Rocks

Before I was ever medicated, I was creative.

I felt strongly and passionately, I had strong sensory preferences, and I created from whatever I was surrounded by.

Rocks in a river, sticks along a pathway, shells at the beach, food, paints, pens, shapes, textures.

I have never responded positively to control or rules without a why.

I have always needed to process how I feel and find the words from my thoughts through movement that flows with the patterns they make in my head… in my Brain Groove.

When financial stress and relationship hardship  happened, I was the least medicated I had been in a decade. That is beautiful and devastating.

I pathologised my worries and fears and how my humanity needed to process those feelings because I was raised in a society that has taught all of us to pathologise ourselves and to pathologise one another. Just as society did to me, I did to myself, others did to me, I did to others, and so the societal values of compassion, unity, and care are perverted by Power and Ideology.

I recognise our shared values; I see them in my neighbours, my friends, my family.

I see them in the cop, the doctor and the security guard.

The judge, the politician, and the real estate agent.

I see the power they wield in these roles and how that power and thus - the power imbalance - is applied to the lives of people without degrees, without shares, without property, without equity, without food, without water…without. Without privilege - without equal power.

The less power we have, the more disabled we are likely to become. Poverty is disabling. Poverty is a human invention.

War is an expression of power struggle, and only rarely necessity. Treatment orders, lock ups and prisons are expressions of power struggle that harm us all because they require us all to uphold the power imbalance.

I see your humanity. Please take off your badge, lower your taser. Please put down the gavel, the clipboard. I see your humanity, please see mine. I am not seizing power, I am healing from a lifetime of being told that my very Being is not acceptable…That my way of being needed to be chemically altered forever.

Before I was ever medicated, I was creative.

Before I counted calories, I was counting all the different ways I could paint a memory of a feeling I hadn’t voiced before.

Before I placed stickers on poles, I was placing my grief and sorrow with my guilt and shame of a society that so easily perverts our humanity to uphold its own power.

Before I was an illness, I was human.

I am sorry. I am sorry for every way I have upheld the same colonial, imperial societal values I now denounce. I am sorry it has taken me 32 years to get here. I am sorry you are going through it too, I am sorry for the isolation from one another we all hold because of it.

The more I listen to my values and allow myself to Be, the more I question Power and believe myself and believe the experience of others, the patterns and movement flow.

I cannot separate from this ever again. It is my humanity. It connects me to every other human that is, was, or will be.

It connects me to every other being, every flower, every petal, every bird, butterfly and fish.

• - - - - - -

Individualism is isolating and hurts all of us. It allows us to hurt one another and then absolve ourselves of communal understanding and healing.

We go to the doctors office instead.

/ on capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, psychiatry, climate change, and plutocracy.