ESSAYS on THE NEW ECONOMY #8

An experiment in mental health recovery

In the New Economy, it will be more important your health than your wealth, more valuable the quality of your friendships than the quantity in your bank account, more interesting a demonstration of how curious you are about others than a demonstration of how much you already know. Are you manifesting the New Economy in your life?

What if it didn’t need to take years to heal from emotional wounds?

When I was young, I experienced deep emotional wounds that went unhealed for decades, and the trauma impacted my mental wiring and my ability to feel and perceive situations. That was difficult to experience, but I’m doing much better now. This essay is a story of something that happened more recently — something that happened last summer. It’s my best attempt at describing a very real experience, and it is my hope that the story inspires curiosity.

It feels to me that no matter who you are, you’ve probably experienced trauma in one form or another — maybe even during the pandemic, if not before or since — and we are more likely to heal if we talk about our experiences. That said, hearing about difficult experiences can be disturbing as well as inspiring, so please take care of yourself first.

There’s a movie Encanto that we saw recently as a family. The film takes place in Colombia, and it paints a picture with song of a multi-generational family who live in a magical home and everything is perfect… except that it’s not. Whether or not you know the story, it’s worth saying that Mirabel, the main character, has a wonderful ability to listen to others share their vulnerabilities. She can see the cracks in the perfect-seeming facade. And she helps her family realize that their strength is not in individual or performative perfection but in the ways that they show up for each other. The support they can give each other, when each makes their mistakes, is what restores to their home the magic it was given to begin with.

Here is a story of my family that reveals the cracks, but also shows the strength… of our wider community:

Last spring, my life partner experienced a series of unfortunate shocks: (1) She was suddenly and unfairly let go from a job to protect a corrupt boss’s best interests; (2) She was unable to defend herself in this unjust work situation because at the same time her mother was unexpectedly hospitalized needing open-heart surgery; (3) She started therapy and realized she had long-suppressed anger emerging against her father that made their relationship quite tenuous; (4) She was diagnosed as bipolar which triggered a re-evaluation of her definition of self.

She hardly knew who she was anymore! She became unhinged. To make matters worse, her mania discouraged her from getting full nights of sleep. Waking up regularly in the middle of the night full of ideas and energy, she began to construct a new narrative in her head:

She wanted FREEDOM. She wanted happiness. She had been abused. That explained why she used to feel so bad. Why she used to be depressed.

(Bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, has genetic, biological, and environmental explanations. Basically, high stress triggers a re-wiring of the brain, causing extreme mood swings between the two poles of clinical depression and hypermania, sometimes seasonally, sometimes within the same day.)

She wanted to put a stop to the sadness and the pain. It had been too much. Someone, she felt, must be to blame. Someone was keeping her from being free!

And she chose me :)