Filed under: Marriage, Mental Illness, Race, Society | Tags: mental illness, race, schizophrenia, society
When you listen to made up rules and say in the voice of the man that you are wrong and inappropriate you speak of me and all people. Please don’t say it for me. I have heard it all my life. It gets old. Instead do what has never been done. At least not by King, or Jefferson or Lincoln. We don’t know what freedom is. Believe in yourself for a moment and forget the world. The world is temporary but you are timeless. Believe in yourself and understand the woman no one understands. She stands on the edge. You will know her and feel no wall between you and her if you believe. Stand with yourself and stand with her. Believe in yourself for a moment and you will forget the villain the world makes from the things you cannot stand to see in yourself. The things you hide and throw away wait in a sea of unconditional love that we do not accept as our home, too. The things we throw away threaten life because the things we throw away threaten life. The “living” are like ghosts. They still oppress what is black in themselves. Free them and free yourself. Speak in one voice. Your own.
Note: I wrote this (above) after reading some mental health blogs yesterday. A couple of times I felt restricted in what to say in comments on a blog or two.
My views are not commonly held. I don’t believe in mental illness. The mentally ill are not singularly mentally ill. Everyone suffers from what people with mental illness suffer from: ourselves turning against ourselves. What manifests as more pronounced/apparent mental illness is yourself trying to bring attention to an infection, a foreign body within: societal expectations that rule us instead of our own hearts.
My central struggle with schizophrenia is believing in something outside of myself more than myself and letting it rule my behavior. In psychotic episodes I do things I don’t want to do to be “good,” like walk outside at 4 a.m. in the snow with no shoes on. I followed the voices and beliefs I previously found to be false when I did that recently. People do the equivalent of that everyday when they go to a job they hate, or marry someone they don’t want to marry. They are against themselves, like I was on that early morning about a month ago (Jan. 31, 2014).
Everyone suffers from mental illness, i.e. a split self. Some of us just can’t take it anymore. This seems like a problem, but consider a slave who decides he just can’t be a slave anymore but no one sees he’s a slave except himself, or a man or woman in an abusive relationship who feels he/she just can’t take it anymore but no one acknowledges that the relationship is abusive. That’s a diagnosed mentally ill person’s experience–in my view. No one agrees with me, so it’s hard to just leave a comment on a person’s blog. What manifests as mental illness is not the problem; it’s a solution.
Filed under: Mental Illness, Society | Tags: psychosis, reality, schizophrenia, society
“I would believe more in what we call ‘reality’ if it included what people really thought, felt and did, and didn’t exclude so much of what we consider ‘private,’ ‘shameful,’ or ‘inappropriate.'”
— Marla Luster
Filed under: Society | Tags: beauty, character development, discrimination, healing, Once Upon A Time, produce, society
The side of apples we never see. And for good reason. It's best apple growers keep apples such as these to themselves.
I don’t really believe what I said in the caption. But seeing the apple disturbed me, and still does. I kind of didn’t want it at the store. Maybe because it seemed no one else wanted it. It and three other apples were the last of the organic cameo apples on sale at Kroger for 99 cents a pound.
The question is, Why did the apple’s appearance bother me? I think if we see a certain look often enough, we start to consider it normal, or safe. Does that mean everything rare starts to look untrustworthy? I think perhaps it does.
The bottom of the apple especially disturbs me. It’s kind of flat, not knobby and curvy as it meets at the center, or rind, of the apple. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an apple like it; growers must not usually ship them to stores.
I bought the apple precisely because I didn’t want to discriminate. Also, I assumed it’d still taste good.
Of course, I’m writing this because I feel my apple experience sheds light on why humans tend to discriminate against people who are different.
I often lash out at society, but I’m aware that it, like everyone, is innocent, coping with challenges the best it knows how.
This occurred to me Sunday night watching a show I once liked, Once Upon A Time. I hate that the witch is so villainous, and we don’t get much view into who she is, other than… bad. I liked the show better earlier in the season probably because we got more insight into why the evil witch does villainous–annoying!–things. Other characters in the show have also gotten more one-dimensional as the season progresses.
Once again, I think it does people a disservice to hide apples or character traits that are different, rather than facing them head on. In my last post I said I thought everyone should accept their natural selves, and not alter their appearances so much.
I’ve wondered if I was unfair to transgender people, or people who crossdress. I just feel it’d be more comfortable for us all if there weren’t such narrow definitions of beauty, intelligence, and what it means to be “man” or “woman.” I personally found it freeing to stop straightening my hair, which I believe is influenced by the idea that caucasian features are most beautiful.
They are the features we see most often promoted as beautiful in commercials, movies, magazine covers, etc. Despite that, I know I can’t be chopped liver. Nature produced me, just like my ugly apple–except maybe it’s not so ugly. It’s just usually hidden as if it’s unacceptable to be seen–like my African American women’s hair.
Off to eat my apple with some tahini (made from sesame seeds I unintentionally burnt) mixed with homeade cashew butter.
Filed under: Human Potential, Society, Writing | Tags: balance, harmony, interracial relationships, memoir, race, racism, society, writing
Haven’t felt as interested in posting here. I’m starting to feel like I might really have something worth writing about for a writing career, starting with my memoir. I’m someone who’s always felt like I wasn’t worth much to this world, just being who I am, different. I’m starting to see I mean something in another way, the same way anyone who’s born into a society that tells her she’s less than because she’s black, or mentally ill, or too negative, or too blunt/offensive. The way I’m referring to is believing in something greater than this world (like black slaves did). Another way is to kind of live in my own world, and believe whatever I want to believe. Believe I’m beautiful, even though all my life I’ve seen the men I find most attractive choose women who look nothing like me, the women society says are most beautiful. Believe huge chunks of my life are worth something, are meaningful, even though they’re considered something to hide and “shameful,” like having a mental illness or sexually transmitted disease is.
At the end of the day, all anyone has is his/her beliefs, whatever one chooses them to be. We all live in our own worlds, but too many of us obviously shape our worlds with society’s beliefs. Why should I make my world so much like our world? It’s natural that I believed in the only reality I knew, but doing so only distanced me from really being in (speaking, writing) this world.
Since I was a little girl I enjoyed unfolding love stories in my head. (I didn’t want black girls in my stories, even though I was one–so I kind of understand when I see only white women in perfume and Victoria’s Secret ads.) As an adult, I look back and see I had it partly right from the start. When the world you find yourself in tells you you can’t have what you want (like being pretty, or the white boy on the other side of the playground), dream it up in your head, and have it there.
And when the time was right, I could let all the dreams go and the stories go, and watch them materialize in front of me. This is what I hope to do, bring my world to the world I was born into, and hopefully make this world warmer.
I understand people hear the black side of racism all the time, but maybe it’s because white people (and others) don’t know how to tell their side. How can calling one witch “good” and one witch “bad,” hurt the “good” witch? To find the answer, look at whose schools are plagued with school bullying, school shootings, eating disorders, suicides. Telling someone he’s valuable only because he’s rich and white hurts a lot, probably just as much as telling someone he’s less than because he’s black and poor, and poor because he’s black. I know partly because I felt it one day in a vision I had while dozing off to sleep of small white children in an all-white school.
I’ve written more than I intended. I’ll always believe in the power of harmony/balance, that what one human being suffers from is not so different from what ails another. The happiness of each of us is wrapped up in the happiness of all of us, and so I doubt very many of us have been happy in the history of mankind, considering segregation, slavery, and (hmmmm…) maybe what happened to Julius Caesar. I’m no history buff.
A poem for yeh:
I’m a human in the world God made
A misfit in man’s world
I’m an evil spider
A nigger
A dairy cow
A buffalo
Perhaps the last of my kind
Unless I’m a cockroach.
Filed under: Human Potential, Race, Society | Tags: character, class, classism, fitting in, human value, race, society, suicide
The first time I considered suicide I was 16. It was Friday night and my twin sister had gone out with her friends. When I think back to my high school days I remember wearing baggy jeans like the girl rap group TLC, but I think I wore them only in 9th grade. I wore my hair in a stressed pony tail, stressed because it was tight, and the hair in the back fell and stuck out. My hair was chemically straightened then, like all the black girls I knew of (except Whoopi Goldberg, and she really disappointed me for this reason). Also, “pony tail” is an exaggeration because I wore something like a banana clip to make my hair look longer.
Hair was always a problem for me, knowing that all cute black girls had “good” (curly) or long hair. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to wear my hair loose, not in braids or hair bands, because I thought it was more of a grown up style, and most certainly like a white girls’ style.
Anyway, I’m telling this because baggy pants and “bad” black-girl hair (and many other imperfections I was aware of) made me feel unattractive, insignificant. This may have been partly why I felt expendable.
But the main reason I wanted to disappear that night was because I felt like I was not doing what I was supposed to to enjoy life. I had no friends. Because of that I never went to parties or events. This may sound unworthy of suicidal thoughts.
But I believe being a valuable part of society is very important to human beings and is likely a key reason people consider suicide. We have very narrow definitions of what makes someone valuable in America. These are some standards I’m aware of:
1.) For one, being unsexual seems important. Whenever politicians are exposed for being sexual (for example, sending women shirtless photos of themselves) it threatens their job. Also, it seems a lot of people have sexless marriages, since psychologists and magazines often offer tips for couples to get back “that spark.”
When I first learned about sex at 13, and went to school the next day, I looked at all my teachers and wondered, “Does Mrs. So and So have sex? She’s married, so she must…” But none of the teachers I looked at, with the definition of sex (and a sex scene) in mind, seemed at all sexual. Maybe they looked too unhappy, or uptight, or perfect, and sex seemed to involve getting messy. I’m not sure what seeing my teachers as unsexual meant to me then, but today it means that none of my teachers had good sex. So, first rule of fitting in is hiding your sexuality.
3.) Another rule of being valuable in society is: Make a lot of money. People sometimes kill themselves when they face financial trouble. In two instances I heard about in the past year, people killed their whole families and themselves, reportedly because of financial problems. I thought more recently of killing myself because I didn’t want to be penniless or go into more debt to pay bills. I think feeeling like a failure is what really makes one feel expendable, not just having no money. But having no money is considered failure in America, and probably lots of other places.
I really wish more suicidal people would stay. America needs people who see that life here could be better, and one way to do that is acknowledging that the contents of our characters matter more than the contents of our wallets.
3.) Marriage also seems very important in making someone seem alright with the group, and someone others can hang out with. It used to really bother me that one of my coworkers tried so hard to make friends with another woman at work who was married, like her. It also bothered me that she seemed not to try to make friends with the people in the classroom who worked with her, such as myself.
Hmmm, now that I think of it, all of the people in the class, including me, were black, but the friend-seeking coworker was white. One man in the class was married, but he was much older. Still, people put too much value on external things like age, race, and marital status in making friends.
4.) Being white helps a lot in making someone valuable. In a very stereotype-based society (where employers tell employees to smile at customers to be “friendly,” for example, rather than just being one’s self), white people have the closest thing to being valued for the contents of their characters because they are portrayed in almost every movie, television commerical, magazine article, and news story there is. They have hundreds, thousands more opportunities to be seen as having various kinds of personalities.
Also, they more often have money, and spouses (than black people), and are more likely to have features we consider good-looking, such as straight, long, blonde hair, and blue eyes. (They also tend to be thinner than black women.) Those features describe the models gracing every Victoria’s Secret ad I get in the mail, except one that had a lot of models featured. One of the models was a light-skinned, black-looking girl with long, silky brown hair. (It could’ve just been me, but I felt I could see her insecurity, and insecurity speaks louder than beauty or sexy lingerie.)
There are probably lots of other appearance-driven values that make individuals valuable in America, but these are some major ones that come to mind right now. My advice is to rebel against these values as often as possible. Get married because it means something to you personally, not because getting married by age 30 is on society’s “to do” list for you.
As mentioned, these standards can be deadly, driving some to suicide for falling short of “perfect.” Many others will find themselves unhappy after pursuing such trophies (whiteness, money, marriage) and neglecting their dreams, true desires, true selves.
Enlustered 