If this is your first time reading Wild Kin: Letters, welcome! Check out the previous posts to get the backstory. There you’ll encounter imagined stories of escapes into the woods, conceptual frameworks for rural life, questionings of what it means to be human as urban, technological, and colonized world views are crowding out alternatives. If you’re not already subscribed, please consider doing so, to not miss an episode. It’s free, unless you decide to voluntarily support me with a financial boost and with that you get an extra zing of gratitude. Thank you!
Here’s one story of how I ended up back in the Negotiations, after 15 years in Urbia… which happens to also be a loose, personal critique of mental health care.
I worked with a social worker once. I mean, as a client, not as a colleague. Back when the grief I had bottled inside started bubbling and foaming and leaching out of my pores, keeping me from working, sleeping, and most of all, playing. Back when I had achieved the life/career/condo that the world had set out for me, when all the striving had ended and no longer served to distract me from the unsettled, building pressure inside.
I told her everything that was wrong: how I couldn’t focus for more than 6 minutes at work, how I would wake up at 3 am without fail in ravenous hunger, how I dreaded each day. She proposed trying to address my project manager differently. She proposed trying to change my work schedule. She proposed calling a meeting with my department head. Before we got through the end of the third session however, she breathed out sharply and stopped trying to suggest ways to improve my conditions at work. She started, gingerly, to introduce the thought that maybe the only thing that could help me was a prescription maybe for anti-depressant drugs. My existing, overwhelming grief flooded beyond its previous confines with the thought that she saw me as being so broken that even her human warmth wasn’t enough to soothe me, that we needed to go to last-ditch efforts. Her lack of faith in the balm of her own empathy, combined with my unspoken thirst for her warmth, wholly unquenched after less than three hours with her, made me feel a new level of aloneness. She was giving up on me without even trying. She held the antidote of her warm, breathing humanity with ignorance for its potency and with a closed fist, while slinging the hollow workaround in my direction with the other.
I knew of my thirst for her warmth as much as a fish knows of water. Only in retrospect is it clear to me. I wanted her to extend and anchor all four of her legs to the ground, tied tight with gravity, like a backhoe preparing for a heavy lift. I wanted her to extend her lightning rod to the heavens like an antennae for omniscient and divine knowing. Then, seeing she was both stable and dialed-in enough for an army of me, I wanted her to reach out her arms, open her palms, smile and welcome me into the warmth of her heart. And me, having checked the footing of every leg, and the height and conductivity of the antennae, and the sincerity of her heart, and the integrity of her will, all with the most stringent of tests, maybe then I would look into her eyes and let myself be seen by her: the entire depths of my grief surfacing and bubbling over, witnessed by a witness so unshakeable, so loving, so wise that the grief could flow and flow and flow, and the ground holding us to this earth would soak it up like a sponge made for transmuting pain into fertile soil, with no point of saturation in sight.
I would cry all the tears of the world, all of my alienation, all of my difference, all of my banishment. I would cry my aloneness, my panic, my confusing innocence. I would cry all the pain of my mother too, then sick, and her deep frozen terror, and abandoned adventures. I would cry for my father, his shame, his neediness, his hard oblivion.
That was what was pestering me and what I couldn’t speak out loud to her, at least not as she sat across from me in her grey office with windows facing an alley off of Somerset West, in her business casuals, with her blond bangs and a nice smile. On the grey desk beside us were her papers bleached white, where she had me mark on a scale at the beginning and end of each session how I was feeling, in order to chart the effectiveness of her interventions, and maybe even present it during a board meeting in a powerpoint slide. “This patient is resistant to treatment,” she would say. “As you can see in Figure 3.2, she feels just as bad now as she did when she first came to my office.” Then, in a low, pained voice: “She has refused pharmaceuticals.” The board members would nod with eyebrows furrowed. One of them would raise their hand. “Have you tried to wrap her up in a blanket?”
After crying all my grief, I wanted to be wrapped in a blanket and rocked at night. I wanted to be told funny stories and smiled at. I wanted to feel the warmth of a fire. In her office, there were no blankets and no oversized rocking chair. No fire pit. And there was no touching at all. Furthermore, the waxed linoleum floor was notably waterproof, and by extension tear-proof, and absolutely nothing like a sponge or a forest floor. Looking at her, I couldn’t tell how deep her rootedness went, whether she had ever crossed a suspended bridge across an ink-black abyss on a moonless night and whether she had the sharp listening skills to hear with sufficient clarity the quietness of a voice from the other side. As much as I tried to see through her good intentions, her heart was nowhere to be seen or felt. I was expressly in the place created by my people for people having a crisis of grief such as mine, namely a social worker’s office, and it had nothing of what I truly needed.
Except for one thing.
A book on her shelf, entitled Healing Fear, about treating anxiety in all manner of ways, contained a list of things one could do to alleviate anxious suffering. And in that list one item sprang out: move to the woods and take up cross-country skiing (I paraphrase). Given a lack of better alternatives, that is what I’ll do, I thought. And that is what I did. With no more elaborate a plan, that is what I did.
Thanks for reading. Please consider sharing with those whom you know are working in or with mental health care, and especially those with their own struggles.
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