I’m in a weird headspace tonight. What I want to do, quite selfishly, is write the kind of long, rambling, ranting blog post that I wrote regularly in my early twenties, when blogs were a new thing, and my filters and consideration for others stories or privacy were no so developed as they are now. But I’ve learned that I’ll probably regret that sort of post when morning comes, so I’ll just say a few things tonight.
First, the stigma around mental illness is real, and lasting. I’ve experienced it in the last few days in a variety of ways, always in situations where assumptions were being made. The reality is, that while parts of me are fragile, and maybe always will be, my psychologist and I agree that right now I’m in the healthiest place I’ve been in several years. That said, over the last week or so, a couple of areas that need some attention have been revealed in my life. They feel raw and prickly, so I’m giving them the attention they need.
The artist Frida Kahlo once described women as not fragile like a flower, but fragile like a bomb. Someone else, I’ve forgotten who, maybe Sue Monk Kidd, wrote about all the women we are in our lifetime. The truth is that the things I’ve endured over the last three to five years with my mental and physical health have turned me into a new woman. I’ve leaned into healing and found new strength. And while I’ve actively pursued an exploration of what it means to be feminine, these days I’m far more bomb than flower.
And yet, I’m flower too – in healing I’ve become more open, more fragile, more exposed. Strong back, soft heart (which I think might be a Brene Brown line, but I’m feeling lazy about googling the quote fragments floating in my head tonight.) I cry more easily, hurt more deeply, feel more fully.
It’s a weird paradox, one of many I’m holding right now, that to be strong and fierce I must also be soft and fragile.
One of the things I hate most is when assumptions are made about me. It’s partly my personality type – I hate being pigeonholed. I relate a lot to that other quote fragment about containing multitudes.
Almost every time I see my therapist, we encounter another place in my world where the answer seems to be holding two things in tension – another paradox to hold.
Recently I said yes to something that I knew would likely cause some pain, and it was the easiest yes in the world, because it was a question posed by someone I love, someone who has loved me well in return, someone who fights to include me, even when they know it might hurt. But here’s the thing – they always give me the choice, and they trust me to know my own boundaries and limits. That trust makes it easy for me to make space for them, makes it easier for me to lean into strength in my fragility, and do the big, hard things.
Lisa From Canada 