Show of hands and just so we can point some things out
All the black people who had similar moments of school trauma.. How many of you were were in classes/schools/ environments where you were less than 20% of the class if not the only one
*raises hand*
Now how many of the black people in those classes were called on to be the spokesperson for all black people?
*keeps hand raised*
How many were asked where the other black person in the class was when that other person of color so happened to be absent?
*keeps hand raised*
How many have had white people in that very same class try and tell you that your experience as a black person in a white supremacist nation can’t be as bad because they had their fee fees hurt by a black person?
*arm is getting tired*
Whose White classmates tried to set them up with the other smart Black kid because being smart and Black, the two had everything in common?
*raises hand*
Ooh, ooh!
Who got constantly mistaken for another black person, who you look nothing alike?
*waves hand around*
Whose high school teacher tried to act like their misbehavior might reflect badly on Black people during a field trip to a foreign country?
*raises hand*
*raises hand*
Whose elementary-through-high school teachers constantly told you and your parents you couldn’t keep up with the work, regardless of the fact that you were keeping up with the work?
Whose teachers were always reminding you how smart you were for a Black girl?
*raises hand*
My teachers took books from me! My mother has never lit into any human as she did that day
more lars & the real girl (spoilars!)
- lars’ actually very fucking convincing panic attack made me cry. real talk.
- also the community response in this film is kind of overwhelming me. they come together and they very gently leverage the nature of the delusion against him—treating her as fully real allows them time to gently deprive him of her by offering to cut her hair, giving her a job, asking if she’d like to volunteer at the hospital. it’s kind of blowing my mind that this is actually about the healing/transformative power of community.
- at the same time i really have issues with the way lars is “outmaneuvered.” it sometimes does happen that third parties intervene to influence when and how a person with mental illness accesses care. i have been in both positions—both the person who needed (more) help but didn’t know it and the person who has facilitated an acutely mentally ill person access care—in very different ways and at very different times. it’s way too common to forget that this is a story with two very distinct and equally compelling sides and multiple different outcomes, not all of them desirable. not all people with compromised judgment are mentally ill, and not all people with mental illness have compromised judgment. framing this kind of situation as a less-competent person being outmaneuvered by more-competent peoples perpetuates the dangerous false assumption that mental illness automatically confers unilaterally compromised judgment.
- but i do think that this movie puts a really powerful idea out into the universe in an exciting way starring ryan gosling. a caring and engaged community that understands having a certain degree of respect for people’s perceived realities can be incredibly fucking powerful. and that is really fucking important.
- but also i am writing this as i watch the movie (side effect: this is making it take me a really long time to watch the movie, and i really wish brandanowitz would shut his stupid white dude face because if this movie turns out to be another ‘white dude learns to be a caring respectful and generally decent person’ movie i will be fucking cranky)
- ryan gosling is giving me a lot of feelings. this whole ‘i don’t understand how to let other people love me’ thing is resonating with me really strongly. the bowling scene kills me. patricia clarkson is slaying me the deadest. like i’m sure there’s more to be said on an analytical level but this is affecting me really deeply on a personal level.
- conspicuous if not excessive bechdel test failure. lots of ladies, all talking about lars (or bianca) all the time.
*also, where is that crossover? lars takes bianca to luke’s, bianca plays the tambourine for lane’s band, kirk and bianca perform stand up comedy together, etc.
disclosure. [tw: suicidal ideation.]
blatantly work tumblin: because it’s friday, because i have too many feelings to focus, so i might as well get them out.
we are planning a post on antidepressants to run on the blog the week after thanksgiving. i am looking for patients blogging about side effects.
it would be so easy to self-disclose; to say: as the one person in five in this office, i can definitively say that yes, the side effects can be “gnarly” (as my coworker K. put it) but not wanting to kill myself definitely outweighed the misery of the week i literally didn’t stop sweating (thanks cymbalta) or even the time i shat myself (thanks zoloft). not wanting to kill myself outweighs fatigue and sleep disturbances and feeling like a party pooper for having to head home by 10 on a weeknight by about one million percent. not wanting to kill myself even outweighs issues like slightly increased blood pressure and potentially increased blood glucose levels, at least in the short term.
but i didn’t. i haven’t. i probably won’t. because i’m concerned about how that information will be received by my coworkers. i’m concerned about what my supervisor will say in the future to potential employers.
the irony of considering myself deeply committed to busting stigma but opting not to self-disclose because i’m concerned about stigma is definitely not lost on me.
tw depression
so hyperbole and a half did a post about depression.
i read it.
it kind of feels like all of the bones in my torso have been shattered, but in a good way? it’s weird that i have been thinking and talking and reading about mental illness for a huge chunk of my life but i never felt like anyone really, really got it until now. that is exactly what it was like for me, the first time. only i never went to the video store. i went out to dinner with my family for my fourteenth birthday. on the way to the restaurant i started crying. i couldn’t stop for five hours. the next day my mom called and booked me an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Tiger Beatdown › World Mental Health Day and political pain.
There is no doubt in my mind that my mental health issues have a strong innate or biological component. Some of my earliest memories center around having anxiety that I knew on some level was “not normal.” But there’s also no doubt in my mind that in a world without fat hatred, in a world where bullying wasn’t tolerated, in a world where we learned early to talk openly about our emotions and where having thoughts that “weren’t normal” wasn’t something to be hidden, I would struggle much less with anxiety on a daily basis than I currently do. My first go-round with depression was triggered when, as a pre-teen, I went on a diet so extreme my mother threatened to take me to a psychiatrist if I didn’t eat (but which didn’t count as anorexia because I didn’t lose my period, so fuck you very much, DSM-IV). That speaks to me so, so loudly about the effect oppressive systems have on individual mental health.
wait but what about “medication is the easy way out”?
i almost feel bad about holding a grudge against the person who said that to me as a freshman for all four years of college and probably until i die.
almost.
(Source: vsawyers)
Bitch Magazine: We're All Mad Here: Dating While Crazy
Common perceptions of mental illness and relationships suggest that mentally ill people do not belong in relationships, do not deserve love and affection, and are even dangerous to marry or get involved with. Not for nothing are undesirable prospective partners ‘crazy bitches,’ are former partners whom we’re supposed to hate ‘crazy exes.’ It is highly unusual to see a depiction of a functional relationship with a mentally ill partner or partners; such a thing is alien to the arbiters of relationships in pop culture.
[emphasis mine.]
unlearning this shit is really hard, folks. so please please be conscious of how you might be perpetuating it.
(Source: se-smith)
the thing about recent doctor who is
that obviously Moffat gets an F— on lady agency and historical sensitivity, but between “Night Terrors” and “Vincent and the Doctor” he is doing kind of a bang-up job on integrating experiences generally construed as mental illness into the broader cultural narrative, and really humanizing them. “Night Terrors” is really all about how stigma perpetuates the crazy cycle and how love and support are instrumental in healing (the healing itself was obviously unrealistically speedy, but from a showrunner’s perspective, yeah, that’s the boring part).
(I think it does bear a gendered analysis that both “Night Terrors” and “Vincent and the Doctor” are about male central characters, and I mean, obviously Vincent is a dude but I would have rather liked it if George had been a girl child, but blah blah sexism George’s behavior wouldn’t really have been seen as super abnormal for a girl, only medium abnormal, even if the level of emotional distress had been the same, blah blah kyriarchy sucks.)
So yeah. Moffatt is hella problematic, but he also occasionally does good things. “Night Terrors” and “Vincent and the Doctor” are both really important to me and also make me wish the Doctor was real.
this ain't livin': Debunking Mythologies About Mental Illness and Domestic Violence
The persistent social attitude that the danger in relationships with mentally ill people comes from the person with mental illness makes it very difficult to deconstruct and combat this particular link between violence and mental illness. This framing makes it easy to dismiss violence against mentally ill people as an isolated outlier, rather than evidence of a systemic social problem, because everyone knows that mentally ill people are violent and dangerous and frightening. We need to take measures to protect the rest of society from them, not the other way around, goes the popular logic, and thus a group of people identified and targeted as victims will continue to experience abuse at shocking rates.
What’s striking to me about this piece is how strongly parts of it resonated with me, as a person who experiences ongoing mental illness of varying severity, and who self-identifies as “crazy” for stigma-busting purposes:
Popular perceptions of mental illness include the idea that mentally ill people are ‘difficult.’ Hard to get along with, impossible to engage in a meaningful way, too hard to be around. Work. … For mentally ill people, there is a constant reminder that you are not good enough for relationships, you don’t deserve them…
It’s incredible to me how many of these internalized beliefs I still have.
(Source: se-smith)
