A Letter to A Professor: On Foucault and Mental Health: A Personal Experience

Dear Professor,
When I received my acceptance letter for a masters program in a prestigious ivy-league university, thoughts raced through my head. I knew that having this opportunity to study at one of the world’s renowned environmental studies institutions would no-doubt advance my ideas and career. Little did I know that it would also give me the tools I needed to examine a very painful period from my past. As soon as I arrived I immediately took advantage of the school’s mental health unit. As helpful as this was, I gained the most profound insight into my past from the class: “Advanced Readings in the Social Sciences: Governmentality, Power and Capitalism” that was theoretically immersed in Foucault and Foucaudian analysis.
It might be strange at first to see the connection between a class and the mental heath issues that had haunted my past. From 1999 to 2001, those who had the power granted to them by their psychiatric knowledge effectively converted me from the person I had always known into a bipolar subject, which later evolved due to misdiagnosis and medication induced psychosis into a schizophrenic subject. I was no longer “me”, I was bipolar or I was schizophrenic. I did not have the knowledge or power to become any other subject, this privilege was held by the mental health experts who proceeded to conduct my conduct, through psychoanalysis, restrictions on my lifestyle and medication. By 2001 I had to drop out of university because I was so heavily medicated that I could not function. I walked around, at the very best a drooling zombie, and the mental health experts considered my progress a success. My family and therapists’ panopticon reached to the deepest recesses of my psyche, watching over my every thought, action and chemical constituents of my mind, responding expertly to any signs of elation, paranoia or depression. I had become regulated, by altering my neurotransmitters my thoughts and emotions had become governed and my mental deviance became governable. So why was I not feeling happy, weren’t I finally regulated, hadn’t this team of experts finally managed to govern my ungovernable mind? Why was I feeling alienated from my own mind and body? Why was I feeling powerless?
In 2001, I finally rebelled against their expert authority and concern, and went through the hazardous journey of navigating through intense mood swings, withdrawal from psychiatric medication and assistance. I improved tremendously after this period, but till the spring of 2010 I felt something had been taken away from me, and for years I did not know what this something was. Whenever I looked back at these two years and I would feel a heavy sensation that would overwhelm me. I could not put my finger on it till I was introduced to Foucault’s writings.
Professor, I am sure you often wondered during our Thursday morning classes why I was so engaged, why I hung onto every word and why my passion would veer on rage. I do not know if you ever noticed the times my when eyes would well up with tears or when my face would flush because your lectures made my heart race. During our Spring 2010 class I not only was able to understand what had happened to me, but I was able to reclaim power that had been violently stripped away from me at my very first visit to a psychiatrist’s clinic in 1999. Two years of my life had been taken away from me, for my own wellbeing, yet not for a minute did I feel well during this dark period of my life. How could I have felt well when I was rendered so powerless?
My words will never convey the amount of gratitude I have for your class and instruction. The class not only changed my theoretical inclinations I left it feeling more whole than I had ever felt in my life. I’ve expressed to you my gratitude for what it brought to me academically, but I had never told you the complete story to what your class and lectures have meant to me. I was finally able to understand what it was that was taken away from me, the actors who took it away from me, and the mechanism in which my power was wrenched from my being. Through your teachings I was able to reclaim a power lost, for that I am eternally grateful.

Governmentality Meets Bipolar

I love the autumn and I especially love my walk to school every morning. It’s my time for myself. Its that time of day where I feel that everything I see was given to me. The leaves change their colors just for me, just so I can see them and enjoy them. The light trickling through the branches is mine, the shadows flitting across the floor, yes, that is also for me. The grey rocks arranged along the path were just what I needed. I and nothing else exists, I barely notice the joggers with the black LCD screens strapped to their arms, measuring their heart rates, or the teenagers with their acne cutting school and making out. It’s a good time for me to connect with how I feel and what I want to get away from. It’s a time where I know I can get away from everything and yet that I cannot get away from myself and I am forced to look at this disobedient defiant self, who refuses to be regulated, who refuses to be governed.

I’ve come to know that if I want to keep people around me, if I want to be respected and if I want one less reason to feel self loathing, one less reason to give other people the right to make choices for me, to tell me what can and cannot go into my body, to become medically regulated, to become socially regulated, then I need regulate myself and my bipolar. It must not be displayed, I walk around imploding, and I feel rage of unknown origins. I draw it in, tightly sealing and containing it, it simmers as I conduct its conduct and it conducts mine.

Restitution

It’s the fourth night that I haven’t been able to sleep. I lie in bed and I try to be aroused. I try and feel something, something to remind me of a connection we had. I stay up to masturbate so it helps me sleep, but then it just keeps me awake. It takes so long to be aroused, different memories, from long ago. Memories of a time when it was passionate when I would just look at you and my vagina would clench, arousal that was painful, that consumed me. Just standing next to you close enough I could smell you, your smell would make me dizzy, it would be difficult to breathe. I would hold my breath just to keep your smell inside of me. Just as I grasp a memory and just as I start to feel aroused, a memory of you digging your nails into my back as you orgasm and it makes me orgasm, reality is quick to snatch it from me, with images of the repetitiveness of sex that I would rather be flossing or clipping my toe nails than having. I lose the memory and I lose the arousal. Minutes tick away and I can’t fall asleep because I need to masturbate to fall asleep, which means I need to be aroused to masturbate. I try quickly to conjure another memory of a time where I enjoyed it with you. Do I really have to think this hard and think this far back? Maybe this was the inevitable that such a powerful passion would burn itself out, maybe I didn’t try hard enough to keep it going or maybe I tried too hard? My thoughts keep me awake, and I try again to find restitution. I hear your voice in my head telling me, “Everything is fine, you just like having drama, because you’re pmsing”. Another memory, another moment lost to a past that’s irretrievable. I remember my hands used to tremble before I would touch you, and when my fingers would find your skin they would burn and that burning would consume me. It’s so far away, so long ago that it feels like it was someone else. A someone that is not this cold clammy body that I find myself touching and not feeling anything. I forget about you, which isn’t hard since you are sleeping in the guest bedroom. Tonight is because I said I needed the bed to spread out in, but really it was because I wanted to masturbate, other nights were because I snored, because I moved, or because the cats were making too much noise. I wanted to masturbate and I wanted to be aroused and the only thing that arouses me is our past. Its hard remembering a past when the present is right there next to me reminding how far away I’ve gotten from this past. I finally find a memory that I can hold onto, I deny the present and detach myself from it completely, and I can finally orgasm. Before my orgasm is over waves of sadness run through me. I find myself crying quietly, my chest painfully tight. I’ve disconnected myself from the present and put myself in a past that doesn’t exist anymore, and when it starts to fade away, I do not know where I am.

You Take My Breath Away

You take my breath away. I say this and I sigh. I say this and I fill my lungs with air. I exhale loudly. Freely. I feel my chest expand, my spine curve, my diaphragm reach its utmost extent and quiver, tremble, almost a yawn, almost a sigh and almost an orgasm. I exhale loudly as loudly, as I need to. As loudly I can now that you are watching me. I left the room to breathe freely. I left the room to explore my breath and how I have been holding it. I left the room to try and understand what it means to say you take my breath away. You are here now. I’m not sure why. You are not the faceless, nameless intangible protagonist, subject, object that I hide in my words, you are real and you are in my life. You are ***. I have named you. Now you’ve came out of the room to sit with me and I cannot breathe as loudly as I want or as freely as I want. I censor, I censor my breath and I’ve censored my words. I censor my words and I breathe at about 10% of my previous capacity. My diaphragm does not expand to its utmost extent. I breathe silently. You’ve taken my breath away.
I will not end this piece of writing here, hide the ugliness of myself, or hide the ugliness of you through literary dramatization and mystification. I will say this. You take my breath away. I hold it. I regulate it and I make it as quite and subtle as I can. I flare my nostrils, pull back my soft palate and slow it down. It’s my trade-off, so I can be near you. To breathe freely and fully means that you will be irritated, to curl up to you and let my breath come as it wants to, as loudly as erratically as it needs to, means that you will not want to be curled up next to me. That is the trade-off. We all come with our baggage and mine is that my desire to be near you takes precedence over my breath. In that way, you take my breath away.

Writing Block

It’s been so long since I wrote. I write and it’s clunky. I write and it’s contrived, its forced. I try to let the words flow; I’m scared that they are pretentious. How did I string the words together before into sentences that were not derivatives, plagiarisms of someone else’s expression?
I look back and think it must have been someone else’s writing. I read things I wrote and I’m so impressed, maybe I am stupid to be impressed, maybe they are just as bad as this clunky clumsiness, but they freed me and this doesn’t.
The words flowed. It was always about flowing, flowing not like water, but like air, flowing effortless frictionless.
I write and reread and its clunky, clumsy, word after word. Hesitant.
Pause, is this pretentious? Or is this lame? Is this pretentious so it’s lame? Or is it lame that it becomes pretentious. I have to laugh at myself because once I’ve asked that question in that way in this prose then that it was it has become, pretentiously lame and worst of all uninspired.
There is no rhythm for my words to dance to. I would have liked to use reverberate because that is the word that sounds right, not dance, but reverberate does not have the right meaning.
How many times have my words, my heart, my chest “danced” how many times have situations, thoughts, desires “sung”?
A few words strung here and there used, reused till they have lost all rhythm, all element of surprise and inspiration. Uninspired. The same worn pack of cards, you know what’s coming next, you know every bend and fold and which card it corresponds to, there is no more game to play, it is predictable, the excitement contrived, the excitement forced. My words are words, my emotions are not expressed in words, and they become contrived by my words. Clunky, silent and clumsy, awkward post-modern and pretentious. My expression not just my words are predictable. If I say it’s contrived, I know it will be followed by me saying, thinking or writing forced. I try to edit myself, to sound a bit more original to myself, but then it feels contrived, it feels forced.
I talk about you, again and again, always you, you the faceless, the nameless, the abstract, the hidden masked love. You change outside my words, but in my words you remain as you, eternally, unchanging, you. You were the transient, the fleeting. Once again predictable words strung together. If I say transient, then it will be followed by fleeting. You were the transient, the ethereal, the fleeting, but today you become the stagnant and the stagnation. You remain hidden in my words, but if I must write then you must become something other than you. Something unhidden and unmasked. You must become un-air-brushed, your ugliness exposed, your abstractness denied. You will be made tangible. My heart must not “sing” or “dance” or “quiver” with its love for you, but rebel, scream and free itself with its hatred towards you. My words must expose your ugliness not just mine.

Depersonalization

You call it:

Depersonalization,

Dissociation,

Detachment,

Disconnection,

Or a Dream-like state

A Diagnostic criteria for the DSM-IV to the define the disorders of the undeselfed self

You describe the causation:

Deep trauma that results in a deselfing of the undeselfed self

Damage to neurons from drug use

I have lost connection with my self. I have no connection with my past experiences. I have no connection to the people in my past.

My past is every second which is not now

Your face is new,

It does not evoke an emotional reaction

It does not evoke a visual familiarity

You are not part of the deselfed self, you do not constitute a part of my deselfed self.

What we have shared does not constitute a part of my deselfed self

Then what does?

My memories are there, flitting across my mind’s eye like faces of strangers in the windows as I stand on the side of the Metro tracks

Inconsequential

This is not amnesia, I remember

Why does it scare me?

Why does it trigger paranoid ideations that I am another being in this body that does not belong to me?

In this life that does not belong to me?

What if I wasn’t scared?

Can I accept that this deselfed self is another fleeting manifestation of transience?

That what You tell you me the undeselfed is, is not?

Is not, that is why it doesn’t constitute my deselfed self?

If I know that I am deselfing Your construction of what my undeselfed is and not my self,

Then What am I scared of?

Rabid Special ver2.4

I did think I was a better and more evolved version of bipolar, the new and improved bipolar 2.4, a rare edition of the self aware non medicated calm maniac.

I thought it was one of those sometimes I’m not bipolar phases.

I thought I was better, because I knew my psyche and because I knew what the signs were.

I really did think I was better than the rest

Because I am not on medication,

Because I can articulate this obscure fluctuation

Because I can accept my loss of control without losing it

I thought I had beaten it, I thought I wasn’t another bipolar

I wasn’t another psycho freak

I thought I was special

I still thought I was special the limited edition version 2.4 as I gnawed through my arm like a hungry rabid dog

I thought I was special because I currently am going through a depressive episode and I am totally aware of it, I am working out my issues, I’m not just another bipolar, I am an enlightened bipolar.

I thought I was special because I understood that the rabid dog had to feed and I could control it with applied behavioural motivational therapy, no no no not control train through a series of positive reinforcements. I accepted my rabid dog and I respected my rabid dog.

And it respected me.

I thought I was special because I thought I was better

Better than you, better than every bipolar, better than you nonbipolars because I have the bipolar edge

When I cannot control my voice

When I cannot control my actions

When I cannot control my tears

When I cannot control my drama queen

When I cannot explain it anymore

When I am humiliated by a self that I do not know

I know I am not in control

When I am no longer there, but I am

When I cannot accept this part of me, but it is

When the rabid dog wants to feed and I do not want to give it an arm

When I want to put it down

I am not better

I am not special

I am another A bipolar

I am another A bipolar who cannot accept it because I think I am better

Because I think I am special but I am another A bipolar who isn’t better and who isn’t special but thinks there are, who cannot accept it they are A bipolar because they think they are special and that they are better,

when they are just another A bipolar who isn’t better and who isn’t special

(wow, I just realized how I have been using my "illness" to feed my ego, wow aren't I special, aren't I better?)