My year on the D List: divorce, death, deception, and other duh's
I tell you some personal things
vol. 5 issue 4
Greetings,
You might have read my post about suicide as a social justice, not public health, issue last week.
Soon after it was up, a good friend called. Hey, what’s up, how are the kids, all that.
Then, “You and I both know that you have enough readers that statistically speaking, 1 in 10 of them were already having suicidal thoughts when they read what you wrote.” My friend is also an academic and clinical psychiatrist, one with whom over the years I have had literally scores of hours of conversation about the nature of soul, spirit, and mental health. “What do you think they thought when they read that?”
This friend is also someone who knows exactly how to challenge me in ways that always leave me feeling stronger, more confident, and healed, regardless of the topic of conversation. Still, I blanched.
I said, “That’s definitely the right question. Give me a moment to think about it.” And then a little silence.
“You know, maybe a person was enraged enough that they thought acting out their anger was a good idea after that. I don’t know,” I paused again and felt my reflexive indignation at being challenged, mixed with shame for having so strongly averred a perspective that might have led to harm.
And then something happened to me that was mental and emotional in nature, but which I felt surge through my body like a straight shot of whiskey.
“But here are two things I do know: Number one, after this year I resolutely refuse to instinctively think everything bad in my sphere is my fault either because I did or didn’t do something; and number two, I absolutely know that what I wrote about suicide was framed in a way that my readers had never thought of before, and that alone is empowering.”
“That’s the right answer,” said my friend. “Just making sure. Sometimes I think you need reminding how powerful your words are.”
Then, referencing my essay on the topic, my friend quoted me back to myself: “’FUCKING RAGE’? You okay?”
Yes, I laughed. I was just making soup for breakfast when the thought of how how much power pervasive outer authorities have over individual lives to which they have no accountability and so act horribly and with impunity, occurred to me and then I had a flash of anger about it. You know, typical making-soup kinds of thoughts.
But, yeah, I said again. Despite it all, I am good. And then we talked about the “despite it all” part.
My life since the summer of 2022: Deception. Disappearance. Divorce. Death. Debt. Also, having to give up my dog.
There are several other “D” and “duh” moments, but listing them would just make the farcical nature of it all into a parody, which, even though my sense of humor is intact, I don’t think at this point would honor the magnitude of all that has happened.
But there really are two more “D”s on the list that I need to unpack.
One thing I haven’t had to grapple with is depression.
Although long-time readers will likely have noticed in the past year that my posting became less frequent, I did keep a regular schedule. It’s true that I was putting more of my energy into my other publication News from the Ensouled Universe, and its now-weekly podcast, but even then, I more than once confessed to my cohost that I was barely able to keep the energy going to accomplish what needed to be done just to function at the bare minimum.
But I never stopped loving docu-mental and those of you who have continued to read it. It is my flagship publication, my stage for thought performance. That I would waver on what to say here is only because in the past year, I felt too focused on making sure I could “keep it together”, that the kind of open heart and mind with which I have always approached this publication wasn’t possible for me to sustain.
I don’t tend to go for confessional-style writing. Too often, I find it self-indulgent, and there is too much beauty and inspiration in the world that I want to squeeze into the finite hours of my life, such that I refuse to waste time absorbing other people’s dumb, self-pitying bullshit. I certainly don’t want to put that kind of burden on you. So, most of the time, I just keep my shit to myself. And yes, I am also fiercely proud. I do not like people knowing when I hurt. That seems like the surefire way to be hurt more.
But it occurred to me in the days after my friend’s words had time to resonate through me, that it might be helpful to my ultimate cause, and to you as a reader who is invested in me as a writer, if you also knew more about me as a person.
So, you might as well know that I have lived on the D List for the past year.
While I do believe in karma, and know that I am not exempt from it, I did not bring these things on intentionally, certainly not through carelessness nor for lack of commitment.
As someone who too often lives her life attempting to “keep it together”, ie, be in constant control, to be pounded with situations where I had no control over the fact that these things were happening, it would have been easy to slip under the waves.
But it all served to remind me that I have been in these kinds of waters before, and that the quickest way to safe harbor is to surrender to the one fact I can control: Namely, how I will shape myself around my new reality.
I remembered that if I can’t be a sleek powerboat, I can become a doughty coracle.
And so, I made adjustments.
At 55, I am lucky to have this wisdom. I see plenty of people my age and older who exhaust themselves and everyone around them by fighting to remain in control, refusing to see that they lost it long ago, if they ever actually had it to begin with.
But that is not to say this year hasn’t been fucking hard. And painful. I had to move into my parents’ basement. I had to leave the city I loved. I left friends behind. I now question things I thought I knew, people I thought I could trust, attitudes I thought were practical, only to see in retrospect they were naive. And worst of all, there is at least one person I cared deeply about but whom I will never see again.
But depression? No. Not this time. Humiliation? Check. Rage. Yup. Grief, definitely.
This is not to say I have never been depressed.
I have been, and severely so, more than once. The first episode I wrote about here when I recounted about my battles as a young woman with eating disorders. Then there was the time around 2006-07 when I was catatonic, and couldn’t even move myself to take the dog outside.
There were many factors that had led to my state of being then, including a sense that I had nothing of value to offer the world, which because I was a mother, was obviously wrong.
But in a moment of inspiration that saved my life, I started testing my truths; they were obviously wrong and would lead to my death. Once I changed my truths, ie, what I believed, my narrative of who I was also changed.
That shift led to me to interrogating the status quo that had ingrained me to see myself a certain way I knew wasn’t fully true. That was a lot of why I was so pissed off, but had tamped it into depression.
And that is when I began to see that the whole damned society was rigged to keep me (and you and everyone) feeling ashamed for not being “that thing” I would never be for all kinds of reasons, including that I really didn’t value fitting myself into being “that thing”!
I thought about getting therapy, but as soon as I had made that connection between my chronic anger-depression and public and economic policies built around status quo lies, I took a dim view of therapy. I did at least try it, but within a few sessions, I decided that all the therapist was going to do was attempt to make me accept the reality of the thing that I wasn’t ever going to be, not say that the thing was a made up bunch of bullshit to begin with.
Once I realized the question wasn’t, “What is wrong with me?”, but “What is wrong with society?”, I started to feel a lot more empowered.
I already knew healthcare from the inside as an industry consultant, but the seeds were now planted for my eventually covering medicine and health policy’s actual impact on people like me: mad and sad.
It was a slow start, but I got there in time. At 44, to my astonishment, I landed a job in Washington that came with Capitol Hill press credentials in order to cover health policy, which I parlayed into covering mental health policy and clinical psychiatry, thus deepening my personal quest to discover the threads tying public policy and sanity together.
I first spoke publicly about this especially bad episode of depression and how I healed my way through, in a speech I gave in 2017 to a room full of psychiatrists. In it, I challenged them to test their own truths. I also relayed this message here.
I wasn’t explicit (they were giving me an award, and I didn’t want to be rude), but what I was trying to do was suggest to these elite mental health professionals that they might want to question why they accepted their field’s dogma about medication, about pathology, about science, about industrialized medicine that claims to “treat” people’s pain, but is designed to profit from it.
My point, obtuse as it might have been, was that it was when I had challenged my own perceptions about what is “mental health”, that I ended up healing myself.
Additionally, over the time I spent in the field, I was gratified that even though I had been ignorant or straight up wrong about some important aspects of psychiatry, I had been right about others, and eventually was even recognized by the field itself for these insights.
Among my greatest personal points of pride is that by engaging my mind and my pride and my sense of purpose, I created for myself not just a career, but a network of people whom I respect and who respect me, too: the scrappy and late-to-the-game, doggedly persistent, curious me that I am.
Put another way, I shaped myself around what I could control.
And ever since then, I have grown stronger in my ability to trust that if I have a question about something, I should ask it, that doing so might save my life, and I believe my life is well worth living.
I also have come to trust that others will find utility in my process of gathering and synthesizing information.
It is this sort of push back against the status quo/put the pieces back together and see if they still fit/repeat, process that is what ultimately led me to creating docu-mental.
This past year on the D List has only reinforced my belief in the power and liberation that comes from asking the right questions. If only I had allowed myself to ask the ones that I should have asked prior to the start of 2022, I might be working with a different plotline now.
But I didn’t, so I’m not, and so here we are.
Maybe one day it will be appropriate to share the details of some or all of what has happened to me these past months. But I don’t think the material details are as impactful as my process. Who really wants to read the ravings of a person who absofuckinglutely is mid-rage, as I have been recently?
What is more interesting, I think anyway, is that I did process and integrate that rage, or at least I have integrated it enough that I now can articulate it within the context of larger themes.
It’s this kind of perspective I have come to see is what makes my work here valuable to others, if the feedback I receive is to be believed.
I have thought a lot about what it is that I am “here to do”, because I think we all need some sense of purpose if we are to connect to the future, and thus will ourselves out of bed each day.
Without that connection to what is yet to come, we will see no point to tossing our grappling hook up and over the rocks ahead. Without that line to the future, instead of filling the gap between here and there with hope and anticipation, what fills the space is apathy, which can only lead to violence or death, or both.
And what I think I am here to do is demonstrate my process, because I know it works.
That is my “ultimate cause” I spoke of earlier. And it is the second “d” I mentioned: knowing that eventually, I would have worked through these things and would be able to share them in digestible form here in docu-mental, and that I would have your support in doing so.
I don’t have answers. I only have observations based on my process.
I deconstruct prescriptive thinking. I suggest you use your own powers of observation. I offer ways to disengage yourself from the information streams that have colonized all of our minds and kept us distracted from exploring what might be more real, more true, and more life-giving if only we weren’t moored to their poisonous and lie-filled cults of branding.
If we americans are ever to be truly free, we can’t be someone else’s product, data point, cult member, adherent, patriot, slave, number, customer, consumer, beneficiary, viewer, congregant.
And if we are spiritual, democratic, mature adults, we’re less likely to want to be any of those other things anyway. That’s why it’s so important to the ones at the top of the hierarchy to keep us distracted; so our power flows away from us and toward them.
Every single way this has been the case that I have thought of so far has been explored in the volumes of docu-mental. I am now at work on a book collecting these essays; the explorations have been that thorough, I have to pare them down.
None of this would ever have been as exciting or worth doing without you, my audience, being there for me as witness. That was why in my conversation with my friend, I felt a jolt when I realized what had happened when I posted about suicide and justice: I frame things in ways that provoke you to find the leverage to challenge how the status quo has harmed you, and you are my witness to having thought the things I have thought, asked the questions I have asked.
We see each other and are more of who we truly are as a result.
That is so powerful.
To those of you who have remained supporters of docu-mental throughout these months when I was straining from the pressures, I thank you. You have helped keep the foundation clear for me to return full-strength.
As I have outlined before here and here, now we’re going to look for new ways to:
…swing a wrecking ball through the last remaining stanchions of Hierarchy’s mythical underpinnings, to topple the paradigm of Empires, and scout the materials we will need for the construction of a new myth of being, post-Empire.
and then
…revisit the discounted indigenous and so-called “pagan” belief systems that once were the predicate of entire civilizations, sophisticated ones … Making new myths can help collect us together again, move us forward, but also encircle us, helping us derive a richer sense of meaning from our lives and fill out the contours of an entirely new paradigm — an ensouled, Earth-protective one, not the current one of destructive either/or empiricism.
With conversations with folks such as this:
Dr. Gwilym Morus-Baird, founder of Celtic Source, an online school of Celtic mythology and Medieval literature, who points out that if we believe that by consuming what the Powers That Be tell us are “news” and “facts”, we are then well-prepared to build democracy, we are deluded:
As is evident, I am starting over, again. docu-mental and its sister publication News from the Ensouled Universe, together form my vessel as I push away from the safety of the cove. As such, I want to stress how much I appreciate those of you who have supported the voyage thus far, and who might be inclined to ask others you know to come aboard.
For those of you who are not already, I ask you to please become a patron (paid) subscriber, and maybe even give a gift subscription or two to others.
If you are unable to become a paid subscriber, please comment and pass along what you do like to others. Sharing does help.
As I have noted previously, I am leaning into developing a larger paid subscription list as this is to become my primary source of income. I could always go back to reporting and other freelance work, and have not abandoned that; however, here, my hands are in a way held by yours, not tied behind my back by corporate jobs that do not fully — if at all — align with my values, as expressed here.
My intention is that after May 15th, much of the material here will go behind the paywall after a few days of being generally available. I will still make some works available for all, because I know that not all of you have the means to invest, but that you all choose to spend your time with me, and I honor that.
The next two weeks you will start receiving more posts, as promised here. I know it’s possible that in the run up to the paywall, my posts might start to feel like a membership drive, so I will sweeten the pot with more personal stories and insights that I hope will inspire, not burden you.
Thank you!
Peace,
Whitney
Happy to be here for this, Whitney... there is so much in this one post thst I can relate to, I suspect we are on similar journeys. Looking forward to reading more. Grá 💕
You probably were not looking for sympathy, but you have it from me. May you be surprised by gifts from God.