Real Talk

I was originally going to write a small Facebook post about this, but my small post grew, and here it is.

Today's Let'sTalk blah blah blah got me thinking - I see a lot of people "support" this day with various social media gestures, but I have never actually heard someone speak out about their own experience with mental illness. I've never actually seen someone take this day to talk about it. So today, I'm talking about it.

Mental illness is different for everyone who experiences it. Anxiety is different for everyone who experiences it. I can pinpoint where I physically feel my anxiety - it sits right below my heart, below my ribcage and down into my abdomen. It is a near constant sensation that increases and decreases situationally. When I'm feeling mentally and physically healthy, stable and on top of things, it decreases; when I'm feeling destabilized and in flux (the way I've been feeling lately) it increases. I've gotten really good at tempering my anxiety with various tools: exercise, yoga, breathing techniques, aromatherapy, acupuncture... keeping things around me clean and organized also helps. But even doing all these things never fully eliminates the signal my brain sends to my body that something even minutely stressful is happening or might happen in the future.

My anxiety presents itself in the way I worry about things that are totally beyond my control, things that I know will probably never actually come to fruition (and most often never do). It presents itself in a constant preparing for things that probably don't need preparing for. It presents itself in my internal restlessness, never quite being satisfied with being in the moment. It presents itself in a constant need to check the clock.

It most keenly presents itself in chronic insomnia, which has me laying awake for hours before falling asleep, unable to turn off whatever unhelpful circular worries swim through my brain, waking up throughout the night and having those same circular thoughts immediately swim back in. This aspect of my anxiety has mercifully improved with the use of various tools, but I've still never had a decent night's sleep without the help of things like melatonin, earplugs, and on really bad nights, gravol. Cannabis often exacerbates my unhelpful circular worries but has been a lifesaver in terms of falling and staying asleep; it has been, without a doubt, my number one help in my struggle with sleep, and my quality of life would be significantly lower without it. 

My anxiety presents itself in sensitivity to auditory and visual stimuli. I am rather jumpy and very easily irritated - too much stimulus tends to make me feel extremely elevated, probably because I'm working so hard to regulate what's going on internally that any extreme external stimulus is simply too much for me. I have gotten this far in life with zero debt, I make regular investment contributions and I am able to save enough to take myself on amazing world adventures... but I constantly worry about money and that I'm not doing enough to be financially stable. 

I know logically that everything is fine, that my life is great and I have my shit together more than most people... but my anxiety - that unsettling sensation in my chest and abdomen - can not be rationalized away. It is something I have dealt with since my teenage years, and something I couldn't actually recognize in myself until I was a young adult. I've worked really hard to combat my own specific neuroses that are nothing more than inconvenient, annoying symptoms of my anxiety, and I've started to talk about my mental health more and more, and without self-consciousness. It isn't to get attention, or concern, or even help - I know I'm doing very well overall and that I will continue to do very well, because it's who I am. I am strong, I am capable, and I am totally secure in who I am. 

I talk about my own experience with mental illness to normalize it. 

I see symptoms and unhelpful neuroses in so many other people, and I see so much unwillingness for people to speak out and say: "I'm having a difficult mental health day, and I know I'll be fine, but here are the boundaries I need respected right now." And I know other people deal with much more extreme cases of mental illness and aren't able to say "I know I'll be fine," so I feel lucky that I am able to recognize and acknowledge that my own elevated state isn't necessarily rooted in reality, but in the way my brain is wired.

Mental illness is different for everyone, and it is much more common than we think. I don't give a shit about hashtags and profile picture frames. Instead, I'd love to hear an unapologetic, unfiltered account of your own experience with mental illness. Let's actually talk.

Free the nip

Last summer I had a conversation with a guy who "didn't get this Free the Nipple thing." He didn't understand "why women would want to give away their power like that." The following post explains why women don't want their power to be associated with any part of their body, thanks very much.

For those of you who don't know, the Free the Nipple campaign is another example of women boisterously fighting for equality - in this case, with the assertion that women should be allowed to go topless the way men can. A lot of folks don't know it's actually legal in many places, including Canada for women to go topless... but this doesn't mean women don't catch a lot of flak when they do it. Take this story of three Ontario sisters who got stopped by a police officer for riding their bikes topless on a hot summer day, for example. There is obviously still a taboo when it comes to women showing parts of their bodies that men may freely show. So obviously this is a problem.

The reason it's still seen as inappropriate for women to show their breasts in public is rooted in the sexualization of women's bodies. It's as simple as that. The gentleman I was discussing this with continuously contended "Men are always going to ogle women's breasts! It's biology!" To which I continuously replied "It might be partially biology, but it's mostly socialization." If western men weren't socialized to see women hyper-sexually, women's breasts wouldn't hold this apparent "power" (LAWL). There are countless societies throughout the world in which every member spends their days fully or partially nude, and - unsullied by western patriarchal concepts and convenient power structures - IT ISN'T A THING. We see things largely the way we are taught to see things, and even though men are biologically geared toward procreating, if we didn't raise them in a society where women's bodies were, at best, objects of intense desire and at worst, dirty and shameful, we wouldn't have this issue in the first place.

Not to mention the fact that focusing a person's value on a body part (or two, in this case) completely devalues that person as a whole. Instead of seeing women as fully realized human beings with strength, intelligence, drive and talent (you know, the same things men are valued for), telling women they hold singular power in their bodies simply because men are fucking animals who can't control themselves reduces women to nothing more than their bodies (and is also totally offensive to men, who are absolutely capable of better, obviously).

Look, of course women's bodies are powerful - they have the capacity to build and sustain life, for chrissakes. But that isn't the power this uninformed dudebro was referencing; his idea of the power in women's bodies had nothing to do with the amazing and uniquely female things our bodies can accomplish and everything to do with their value under the male gaze... because clearly the female body's raison d'être is men's enjoyment! This type of inherent misogynist thinking is also evidenced in the way many men react to women breastfeeding in public - as soon as a woman's body is being displayed for reasons other than men's pleasure, it is deemed unacceptable. (Conversely, women who consciously choose to entertain or exploit the male gaze are derided as desperate sluts for seeking male attention... we can't fucking win.) I am aware that there are women who have a similarly negative reaction to seeing other women breastfeed; these reactions also stem directly from the patriarchal structures that have determined our societal attitudes.

And to those who STILL insist that men simply can't help themselves (because biology!), I call bullshit: We are advanced enough mentally and psychologically to move past our biological urges. We have figured out the mathematical constant Pi, we can continuously monitor the Earth from space, and we are moving ever closer to more fully understanding the human brain and body, but we can't move past being uncontrollably titillated by boobies? I don't believe. Feminism holds men to a higher standard, and I hold men to a higher standard, and the suggestion that men are inherently incapable of seeing women's bodies as anything but sexual objects to conquer is damaging to both men and women. (Don't even get me started on the way we talk about the bodies of gender fluid, non-binary and trans folks.)

I challenge you: the next time you see a topless woman in public, take note of your internal reaction and take the time to question where your reaction has come from.

Our bodies aren't shameful, they aren't purely for heteronormative pleasure, and they deserve to be left alone the way men's are left alone. Women's bodies are strong, beautiful and amazing - why shouldn't we be free to celebrate them?! Better yet - let's stop talking about people's bodies altogether.