Writing about mental health in the United States means having to write about growing social atomization, aided by technology. Technology impacts our efforts to reach out to one another. We interact with each other physically less and less — we can’t be bothered to keep in touch outside of a stream of texts. Even dating apps, ostensibly meant to bring people together, instead create the illusion that someone better is always around the corner (perhaps this is why I have success with them — I am disillusioned enough to actually meet men for drinks.)
In crisis, however, you make do with the tools you have. While I am back in therapy and am also taking medication for my chronic post-traumatic stress again, I am also a person who works with words and thus words have power over me. This is why I have utilized my comparatively substantial Twitter following for a chance to crowdsource empathy, as it were.
By crowdsourcing, I don’t meant that I urge my followers to say nice things to me while I flail about in despair (though they are more than welcome to!) Instead, I have used the platform as a way to connect to people — hear their jokes, stories, occasionally, their secrets.
Like an editor putting out a call for submissions, I ask my followers to slide into my DMs — but not before first opening up to them, showing them that I can be vulnerable too, that we are all, as paradoxical as it may sound in this day and age, still in it together. Having built enough of a platform through both my work as a journalist and a purveyor of occasionally witty takes, I am privileged enough to instantly connect with a large group of people who wish to respond to me.
Is this approach helpful? Based on how I feel after I interact with people in this manner, I would say yes. The process takes me outside of myself and the vicious vortex of pain and fear I am perpetually spinning in, and into other people’s lives, their worries, their fears, the things and people and animals they take joy in, the tales they are fond of retelling, burnished now by time. I have been sent everything from photos of cute children to long soliloquies about travel plans gone hilariously awry, tributes to beloved dead uncles and confessions about unrequited yet mystically powerful crushes.
This is a good reminder that everyone has their own damn issues and that no one really knows what they are doing half the time. It’s humbling, and it can make one’s sickness seem smaller. As I have previously written in this series, “Mental illness is selfish like a tumor — it only feeds itself, and wants everything to turn into a version of itself.” Well, guess what. One way to blast the tumor is by the rays of light emanating from pure, scorching truth, and the truth in question is this: none of us is fucking special. This is why we are never truly alone.
Talking to people is also just a good way to pass the time. Having recently gone through a breakup that leveled me in the manner of an earthquake, and having survived previous earthquakes before, I know that half the trick is simply putting one foot in front of the other. It’s somewhat ironic, because I am a believer in the biocentric model of the universe and tend to relegate time to being an illusion of the conscious mind. And here is time, helping me anyway, dragging me down the stream, further and further away from the blank-faced darkness, diluting agony in the manner of a chemist.
Of course, my crowdsourcing approach is not for everyone. Making yourself vulnerable to people you don’t know on the internet can be a difficult, sometimes dangerous (as I know all too well) task. There is also the fact that the internet turns most of the connections we make ephemeral, gauzy, and therefore potentially shallow.
This is why I frequently hear that I’m a “grief performance artist” or else that I’m merely trying to “get attention” in my attempts to connect with my audience in an empathetic way. These accusations used to upset me, but staying upset requires stamina that I simply do not have at this time.
There is also the fact that there is simply no right way to go about getting better. What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa.
Consider the man who approached me at a party recently and asked what I like to do to unwind in D.C. I told him, in what I thought was an offhand yet polite manner, that I would really like to start going to a shooting range again, because aiming and shooting at targets relaxes me. The man immediately became angry and accused me of being an “NRA gun nut.” When I protested — for one thing, I hate the NRA — he only grew angrier. A few weeks later, I had already forgotten the incident, when I ran into the man again while getting lunch with a friend (D.C. is a big city with a small town feel, and I am constantly running into people I know, or people I wish I didn’t know). The man decided to start yelling at me again, right there in the cafe and, while I was momentarily too stunned to respond — who on earth yells about such things? Let alone weeks later? — my friend said the nine magic words that fixed the situation, “Don’t talk to her like that, you fucking pussy.”
My friend, incidentally, was someone I had initially made one of those ephemeral, seemingly random internet connections with. And yet he evolved into someone who will call someone else a fucking pussy for harassing me.
Sometimes, being a “grief performance artist” really works. That is, being sincere with people works. They will, occasionally, be sincere in return.
Image credit: Sasin Tipchai