Mental Health in 2020 (?)
Does anybody have any?
The end of 2019 was the strongest my health had been in quite some time — I had cleared myself of mold, was consistent with my therapies and was on the route to getting answers for my ailments.
Then 2020 happened and not much more needs to be said.
I felt like I was given such a gift at the beginning of 2020 — being hired by the photography collective I had been teaching for to help them grow and scale.
At the beginning of the worst year, I got my dream job. And as reality crumbled outside, i was grateful every day for a community, a task and a why.
Then the BLM movement rose and my emotions knew before my intelligence that reality would never be the same because I slipped into full dissociative psychosis — unable to separate my lived experiences of being racist or being around racism from my day to day.
I grew up in a way where I saw and participated in a lot of ugly racist shit as a child — but that’s another story for another time.
But that realization hit me like a freight train that would never allow me to head back in the direction I came from.
I was headed somewhere new and that was not a thing in my control.
And then in July, I followed suit with the rest of humanity and had my existential career crisis with the collapse of the company I was employed with and losing half my income.
That was the first time during this experience that I slowed down and asked myself the questions other people had been asking for the last 4 months:
“Who am I now?”
I did a lot of yelling and ranting and consuming during the period in which I tried to frantically answer that question — and then I just stopped.
I allowed the depression to take me for a moment because it was screaming to me.
And while low hurts, I know there are messages for me down there.
So every time I am called to go, I try not to resist.
No one learns from a place of fear.
And when I got down there — it was clear: my dream job hadn’t been lost, I had just been trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
And that’s always been my journey — try and fit in and blend in when you feel like a dog walking upright wearing pants — if it’s cute enough everyone will let the weirdness slide.
But if you’ve ever met me in person, you’ll know there’s a divide between who I am here and there.
Because who I am here is my highest self and gives zero fucks about shame or gender or money.
But my physical body holds my lived experiences, my trauma and my biases. And she has always struggled to live her truth — but that’s because I haven’t been honest about what that is.
I’ve repeatedly tried to fit myself into the commercial working world, saying that if I’m going to support myself as a freelancer forever, I need to integrate with normal society.
I need to have “normal” clients and make money shooting branded content and participate in the matrix.
And then I spent the rest of summer and fall doing psychedelics and having weird sex and as I am on the last quarter of my 20s, finally came to the realization
that is bullshit.
That is a story I tell myself to fit the narrative that society reinforces: their way is the only way.
I’ve never accepted that answer.
Or rather, that answer refuses to work for me.
Because I’ve tried
And suffered as a result
I’ve made my mental health worse by lying to myself about what I actually want to make me happy.
Because going after what I actually want means I might struggle and even fail to actually get it.
But if I go after something I care for less, if it doesn’t happen I’ll be more okay.
This year has taught us a lot.
And one of my loudest lessons has been
