“We build ourselves prisons and live there, sometimes all of our lives.
We think we will be safe in them, but we just cut ourselves off from everyone else.”
Larissa
It’s my great good fortune to be employed in an environment which allows me to see and speak with some of the most remarkable human beings I imagine live on Planet Earth. They are nondescript, often poor and many times uneducated in the ways of suburban American lives.
Sometimes they are loud, often they see things I do not and can describe them in detail. Often their thoughts do not resonate with my experience, but the offering of them resonates within the speaker, sometimes to such a degree that no one else can speak to the thoughts presented.
The people I am fortunate enough to work among have that thing about them that most Americans fear, more so, I think, than most of us fear death. They have diagnoses. They have mental illness diagnoses.
Yes, the things we fear greatly: schizophrenia (often of the paranoid type,) schizoaffective disorder, severe bi-polar disorders, dysthymic disorders, acute glossalaliac mania, and depressive disorder. Many also have the lesser Axis II diagnoses that add a tremendous handicap to both themselves and the practitioners who work with them, the families who once (and occasionally still do) loved them (and sometimes contorted them into beings as brittle and delicate as funnel cakes,) and for those who live near them, interact with them and wish that they would just go away: borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, anti-social personality disorder and the frightening to others dissociative identity disorder.
Some of those I work among are persistently at risk for self-harm, up to and including suicide. Very few and very rarely do they express a desire to harm others (no more so, anyhow, than the 10-million-times-a-day-said-by-most-children-and-many-adults-and-generally-not-considered-acutely-threatening “I wish you (him, her or they) would die” or a so-usual-as-to-be-not-noticed-in-the-suburbs “I’m gonna kill you (her, him or them.)”
Odd, no, how the addition of a diagnosis that scares the hell out of layman and professional alike (some if not all of those listed above) can make the mundane startlingly emergent, leading to calls for crisis clinicians and police officers, ambulances, psych-wards and state-owned psychiatric hospitals.
Ask politicians if scaring the bejesus out of the population isn’t an effective way to govern unhampered a supposed democratic republic. Better yet, ask yourself how many freedoms and tolerances are you willing to forego for the constitutional right to live forever regardless the fact of your own mortality.
“Larissa” (not, of course, even close to her real name) is one of those folks I am privileged to work among and with. She has one of those dreaded diagnoses so many of us perceive as nightmares on nights when we’ve over indulged in peanut-butter, dill pickle and bleu cheese with Alfredo sauce pumpernickel crust pizza chased by a 6-pack of PBRs.
Yeah, truly exquisite and torturous nightmares engulf us when we consider the possibility of a D-I-A-G-N-O-S-I-S. Frightening stuff, gimme a flaming pit in the deepest Puritan hell instead.
Yet, when one finds herself 21 years down the road working with such folks in one capacity or another, she finds that in most respects, hell, all respects on most days, she feels more safe and blessed to be among them than she feels herself to be among her suburban neighbors and acquaintances. There is no creature alive, I am certain, more liable to erratic, unhinged behavior than a suburbanite on a highway or road with an SUV or sedan.
No creature can be as unpredictably dangerous as the remnants of the disappeared white middle-class who profoundly believe that the ubiquitous relegation of a Puritan-based “Sinners in the hands of an” Angry God to fireside tales designed to frighten children has somehow managed to denigrate their supposed democracy to a plaything of “socialists and those people” who wish to enchain them in a subservience they grew up thinking was reserved to those of browner hue.
They decry their stolen wealth that they declare was taken by those who struggle to eat three meals a day and buy Pampers for their babies and in not admitting that they have been hoodwinked, bamboozled, relegated, stolen from, and demeaned by the very iconic paragons of America’s “wealth equates to righteousness and we do God’s work” financiers, corporate heads and minions, corporatist-Neolibs, Libertarians and -Neocons who they fervently dream will raise them to the level they believed they were born to. Those people are dangerous and frightening.
However, the fever dreams of the disappeared American middle-class and the cynical dictatorships of the wealthy and their minions in modern America aren’t the focus of the canvas I’m trying to paint in this essay.
The words attributed above in the epigraph to “Larissa” are the focus of that canvas. But, I know that her words bear as well on the “American problems” delineated above. We who make prisons for our selves live in the realm of our severe and persistent nightmares. We alienate ourselves from others and find our only friendships are among those who fear the same things as we fear: relationship, compassion, social consciousness and conscience. Afterall, the trope goes for the past three hundred years: God’s blessings are evidenced by the wealth and power he grants us, not by the good and decent works we do nor by finding that love and care are inexplicably among the few slivers of human existence that are both plentiful and free-of-charge.
“I dance in your words. Appreciating your vulnerability. Surprisingly comfortable with my own. Your work is beautiful. Your journey is felt with passion and respect. Rest comfortably in yourself for you inspire me.”
Words from the Netz, graciously posted in comments here. I give her a curtsy in return and offer my hand, how else respond to such a gift?
In her words I dance, knowing full well what it costs to open just a tiny crack in a prison wall that’s built on years of torment and harm received. The common wisdom wraps us, as smooth and constricting as swaddling, or wrappings on the feet of classical Chinese women. It whispers through our limbs and alights while we sleep in our dreamscapes, you must be strong and alone to survive, else the demons will come again and ensnare you, begin the torture again.
Yet, what we know is true is that our dreams possess us even in daylight. Voices from the past flitter or shout through the bones we use to dance. Fear ripples through the muscle that moves the bones we dance with. Still, we maintain our notions of prisons, the safety that inheres inside the walls, closed away in dark cells where, if we are fortunate, the fears cannot find us.
Alas, no one is that fortunate for fear holds the keys to the prison and to the doors of every cell inside the thick, stone walls. He visits us when he cares to and we are helpless under his gaze and in his keeping.
The only avenue out is the avenue we most usually refuse to walk along. Avenue V that bears the initial of the keys to our unbearable, invisible prisons: vulnerability.
The truth is paradox. My hiding and fear never managed to release me from the prison of my being. The recognition and embrace of my vulnerability released me. Your recognition will release you as well. For, what are we if not inherently vulnerable? Who among us is unbreakable, immortal, needing have never a care for death, sorrow or pain?
Would all the secrets of a heart keep that heart from pain or sorrow, keep the brain that holds that fear from moving through the doorway into death? Thus, what is left, but to try the door that one fears most, but that one never tries at all?
In vulnerability lies the sacred space we imagine lies beyond our deaths. In vulnerability and its acceptance for one’s self lies the fact of one’s inherent freedom: the freedom to be, to be one’s very self and take joy in that.
I know without a shade of doubt that the thought of others knowing I am a trans-woman, or knowing that I experienced a brutal rape once upon a time may lead to their removal from my life … out of fear. The fear that grips us in the places we feel most vulnerable: our sexuality, our acceptance and regard from others.
So it goes … and so it goes. On and on human being leads us into useless and groundless fears. We cower before differences in skin color, differences in our beliefs about deity or its non-existence (very like a religion itself, except that it refers to itself with a trope seldom used by the traditionally religious. Whisper now, rationality).
We hide the facts of our rapes, of our brutality toward others or their brutality toward ourselves. We hide, quiveringly, our transsexuality, our homosexuality, our compassion, our empathy, our love, our desire, our skin-color sometimes, our parents and siblings, our girlfriends or boyfriends, our intelligence, our joy. All of our virtue, we often feel, must remain hidden away and unreachable by those who would hurt us, by those we might love, or meet in friendship.
Is it wondrous, then, that the human world abounds with suffering, or that many think of life as “a vale of tears?”
How so? We hide away the best of ourselves, imagining that is the only way we can live long and without pain. Yet, death seeks us out, pain seeks us out, even in our hidden fortresses where fear holds the keys to the cells in which we immure ourselves.
Life hurts us. It’s a precondition of living. To be mortal and made of vulnerable material is to be inherently subject to pain. No amount of dissembling or whistling past graveyards changes that fact.
Fear holds the keys, and the keys are our various vulnerabilities. It’s only in reveling in vulnerability, risking pain and living in freedom from our unbearable, invisible prison walls, that we thrive. Only through acceptance of our vulnerability and through exultation in that vulnerability can we finally live in freedom, knowing others, loving them and laughing with them, crying together and holding one another in spite of ever-possible sorrow, ever-possible joy.
This post originally appeared at Life Journeys To A T
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