Part I: Of Prisons, Terms, and Conditions

In a culture of contradiction, pendulumming between cherished authenticity and the art of the perfect mask, it has become nearly imperative that one seeks life by defying societal norms and braving the waves of vulnerability. Vulnerability, as it were, seems attractive. It’s life-giving, inspiring the hope that someone values you enough to let you show them your mess, to take off your mask, take a gasp of fresh air, and let them see all the cracks and wrinkles underneath. It seems that, in vulnerability, both the teller and the hearer can, for once, gain a sense of fulfillment, of release— of liberation even— from the oppression of a culturally prescribed solitary confinement. The freedom found in vulnerability: it just makes you feel so alive.

There’s a problem that can quickly arise, though, when vulnerability becomes the root of any relationship— You’ve been locked up behind your mask for so long, do you even know how to live free anymore? It’s no doubt you would rather more than just a glimpse of freedom, but, after all these years, do you really know how to foster that freedom and turn it into a lifestyle?

I see vulnerability more like a spark than a flame, powerful when directed into the right conditions, but how long will it keep you warm if you don’t prepare for its quick burn? Isn’t it fair, then, to say that diving into freedom through vulnerability might just leave you feeling exposed, used, cold, and, well… vulnerable?

Have you ever seen Shawshank Redemption?

Even though the movie is mostly set inside Shawshank State Penitentiary, a couple of scenes are dedicated to portraying the post-release life of some long-serving inmates. One such inmate, an elderly man named Brooks, has the prisoners’ lifestyle of being controlled and confined so entrenched in his being that fear of being released drives him to nearly kill a guy just so he doesn’t have to leave. When he does get released, the freedom is so overwhelming that he can’t cope.

“I don’t like it here,” He writes in a letter, “I’m tired of being afraid all the time. I’ve decided not to stay.”

And so, knowing too, deep down, that the point of life isn’t to live in prison, he not only chooses to end his freedom, but feels there’s no other option but to end his life as well. Forty-nine years of waiting for the sweet taste of freedom, and he sabotages it all in just a few days. Overwhelmed, exposed, and afraid.

Yes, it’s drastic, but I’d argue that it’s exactly what so many of us do over and over again when it comes to our relationships and friendships. We invest so much time, energy, worry, and emotion into finding people with whom we can safely let down our walls, naïve to the possible consequences of vulnerability unleashed. We dream of the perfect relationship— that one person— who will love us for us and with whom we can just be naturally ourselves. Authenticity demands release, driving a longing for us to liberate the real, raw being we’ve locked up inside— so we wait. We wait for love, understanding, and acceptance. We keep it all tucked away, waiting for someone who might fight to dig through the walls we’ve built around our true selves. We wait for that day when finally, after all the rejection, we might be set free.

Waiting. Masking. Pretending. Hiding.

And so here you are, waiting out your sentence— but don’t they all say that prison changes a man?

Waiting. Masking. Pretending. Hiding… What kind of person are you being made into?

You wait for change, not seeing the way it changes you, and the taste of freedom becomes much too rich for your palate.

Finally, when you get that long-awaited taste, it’s too much.

You spit it right back out, or even worse, you choke on it.

Prisoners can’t handle freedom. They can’t handle having all they’ve known, everything they’ve learned to live by, stripped away. They end up either living as if they were still in jail out in the free world or end up, very soon, right back in prison. (Serial dating, anyone?)

It’s obvious there needs to be some sort of transition— a break in the cycle, a reestablishment of control, a rediscovery of self-identity. The same must be said for us and our relationships.

There is hope though, because, when it comes to the walls of imprisonment surrounding your personal identity, the only one laying bricks is you. Sure, you’re being told where to build and how to build, but maybe the key to real, lasting freedom is understanding what kind of building the plans you’ve been handed are actually going to produce.

Here’s how I see it: Without deeper understanding, a vulnerability-focused relationship, much like the type society promotes, will always demand more. It’s a needy relationship, a fragile one, requiring two things to survive: deeper vulnerability and obligatory acceptance. To disrupt this rhythm is to put a crack in the relationship’s foundation. Fail to fulfill your prescribed role, and all connection begins to shatter. Too much friction, and the paper house you built together burns to the ground. All that remains are the ashes of a reality in disarray, and both individuals can’t help but feel broken, used, and betrayed.

It’s a story we know all too well, isn’t it? Our relationships have been reduced to a set of transactions, contracts even— and the relational economy never sleeps. Our accounts are always empty and we’re never satisfied, piling up the interest by digging deeper for vulnerabilities we can use as credit. We buy into society’s sales pitch for a knockoff. We’re held captive by the latest and the greatest because a secret’s novelty quickly fades. Without realizing what’s happening, we continually give more and more of ourselves as we become fully absorbed in the commercial craze of counterfeit stability. We hollow our hearts out, amassing massive debt and bankrupting ourselves of whole, authentic living. Should we really wonder why we walk around feeling so empty?

Forget to share your latest news, and you put your friendships at risk. Hide a part of yourself, and they’ll label you a fraud. Isn’t it ironic though, that we’ve learned to pay for counterfeit stability with our counterfeit selves?

Contracts have terms and conditions, but they don’t leave room for humanity. No contract will ever last and disappointment will always come. Trust will always be broken and standards will always fail to be met.

And so, we learn. We learn how risky it is to sign a contract, but, knowing it’s how the world works, we learn to sign in evasive ways. Why use the real stuff when they’ll take the fake? We learn to lock away the substance of ourselves and spend token replacements instead. We buy into our relationships by “monopoly money” means, and then wonder why they have no real, lasting value. We build up walls of fake identity, and then question how in the world we got so trapped.

Maybe a counterfeit life is just a prison in disguise…

//

Lets Talk

Let’s not just talk, let’s change the way we talk. Let’s change when we talk and why we talk. Let’s even change what we talk about.

Yes, until the ignorance surrounding mental and emotional health in each of us as individuals is removed, mental illness will continue to invisibly ravish our communities. We need to start talking as if mental health is part of each one of us, with each of us experiencing the challenges and triumphs of different places on a health spectrum.

You’ll see a lot of talk today on social media and in the news about removing the stigma around mental illness, and I find that so hopeful to see, but it’s not the only conversation about stigma worth spreading. It is imperative that we begin to understand the inherent needs we human beings possess, and remove the stigma surrounding them aswell. I hope that in doing so, compassion will win the day and stigma might truely be dissolved.

Of all human needs I feel one of the most urgent and disregarded universally is a need to be seen for the entirety of who we are. To be human is to exist at a crossroads of various, intermingled identities. For instance, the fact that I am a white male, Canadian, and a university student who grew up in church says something about how I experience life, and each of those characteristics contribute to every aspect of my life. They amount to one, complex whole. You could not ignore any of them and be able to fully experience who I am and I love the movement in our society to understand this; to look below the surface of people’s stories in order to navigate the huge social issues that make up our reality. I feel the application of this, however, must extend to how we experience ourselves personally too.

As individuals we exist at the intersection of numerous concepts and definitions of “Me.” Me is my physical body and the biochemistry that allows it to function. Me is my personal values and beliefs and how I interpret my experiences from a higher-power perspective. Me is my relationships and place in society. But Me is also my experience of emotion, and to limit the expression or acceptance of this can do nothing more than leave a black hole of emptiness within myself. All the “Me’s” intertwine. They intricately mesh together like a braided rope, and to weaken one reduces the weightbearing capacity of the whole cord. What do you think happens, then, to the individuals in a society that goes out its way to unravel the braid and focus on a single strand (as ours does)? What happens when a thread is treated as if it were the entire rope?

All around me, I see an emotionally sedentary society- one that somehow hasn’t realized yet that our couch-sitting, chip-eating ways aren’t taking us anywhere good. Yes, we’ve started to realize it in a physical sense, with the obesity crisis and other similar trends, but when will we realize that idle, unexpressed emotions are just as unhealthy as an inactive body? We teach kids from a young age how to eat healthy and to make sure they stay active, but it seems we simultaneously teach them how to starve their need for emotional experience.  Hunger tells us we need nutrition, so why can’t we see the twinge of pain or joy or loneliness as a need for some new form of expression? I think, only once we do, will it become apparent that there’s a greater level of health and wholeness out there for us. When will we let our brains and emotions live the full life we prescribe for our bodies, rather than just seeing it as a binary of “yes or no” to the presence of mental illness?

I’ll drop the metaphor to make sure I get the point across. We’ve all been taught that to keep our emotions to ourselves is strength. “Don’t let them see you suffer!” we say. We’ve come to believe that comfort is keeping quiet and that expressing emotion disrupts the cool, calm vibes of any situation. We teach ourselves not to celebrate little victories because someone else has already done it bigger, greater or with more style. Or, on the flip side, we worry our success might offend someone if we feel they won’t ever get that chance. We see grief as weakness, a chink in our armour, and passion as something that makes us weird, dramatic and messy.

Without words, we tell each other and ourselves to simply stop emoting— to ignore it or just not let it effect us so much. Our so-called soul-solution to emotion is to master the art of fake smiles and not feeling. But if you stubbed your toe, would your first— and only— response really be to just tell it to stop hurting?

Pain, as a concept, has been painted in so many dark and moody tones. We denounce pain as everything that’s wrong with the world, and cry out for a hero to come and save us from our miserable state, but maybe it’s our perspective that actually needs saving. We see pain as evil, the enemy: an ominous presence that seeks to bring about our demise. What if we simply befriended pain as an ally instead? What if we recognized pain, not as the root of the problem, but rather a scout who’s come to warn us of danger on the horizon?

Without pain, health cannot exist. Pain is like the thermostat that leads to health, gauging the environment and sending out a signal for change. It’s the communication of a hidden problem, like a warning light in a car or a carbon monoxide detector in your home. (Carbon monoxide’s common name is the silent killer for a reason, so why would you think that ignoring the alarm is brave, noble, or strong?) Even more, if you heard your neighbors alarm go off, would you not be concerned enough to wake them up in the middle of the night?

Maybe it’s time that we tear off the gag and start learning what messages our own pain is actually trying to send us, and seek to discover the subtleties in which the pain of those around us might be hiding. This is the only way to ignite a culture of self- and other-focused awareness—A movement for whole-hearted health and connectivity.

Our need to be seen and known in our entirety is an extension of the fact that us humans are expressive beings. I would go so far as to say that we were created with an innate obligation to express what is going on internally; that our external was fashioned to creatively embody what is happening at the centre of “Me”. How would things change if each of us consciously lived in the truth that, by not outwardly expressing what’s swirling inside, we are simply talking to an internal crowd of one? What words are we uttering to ourselves when we choose to not share our battles openly? The implied whisper only knows one phrase: “You aren’t worth being known.”

It’s a cycle: to reject our need for vulnerable emotional expression is to reject that that part of “being” is worthy of taking notice.  We fall into the trap of these subconscious conclusions as they further cripple our ability to walk openly in wholeness and authenticity, and when shame attaches itself to this, and all our bridges have been burned where else can we turn, but to self-medicating behaviours and activities that might numb the pain?

The same principle exists in the atmospheres we create. What are we telling people about themselves when we fail to take the first step and welcome them into an environment in which internal experience is celebrated, explored, and sought to be understood?

The Let’s Talk campaign, to me, is not simply a call to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness, but to bring to light the need for a culture of emotional compassion and companionship. It’s a call to create a level of intimacy with one another that can support and celebrate emotion as a representation of deeper beauty. 

It is time that we not just talk, but that we seek to experience one another’s true realities. We need not only carry a mentality of “it’s worth talking about,” but of “you’re worth understanding, loving and experiencing.” It’s time we start to validate and champion the completeness of each person’s being and to recognize how, as individuals, we all exist somewhere on a spectrum of mental health.

 What if we treated their battle as if it too might be ours, if only at a deeper level of severity?

It’s time we talk, and in doing so, allow one another to experience more fully the wonderful wholeness and creative genius of being human.

Today, and every day, Lets Talk.