by Tiffany | Jan 29, 2017 | Health, Identity, Intersectionality, Neurodivergence
This is the last in a four-part series exploring the Let’s Talk campaign. Part One is here, Part Two is here, Part Three is here. If you would like to support this work, please consider becoming a patron on my Patreon.
Let’s Talk about pushing the conversation out of the comfort zone – an interview with B.
B is a lawyer in Calgary whose family law practice is explicitly trans and queer-inclusive, and he is committed to social justice within family law. He used the Let’s Talk campaign as an opportunity to explicitly and directly address his own personal mental health struggles with his employer.
I know the Bell Let’s Talk day is really complicated. On the one hand it’s great to see the dialogue happen. On the other hand, it’s hard to get over the commercialization of this really important issue. It’s helpful to see celebrities speak out about mental wellness but it’s easy to feel like you’re only allowed to experience mental wellness if you’re a celebrity.
I think individual people can try to take advantage of the positive momentum behind this movement, though. I recently experimented with using Bell’s Let’s Talk day as a framework to address my own personal challenges with mental illness with my employer. I don’t know how it will work out. But I feel positive about my experiment and I’m hopeful it will work out.
I’m 32 years old. I’ve been a member of the Law Society of Alberta since 2010 and I’ve been an associate at the firm where I practice family law for 4 years. I like working where I do. Generally speaking, I think our management team is compassionate and actually cares about the people who work here. I know I’m lucky in that regard. However, like most businesses, profitability is still the bottom line. It’s impossible to be successful in our world without keeping a careful eye on productivity. Lawyers at my firm have targets; our value, as employees, is closely tied with the amount of money we make for the partnership.
In every year leading up to 2016 I maintained steady growth in my numbers. At various times, I have been the top associate in a number of areas. I bring in a lot of my own work, I have a good profile in the community, and I’m very productive. Up until 2016 I routinely received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the management team and from other partners. In 2016, though, a lot of that positive feedback dried up.
2016 marked an extremely challenging year for me, personally. My mother battled cancer throughout the year and ended up with a number of related and serious health conditions; my grandfather died; and a number of other personal things came up that created a very large black hole in my life that seemed to suck up everything I had to offer, and then some. I found myself in one of the darkest places I’ve ever been. Without getting into all of the details, all of the areas in my life that previously gave me fulfillment suffered in one sense or another. My career was no exception.
In 2016 all of my numbers shrank. I had to pare back all of my commitments in the community. I ended up putting off my continuing education (I am engaged in an LL.M and was scheduled to finish in 2016). I also became somewhat less involved in our firm culture (ie: attendances at firm dinners and firm events like our golf tournament). The impact of my mental wellness became real to me when, in a very short span of time, a few members of the partnership came to me with the exact same feedback: “We hope you’re ok. A bunch of us at the partnership table noticed you’re not your usual self.” When I asked for more specifics I was simply told that the partnership thought of me as a leader in positive energy around the firm and that people were starting to notice a definite deficit in that leadership. My performance with respect to my targets was also referenced, though I was told that the partnership wasn’t nearly as concerned about that at this time: “everyone is entitled to an off-year.”
My initial response to this feedback was absolute panic. As feedback about this kind of stuff goes, this was all very mild. However, I’ve been around the block enough times to know that this is how it starts. Many of my colleagues and friends have experienced mental wellness issues. I know that it starts with mild feedback but quickly escalates to more overt displays of displeasure over your “attitude” until you’re eventually fired because your employer thinks that you don’t really want to be there anyway. When I received my more mild feedback I really heard: “there’s something wrong with you. We don’t like you anymore. You’d better fix it.” In fairness, no one was saying that: it’s just what I heard.
I received that feedback about 5 months ago. This month, our associate evaluations were due. Every year associates have to fill out a reflective evaluation in advance of our employee reviews with management. The evaluations include the standard information you’d expect to see: “What are your goals for the upcoming year?;” “how can you achieve those goals?;” etc.
My evaluations have been relatively easy to fill out in the past. This year, in light of my performance and the feedback I received throughout the year, my evaluation was much more challenging. I decided I had two options: I could gloss over my weaker performance with a commitment to improving; or I could directly address the challenges I’ve grappled with.
Glossing over my weaker performance had some appeal. My numbers weren’t abyssal. Really, the only reason it’s noticeable is because I’ve had such positive success in every other year. Surely experiencing some shrinkage during one of the biggest recessions in a lifetime is forgivable or even expected. However, glossing over my performance didn’t address the feedback issue. Additionally, it potentially set me up for an impossible 2017. Promising to return to growth in 2017 might only lead to a more challenging review in 2018 if I can’t deliver.
On my personal evaluation, I decided to more directly engage with my employer about my personal challenges. I referenced the feedback I received. I was honest about my immediate internal response to the feedback, but then I praised the partnership for paying such close attention to the wellbeing of the associates and thanked them for their concern. I didn’t provide many details, but I hinted at the personal issues I’ve struggled with while referencing the major items (it’s no secret, at the firm, that my mother was diagnosed with cancer). I identified my hopes for 2017 but assured the partnership that I knew my challenges didn’t just evaporate with the change of the year (and, thus, reminding the partnership that my challenges didn’t just evaporate with the change of the year). And then, I expressly invited anyone on the management team or the partnership to talk to me about anything they wanted to talk to me about.
Inviting the partnership to talk to me was probably most challenging. However, I think it was the most important part of my evaluation. I needed the partnership to know that they could, and should, be open and transparent with me about any concerns they have. The partnership was clearly already having conversations about me. Inviting them to talk to me directly essentially gave me a place in that conversation. Also, getting more transparent and direct feedback allows me to try to be more responsive to specific concerns while being open about my own particular needs. Finally, opening up a dialogue with my employer helps with my own anxiety. Instead of panicking about the extent to which my employer is secretly hating me, I hope to have more confidence that I am, in fact, hearing everyone’s true concerns and that those concerns aren’t as catastrophic as my brain tells me they are.
Helpfully, Bell’s Let’s Talk day opened up a tiny crack in the door for me to make my invitation. My evaluation introduced Let’s Talk Day. I said that Let’s Talk Day helped me find the right way to address my challenges at work. I suggested that it’s a perfect opportunity for us to maintain openness in the partner/associate relationship. After introducing Let’s Talk Day I said:
“…It is important to me to be reliable and to meet your expectations, notwithstanding whatever else is going on for me. Please continue to discuss your concerns with me openly. I welcome your compassion but I also want to be valuable. I am open to receiving feedback and criticism about my work. Talk to me about your concerns; talk to me about my performance; talk to me about my work: let’s talk!”
This approach is not without its risks and I’ve yet to actually find out whether my experiment was successful (my review will take place next month). Certainly, I expect my frankness and vulnerability will catch the partnership off-guard. But I’m hoping that demonstrating my vulnerability and inviting my employer to be open with me about their needs will create a dialogue that will help both me and my employer to continue to develop a positive and mutually beneficial relationship. I’m experiencing a great deal of anxiety over my evaluation and my imagination is cooking up all sorts of nasty ways this could go horribly sour. But I know that another year of quiet suffering as my career erodes before my eyes would be the end of me. My vulnerability gamble might not work, but I’m thankful I’ve tried. I’m privileged and lucky enough to work in a place where an approach like this might have a shot. I figured I had to take a chance.
Win or lose, I’m glad Let’s Talk Day helped me find the framework to take this chance. Notwithstanding my current anxiety over my evaluation, I feel the most positive I’ve felt in a long time about the way my mental illness has impacted my career. I expect things will still be very hard and I might end up facing more dramatic loses to my career. But, for a moment, my mental wellness was no longer my own private burden to bear in the workplace.
B was able to use the Let’s Talk campaign as a way to start a conversation that he hopes his management will be open to. He’s in a good position because of years of steady growth, and because of his reputation within the firm.
Although I am hopeful and happy that B was able to take this step, I think that his story should be an indicator of how much more work still lies ahead. He is the outlier, in that he was able to leverage Let’s Talk day as an opening with his employer (though he isn’t sure yet whether this will be effective). He’s also in a better position to open up this conversation because his mental health challenges can be framed as situational, and externalized. The same is not true for individuals who are bi-polar, as Emily is, or who have other neurodivergences that can’t be situated so easily outside their core identity. In order for every person struggling with unsupported neurodivergences or mental illnesses to find help, acceptance, and equality, these conversations must move beyond the individualistic peer-to-peer model that is most common on Let’s Talk day (and beyond).
Similar to Flora’s concern that using her own name would negatively impact her employability in the future, B expressed concern about what he has witnessed when other individuals either admit to or are assumed to have mental health challenges. It is tragically common for unsupported neurodivergence to negatively impact employment. It happens too often, too easily, and is too quickly dismissed as a problem with the individual, for the individual to manage on their own.
In order for us to see significant, systemic changes that address both the issues that lead to so many people suffering with unsupported neurodivergences – unemployed, underemployed, homeless, and hungry – and that open up new and more holistic avenues to health, we need to push these conversations far past our current societal comfort zone. We need to start talking about the harms of systemic oppression on racialized, disabled, fat, poor, queer, trans, neurodivergent and otherwise marginalized folks.
We need to talk about intergenerational trauma, and about the deep harms of capitalism, colonialism, and systemic inequality. (These harms that hurt everyone, though not everyone equally. Inequality causes greater unhappiness in the poor as well as the rich. And our inability to speak openly about the ongoing harms of colonialism – not just on the colonized, though those harms are exponentially greater – but also on those of us descended from colonizers, who lack a connection to our own cultures and often feel that loss deeply but without any language to articulate and heal. The negative impact of these ongoing injustices is felt, to wildly varying degrees, by each of us. Healing these fractures in our social foundation will help everyone find easier and more accessible avenues to health.)
We need these awkward, uncomfortable, painful conversations.
We need them on Let’s Talk day, and we need them on every other day.
And we can’t do it alone. We can’t do it individually, in isolation and steeped in the shame that currently surrounds needing and accessing help.
Let’s Talk about where to find help
Valerie, a mental health clinician in Calgary, shared these resources for Calgarians:
– Distress Centre at 403-266-4357 (24 hour phones, plus walk-in therapy and crisis therapy)
– AHS Mobile Response Team – reached through Distress Centre, can see you at home or in the community
If you need to be seen in person more urgently, we recommend one of the Urgent Care sites:
Sheldon Chumir Urgent Care Mental Health
1st Floor – 1213-4th Street SW
Provides mental health assessments
Hours: Monday-Friday 08:00 am until 10:00 pm; weekends and statutory holidays 08:00 am until 08:00 pm
Phone: 403-955-6200
South Calgary Health Centre Mental Health Urgent Care
1st Floor – 31 Sunpark Plaza SE
Provides mental health assessments
Hours: 08:00 am until 10:00 pm; 7 days per week
Phone: 403-943-9383
If you’re interested in same-day, free, walk-in counselling, consider:
Eastside Family Centre
Suite 255, 495-36th Street NE
Provides counselling
Hours: Monday-Thursday 11:00 am until 07:00 pm
Friday 11:00 am until 06:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am until 02:00 pm
Phone: 403-299-9696
South Calgary Health Centre – Single Session Walk-In
31 Sunpark Plaza SE (2nd Floor)
Provides counselling
Hours: M-Th 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm; Friday 10:00am to 1:00pm
Distress Centre – Walk-In
300, 1010 8th Avenue SW
Hours: Monday to Friday, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
403-266-4357
In emergency situations, please head to the nearest hospital emergency department.
If you want to discuss resources for yourself, or a loved one, consider calling Access Mental Health (403-943-1500, M-F 8-5) or 2-1-1 (24hrs).
The Greatist shared these 81 Awesome Mental Health Resources When You Can’t Afford a Therapist.
Healthy Minds Canada has compiled this comprehensive list of resources.
And, as of 2018, I also offer narrative therapy services. You can contact me at sostarselfcare@gmail.com.
Good luck, my friends. Let’s keep talking.
Part One: Mental health and corporate culture; Funding for mental health supports; Starting the conversation
Part Two: Hospitalization, and the “Scary Brain Stuff” – an interview with Emily; Long-term and alternative supports; The intersection of race and mental health
Part Three: Social determinants of health, and moving beyond individualism – an interview with Flora; Corporations
Part Four: Pushing the conversation out of the comfort zone – an interview with B.; Where to find help
by Tiffany | Jan 26, 2017 | Health, Identity, Intersectionality, Neurodivergence
This is the second in a four-part series exploring the Let’s Talk campaign. Part One is here. If you would like to read the article in its entirety right now, it is available on my Patreon.
Let’s Talk about hospitalization, and the “Scary Brain Stuff” – an interview with Emily
Emily is a creative, playful, artistic woman with strong connections to her family and friend group and a penchant for wearing T-Rex costumes.
I’m glad that conversations are trying to happen and that more attention is being placed on people with mental illness – that it`s not the scary, “crazy” thing that we continue to see in movies and TV. The fact that initiatives like this are happening in order to try and destigmatize these issues and get people talking is good.
However, after today people will forget. This isn’t enough. It needs to be a constant public dialogue.
I’m glad people are showing solidarity but I still don’t feel like I can just come out and say that I have a severe anxiety disorder and Bi-polar II.
I told my boss last week about my Bi-polar II. She had no clue what it was and immediately started acting weird.
Mental illnesses such as Bi-polar, Depression, Schizophrenia, are all under a blanket of “scary brain stuff” that people don’t seem to understand and don’t get because the people that have these can look and act “normal”. It’s scary because we can’t identify it or label it right away.
Initiatives like #letstalk are nice and all but it’s not actually starting a conversation. It’s just giving most people something to do so they can feel good about themselves and have their Good Deed of the Week crossed off.
I still know that I can’t call into work because I’m having an awful day and can’t get out of bed because today I’m out of spoons and crying. It’s not visible, it’s not understood, and therefore not an acceptable illness or weakness. Mental illness is still joked about, feared, and not taken seriously.
I spent almost a year (on and off) in the hospital because my brain was literally trying to kill me. I am doing so much better now and I’m on medications that make it so I can live and love and FEEL and work. I HAD to go to the hospital in order for that to happen.
But I can’t tell most people that I spent time in a psychiatric ward because to them that’s where “crazy”, “unstable”, “weirdos” and “freaks” go.
It’s not a place that is viewed as where you go to get help.
If I were to say that I had to be in the hospital because of kidney issues or another major physical illness, but that it was all good and I’m well and there’s nothing to worry about, no one would bat an eye. There would be minor concern, obviously, but it wouldn’t have the impact that saying I had to be hospitalized for mental illness would.
One of those wouldn’t keep me from getting a job.
Let’s Talk about long-term and alternative supports
That issue of being able to get, and keep, a job is one that came up in most of the conversations I had about this issue.
The standard work week, and the expectation that people will be productive in these normative ways – work the regular job, pay the rent, see your therapist after work and read some self-help books on the weekend – really limits the avenues to health that are available. For most of the working population, taking an extended period of time away from work to access support is not a reasonable option. And for individuals who find themselves without a choice because their neurodivergences don’t allow them to work, the costs are huge. Emily needed that time in the hospital, but the impact on her ability to find work after an extended absence was significant and the financial impact of that time is still an issue for her.
Current workplace culture and expectations also cut off access to alternative supports and paths to healing.
Teresa says, “So, I’m not a huge fan of the Bell campaign although I’m certainly for more talking, reaching out and asking for help. I am a big fan of peer supported open dialogue, sanctuaries like Soteria and Diabasis House, health and lifestyle coaching, depth and transpersonal psychology, humanistic, existential, ecotherapy, art therapy, narrative therapy, trauma therapy…there is lots of good stuff out there but psychiatry holds too much power and is far too often the first place people are directed by campaigns like this.”
Accessing a sanctuary like Soteria or Diabasis House is expensive and time-consuming, and although sanctuary-supported living has significant positive outcomes for participants, it doesn’t have the necessary funding and our work culture doesn’t support it.
Part of the reason sanctuary spaces aren’t commonplace or accepted is because they challenge the deeply individualistic model that we take towards almost everything. Community care is critical, but our emphasis so often is on self-care and self-reliance.
Although I am a “self-care coach,” I believe strongly in the importance of community care. Often, community care is self care, and it is only possible to maintain sustainable community care when you have good self care practices.
We need safe spaces to fall apart in community, and we need to find ways to integrate community care with self care.
Let’s Talk about the intersection of race and mental health
Communities that have been marginalized for generations, and denied access to mental wellness supports, are the leaders when it comes to finding and creating alternative strategies for self and community care.
Black women, who are so often held to an impossible standard of strength, and whose struggle is often dismissed as nothing more than anger, are doing a lot of work when it comes to moving the conversation around self-care and community-care forward. This post at Blavity, by Amani Ariel, is important. She speaks explicitly about the ways in which self-care culture – with its heavy individualism and the isolating effect of an underlying message that says “you need care, so take care of that yourself” – can exacerbate rather than heal trauma.
Let’s Talk included Gloria Swain and the Let’s Actually Talk initiative, acknowledging the ways in which access to mental health supports and even space for the conversation is restricted for marginalized communities. It’s an important step.
It’s hard to talk about mental illness, especially if you’re a Black woman whose ancestors have suffered in silence for centuries because we were told we had to be strong and not complain. It’s difficult for the Black community to end the stigma when the people speaking about this illness look nothing like us. Mental illness does not see race, sex or economical status; yet, those who are marginalized are the ones whose voices and needs are not prioritized in such campaigns and dialogue. Making me feel like my depression isn’t important doesn’t help me heal. I am not invisible.
My name is Gloria and my depression is political. (Text from this Let’s Talk campaign image.)
Indigenous communities also face significant barriers to access, and see their traditional practices and sacred teachings appropriated into contemporary self-care/self-help practices that erase and exclude the indigenous cultures being used as inspiration. This happens throughout our culture, but particularly in many new age approaches. (A similar appropriation, erasure, and exclusion happens in a lot of yoga studios. Decolonizing Yoga is a great resource for folks who want to bring an intersectional awareness to their practice.)
SooJin Pate has also written about self-care within marginalized communities. This post includes specific ideas for self-care practices, including narrative framing strategies that are similar to my own work.
Communities that are vulnerable in multiple ways face significant barriers to accessing the mental wellness resources that are available, and since those resources are underfunded, understaffed, and the demand far exceeds the current capacity, it is often the most vulnerable who are the least able to access care, or to find care that acknowledges the specific intersections of their experience. Race, class, gender, orientation, ability – none of these identity categories exist in a vacuum. It can be difficult to understand how someone else’s experience is different from our own, but the willingness to stay present for uncomfortable conversations is a critical part of deep community care, and it is a valuable tool for self-care and growth.
In Part Three, we’ll talk about social determinants of health, and moving beyond individualism in an interview with a resident physician.
Part One: Mental health and corporate culture; Funding for mental health supports; Starting the conversation
Part Two: Hospitalization, and the “Scary Brain Stuff” – an interview with Emily; Long-term and alternative supports; The intersection of race and mental health
Part Three: Social determinants of health, and moving beyond individualism – an interview with Flora; Corporations
Part Four: Pushing the conversation out of the comfort zone – an interview with B.; Where to find help
by Tiffany | Jan 26, 2017 | Health, Identity, Neurodivergence, Personal
This is the first part in a four-part series exploring the Let’s Talk campaign. If you would like to read the article in its entirety right now, it is available on my Patreon.
Introduction
Today is Bell Canada’s #letstalk day. There’s a lot of hashtagging happening, and a lot of billboards up and good intentions, but it’s a complicated and messy issue. It’s not a simple narrative – “this is a good thing” or “this is a bad thing.” What this is, as many health issues are, is complicated. It’s messy. It’s a big conversation.
One critical part of the conversation is the language we use around it. I use the language of neurodiversity, because the illness model is not one that works for me. I appreciate the Drop the Disorder movement, and the Mad Pride movement, and in my own personal narratives of mental health and neurodivergence, allowing myself to move away from an illness model and view myself as divergent rather than broken has been important. However, I know that the frame of illness works for a lot of people, and the idea of a “broken brain” can be the right fit for some. (I definitely understand the appeal of a metaphor that includes the potential for “fixing”!) It’s not the language that I use, but that’s not because it is wrong language.
But the larger conversation gets narrowed, at least in Canada, on one day in January, to the viral and hugely successful Let’s Talk campaign. The campaign has run annually since 2011, and has raised over $100 million for the various charities, research foundations, and grants that Bell supports through this program. Bell’s website says, “For every text, call, tweet and Instagram post, Facebook video view and use of Snapchat geofilter, Bell will contribute 5 ¢ more to mental health initiatives. So let’s work together to create a stigma-free Canada!”
Their initiative is built on four pillars, described on the site. “Dedicated to moving mental health forward in Canada, Bell Let’s Talk promotes awareness and action with a strategy built on 4 key pillars: Fighting the stigma, improving access to care, supporting world-class research, and leading by example in workplace mental health.”
It is sparking conversations. My facebook feed is full of temporary profile pictures featuring the hashtag, I’ve heard multiple spots on the radio, and people are talking about how important it is to talk about mental health. These conversations can absolutely reduce stigma, and that is a critical step.
But I’m also seeing a significant amount of skepticism, as well as deep personal pain.
Let’s Talk about the intersection of mental health and corporate culture
People are skeptical about another corporate initiative that hopes to raise awareness but may not do enough to shift the corporate cultures that actively harm people struggling with unsupported neurodivergence. It’s not just the stigma surrounding issues of mental health, unhealth, and diversity, it’s also the fact that there are very few acceptable ways to be a “productive member of society.” In order to be productive, you must be a worker, and mental health impacts productivity and expectations in the workplace.
As one resident physician described it, “I’m struggling a ton right now and the cultural narrative of “work=productive member of society and therefore notwork=lazy layabout who needs to get their shit together” is really bringing me down. Self care isn’t gratifying in the way working for 14 hours straight is for me.”
Unsupported neurodivergence fucks with productivity. It doesn’t mesh well with contemporary corporate culture, and no #letstalk hashtag will change that. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health challenges are viewed in terms of both absenteeism and presenteeism, and framed as economic issues – not because an inability to work means an inability to live in our culture, with its eroding base of social supports, but rather because of the cost to corporations.
Google absenteeism and you’ll see pages and pages of search results talking about the cost to corporations when full-time employees are absent, and mental health is a huge factor here. Absenteeism costs Canadian corporations an estimated 16.6 billion. And it’s talked about in terms of a problem that corporations need to fix – and that fix? Usually means reducing the number of days employees are absent.
But then corporations run into presenteeism. Presenteeism, or being physically present but disengaged, costs Canadian corporations 15-20 billion per year. Those are big numbers. Big numbers. The cost of unsupported neurodivergence for an individual is much smaller in terms of dollar value, and it’s much harder to find quantifiable numbers when discussing the personal costs. But does that mean the cost is less meaningful, less worth acknowledging and honouring?
And when employees are fired after disclosing mental health challenges, what is the recourse? How do we protect people from employment discrimination when the illness they are experiencing is still cloaked in mystery and fear and shame and stigma? How do we change corporate culture to make space for truly productive conversations about mental health when it is still not even remotely acceptable to speak openly with employers about depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar, or other neurodivergences?
So the skepticism regarding the Bell Let’s Talk program is justified. Reducing the stigma by sparking conversations is an important step, but it’s not enough. And individuals who are facing under- or unemployment as a result of their mental health challenges feel frustrated that it is a corporation leading (and financially benefiting from) this initiative.
Let’s Talk about funding for mental wellness supports
The money raised through the hashtag interactions is tracked, and a lot of money is put towards various grants and funds. The money supports research, and funds community supports for children and youth, aboriginal communities, and military families, among others. These are important initiatives.
But mental wellness supports are chronically underfunded. Valerie points out that, “It’s great we’re donating and sharing and hashtagging to Bell (who does not seem to have Alberta partners this year) but here in Calgary we just lost 2 low-cost therapy programs this month because they lost funding. These were the Alberta Health Services women’s health resources (which offered 6 free sessions of psychology/year for all women) and Jewish Family Services (which had a great individual/couple/family counseling program at a sliding scale).
It’s frustrating talking to folks who are motivated to start the work and having to tell them it’s public waitlists or expensive private options. Every day I wish I had more to offer our neighbours when we’re discussing referrals. I’m glad we’re confronting stigma, but disappointing to know that just because you’ve recognized the problem doesn’t mean the help will be easy-peasy to find.”
Let’s Talk about starting the conversations
For others, the conversation is enough to make the campaign worthwhile. Angie K. says, “For me, this initiative is a huge positive. The fact that conversations are being encouraged, and had is a sign of progress. A few years ago I would have still been too ashamed to admit I have mental health issues. It may not be as much or as fast as we would like, and there is still much work to do on the behalf of the companies to accommodate those with mental illness, but it is a good start.”
A lot of people’s responses to the initiative include that same cautious optimism – the conversations are good, but they’re not good enough. It’s a place to start, but it can’t be where the conversation ends.
Unfortunately, it is where the conversation ends a lot of the time.
In Part Two, we’ll talk about hospitalization and the “Scary Brain Stuff” in an interview with Emily, and about other long-term and alternative support options.
Part One: Mental health and corporate culture; Funding for mental health supports; Starting the conversation
Part Two: Hospitalization, and the “Scary Brain Stuff” – an interview with Emily; Long-term and alternative supports; The intersection of race and mental health
Part Three: Social determinants of health, and moving beyond individualism – an interview with Flora; Corporations
Part Four: Pushing the conversation out of the comfort zone – an interview with B.; Where to find help
by Tiffany | Jan 8, 2017 | Identity, Lego therapy, Personal, Step-parenting
Some days are tough.
I know my stories, most of them. I know the story about Tiffany-the-entrepreneur. I know the story about Tiffany-the-helper. I am learning the story about Tiffany-the-stepparent.
But knowing the stories doesn’t always mean it’s easy to hold onto them. And even when you can hold onto them, there are times when you just need a break. When building a thing – this website, this business, this life – is heavy and each brick sits uneasily on the last because I just haven’t quite figured out how they fit together yet.
In those moments, I have a few reliable tools at my disposal.
I can go for a walk, if the weather is good and the kids will tolerate it.
I can make some tea, though honestly this doesn’t help like it used to – I don’t have the tea nook that I did in the house I was in before, and it’s always a bit messy, and my desk serves multiple functions and the table is always full of stuff, so the ritual of tea is something I need to reinvent for myself within this environment. I’m good at reinvention, but reinvention takes time, and energy. It draws on the well, it doesn’t fill it.
I can write, if it’s quiet enough.
And I can build Lego.
More and more, Lego has become both a metaphor for the way I’m currently approaching narrative, and one of my most effective self-care strategies. The little Lego photo shoots I’ve done for this website, and the act of building Lego, have given me new tools and new language.
I build Lego differently than my partner does. I like to divide all my pieces up by type and colour, and then build. He dumps them out in a pile and sorts as he goes. That, too, is a rich metaphor – the different paths that arrive at the same destination. The value in that variation.
The last few months have been challenging. Launching a business is quite a significant task, learning to be a stepparent is quite a significant task. I work two, sometimes three, part-time “day jobs” and am trying to turn this into a full-time, sustainable career.
My youngest stepkid was diagnosed with autism in December, and that has been an emotional and challenging process – figuring out whether to use the same therapy team for her as we use for my older stepkid, trying to get a handle on the differences in autism in young girls (and feeling so much pain and grief for her, for the way autism stigma hits girls so hard – girls who are supposed to swim in that toxic soup of sociable femininity).
But still, I build.
Brick by brick, I build.
Lay all the pieces out, look at the plan, take it one action at a time.
Right now, I’m trying to get this website launched.
Brick by brick, page by page.
We’re getting there.
by Tiffany | Jan 1, 2017 | Coaching, Identity, Narrative shift, Personal, Plot twist, Step-parenting
The other morning I was sitting on the floor in the living room, assembling Lego. Some days I build new sets for myself or for the kids, and some days I reassemble sets that have taken too many toddler-assisted falls. It was a good morning – the kids with their mom, and I had a London Fog and affection and I have this beautiful life I’m building – but I was overwhelmed with wave after wave of heavy emotions.
Because this story is not the story I thought I would be telling now, at 35.
And this is not the first time the story has changed.
And every time the story changes, there is grief, and loss, and guilt.
Lego octopus in a sunken ship.
Photograph by Tiffany Sostar
Once upon a time, I was straight. I was monogamous. I was a woman. I was married. I was going to grow old having chili bake-offs with my husband, inviting family over to taste-test, both of us winning. Every year we would go to the boutique gift shop for beautiful Christmas ornaments, to be given in wooden boxes we had designed and built and stained together. We would go to Croatia to meet his family someday. We would go to Norway to meet mine. We had three dogs. We had a new house. But I’m not straight. And I’m not a woman. And I’m no longer married.
Once upon a time, I was a dog trainer. I specialized in working with fearful and aggressive dogs. I was really good at it. I was APDT and CAPPDT certified, I took courses at the San Francisco Academy for Dog Trainers. I ran my own business. I was going to be an expert in the field. I would speak at APDT, I would host conferences, I would be sought out for interviews, I would publish books. But the economy tanked, and I went to university, and I love dogs but I no longer train them.
There are other once upon a times. Stories that felt like my forever story, fundamental to my being, that I am no longer in. The story where my soul mate and I grow old living together, he a lawyer and me a gender studies professor. The story where my anchor partner and I grow old living together, them at their video game console and me organizing events for the bisexual and trans communities, doing activism, being an activist. The story where I’m a famous author at 25. The story where I never have kids. The story where I work in my dad’s bookstore until he retires and then I become the manager. The story where I’m straight. The story where I’m cisgender. The story where I’m able-bodied. The story where depression is overcome, forever, and I am triumphant over my mind. The story where I’m inherently and eternally broken (that one was so hard to let go of).
“I am not the only one who has lived in many books.”
I am not the only one who has felt my identity sink solidly and safely into a narrative, only to have someone in the distance shout, or whisper, “plot twist!” and to feel the ink of my identity fading on the page, new words forming, words I do not know, or know how to inhabit.
These plot twist moments can be traumatic. They are moments of “identity threat” – times when our sense of self, and who we are, and how we are in the world and in relationships and in each other’s eyes, when it all shifts.
When we come out. When we divorce. When we lose a job, or a friend, or a partner, or a parent. When we gain a job, or a partner, or another partner, or a new name or a new body or a new baby. When we transition to polyamory. When we discover our kinks. When we tell our lover. When our lover tells us. When we hear that voice, stage left, “plot twist!”
Or, sometimes, when we feel the slow twist of a knife long buried. Microaggressions. Erasures. Moments of invisibility and coercive passing. When we are read by those around us as something we are not, and we see reflections of ourselves in others’ eyes that do not feel right. When stereotypes or biases against us start to eat away at our own sense of self and wholeness.
Illness. Wellness. Brokenness. Wholeness. Togetherness. Aloneness.
When we move from one state of being into another. When we find ourselves lost, and find ourselves, and lose ourselves.
Photograph by Tiffany Sostar
Lego can be fixed. I can go back to the book, find all the missing pieces (or most of them, anyway), reassemble it and it will look almost like it did when I first built it.
Life is not like that. I cannot find the booklet and all the missing pieces to reassemble those old stories, those old lives.
But my life is like Lego in another way – endlessly adaptable. A smashed house can become a truck can become a dragon can become another house. There is hope, and new wholeness, and new stories, and there is healing possible. I have learned to sit with the grief, and the loss, and the sadness, and the hope, and the joy, and the excitement. I have learned to let the plot twist, to trust myself to be present in whatever story comes next. To know myself, and love myself (in action if not in emotion, and in intention if not in action, and always reaching towards a more wholehearted love), and care for myself. I have learned how to breathe in to the moments of change, and trust that even when my identity feels threatened, feeling or fearing a thing doesn’t make it real. Whatever comes, comes. I can find a way to exist within it.
Moments of identity threat can be incredibly challenging. We often feel guilty when the narrative changes, because we know it isn’t just us that’s impacted. And we want the people around us to be happy, we want them to like us, we want them to know us. It’s hard to find a solid sense of self in the plot twist moments.
Lego can be fixed. I can go back to the book, find all the missing pieces (or most of them, anyway), reassemble it and it will look almost like it did when I first built it.
Life is not like that. I cannot find the booklet and all the missing pieces to reassemble those old stories, those old lives.
But my life is like Lego in another way – endlessly adaptable. A smashed house can become a truck can become a dragon can become another house. There is hope, and new wholeness, and new stories, and there is healing possible. I have learned to sit with the grief, and the loss, and the sadness, and the hope, and the joy, and the excitement. I have learned to let the plot twist, to trust myself to be present in whatever story comes next. To know myself, and love myself (in action if not in emotion, and in intention if not in action, and always reaching towards a more wholehearted love), and care for myself. I have learned how to breathe in to the moments of change, and trust that even when my identity feels threatened, feeling or fearing a thing doesn’t make it real. Whatever comes, comes. I can find a way to exist within it.
Moments of identity threat can be incredibly challenging. We often feel guilty when the narrative changes, because we know it isn’t just us that’s impacted. And we want the people around us to be happy, we want them to like us, we want them to know us. It’s hard to find a solid sense of self in the plot twist moments.
“There is hope, and new wholeness, and new stories, and there is healing possible.”
That’s what I’m here for.
If you feel like you are losing yourself, or have lost yourself, and the narrative is getting away from you and everything feels scary and overwhelming and you don’t know what your story is anymore, I can help.
Self-care, self-discovery, self-expression.
I can help you find the story that lets you move forward.
You can find my daily self-care tips on Facebook.
You can email me.
If you’re excited about this work and want to support me, you can find me on Patreon. In addition to the coaching, I am committed to creating accessible self-care resources because financial insecurity is too often a barrier to help.
Or you can watch this page, because as I develop resources, they’ll all be collected here.
I’m excited about this journey! We’ll build the path forward, brick by brick.
