Dear friends,
I’ve been obsessed this weekend with watching episodes of Lateral, a comedy panel game hosted by Tom Scott in which contestants have to solve lateral thinking problems together. It is so fun to guess along, and I highly recommend it.
At the beginning of the month, I went to San Francisco for a weekend in-person intensive that was mandatory for the Spiritual Counseling 1 course. My mother tagged along because she worried about my health and also wanted to have fun in the city. The city was marvelously affirming in multiple ways, starting from when I saw “Harvey Milk Memorial Terminal” printed on the wall of the airport. Since the hotel breakfast’s vegan options were limited to sugary breakfast cereal and small apples of a cultivar that I do not favor, I went looking one morning for a suitable cafe and serendipitously discovered one that was an queer-centered space and had a few vegan food options. There were multiple vegan restaurants for various Asian cuisines in a small area, which was a delight, as it gave me a sense that it was encouraged to be progressive and Asian there.
The intensive was very interesting, and it was also really great to finally meet some of my classmates in-person. Many of them live in California (but not necessarily local to San Francisco), while others live elsewhere in the country or even in other countries. We practiced therapeutic listening several times in dyads, exploring topics relating to our personal spiritual journeys. I started to discover my own way of listening to and connecting with people. Presence is not only communicated through eye contact; I often do “ear contact” instead, tilting my head so that my left ear is slightly more directed to the person I’m listening to. My dyad partners let me know that they could feel my presence even though I might have communicated it differently from other people. If someone personally finds eye contact important as a mode of connecting, I’d try my best to offer it. But knowing that my neurodivergent ways are also effective eases some of my anxiety about “doing it right.”
In the last dyadic practice, we were supposed to lead our partner in an exercise of exploring a safe space in their mind — typically a visualization such as a beach or a place of pleasant social connection. As my partner led me through the exercise, I was seized by a sensation that the world was not safe for me. It was terrifying, even though I felt safe in the classroom. So, from lying down on my back, I curled up into a fetal position, as if I were inside an egg. I stopped responding to my partner and began crying, so my partner called over the instructor and TA. Eventually, as these three people spoke some soothing words to me, I slowly came out of the egg. My partner commented that an egg is indeed a safe place to be in, so in a sense I was actually doing what the exercise asked me to do. But the feeling of being unsafe was so strong. I can sometimes be in denial of how the world is unsafe to me, perhaps because I see my relative privilege in various senses and think that my situation is not as bad as other people’s; therefore, I shouldn’t worry as much. Maybe the feeling of being affirmed in San Francisco had a flip side of making me realize that I am not so affirmed in other places (and that even in that progressive city, there are movements towards reactionary politics).
Next semester I will be taking the second course in the spiritual counseling sequence, which will also require an in-person intensive. I want to go alone next time, but my mother insists that she wants to come again and that we should get there a little earlier or later so that she and I can have fun in the city together. While that might be nice, I really need to practice navigating the world independently, which I know I can do as I have done so many times during college and afterwards until I had to move back to my parents’ house during my last severe manic episode, but now it’s as if I’m a teenager again fighting for my agency. My brother, four years younger than me, is permitted more independence than me, unfortunately in part because he is a cis man.
“Girls need more care,” my mother said to me yesterday. If my brother and I eventually live in places far enough away from each other, my mother will choose to live closer to me because of her frustrating beliefs that I am a girl and that girls need protection. We were arguing about whether or not I should live in Philadelphia, like in the actual city. I believe it would be advantageous and convenient as an artist to live in the city, while my mother claims that the city is dangerous and poor and compares it to the Bronx, where my family lived until I was five. She did not seem to understand that just as the Bronx was a poor section of New York City, Philadelphia has its wealthier and poorer areas as well as safer and not-as-safe areas. The one good point she does have regarding the city is that it might be sensorily overwhelming for me to live in it. I can only hope that living in the city and being exposed to the sights and sounds long-term would help me learn to tolerate it, whereas living outside of the city, I still have to go to the city occasionally for events, and that can become a problem because I have not developed that tolerance. Regardless, this is all just hypothetical right now.
After I got back home from San Francisco, things became more rough for me emotionally. At one point, I was even seriously considering some sort of inpatient or residential treatment. I was at a low point, having fallen behind on coursework and had some depressing realizations about how my disabilities impose limits on what I can sustainably do in my life. I had a lot of music gigs in a short period of time, and it caused my ears to hurt and me to feel drained and more prone to shutdowns and panic attacks, which suggests that I have to be careful with the amount of performance activities that I do. I lost interest in approaching academics from a more traditional scholarly standpoint, such that I felt that I could only approach writing assignments from a purely introspective angle. It was as if my soul was calling to me away from intellectualism and into an inner world.
Initially I told one professor, with whom I had established a strong relationship, about my depressive feelings. He connected me with the care coordinator, who recommended that I try TimelyCare, the service that the school had just started to use this semester in order to offer limited mental health services to students who are not physically in California. (Previously, only students in California could access counseling sessions due to the school being physically in California, and there also were no on-demand sessions offered for crisis situations.). I tried using an on-demand session once, and I immediately got frustrated. First, there was a technical issue, and I had to call technical services to resolve it. Then, when I started the session with the counselor, the counselor had to do a questionnaire with me before we would chat about anything. The questionnaire had some standard questions inquiring about suicidal ideation, plus some other questions that I found oddly specific, like “Do you feel like you can’t stop worrying about things?” (paraphrased because I forget how it was phrased). Based on my answers to the questions — at times given hesitantly, as I was not sure how honest I should be with a service that may have some sort of mandated reporting policies relating to suicidality — the counselor had to go through a suicide safety plan with me after our brief chat.
Both of these required processes irritated me, as I have done way too many questionnaires and suicide safety plan stuff and did not find them to be useful in that moment. I wasn’t in my worst crisis, I just wanted to test out the service before I might become more desperate. The chat with the counselor was itself fine, certainly better than some other supposedly therapeutic interactions I’ve had. But the standard procedures of the questionnaire and the safety plan left me feeling like the time could have been used more effectively. It reminds me of how every patient in the psych hospital is forced to take the PHQ-9 questionnaire at intake and discharge, presumably for the hospital to measure its effectiveness. It’s called the Patient Health Questionnaire and has 9 questions, but it is primarily designed to measure depression. I had to take that questionnaire even while I was manic, which felt really stupid. Technically, someone experiencing a euphoric manic episode as defined by the DSM-5 is likely to score high on questions 3, 5, 8, and maybe 7, but only because depression symptoms can vary for different people (for example, question 3 asks about whether you are struggling to sleep or sleeping too much; both are possible in depression, while the former is much more likely in mania). But still, it’s a really stupid standard procedure.
So TimelyCare didn’t really help much, and I mostly remained in a low state. Atypical of me, I became deeply ashamed of falling behind academically and was scared of letting my professors know that I was behind, even though I knew that the professors in my program — at least the core professors, since adjuncts might feel more compelled by the tenuousness of their position to more strictly abide by the rules — were generally very accommodating. That was a sign that something was really wrong. So I decided to reach out to the disability services coordinator. He wrote me an accommodation letter that said that I could work with an academic coach to help me catch up and to keep on track in future semesters. This has been helpful so far, and since last week I have been feeling less depressed, although still a bit wacky as my mood and gender state have been unusually labile. (I am genderfluid to an extent, but gender lability tends to go along with some sort of mood change and often feels very disorienting.) I am glad that I was able to avoid going inpatient/residential, as either of those treatment options would be disruptive and expensive.
However, I have been feeling a strong urge to explore some sort of psychological underworld. I view my period of mental health struggle after college to be a time of spiritual exploration that eventually gave me the conviction that I wanted spirituality to be the center of my life. But some part of me feels like there’s more to explore. I did not do anything for Halloween, but the spooky vibes have been getting to me a bit. I have been wondering if there are spirits about and if I might be able to perceive them. On the evening of Halloween, as I was driving alone, I thought I heard some really soft sounds of a radio, when I never have the radio on in my car. It freaked me out, as I worried that I might be hallucinating. I still don’t know what I was hearing — perhaps a misinterpretation of a combination of the car noises with my tinnitus. I’m taking note of what happened, but I’m trying to not be too worried, as stressing out about psychosis doesn’t help whether it is the case or not.
Yet part of me is not scared at all, but rather curious about psychosis as an experience and as a mental ability. Obviously it is disabling for many people — I do not deny that. Yet in some cultures, what we would call hallucinations or delusions are considered a gift of spiritual connection or communication. I have experienced some mild forms of psychosis before — though I can’t list all the ways, as the boundary between psychosis and simple imaginativeness is difficult to discern especially as I almost always have insight, as in, some observing part of me that rationally knows what is and isn’t real. Recently my therapist claimed that they observed me having delusions at some point while manic, but when I asked them to explain what the delusion was, they couldn’t verbalize it. So [hands in the air] I can’t really say either.
What we call mental illness is only one way of accessing the underworld, though. Some people go on wilderness vision quests; others document and explore their dreams. In an ideal world, I would have more time for free exploration in the late adolescence stage of Bill Plotkin’s model of human ecosoulcentric development — and I probably would have been permitted that exploration earlier in my life as well. Instead, I am forced to travel quickly from the “thespian” identity explorations of early adolescence that concluded with my college years, to the “apprenticeship” of early adulthood in which a person begins to hone the requisite skills for their soul’s work. Perhaps I was able to complete, at least partially, the task of late adolescence — discovery of one’s soul, one’s true place in the world — relatively quickly, but it feels to me that there are more discoveries to be had. Some of these may come to me in my academic work, but I suspect that eventually I must go on a spiritual journey of another type, such as a vision quest. If I don’t intentionally seek it out, it might eventually overwhelm me, which would be quite inconvenient and potentially dangerous.
Recommended Readings
I’ve been doing more reading through my Substack app, and I would love to share some of my favorite articles from the past month:
From a few years ago, “You’re probably a eugenicist” argues that pretty much everyone engages in eugenicist logic some way or another. According to Fleischman, the issue may not be eugenics itself, but rather the specific situations in which that logic is applied.
This article is a call for autistic people who speak to reflect on whether they are denying nonspeaking autistic people the same rights that they claim for themselves. TJ busts the myth that “high functioning” autistic people do not have movement differences, demonstrating that the struggles of speaking and nonspeaking autistic people are more similar than many people assume.
In this article, Isha Snow applies linguistic anthropology to make the case for autism as caused by English-dominant colonialism. According to Snow, the linguistic peculiarities of English amplify the pathologizing methods of Western psychiatry, turning the collection of traits that used to be the driving force of human intelligence into the psychosomatic dysregulation that autistic people experience today.
Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing analyzes the data to show, shockingly, that men are abandoning college in droves because now, the majority of college students are women. Apparently even the dudes on Freakanomics didn’t consider this possibility.
As you can see, I love reading essays that express challenging perspectives. Let me know what you think about these articles and whether you’d like me to share more like these in future months!
A Contemplative Offering
How have you connected with the underworld in your life? What purpose does it serve for you?
What are some ways that you communicate presence to other people when they are in need of connection?