I don't feel like anyone understands me personally - like, my specific configuration of things and pain and suicidality. I'm what people might pathologise/negatively judge as "treatment-resistant" (when really, I'm just discerning with accurate pattern recognition) because a lot of the "therapy" I've seen 1) disgusts me, 2) feels inhumane and ineffective to me, and 3) feels like it's more about restoring better functionality in human worker drones for capitalism, instead of actually caring how to help someone feel better, even if that Feeling Better might come with Rejecting Capitalism & the brainwashing that we all Have To Work and glorifying labour as this whole thing. I don't want to work. I hate work. I believe no one should have to work to have their basic needs met. Apparently, that's fucking radical and a bit of a scandalous and "lazy" thing to say in some circles. The therapy standard often feels like "can this person return to productivity" and not "is this person free" even (ESPECIALLY) when that includes burning down the current capitalist system and billionaire dominance/wealth hoarding. It's a productivity-restoration machine disguised as care.
(I've had several therapists, been in an inpatient mental health ward once before - voluntarily - because I was suicidal, and my current only/biggest hope is finding an integrative therapist in the future that lets ME shape or at least lets me help shape and structure lessons, including a lot of bottom-up therapy. SE, EMDR, talking therapy, creative & drama therapy... I think sticking to just one framework is bullshit for me specifically. I am more complex than one simple category or box, and I deserve agency over how I want to do it instead of being forced into a generalised cookiecutter plan. I also hate thinking about it as "treatment", thinking of myself as a "patient" or "client." I think the white-Western medicalisation of suffering has done great harm. My suffering is not, never has been and never will be clinical.
I'm looking for a knowledgeable person to hopefully help me heal and make things/life easier for me - not a doctor I pay for treatment and have no attachment to whatsoever. I think capitalism has really bastardised what "healing" looks like and forced it into this sterile grey patriarchal box. I'm very anti-psychiatry, I think the DSM is bullshit harmful capitalist patriarchal judgemental nonsense, and I don't entirely agree with the current ethical rules for therapist-therapee relationships.
I genuinely miss the shamans and vǫlur/vǫlvas of old. People who know that at least certain types of suffering aren't things to be "fixed." People who are way more holistic and world-wise about it. People who know that everybody's heart and soul is different and the world should be adapted for us, a place should be made and held for us, not the other way round, and that our differences are important and fit different roles. I miss certain pre-Christian, pre-industrialist societies who built specific roles for people whose perception, sensitivity or psychological experience falls outside the norm (though stigma existed nevertheless). Seers, skalds, those who walk between worlds. Soul-making instead of symptom management. The vǫlva didn't sit across from you in a beige office with a 50-minute timer. She sat with you in the dark and said "this is what I see in you" and it meant something cosmically. Where the person holding you could sometimes have been embedded in the same world and social circles as you, not some neutral stranger (contractually forbidden from caring "too much" - like WHAT THE FUCK) who could potentially become the most important person in your life, but you'll never see again after your "treatment plan" is up. The person who might know you more intimately than almost anyone in your life is "ethically" prohibited from being someone who actually loves you. That's insane.
It's worth saying that the historical record of the relational closeness of vǫlur is sparse, fragmented and mostly filtered through later Christian-influenced sagas - it's plausible, but not necessarily well-documented. But the spirit of what I'm saying holds; what I said above is not a fantasy. It was real. And we have largely lost it.
The modern world is a perverse bastardisation of all of this. Turning pain into a service transaction (therapy sessions) is extremely perverse and violent to me. So is the stigma/cookiecutter knee-jerk reaction that, if you're suicidal, "you need therapy" or to be admitted (could do a whole TED talk for that alone, but some of you know what I mean anyway). Most of us don't know what to do with people in psychological pain, so we wave them away, shepherd them away to strangers (!) who might or might not judge us, treat us horribly and hurt us futher. At what point are we a person being known and at what point are we just a case being managed? We don't need to just settle for the latter. We have lost - and, largely, a lot of men have destroyed - important generational wisdom, culture and knowledge that men turned into hysteria (BPD?), madness and deviance. A lot of it was just: women who knew and let themselves feel and express things. We are poor now when it comes to these things. Including the financially rich - perhaps especially the financially rich.)
Wow, I wrote way more than I expected. And I barely have energy for the thing I mainly wanted to say. Oh well. What I really want to say is that being a feminist woman who constantly feels an inferno of destructive, violent rage (and who heartily accepts and WELCOMES that rage) is an extremely lonely and isolating experience in my social circles/area of the world. I hate people who try to moralise about it. The qualifiers of "healthy" and "unhealthy" anger disgust me - as if I need a fucking permission slip or safety vest. I hate people who mistake it as or twist it into "this woman could become physically violent around anyone at any moment/is a danger to innocent people" (which is just not true, and also a very cheap way to bypass their discomfort with it). I know where my rage comes from and who it's directed at; it makes perfect sense. The enormous, constant, violent nature of it is absolutely proportionate to the harm others have done to me (incl. my mother, a lot of men). I think my fury is extremely intelligent, and deserves visibility and expression without (misogynist) stigma. I'm pretty left-wing and, even among leftists, some radical groups, and a lot of women, there's so much judgement and misogyny towards raging women. Of course, this is by design, and I wish people would stop playing into patriarchy's hands.
I refuse to perform the narrative of "I'm working on it." Recovery. Healing. Give them a narrative of contrition and effort and the slow arc toward acceptable personhood and you might forgive me anything. But I'm not interested in your society-sanctioned stamp of healthy approval.
And the truth doesn't prevent you from killing yourself. It's extremely hard. I don't know how much longer I can hold on for. If I end my life or something happens to me, I ask you to remember my words and hold them close to your heart (if you want to).
(I'm a writer, and sometimes words are the only thing I have left.)
Anyone is always extremely welcome to message me anytime (as long as it's good - I don't want your negative shit, critique, whatever, you'll just be blocked without me reading it - also if you come @ me with any intention of "I can fix/heal/be the one for her", I will yeet you into outer space). I ask you to reach out. Even if a lot of time has passed since this post. I just want connection. I want love. I want affection, attention. I want people who see me, understand me, relate to me. Especially women, especially raging women (but not exclusively). Goddamn. I just... I need something. I need someone.
