Contexting disease and mental health

A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately on chronic illness is aimed at eliminating the disease-by-disease, body-part-by-body-part way of dealing with physical conditions. And at its most provocative, it also questions the arbitrariness of what we think of as disease entities, as much social constructions as they are viruses, pathogens, etc. A really obvious example — diabetes was once perceived as a disease and depression as a moral failing; we now understand the social determinants of diabetes and the chemical aspects of depression.

In the world of social constructionists, there has been an ongoing questioning of the pathologizing of human behaviour as mental illness; this is starting to make its way out of the wacky world of constructionists and into the mainstream.

A recent excellentNY Times piece by Ethan Watters explored how the American (highly contexted) experience of mental illness is being exported as a “medical truth.” One important conclusion is that the the biomedical explanation of mental illness actually increases social distance between people rather than decreases it.

I just came across another blog post that further pokes at the meaning of how we talk about mental illness. Lots of food for thought about the different “truths” behind how we can frame even what we might think of as “scientific fact.”

Wet January

I’ve been feeling a fair bit of January malaise — post-africa, and finding out I have to move from my sweet little place. No new story for my life is emerging yet, and the older ones are still circling the drain a bit.

But yesterday I did this little fb status thing: “Fill in the blanks: I am___ I love ____ I can’t stand _____.” And seeing myself refracted back through others bolstered me.

I am….
a doctor of Philosophy; incredibly smart and creative; generous; Very supportive of friends; smart, smart, smart; getting a coffee right now; brilliant; engaging; independent; brilliant.

I love….
Africa; knitting; running; ju jubes; the colour red; spilling water on something expensive; my nieces, generative conversations, my family and friends; Habitants; to run; complexity.

I can’t stand….
getting my credit cards compromised; poor grammar in online dating introductions; being told that you can fix me; not being challenged; TIME ZONES; mediocrity; racism; closemindedness; non-stop street drummers; details…LOL; mindlessness.

Is this thing on?

I’ve been so busy blogging about my africa/post-africa life over here that I haven’t wandered in here for a while. Hm. Stock-taking. Back in concrete-cold Toronto, chest cold, achieved Elite status on Air Canada, getting to see my nieces this weekend for the first time since thanksgiving, possibilities of what happens next in my life shooting off in different, fizzling directions, like the muted sizzling of Canada Day sparklers when we were kids. (Was it Canada Day then, or Dominion Day?).

The biggest thing is that I have to move out of my sweet little BC house, and I don’t really want to post about it because I’m trying to let it sit lightly. S & T need to sell the house. It’s going to force some decisions I’m not quite ready to make, and January is so the wrong time for that.

So I focus on me in my happiest state, after Kili:

.

Even through my hacking, she’s still alive.

In kampala

And my other blog is crashed somehow (the whole site), and I’m wakeful and hallucinatorily asleep at the same time.

Last year my flight to Entebbe felt like an adventure in itself — this year, it felt like a plane ride. Partly the slight familiarity of it, and partly crowded, overheated BA flights and a rapidfire turnaround at heathrow didn’t have the same air of cool other-wordliness of boarding the more serene, shinier KLM planes. Traveling with BC also made it more like something I was doing routinely — chatted about life in general, the clubbing he did in london, work pressures, my lovelife, rather than the more rarefied conversations about What are You going to Africa about.

It felt good to get out of the airport to be greeted by someone we know, and, so dead on our feet, I also had my first sense-memory of what’s different here. My accelerated pace is so visible here, so clear in relation to the soft slow drawls of uganda action. I was reading a text about The Other, and I realized that “Other” for me is partly about race, privilege, etc, but it manifests in pace, and having to reframe my context from “absurdly slow service in hotel” to “people welcoming me by showing me the best they have.” The welcome is the bone, and where I need to fix my gaze. Not on the huge bottle of KILLIT bug spray prominently displayed in my room in case it’s needed.

blerg

So I’m feeling all anxious about this trip, right? And I decide to alleviate some anxiety by reading a guidebook and getting all excited about it? And I read about Bwindi, where the mountain gorillas are?

Bwindi hit the headlines in March 1999 when the kidnap and subsequent murder of eight tourists tarnished Uganda’s image. In light of this dreadful incident, gorilla bookings nosedived and security was upgraded significantly. There is now a large, invisible army presence down here and it is considered safe to visit. However, given what once took place here, it doesn’t hurt to check in Kampala for the latest security situation in Bwindi.

This on top of MSF earlier this week speaking out to remind the world that it’s not safe in the eastern part of the DRC, despite the fact that the media coverage has simmered down.

Not so much helping with the anxiety.

intrepid

I was just in Shoppers buying a whole whack of stuff for traveling (peanuts, wipes, purell, blister stuff, ziplock bags), and I had a sudden momentary freakout. I’m going to Africa in 4 days, for 3 weeks. I’m spending a CRAPLOAD of money and traveling by myself in some half-world between luxury (the safari parks in uganda), NGO (using language like “in country” and printing out budgets) and quasi-adventurous traveler. (“An Intrepid traveler doesn’t use a suitcase,” says the Trip Notes from the Kili portion of the trip. “THey use backpacks.”)

Intrepid is the name of the travel company running the Kili hike, and it’s a bit ironic to me. N and I had a little thing at the beginning over our relationship about
an adventurous Brit couple of the mid 20th century, and I always felt like he liked me best when I could enact the Beryl Smeeton part of myself. But I’m just not that kind of woman, not in travel and not in life.

It’s so odd — I leap, say yes to the gorillas, the kids, the kili climb. And I organize myself to do it, orient myself steadily — and then it’s like the hula hoop I’ve been gracefully spinning drops abruptly to my ankles and knocks me over. Today it was in the drugstore, spending yet another $80, wondering where I’m going to cut off this endless doing and moving around of this year, keep my feet settled somewhere.

I’m thinking that four days before an intense trip is probably not the right time to be yearning for settled feet.

borderlines

I dreamed last night that I was in Kampala and there was a Taliban-like religious coup. I was trapped in a hotel room, hiding behind the curtains, taken completely by surprise, while they herded citizens onto my balcony to Make a Moral Point. One of my colleagues had left to rent a car and drive someplace by herself; the coup-leaders dressed me up like a prostitute (though I was wearing my favourite Danish winter boots) and let me go outside, where I went, with great fear, to someplace where they were rounding up children. It turned out that they were lining up the kids to give them a chance to run through a doorway and possibly win prizes. My nieces appeared, and I woke up.
On a 777 crossing the prairies right about now, heading for a last wave of Consultant Cate before leaving on Saturday. Listening to an episode of The Next Chapter called borderlines, reflecting on how I started out in a border town, crossed borders for N and my phd, managed to move myself to another border town, and a life that is more liminal than ever. Wondering if I’ll ever want to stack the planes more closely together, and how I’ll do that. And whether I’m finding more and more that the cubism of it all is a kind of deliberate space to live my most adventurous, edge-pushed self without having to make a full commitment to any particular aspect of it.

My last relaxed morning in WR

For a while. Watching some ambitious sailboats in the post-gale wind on Semiahmoo bay. My couch becomes the best nest in the world as I drink coffee, talk to someone whose chapter I’m editing for our book, and move pieces of clothing and ideas around to make sure I have everything I need when I go back to TO on Monday, en route to UG.

Somehow Karen and I got onto the topic of animal energy (such eclecticism, these CMMers have), and I told her about the crows, racoons, squirrels, seagulls and neighbouring cats that comprise the ex-urban wildlife here. “What a collection of resourceful beings,” she said. Racoons apparently leave a protector behind in their nests when they scavenge, and then take care of feeding him/her; crows, according to her book of native mythology, look at the world cross-eyed, and are a reminder to “stand in your truth” and become your future self.

I still think a little bit that they might peck my eyes out while I’m sleeping, but I’m deciding to take this call as a reminder that the bags packed for so many diverse destinations (and mounting visa bill) are taking me someplace intentional.

Gales

Still trying to figure out the shape of my life, this backing and forthing, so much more admin in holding two homes on top of the work, the travel, the adjustments. But I went for a wet, windy run along the seawall Monday afternoon, and a very long gale-force walk along the roiling water yesterday, and I felt more ME than I ever have.

There is something I need to pay attention to about my incredibly strong pull to be alone most of the time right now. Potential lovers intrigue, especially one nice boy, and friends are under my skin, but I want so so much solo right now. There is so much going on — Africa and the kids, the lost boy, Africa and the adventure, work and what it could become, who I am in all of this. Had a good meeting on Tuesday with one of the PI’s on the project I work on out here, and found myself reiterating how much I want to be HERE.

I’m not thrilled with the aspects of HERE that involve fetching the laundry in freezing drizzle, but the opportunity to work while looking at the fog, the sea, the wind that has more life around my bedroom windows than I’ve ever felt — it’s where I’ve been aiming all my life.

The inbox is overflowing right now with emails about Africa — travel logistics I can’t possibly sort through (I’m imagining I’ll find myself in Tanzania with no airport transfer), the boy whom we found foster space for for another couple of months, pleadings to deal with the Bad Boys who won’t practice their songs for the Visiting Canadians, formal, jesus-infused supplications for more money wound up with panegyrics to our niceness and general goodness. All part of the fabric… compelling, obsession-making passionate life. And the gales of november turned gloomy seem like the right backdrop for the intensityof this white-sun story.

(un)packed

I had such a full weekend in the bay area. Nominally, I was at a conference with my fielding friends, and we led a workshop on dialogic practices on friday morning. It went well, and, as I hoped, it got my head back into the conceptual, the stuff that can only be connected when I’m not running around like crazy.

True to form, though, I skipped more sessions than I actually attended, trying to cherry pick on instinct. Just no more room for new ideas right now — I needed space to let some of what I’d been doing, aiming for, hoping, to form some shape.

I did go to one session that really resonated. It was about intercultural conflict transformation, and was a simple conversation among three women who are doing work in the middle east and china/tibet. A palestinian woman from an organization called Abraham’s Vision got me tapped into my hopes for the work with the kids in Uganda again — a hope I hadn’t articulated in connection with this weekend. Someone made a comment about how starting and then abandoning projects does more harm than anything else to the trust of the people involved really hit me — underlined for me what would happen to the individual kids, Anita, and Phiona, and Angella, and Abdu, and all of them — if I disappeared now. A minor loss in one sense, and in the general discourse of western/developing, cross-cultural links, a huge betrayal.

At the end of the session, the facilitator invited a moment of silence or invocation, and a southeast asian woman began a chant that transported me momentarily, made me find my ground.

I think this is part of what gave me the space I needed to start writing again, working on my neglected chapter for the book. That, and just being with people who accept and see me in my edges and hopes and brains.

One of the harder things to make meaning of was being in bp’s home. My mentor, he and his wife are away, and they generously lent us their home. It was hard to be there, in so many ways — in one sense, he’s hallowed to me, and just being in the intimate space made me giggly, like I shouldn’t be naked in the same shower he uses, step on his scale. (And let’s not mention the number I saw on the scale after a summer of too much food and too little exercise). An adolescent giggling at wondering if our dissertations were on his shelf.

Beyond the incursion into intimate space of my Teacher, though, I was so looped by the evident love and warmth between K & B. Pictures of the two of them in the peace of perfect connection, postits with a line from Rumi — “the point of my life is to be in your presence” — on the fridge, over K’s desk. Such a sharp stab of longing and sadness that I had to circle around it, step into my joking self.

And then, find the place to do some writing with ease for the first time in forever, the starbucks nearby.

All of this, all of my selves flipped past one by one quickly — child looking for family, woman with girlfriends, writer, thinker, connector, philanthropist, teenager, yearner, physical being, woman without family who can’t be in a group so readily. All.