, a dark water.”

Plath would not live to see widespread critical acclaim or her works become best-sellers. As her depression deepened, Plath feared another round of botched electroshock therapy. She ended her life on the morning she was scheduled to enter a psychiatric hospital. But as Plath’s daughter later wrote, and Red Comet affirms, “The art was not to fall.”

Racial Injustice and Mental Health

guest post by Ray Littleford of Desert Palm UCC; this post originally appeared in the Desert Breeze

February 14 may be Valentine’s Day, and in the United Church of Christ, it is also designated as Racial Justice Sunday, and the theme across the denomination is Compassionate Community. It is well established that experiencing racial discrimination often leads to mental health problems that detract from quality-of-life over the course of a year or even a lifetime. Numerous studies have found that rates of anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are significantly higher among minority groups in the United States.

Historically, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the first American physician to study mental disorders, declared that Negroes were not inferior to Whites. In the 1850s, however, Dr. Samuel Cartwright defined “drapetomania” as the disease which causes slaves to run away, and “dysaethesia aethiopica” as the condition that causes laziness and made slaves insensitive to punishment. A century later it was theorized that the urban violence among blacks in the 1960s was due to brain dysfunction.

There is also the problem of the over-diagnosis of schizophrenia among African-American males, nearly four times greater than that of white males. The diagnosis was applied to many hostile and aggressive black men, and then they were treated with high doses of antipsychotic medications.

Articles in prominent journals of mental health and psychiatry have explored the reluctance of African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and Latinx individuals to seek mental health treatment. Cultural paranoia and lack of trust in the medical community are often mentioned, as well as concerns regarding the cultural competence and understanding of clinicians. Mental health professionals are predominantly white (e.g. only 2% of US psychologists are African-American) so these professions need to do a better job of attracting minority groups.

Finally, another area of discrimination is the lack of awareness by physicians of physiological differences of various racial groups in how medications are metabolized by the liver. This can result in either toxic levels of medications or ineffective levels. If you have tried several different psychiatric medications with poor results, then ask your physician to order genetic testing of the liver enzymes. Most insurance plans will authorize it, and then the test results can point to the medications that are well metabolized by your liver, not too fast or too slow.

I believe we are making progress in reducing the stigma of mental illness in the general population. It behooves us to extend this progress to people of all races and ethnicities so that biases in diagnosis and accessibility to treatment are eliminated. As members of DPUCC, our witness to the community is that everyone is welcome here. In the words of the Apostle Paul:

If our Message is obscure to anyone, it’s not because we’re holding back in any way. No, it’s because these other people are looking or going the wrong way and refuse to give it serious attention. All they have eyes for is the fashionable god of darkness. They think he can give them what they want, and that they won’t have to bother believing a Truth they can’t see. They’re stone-blind to the dayspring brightness of the Message that shines with Christ, who gives us the best picture of God we’ll ever get. Remember, our Message is not about ourselves; we’re proclaiming Jesus Christ, the Master. All we are is messengers, errand runners from Jesus for you. It started when God said, “Light up the darkness!” and our lives filled up with light as we saw and understood God in the face of Christ, all bright and beautiful. (2 Cor 4:3-6, The Message)

Living in An Age of American Anxiety

by Ryan Gear

If you have a hunch you might be feeling more anxiety than usual, you’re probably right. With COVID-19, our political situation, the stubborn continuance of racial injustice, and the recent economic downturn added to the normal stress of life, Americans are suffering with astronomical anxiety levels.

According to the Census Bureau, as of mid-July, 35% of Americans are experiencing what could be classified as Generalized Anxiety Disorder. This is almost double the percentage in 2014 and is up by almost five percentage points since January. Arizona is on the higher end, nationally.

There is also a clear correlation of stress experienced according to age group, with almost half of 18-29 year olds experiencing diagnosable anxiety. Ethnic minorities and those with lower educational attainment clearly feel more stress than whites and those with higher levels of education.

It’s not just Americans who are feeling stressed out. British historian Richard Overy states that, like the 1920s, with political change, the increasing strength of nationalism, and fear of future wars, the 2020s in the UK will be an “age of anxiety.”

The same is true closer to home. While Trump may currently be headed for defeat in November, “Trumpism,” a form of nationalism motivated by the dwindling percentage of white Christians in America, will likely live on into the foreseeable future. It is conceivable that every four years for the next couple of decades, American voters may face the choice between leaning into the ideals enshrined in Declaration of Independence or falling toward fascism.

The economic downturn caused by COVID-19 is weighing on American families who have already suffered growing economic inequality since the 1980s. Pew Research found that income inequality in the U.S. is the highest of all G7 nations, and the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorest families more than doubled between 1989 and 2016. Middle class incomes in America have grown at a slower rate than upper-tier incomes since 1970.

In August, I’m giving a sermon series at the church I pastor called Distressed: Living in An Age of American Anxiety. My central point of the series is that, as people of faith, we have two things to offer to stressed out Americans, including ourselves:

Our faith offers us resources to cope with anxiety, and
Our faith addresses the root causes of American anxiety.

At the center of the Jesus Way is the belief that God cares for all of us and is especially predisposed toward people who are struggling. 1 Peter 5:6-7, encourages people who feel beaten down:

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”

We have the comforting words of Jesus from Matthew chapter 6:

“‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?… For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them… But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’”

We believe that God cares about stressed out Americans and that God provides. At the same time, we also know how God expresses care and exactly how God provides… God cares and provides through God’s people who partner with God and allow God to care and provide for society through them.

God cares for us, and God cares through us. As people of faith, we have the invitation to partner with God to address the root causes of our nation’s anxiety. In a previous time of heightened inequality and anxiety, Walter Rauschenbusch woke up the American church with the book that birthed the era of the Social Gospel, Christianity and the Social Crisis. The Social Gospel movement was fueled by the words of the Hebrew prophets like Micah:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

The champions of the Social Gospel were optimistic in their belief that human hearts could be quickly bent toward justice and usher in the millennial reign of Christ in the 20th century. The quagmire of WWI, however, along with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the doldrums of the Great Depression, exposed a degree of naiveté in the movement.

Reinhold Niebuhr, while agreeing that the premise of the Social Gospel was rooted in the biblical concept of justice, suggested that a new kind of “Christian Realism” was needed. Niebuhr wrote in the 1932 Moral Man & Immoral Society that people who desire social justice must force it to happen politically. He points out the reality, for example, that a few exorbitantly wealthy people will pay more taxes out of the goodness of their hearts, but most will not; tax laws must be changed. There are individuals who love justice, but society as a whole does not. Therefore, the political will must be influenced by those individuals who do, and laws must be passed that force the rest to comply within a more just system.

In an era when, like ours, racism and economic injustice played the central role in American politics, Niebuhr presented a strategy that we can also utilize today to address the root causes of American anxiety. In Moral Man & Immoral Society, Niebuhr holds up the example of Ghandi who, while known primarily for using the method of non-violence, also wisely employed another strategy to influence the political will of the British Empire to act more justly toward India.

Niebuhr writes that even though there is actually no ethical distinction, in a strategic decision “Mr. Ghandi never tires of making a distinction between individual Englishmen and the system of imperialism which they maintain” (p. 249). Ghandi acknowledged the perceived difference between the decent and law-abiding individual Englishman at home and the horrible injustices the English collectively perpetuated in India. By doing so, he slipped past the defense mechanisms of the individuals who maintained the system and ultimately changed the political will. Quoting Ghandi from C.F. Andrews’ Mahatma Ghandi’s Ideas, p. 238:

“An Englishman in office is different from an Englishman outside. Similarly an Englishman in India is different from an Englishman in England. Here in India, you belong to a system that is vile beyond description. It is possible, therefore, for me to condemn the system in the strongest terms, without considering you to be bad and without imputing bad motives to every Englishman.”

As anxiety-producing inequalities are worsening, and political divisions are widening, Ghandi’s graceful strategy of inviting willing individuals to change the system may both counter the politics of division and be the most effective approach to addressing the root causes of our national anxiety. We have an opportunity to reduce our own anxiety and be the change we want to see.

Ryan Gear is the Lead Pastor of The Well in Chandler, AZ. During the COVID-19 shutdown, The Well meets online Sundays at 10am AZ/1pm EST.

All Together. Separate.

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

Here we are. All together… separate.

What a weird time.

I have been doing this a while, this thing that we are doing now where we each take to our own homes and live a sealed life, trading handshakes and hugs for emojis and typed words. Instead of reaching for each other, we are reaching for computers, phones, devices. The phone becomes a portal to a world rather than a device to accompany the world. Our lives getting lived out on a small screen as the natural world around us does what the natural world around us does naturally without us.

The world is healing as we are retreating. We are getting an object lesson that we didn’t realize we had been needing.

I don’t desire to make light of it because people are dying. Alone. People are not able to mourn together because doing so will increase the reasons to mourn. We must wait to even begin the task of grasping that which is lost. So much loss. So much change. And here we sit. Wondering and waiting.

I have been doing this awhile. And yet… this is oh so different because you are doing it too. That matters somehow, doesn’t it? It matters to know that it’s not just you… Even when it feels like it is just you, it never is. Whatever it is you feel, that feeling has been felt by nearly every person on this planet. That’s true pre-pandemic and is mightily true now. Whatever intensity you feel, that intensity has rested heavily on someone else’s shoulders. It rests there now. You are not alone in this even as you are literally alone in this.

I have some isolation tricks to share, but before we get tricky, let’s get honest.

Some of us are loving the opportunity to finally slow down and rest. That feels a bit bad for some because they don’t want to be the one finding solace and slumber when others are exhausted and in a nightmare. Some of us are really loving the break, though. That makes sense.

Some of us are hating every single moment of this isolation. It’s the opposite of anything they would have chosen for themselves. They need people and it feels like they are slowly losing their grounding force as people go away. Some of us are really hating this time. That makes sense.
The disease spreading has impacted us each in different ways even if we have not been sick or known someone directly who has gotten sick. It’s starting to get closer and closer, though.A friend of a friend of a friend had it. Now a friend of a friend had it.Now a friend has it. Closer.

Allergies seem like cruel April Fools pranks coming early. A sneeze turns into a warning where it used to be an annoyance. Scary, scary stuff.
We are feeling things, all kinds of things.It all makes sense in the midst of something we don’t understand. That’s an understatement. I’ll try again. It all makes sense in the midst of something we haven’t ever imagined before. That’s a bit closer. Not there yet, though.

It all makes sense in the midst of something we can’t fathom because we have not had anything like this ever, ever, ever. We are very aware of what is happening globally in a way we never have before and we just can’t begin to wrap our single human mind around it.

There is a lot of stuttering and trailing off of sentences as we try to piece it all together. When the words fail us, we turn our attention to graphs and numbers to quantify the unquantifiable nature of this loss. High school math teachers everywhere are whispering, “I told you that you would need this!” Fine. Mr. Clever was right.

That’s the thing, though. This time is drawing on all the resources within us and outside of us. We are reaching into the recesses just to make sense of what the heck is happening. My goodness, that builds pressure within us and we are looking for a release valve. Some of us might be reaching for the things that have worked in the past and we may find that those things just aren’t working anymore, but we are alone and it feels too late to figure out how to manage this anxiety. I get that on a cellular level. Truly I do.

I don’t have answers. I do have experience in being alone and scared due to illness. I’ll offer that. In that offering, please know, I am scared too. I have the same moments you have still. My illness has not built up an immunity to being afraid of death. I just have a lot of experience of feeling that fear, thinking those thoughts, and having it lift.

My offering is to remind your precious self that you are definitely not alone and isolation breeds all kinds of things that you actually do have some ability to impact. I was surprised to find that out. I still am surprised when intensity lifts and reveals itself as just a part of living rather than the harbinger of demise.

First and foremost, your thoughts are just thoughts. I know they are really, really loud thoughts, but they are just thoughts. You constructed them and shaped them. You made them. We forget that. These thoughts are sometimes helpful, they are often not. There’s more noise and fuzz when there is stress and it gets hard to distinguish what is real and what is not. One of the ways we combat this is by taking in new information. We listen and we add the information to the flow. This may not help because it’s still the same thoughts sifting and sorting the information.

Can we agree that our thoughts sometimes may not be the best, most accurate thing and that news, in its effort to be the most newsiest news, is often riddled with errors? If we can agree with that, can we agree that solely thinking those thoughts and watching that news will only feed the cycle within that feels so bad? We need to break it up. We have to otherwise it will continue to hurt us.

An informed mind is not a panicked mind. Those are very different things. Your feeling of panic will not subside by exposing it to more panic. It will subside by stepping away from that panic because Panic is always inaccurate. We are not doing ourselves any favors by turning our attention to more of it when we are consumed by it. It will make us lose all sense of reality in our attempts to grasp reality.

We can’t be haphazard by the sources of information or our use of this time. If you went from having 60 hour work weeks to now having endless free time it leaves a void. What is filling the void?

The thing that will get us through is intention. Thinking about your day when you have endless time is crucial. I am not someone who adheres to a tight schedule and am not suggesting that you become rigid with your time, but the time will slip away and you will find yourself wondering what you did all day and why you are so tired. You are so tired because your brain was trying to gain purchase somewhere at some point and couldn’t because the autopilot mode feels far too slippery and you can’t seem to find solid ground. Time is a relative thing and if you did not know that before, you are about to know it in a very real way. The minutes can drag and the days can fly by. It’s odd. It’s very, very odd.
Structuring time to some degree is a necessity. Set-up a structure that is loose but something you can bounce around in and keep.

Next up: entertainment. Many of us have endless options to the point of being bored. Excess is overwhelming.

It helps to simplify it. Try to do it in parts and separate the binging of entertainment with something in the real world. Break it up with projects, conversations, connections. The entertainment will be far more enjoyable that way.

Relationships: if you are unhappy and resentful of the people you are quarantined with, it may be time to try and work on that. That’s doable. Truly it is.

If you are experiencing harm from them, that is something else entirely and please reach out to someone for help if it is abusive. If you can’t stand them because they slurp soup, that’s something we can work on.
It will all be amplified which means it is inaccurate. Amplified = inaccurate.

They don’t always slurp, they just are slurping now. This closed down world is mighty claustrophobic (I almost made a pun of cloister-phobic, but didn’t so I should get some points for that). The reason you feel locked in is because you are locked in. They slurped their soup before, your ears were just pointed somewhere else. Zoom out.

Make gratitude lists. Don’t just think about things you are grateful for, make an actual list and do it anytime you feel scared, annoyed, lost. It changes your perspective. Perspective is liberating.

Own your internal world. Your thoughts and feelings are your internal world and you are the only one who gets to construct it. There are endless thoughts we could be having so the thought that we happen to be on is just one of many thoughts you have access to. Pay attention to what gives you clarity and what brings in the noise. That’s yours to shape and yours alone. No one else gets to come in there without an invitation and that includes information and panic.

Lastly… we may find ourselves wanting to use the things that make us forget, the things that separate us from our living momentarily, but ruin us if used regularly. These things are usually addicting. They rewire the brain to search for ease instead of enduring whatever is going on. They overuse the good feeling chemicals in our brain that are finite. They become depleted and need time to regenerate.

The more we use these shortcuts, the less our brain has time to reproduce the neuro-chemicals we need to feel things like ease, comfort, happiness, etc. That’s why we feel so lousy after we use these things in excess. I can tell you that this is very slippery ground in isolation.
Our minds are already a tornado at times right now and if we add in more pressure from increasing drinking, drugs, overeating, porn, binging entertainment to the point of ignoring life, we will feel worse. If you feel like you have some choice over some of these behaviors, consider stepping them down a bit rather than ratcheting them up a bit. If you feel like you don’t have choice over it, reach out for some help because it will make it worse.

Be gentle with your lovely selves. Your life on pause is still life you are living and choices you are making matters.

Even when you think you are the loneliest of the lonely, you are not alone. Not ever.

Of Course We Bought All The Toilet Paper

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

Back in the day I used to go to see funny movies in theaters.
I say back in the day because we can’t go to theaters right now due to the mandatory quarantine happening in places all over where heartbeats exist and life flows. We are not alone in this. It is happening everywhere. That feels important to remember.

I also say back in the day because I have been living a life of isolation due to illness for several years now so I have been unable to go to a movie theater in a long while, even when they were open.

I used to love going to movie theaters, though. I loved watching really funny comedies in a room full of other people laughing. It magnified joy in a lovely way and I would feel connected, alive, happy. How amazing is it that we can be that impacted by each other? It’s lovely when it’s good.

How awful is it that we can be that impacted by each other? It’s hard when it’s bad.

The impact is immense. Your life and my life are so intertwined. My very survival rests in my ability to watch you live, see what I see and respond accordingly. My world and your world are so impacted by each other that the reality of separateness gets called into question all the time. We are far more connected and far more similar than we are comfortable admitting. I have choice and you have choice, but we really do make choices based on the smallest things we have no idea or awareness influence it.

You choose a lot because of me. I choose a lot because of you. That impact changes and fluctuates, but it always exists. We are connected.
The COV19 Pandemic has been a baffling and scary situation to watch as I sit from my long-isolated perch.

It is a world-wide flash mob called “The Dance of Our Primal Fears” brought to you by: “Toilet paper: Need it. Buy It. Wait. That’s too much. You don’t need that much… Hold on…Stop buying it! It’s not the stomach flu!”

It’s a new tag line that is being workshopped by the toilet paper industry. They’re working on it. Needs some polishing. They didn’t see this coming either.

The fear is bringing out the neuroses to the nth degree in all of us. The neuroses we have been polishing and working on for a long time, but we were gonna wait to unleash them upon the world, maybe after the election. They have been a-building for some time now.

Under this new pressure, we are rolling those neuroses out early. Here they come on out like a mighty powerful parade as we buy all of the toilet paper in all of the stores in all of the lands.

We are buying the toilet paper for a reason. And it’s a pretty important reason. We aren’t thinking. We stopped. Of course we did.

Our thinking is distorted anytime we feel fear and anxiety because of the neurochemical response that is just there to keep us safe. That reality is coupled with the long-time building of intense pressure that increased exponentially in 2016. It’s been intense for a while. We couple the fear with the intensity and we react. We see it on display as we take far more than we need and are indifferent to the scarcity we create for others for our own momentary, unsettled, and fleeting sense of relief.

We are having fear. We are having impulses. We are making choices.
I think about the first person that bought more toilet paper. I think about the next person in line who was like, “Why is he buying so much toilet paper? Should I buy more toilet paper?” Then she went and bought more toilet paper. Then the next person walking in the store as she walked out wondered “Why are people buying more toilet paper? There must be a reason.” They bought some more just in case.

That is why we bought all the toilet paper. We do that. We are ridiculous.

We just want to be safe. We are all looking around, assessing, acting and then hoping we got it right.

We are all choosing actions from the same place of fear and some of those actions will hurt us and some will help us and that is completely up to us to determine bit by bit and moment by moment and act by act as we navigate this in isolation-togetherness.

This paradox has to hold the meaning of life. It just has to be in there somewhere.

We have a worldwide shared thought distortion that is damaging on so many levels and in so many ways. It’s a filter that comes from that desperate part of us that just wants to believe that controlling life is possible.

I can control the moment I die if I just stay vigilant. This thought, though, is an absolute and absolutes are flags for thought distortions. It is also a thinking error. We cannot control death.

When we operate in thought distortions, fear is present a lot of the time. We also are about to do some damage if the distortion is the guiding part of our behavior. This distortion takes me from the reality that so many things are needed for my survival and makes me focus on one small thing, what’s in front of me. What I end up losing when I do this is, well…mainly – you.

If I operate in this distortion fully I begin to think that I matter more and you matter less. I then become threatened if you act on something I don’t understand. I then begin to worry that you will get to survive a bit more and I will get to survive a bit less. That changes me and my behavior. It leads to me clinging and clawing and climbing this small part of the world that I can cling and claw and climb because at least I am still moving and at least I am still fighting.

Then I will act selfishly. Then I will act harshly. And then it will be easy for me to become brutal.

It is what happens again and again and again and again when we are afraid on such a massive scale. If you mix our fragility with global panic then people overreact. Of course they do. Of course.

My friends, life is an endless grocery store trip for toilet paper in which people are stopping their carts in our way.

We are huffing and side-eying our communication of anger until it becomes socially feasible and acceptable to yell our frustrations or escalate in a worse way.

We then adjust our path as we lock eyes on the toilet paper we came for.

We then block someone else’s path two seconds later as we get what we came for, not caring for a single moment that they are feeling what we felt two seconds before.

This is us. This is us figuring out how to live while everyone else is figuring out how to live. We have done this before. It’s always what we are doing. It just is bigger right now.

Take a breath, my Dear One. Take a breath. Take another. My friend, take another. And if you didn’t do that. Go back and do it.

Slow. Down. Breathe. That’s fear. It lifts.

Breathe. Breathe. Remember.We have other options.

One of my favorite things written down on paper for my eyes to peruse (as often as I wish) is a line from a poem by ee cummings called “i love you”. The line I love is about the forgetting and the remembering that we keep on doing.

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
on it

I love this because it is the crux of living to me. We are always forgetting and we are always remembering.
We hold something that gives us an understanding of our aliveness and why it’s important.
We hold it for awhile. Then we put it away.
We live.
We exist.
Time passes.
We forget its presence.
We panic that we lost it.
We remember we didn’t.
We retrieve it.
Then we hold it again.

Let’s hold it again. Together.
We are scared and we’ve been acting like it.
We have other options.
We make other choices.
All we have is this moment and in this moment we can choose to do this together.
We are never really apart.
I need you and you need me even when we are healthiest apart. I still need you. You still need me. It just is.
We will survive better together and we forget that.
Now we can remember. We can choose differently.
Of course we can.
Of course.

Cocoon

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

I was hurt really badly some time ago. It was the kind of hurt that you carry in every cell. It was the kind of hurt that wakes you up and refuses to let you sleep. The pain was excruciating at times and settled into an intense ache the times in between. The ache was physical. The ache was emotional. The ache was spiritual. It felt unending. It redefined the word “harm” for me and those closest to me. I didn’t know I could hurt so much day after day after day after day and still not die. I know that now, though.

When I was harmed I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what had happened to me because there was no way I could have anticipated it. My life was solid. I had an amazing family, a job I adored, and friendships that were brilliant and full of life. I had dreams that I was pursuing. I had love at the ready. I had lost a lot of weight. I was exercising. I felt great. I was fully alive to myself and my world more than I had ever been in my 37 years of life up to that point. And then everything changed to such a degree that the life I knew before seemed like it was someone else’s. My lived experience of harm negated all the previous lived experiences of safety. That’s what trauma does to you, locks you in.

Even though I had been safe in this world more often than not, this one event of harm was rewriting me, it seemed. Like a virus that takes over your electronics, it just invaded the depths of my soul and started laying down new patterns of thinking that were the worst, fear-based stuff I had ever known. I thrashed and railed against this reality. I was crawling my way forward and collapsed more than I moved.

I would have stayed there. Laid there. Died there. I would have.

But I didn’t.

And that wasn’t because of me.
It was because of them.
Those people.
Over there.
Coming here.
Holding me.
Loving me.
Reminding me. This isn’t forever. This will change. This will pass. It always does. We are here.

Broken and beaten things need time to heal. A battered soul is the same. We need rest. We need nourishment.

What happens then if the thing you need to have to get better is the very thing you cannot access? I needed to sleep so my body and brain could heal. I couldn’t sleep though because my body and my brain were broken.

I needed to eat so my body and my brain could rebuild. I was unable to eat. I couldn’t swallow water without intense revolting nausea, let alone any food. I couldn’t take anything in as I was desperate to keep all the bad stuff out.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t heal.
Yet I was healing.
Slowly.
Ever so slowly.

You see, I was eating. I was sleeping. It just didn’t look like what it did before. I wanted my life back. I wanted to be able to live and move in this world in the same way I had moments before the harm. I wanted to feel hunger. I wanted to feel rested. I wanted to feel ease. When I thought about eating and sleeping during the worst times of post-traumatic stress, I was comparing it to what I used to be able to do. I was longing for a time that was so different than my own. Of course I was. How could I not?

The bit by bit bites and the minute by minute sleep that I was able to have access to slowly changed the healing process in my body, mind, and spirit. It was slow going, but it was going.

I was not alone. That was what changed it for me. That’s why I didn’t die on the floor of grief and unimaginable sorrow.

When you are that broken and that beaten in some way, you can’t begin to think the next thought of what you should do, let alone act on the next thought. Action was not possible for me. I was needing to be in an idle state, tucked away with comfort, medicine, kindness, compassion, and grace. Where does someone go to get that on Amazon? There is no kit to be purchased. Trust me. I looked.

What I described for you is something that happens from people just being. Those people over there that came over here to hold me, comfort me and love me just sat with me, listened to me and reminded me of who I am. They encouraged me to eat. They encouraged me to sleep. They encouraged me to keep trying. Sometimes I was helped by them mightily, other times I was too far within to hear them. Yet they remained.

You know how you never know what to say when someone tells you bad news? It’s because you don’t need to say anything.
You don’t.
There’s nothing that will fix it.
Nothing.

We hate that feeling, don’t we? We want to have some type of control over the world around us and it is so very strong when we see someone we love hurting. We want to alleviate pain when we see it. We want to skip to the end or hit rewind even though that doesn’t exist. It’s our first reaction, though.

We can’t remove pain. It has a function. It is there for a reason. The focus then is not on removing the pain, but in tending to the harm until the pain subsides as it does with healing.

Your presence is a balm, especially when it is a steady, dependable presence.
Your words, when found from places of love will be far more meaningful than when they come from a place of fear that just wants the pain to stop.

Gradually, there were words shared with me that helped me. That could only have come after being together for awhile. They only were fitting because of the tending that had come before.

Some of the things said to me in the tending that I was able to make use of were really vital because of the love that existed. I believed the sender of the message more because of the care they held for me.

I said, “I feel so much hatred. I don’t want to be a hateful person”
They said, “You are an inhospitable environment for hate. It won’t stick. It can’t. There’s too much love there.”

I said, “I don’t want to relapse because of this. I am so scared to relapse.”
They said, “We’ll sit with you until that passes. We are here to help you not use again. This trauma will not take your recovery.”

I said, “I can’t eat anything, I can’t even swallow water, I can’t do this.”
They said, “How about for today, you eat just a tiny bit more and I will eat a tiny bit less because it hurts me too.”

I was not alone. That was what changed it for me. That’s why I didn’t die on the floor of grief and unimaginable sorrow.

Your love, when expressed through presence or communication, is a magical thing.

Those people over there that came over here to hold me, comfort me and love me wanted my pain to stop. They tried things too. We all did. It just wasn’t effective so we stopped trying to stop pain and redirected our efforts toward living in the moment we were in, with the people we were with, and with the capacity we had. That was enough. That was more than enough.

We created space for healing even though it was so inconvenient and not at all what we wished we would be doing.

We created it still.

I read a joke on some social media platform at some point in the last year at some random time of night and it stuck with me, as random things so often do.

The joke was, “Do you think a caterpillar knows what it’s doing when it’s building its cocoon or is it like, ‘What am I doing’ the entire time?”

It stuck with me because it’s clever and I enjoy humor that wonders about the world around us rather than judges the world around us. I think of that joke on occasion, especially when I see a butterfly (pssttt… spoiler alert, that’s what comes out of the cocoon).

Today, I thought of this joke while brushing my teeth, no butterflies in sight. Something clicked.

I didn’t know I was building a cocoon.
Then the next thought.
I wasn’t.
They were.
I let them.
I had to.

I was a broken and beaten being and they wrapped me up. They waited. They stayed.

None of them knew how to do it and neither did I. We were clueless.
The thread was in the visits, in the expressions of love, in the sharing about their own lives as it reminded me that the world is still happening and that helped me reconnect to it. I cried. They cried. That was some strong, vibrant thread that we had at the ready and didn’t even know.

Our capacity to love is endless and boundless when it meets with others’ capacity to love.

A five-minute phone call is enough if that is what you have to give.
A meal together is enough if that is what you have to give.
A text message is enough if that is what you have to give.
It is not the amount of time of the offering, its the offerer.
It’s you.
That’s the balm.

The hurdle to all of this is our own doubt and fear. We think if we get too close to pain it will hurt too much when it is the exact opposite. Pain hurts less when tended. My goodness, though, isn’t it hard to know that when you are thrashing and railing and afraid? Isn’t it hard to know that when someone you love is the one thrashing and railing and afraid?

I am still cocooned in a lot of ways, but that is changing as I have been emerging more and more.
I laugh far more than I cry these days.
I listen to others far more than I need to be listened to.
I see the transformation more and more. It’s reminiscent of my life before. It’s not the same. It never can be the same because the past doesn’t exist in the present. It is a beautiful, full, vibrant life, though.

I have cocooned others recently, without even knowing it. Just from being and responding I have been able to hold others well too.

That innate thing that prompts a caterpillar to begin the next step for life to be nurtured and continued is the very thing within each of us that prompts us in our living.

We want to emerge. We want to be better, stronger, alive. We think we don’t know how to do that, but we do. It’s within you. It’s within me.

It starts with a prompt, that feeling inside, that nudge to reach out and connect. That is the thread of life, the thread of love reminding you of its presence. It is at the ready, waiting to be woven into sanctuary for one another. It will amaze you as you weave it and will dazzle you when it’s done.