cycles

I swear to the good goddess I feel like the last three weeks have felt like a year but also a day. It’s wild how one moment can shift you into a new chapter of your mental health journey and even when it’s a chapter of finding a shift that feels more stable than any have in ages, it can still throw you for a fucking loop. And even though the celebration comes it doesn’t stop the fact that it will still feel incredibly hard and uncomfortable to do.

Living through history is a wild experience, especially when you can already seeing the history books of future generations writing themselves in real time. There is something about having lived four years in the deeply traumatic experience that was a global pandemic. And it truly feels like things have just snowballed since then and we are now one big ass avalanche racing down the mountain and we are now faced with the fact that we need to find a way to stop it from wiping progress off the map.

They say history repeats itself. It’s a sobering experience to see how quickly that cycle can regenerate. And the things that are different this time around hold such an incredibly radical ‘inevitable’ and ‘unprecedented’ weight you cannot help but feel our realities shifting before our eyes. But I’ll tell you what, the last three weeks have been a different kind of new.

I have to be honest, when Biden finally (and rightfully) stepped out of the race for presidency, the immediate momentum that sprung into fruition to take serious action to fight fascism was invigorating on a collective level. I could actively feel the collective rush of the thing that had been missing for too long—hope. I felt hope rush into my body like a shot of adrenaline right in the fucking veins and a heaviness leave my bones that I didn’t realize I had been carrying around. Which makes me think it had been a really, really long time—or at least longer than it should have been.

From that moment I could see everything shift. Suddenly the future wasn’t just a tunnel of fear, continued grief and legitimate worry. There was suddenly a light. It’s an uphill hike to get there, but goddamn it, it’s worth the work. And it was the hope of a future that didn’t look as bleak as the one we were barreling towards. To realize how deeply your physical and mental health is impacted by outside forces can bring a reckoning, but the willingness to be brave and stand up to hate and the judgement of out side sources can give you the courage to face the shame and judgment you have for yourself. And that’s how it all comes full circle to a shift into hope being a catalyst for some of the deepest healing I’ve been able to access.

Here’s the thing about facing your mental health head on. Even the wins can come with deep grief. As one of my favorite quotes goes, ‘you must feel the grief in order to feel the joy’ and THAT is the process that healing your mind has to embrace. But the more you practice it—the more you truly face the darkest parts of you that have the ability to flood your mind with shame and judgment and hurt and fear no longer feel in control—to be able to sit with the truths that hurt the most and the traumas that rooted into your bones is the exact balm needed in order to heal those scarred neuropathways that perpetuate false and hurtful narratives that don’t belong to you. The were forced on you. And because you are a neurodivergent human with deeply rooted generational trauma and a genetic makeup that is already prone to mental illness, being forced into systematic expectations that are rooted in control and the lack of willingness to learn, adapt and change was always going to have an inevitable ending.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I’m talking about myself here. But in turn, I recognize that my experience is not solitary. My community these days is made up almost entirely (I’m actually pretty sure entirely) of neurodivergent people, many of whom suffer from pretty severe mental health issues, including myself. We all have different cocktails, some of us have more than one that likes to say hey from time to time, but there is one very big and incredibly important unifying factor—we all understand what it is to suffer from chronic mental illness. To feel like you are alone in your thoughts and emotions because we have not been raised in a society that chooses to believe people when they talk about their experiences can be incredibly isolating. To be told your experience is not real therefore isn’t valid because someone does not have the ability to see past their own experiences can take a toll on someone who has endured such invalidation on a regular basis. But when you find a community of people who can validate the hardest of experiences to move through on a daily basis even though it might look different to others can be life shifting.

Through my mental health journey I continue to work through radical acceptance of so many very hard things to accept, mainly being the reality of having a chronic ‘invisible’ illness. And that process has led me to that continuous deconstructing of the belief systems I have been raised in and which have been destructive versus constructive for me as a person. There are many systems that I’m looking at, but being a human who was socialized female growing up has it’s inherent labor that I have been expected to accept as my own without any question. But I have learned to become weary of anyone or anything that tells me I am in anyway ‘lesser than’ because of who I am as a femme person.

We do not consent as children to be brought into this world, that is a decision made by our parents in one way or another, even if it’s under the worst of circumstances. And in turn, to have expectations put upon you from basically the moment your parents learn of your sex while still LITERALLY GROWING INSIDE OF YOUR MOTHER is a pretty wild thing to do to a kid. It takes the agency away from us before we can even conceptualize the idea of what it is to have to learn how to literally keep yourself alive as a creature on this planet. And one of the hardest things to learn is how to regulate our nervous system that is programed to live in fight or flight because we come from mammals that had to survive that way. And these days, the hardest thing to learn is how to emotionally regulate ourselves but that is the biggest piece of this puzzle we call life that is missing. And in order to emotionally regulate ourself, we have to learn how to feel the emotions, name them, feel them and know you are loved enough to feel safe to express even the most extreme of feelings. But emotional safety has not been prioritized and in turn we have continued to pass down the traumas that have lived on for generations within our ancestral line.

Ok, yes yes, I know this is a mouthful to take in but goddamn it this is how my mind works and has been processing and because of my personal cocktail of mental illness I have to be able to understand the ins and outs of depression and the nervous system on an incredibly scientific meets somatic level. Ultimately, the crux of the biscuit is this—

In order to feel safe in our bodies and as our authentic selves, we have to feel accepted and validated by those we love. And so often our realities are ignored or shrugged off or invalidated because it can be incredibly hard to understand that which we have not felt or experienced ourselves. And that’s where empathy and the willingness to not only trust but believe people when they share some of the most vulnerable information with you, especially when it is about their genuine, authentic experience.

There has been a huge rise in individualism over the last 100 years or so, exponentially escalated around 50 years ago. And individualism can and often leads to a lack of empathy for those whose experiences are different than your own—and for those who have been privileged by colonialism it requires a deep accountability to make active changes to deconstruct the belief systems that have given you a sense of permission and ‘right’ to let fear and hate control how you treat other people.

No one is better than anyone else. We are all born with the same inherent right—the right to live and exist on this planet as who we are. And at the root of that is a lil baby animal that has barely evolved on the grand scheme of things and what we actually need to survive is food, water, shelter and community. Three of those things (the things we quite literally need to physically survive) have been capitalized—and let’s be real, the fact that you can be arrested for being unhoused is a fucking insane concept because we live in a country that actively tells us if we do not have the money, a CONCEPT WE MADE UP, we cannot afford to keep ourselves alive. And going to jail in this country actively strips you of many basic rights that are inherently ours.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am to have found the community that is helping me survive. To feel you are not alone in this really fucking overwhelming existence that works everyday to oppress those who are seen as ‘lesser than’ and strip you of all authenticity is a gift beyond measure.

I’m going to stop rambling, I can be longwinded I know, but I’m gonna try and put a button on this:

Believe people when they share their hurt with you. Do not take another person’s truth as an attack against you, the odds are you are projecting and would benefit from taking a moment to check your ego and privilege. Every single person you meet deserves your respect until they give you a reason to lose it. Take care of the Earth, we came from her literally (every living organism evolved from fungus which fucking tracts am I right? We come from FUNGUS) and take a moment to put judgment and fear aside so you might better understand an experience you have not had. And most importantly, have grace for others as well as yourself. You deserve to find the happiness you wish for and the love you always wanted.

I love you. I’m proud of you. It’s really hard to exist when life can feel so painful, but you keep trying and that is a huge fucking win. You matter, your mental health matters and I will keep doing everything I can to heal the hurt for all the women who came before me—which in turn helps heal the collective.

Goddamn my brain is tired. But that’s what comes when you actively work to rewire neuropathways in your brain—that’s mental evolution baby. It’s gonna be hard. But it’s always worth the fight.