Lately I’ve been going out each afternoon to seek a “good” photo of a varied thrush in the autumn landscape. Thus far, this (see below) is the closest I’ve gotten. It’s frustrating work as varied thrush certainly abound - I can hear and see them frequently, but they’re shy creatures; they hide in dark spaces or behind branches and are quick to flee with the warning calls of robins. I’ve had these marathons of seeking a particular photograph before - I turn to them when I need a reason to go through motions, to get up and out each day, to be reminded of beauty against the harder edges of the world.
Nature is and always has been my sanctuary; one of the few places I can just be. It is a place where I’m not pathologized, in tune with the present, and not overstimulated (which I often experience in the human world if I’m not cocooned by music or an audiobook delivered through noise cancelling headphones.) There is nothing wrong with me here in the natural world - I just am, as everything else just is.
Before venturing out on my daily micro-expeditions, I sit with my old (and ongoing) health records, taking each brutal description of who I am and what is wrong with me as a person and transforming such cold, clinical language into what I call “reclamation art.” Essentially I have an old psychiatric textbook (1967) and a plethora of magazine clippings and other creative tools that I take back the narrative of my healing. It is painful work.
It’s a strange experience, working in a highly acute setting in the hospital, but knowing that a few floors down I am seen as a problem to be fixed, a violence risk, a multitude of diagnoses, a walking encyclopedia of pathology. At this point in my life I am a collection of axis I and II diagnoses in the DSM. My insight is described as limited and judgment poor. My prognosis has also been described as poor (throughout my twenties), my anger and distrust of the healthcare system pathological.
But tell me this, if you had been governed by threat and punitive authority on and off since you were a child, would you not find yourself somewhat distrusting of a system that describes this as “care?” If you had been told from childhood on that you can’t trust yourself, would you not feel lost and confused? If your family had been accused of harm, threatened with your removal, and then used whenever convenient as a substitute for real care when it is needed, would you find healthcare trustworthy? If you had been held down by men, had your clothes ripped from your body, been tied to bed frames with tubes shoved into you - would you not fight back (especially in the context of previous trauma?) Would you trust a system that has actively harmed you and the people that you love? Would you trust authority when you had lived through an emotionally abusive relationship and experienced similar patterns within the healthcare system? If I am walking pathology whose anger and distrust is not based in reality then it is only because psychiatric care created the very pathology in me it finds so frustrating to treat.
Nature is a system too I suppose, but it is one that is free to unfold as it is naturally meant to (at least in theory and where human influence hasn’t disrupted this.) When we step back from our need to constantly contain and control, we see that the wild already knows the way; that healing comes from the interconnected nature of rich and varied life in all her forms. A system in balance is one who is never artificially contained. In this place there is no judgement because there is no good and bad, there just is.
I too am seeking balance and the only place that I learn that balance is from nature and my community of peers. Getting lost in the woods and looking for the right photo of a varied thrush might seem silly, but that is far more healing than any care I have received when I have been apprehended and forced into it.
This is not to deny that psychiatric diagnoses can give people hope and access to services they find beneficial. This is not to say that psychiatric medications have not helped me - they have and I depend on them daily. This is not to say that I have not met amazing people who are helpful not because of, but in spite of, the system within which they work. But nature above anything else continues to be the best teacher; the best model for how to heal, and the reminder of possibility of it when elsewhere there is none left to me.
- S.
