vol. 6 issue 4
Greetings,
Even though I had to come up with some kind of headline that sounds cogent, this is just a placeholder while I am on the road and still going through the archives to help with the book, as I mentioned last week. I don’t really have some well wrought premise to share but I did want to welcome new subscribers (thank you Val, Greg, and Julian) and attempt to sum up five+ years of this publication before taking a new direction.
When I started docu-mental in 2019 (but had been amassing ideas for years before), I wanted to see what the correlation between corporate power and mental health was. I talked about how we needed a new story to base our lives upon, one that didn’t force us into drudgery. My premise was that life is about learning what is the matter, good and bad, and then assigning meaning to what we’ve decided matters to us as individuals, not to have our lives proscribed by financiers.
It’s been educational to go through everything I’ve written here in chronological order. There is definitely an arc of development from wanting to “create herd immunity to anxiety and depression” (which I even trademarked), to coming to see that the propaganda of the American Dream — even when it seems to work out well for many people — is the basis of our national cognitive dissonance, to articulating that at the intersection of corporate power and democracy, so long as we mistake consumerism for citizenship, we will always have mental health epidemics.
But to my dismay, where the sum total of these five years of publishing end up pointing to is not to some kind of political epiphany, market reforms, nor some clear policy agenda. It doesn’t even include writing ourselves a new story, as I had put forth.
It’s as simple and yet profound as not fucking up the Earth. Nature is all that we can count on. That’s it. We are of the Earth. What the hell is this virus of heart and mind that has convinced us that we can own land? That we can extract and extract from the earth and then pretend it’s not what we’re doing? That we can ever be above anyone else? That there should be enslavement of humans in any context, and even animals and plants for that matter? Division and hierarchy always lead to war, clearly.
The separation of us from Earth is not natural. The Earth is all we have. Our connection to Earth is the basis of democracy, where all are equal but certainly not the same. Wherever this concept of linearity instead of cycles and upward spirals came from, it’s perverted, wherever it originated. And yeah, take that to where you think I am going with it. Outerspace, even.
It is in our individual relationships with Earth that we will find peace and joy. I am firm in my conviction of this, and thank you for helping me get to that.
The gratitude I feel for the readers who have been here since the beginning is immense and humbling, especially when I go back to what I remember thinking at the time was so insightful of me, to seeing instead was sophomoric in its presentation, even if my insight was keen. Thank you for indulging me.
Most icky is the first year of docu-mental — a prolific one with over 60 essays — because of how dishonest my tone was. I was trying to uncover why mental health was so torqued but I was doing it while hiding from myself and trying to sound like I had my shit so together.
But, it’s also humorous in a sheepish sort of way, to detect how over the course of my deconstructing the house of mental anguish that we collectively live in, I was growing angrier and more honest about my own life.
As I have explored here, we are so shamed and conditioned to accept some form of slavery as a natural state of being, it is, as the late Mark Fisher said, easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of Capitalism. For so many, it would just be too overwhelming, like a fish forced to consider water. Maybe that is less so now, given the world events currently repeating themselves at their highest amplitude ever.
Over the years, I was mirroring that process of overwhelm by coming to see that things I had never ever questioned about myself and my life were just false. Utterly false.
When I began publishing here, I had just gotten re-married and entered a kind of reverse Cindarella fairytale. And with no disrespect to my now ex-husband, he did put a glass slipper on my foot — and then I became the char woman to him, the dogs, the stepkids and grandkids, trapped by my own stupidity until, as I documented here, I was forced to wake up.
I believe that as my personal life became the canvas for exploring society’s ills, which wasn’t my initial intention, the materials here mature, or at least I think they do. It hurt to evolve, but hopefully I am not insufferable now. At the very least, hopefully I don’t sound like an asshole, lol. And if that is the case that my analyses here improved, then I hope it also reflects how we are all evolving. As I have said before, I truly believe human nature is good and kind.
Thanks for being here. I really am excited about the next chapter, which I expect will be beautiful, even if there is pain still to resolve and war on the horizon.
Peace,
Whitney
Exceptional piece Whitney! Living in serfdom brings us closer to the magical round blue ball we’re denizens of. I’ve become much more attached to its wonders, and have organized resistance against those who choose to destroy it for their own profit.
I’ve always believed in the idea of change, yet see far too little evidence of it. Thanks for all you do and best wishes on your journey to the book I’m looking forward to reading…Sla’inte!!
W -- couldn't agree more about human nature, in spite of current events. I'm always so glad to see you here (and am grateful for your shoutout). xo