> THOUGHTS BEYOND THE SELF. GAZING OUTWARD TOWARD A BETTER WORLD
Existence is rarely, if ever, about me. Still, I seem to spend far too much time navel gazing and invested in my internal world. I hope that phase is over, because I am sick of myself feeling degeneratingly decadent, uselessly self-absorbed. May this space be a place that focuses on things that matter.
Reading the news yesterday an article of complaints and criticisms stuck in my head as something in need of a solution. I'll preface sharing the link on "The [supposed] lack of mental health resources" with my opinion that the writer completely misses the mark and is vomiting word salad to fufill a deadline and need for clicks. I suppose categorizing this as "commentary" lets a jounralist off the hook for innacuracies in reporting: [rural-behavioral-health-in-new-mexico-why-the-money-doesnt-become-care]
First, this article assumes that the US model of clinical services is effective in addressing "mental health" or "substance use recovery" I will not provide any links to words, rather, please go outside and talk to another human to see the efficacy of how the medical/clinical model of behvioral health has helped anyone in this society. The writer complains that the money the State has from the Opioid settlement and within the Mental Health Trust isnt being used. Yeah! That's the point of goverment in America, not only to move slowly, but also to sit on money and let budgets roll over and look good on paper without regard to what is happening on the ground. THe writer then goes on to compare New Mexico with Alaska which may be fair to some degree interms of remoteness, alienation from dominant society and indigineous population but even then the article misses the mark. How are the systems of dominant society i.e., clinical care for "mental health/substance use disorder" supposed to allievate the problems the dominant society created in the first place? The writer apporaces the topic from the perspective of all of us who live in New Mexico are incapable unless someone comes along from somewhere else and "trains" us to be better.
A person is less likely to want to die if they have a reason to keep living and conditions that make that reason a possible reality. Alcoholism/opioid abuse are often slow suicides with other addcitions being ways to numb out against the lack of control a person feels in this world. We would be a lot better off with less clincicans and more housing, a healthier enviroment, healthy affordable food and an end to the continued rape and murder of this land and its original inhabitants by the US government.
[here] is a very recent scholarly article that has research and facts on utilizing indgienous culture (land, language, and, customs) as a pathway toward healing from substance use disorder, which most people accept at this point as stemming from trauma/a maladaptive set of coping skills for PTSD. I did a quick search around the internet and foind that New Mexico has indigenous language programs and cultral non profits already doing this work for their communities. When it comes to healing the land and pushing back against mining and corporate and federal plans to further harm the earth and its waters, indigenous communities are at the forefront of the public hearings, tribal, municipal and state meetings to speak out against these capitalistic and millitary programs. A very recent example and one of many: Dine' Community Members Speak Out Against Another New Uranium Project]
I don't belong to these communities. I am someone who was born in a different place and in many ways my family and myself benefited from US settler-colonialism far more than whatever we lost from wherever we came before. I look to indigenous communities with respect and gratitude for being able to live my life here. There is a part of me that wants to do something to help allievate the destruction that the US govt willfully commits to this day on this land. There is a part of me wants to do what I can to help everyone suffering. We all suffer from the killing of the earth for profit and the alienation of a capitalist society. Again, more clincians for mental health treatment will not solve these problems. Again, housing, access to health food, clean water, a reason to live, the persuit of attainable goals/happiness, and the conditions to make all that happen are what solves these existential issues. What we need is a revolution.
The overall universal point being: It is time we stop calling human expressions of the harms of capitialism, imperialism, fascism, and other expressions of power over communities, societies, and, earth as a whole, a mental health issue/psychiatric disorder that is medicalized, clinical, and billable. It's time we expose the delusion for what it is, the system itself providing a false solution to problems it created in order to insidiously shift blame back onto individuals, simultaneously perpetuating root problems and preventing true healing, all while contiuing to alienating people further away from ourselves, each other, and the earth.
> A CLARIFICATION OF INTENT -or- HOVERING OVER THE RIO GRANDE GORGE
I've been thinking about what I wrote below (THOUGHTS BEYOND THE SELF. GAZING OUTWARD TOWARD A BETTER WORLD) a lot. Maybe I was bit too harsh, especially for anyone who knows nothing about me. I did not come about such a harsh stance on a whim. The below I wrote last year In Albuquerque, after I went to Holy Cross Hospital for "help" because I was panicking and hopless. They ended up putting me on an airplane down to Peak Behavioral Health (inpatient) where I was for a month, Peak refusing to relese me back to nothing in Taos, instead putting me in a sober house real estate scam in Albuquerque that was a human trafficking nightmare. From the time I reached out for "help" at Holy Cross (June 2ish) it took me until October 31 (yes!) to make it back, with a few other detours along the way. In another state where I lived this was more or less the routine for about 15 years, minus the plane ride. Has it ever helped? Well, I learned I can make art, at least collage, and I learned what doesn't help (the system). I've spoken and written at length and lobbied for change at the state level where I am from so I'm kinda burnt out on thinking a corrupt system will reform itself for the good of the people. Taken all together Ive spent about 2 years in locked facilities and I've worked in some after, thinking I could be a agent of change from within (ha!) Sometimes I ask myself, knowing what I know about humanity, "wouldn't it make sense that Gwould let us blow ourselves up rather than intervene in our collective stupidity?"
Hovering Over The Rio Grande GorgeMy thoughts flow too fast, especially when I am at home, and that home? Hardly a home. What I call home now is sober housing for women, it was the only roof over my head I could get into after being discharged from the psych unit, but that is a story for another time. I developed this crippling superpower where I can travel down and examine multiple trains of thought, and all the connecting cars within each train, and all the corresponding tracks and interchanges. It would be an endless dialectic if there was a concept that allowed for multiple simultaneously yet independent dialectics all snapping stairs up in time. There is no end to a dialectical chain reaction if each subsequent reality springs forth from the last. It is self sustaining that actions equal consequences which cause new and sometimes contradictory actions as a result. No one seems to care for this super power, as evidenced by my residing in temporary housing, playing the game of going to AA and recovery groups, when what I really need is income support and kind people in my life, art and romance and a reason for living. Competent doctors and the assurance my seizure medications will be in stock on the days I need to collect the bottles from the pharmacy. More importantly, a reason to maintain my health, not only to take the meds that regulate my brain, but to enjoy life enough so I want to take care of my health, to find the beauty and the romance of life, in the midst of all of the world's suffering and pain, i feel it in frequencies. Please believe me I do, at night when everything around me is quiet, the screaming rips through my mind, my skin, my eyes, my hands, silently, unbearably.
So in some ways it was fortunate I moved down south a few hours, though my heart and my car and a few of my most prized personal effects are still impounded up north by the gorge. I hadn’t thought about the social implications of living near the bridge. I thought the natural beauty would be enough to lift my heart from so much hurt and grief over the decades. So many selfish decisions and selfish people I clung to so I could numb my own selfish wrongdoing. I already knew years ago I was done. With life, with trying, with love coming to me, but never with giving. I gave so much I was like the gorge itself, my heart had a worn down groove, but the river of love still played. My first thought about my own potential suicide off of it was to go down away from all the people and the road, but then you dont get the full impact of hitting the river from the middle on the bridge. Maybe just break many bones on the tumble down. Jumping off the gorge isn't a serious thought I have, but I consider it as an option I can always use if I can't function anymore. A serious consideration since I have no one to be a burden on except for the state.
There was one day early on in March that I was walking the west rim trail that follows right along the rim with view point outcroppings along the way. I was walking along quickly, jumping from rock to rock on the path headed to the edge of the rim. I felt I had enough control over my forward motion as I started to get closer. From about 3 feet away from the sand and sage I heard a human voice, male, call out “ayyy-oh!!!” There wasn't anyone around, it was a quiet day, I thought maybe it was a crow, because they like to squawk hello at me but it wasn't a caw that I heard it was specifically a human voice. It didnt occur to me the other day that that bridge, the gorge, new mexico in general is a destination spot for suicide. Theres that part of me that feels ignorant for not realizing it, the first time i drove over the bridge, my first thought was “Thank God(ess) there’s no chain link, or barrier or netting fucking up this view” and not in a malicious I don’t want people to get help kind of a way. The first time I walked on the bridge I thought those call boxes were safety lamps of some sort. They were out-of-order call boxes. Imagine getting all the way to the bridge from wherever the fuck, getting all stoked up to walk to the jump point, then see a call box and think, maybe I’ll try to talk to someone, maybe there is some insight or “resource” or human kindness that will get me to walk back off the bridge, and so picking up the telephone at the crisis call box, and if the line were to be dead I’d expect that but if it were to be semi-live, with a recording saying *hold on while we direct your call* and stayed in that liminal space, I know that would alienate me further toward jumping.
Intellectually I am very interested, concerned, motivated to make changes around the practice of suicide. It used to affect me a lot more internally, but not chronically, for me wanting to die was usually a very background, almost imperceptible, current running through my mind except when I was on antidepressants and then it consumed me. I think I've lived with it so long, also, I lost people. A couple of them I was really close to and that built a wall around me and the rest of the world, killing my hope, giving me the green light that if things should ever get that bad for me it would be ok for me to take my life, because I understood why they took theirs. Possibly, empathy is not rational at all, sometimes. Empathy could use a leash, at least in my case. To be extended enough to offer a hand up from the abyss, but to not get dragged down into that abyss. I love my friends I’ve lost, and I need to find my own reason to stay on this planet.
