WTFIMH (through Siriboe)
TW: acts of torture are mentioned in the second half of the text (between the words “describing” and “hyperstimulation”).
Yesterday Tumblr helped me stumble upon the short artistic documentary produced by Kofi Siriboe on (Black) mental health. Diving into its hazy chiaroscuro colorful images and dwelling on the welcoming young faces who explained what mental health was for them, I finally started this much awaited conversation with myself. Yes, what the fuck is MY mental health. Not only how is it but more importantly, because this is the unavoidable starting point, what is it. As a runner, I am quite aware of my physical health: some days my runs feel easy and on others, they feel so very laborious, mainly depending on how much sleep or how many kilometers I have already run in the previous days. As a scholar, my body makes itself known throughout the long hours spent sitting in front of a screen, on chairs and facing tables that are not always adapted to my shape. But as a person, that is a body and a mind woven together, I am quite at loss when it comes to define what my current mental health status is. Through my serendipitous epiphany of yesterday, I became aware that my strong political beliefs regarding the need for our societies to address the destructive issue of mental health issue was not matched by an equally powerful realization of the very texture of my own. As if mental health was only so good or relevant for “others”, or for intellectual and political debate, or for sparsed personal reference when I was really too down to not see the obvious or as a distanced example of what it is to have mental health issue, I becoming the subject of my own radical rêverie. All this meant that I was never really in myself, with myself, feeling the depths of my mind, its dark and light ones, its fluid and versatile movements, its permanent recreation (and on this latter point, my last text is actually a significative omen). Why am I taking this foundational step today? Perhaps is it a combination of various factors, among them, a long and tiresome and life-challenging period of unemployment having bred, inter alia, the remarkable experience of what is familiarly known now as a “burn out”. More than one year after, I am still processing what this depletion of myself meant at the time, and with regards to who I was, who I wanted to become and who I am now. To this multidimensional phenomenon, I might want to add the regular episodes of anxiety and light or not so light depression that numerous encounters with administrations have generated for me in the past twelve months. Being broke makes one life’s way more difficult. This may sound obvious but as someone who was not raised in a low-income household (only low middle-class) and who, in the past decade, has navigated rather privileged and transnational crowds, this drastic change in my material means and in how I got to be defined by the system was quite violent and annihilating, sending waves of anxiety up in my chest and in my head whenever a new paperwork issue would arise. This was way more than just a paper issue as I had become a paper being, only ever worth what the system had made of me. Of course, I fought against this narrow understandings of myself on a daily basis, through physical (running) and mental (artistic creation) escape. But the bare condition of my (still privileged - do not get me wrong here) broke life kept coming back at me, pulling me under stormy waters of self-doubt and self-loathing. Add to that what could be the last element of this day-old epiphany: this novel I finished reading a few hours after watching Siriboe’s short film. Describing the impact of intense torture techniques on a Vietnam war prisoner, the book offers a striking view on the process of depersonalization these techniques bring about, leading the narrator, after days of abuse, to split into two persona, as he recounts seeing himself from above while feeling himself chained to the bare mattress on which he was subjected to uninterrupted sleep deprivation and sound and light hyperstimulation for days on end. As chilling as this account may be, the mental health result is even more appalling as we understand that the narrator will never fully recover from such a disruptive epiphany: his narration uses the “we” until the end of the book, offering a pessimistic (from an individual point of view) and optimistic (from a collective one) take on post-conflict reconstruction of the world and of the self. So perhaps is this a much lighter version of said split and reconstruction that I experienced yesterday, at last being able to look at myself (as it exists in its mind-borne dimension) and ask: what are you and how are you? To these simple yet tremendously difficult questions, I answered: I am the voice as it exists by itself, a solid manifestation of a mirror reflection. While you listen to me, that is you, feel the space that both separates and bonds us and that creates the empowering platform that is our mind. Respect the differences and the variations and the unpredictability displayed as the sounds reverberate on the plane of that interior stage. Stop trying to tame me. I am your dance partner and there is no other choreography than that of embracing and feeling and loving you/me/us. In the silence that highlights the words you tirelessly utter, hold out your hand without fear and reach out to pat your arm, caress my shoulder, hug our neck. I might be startled by the novelty of the step, but I will not reject you. I promise. You are my mental flesh. I adore you. This is us.