Society
February 2023.
Like ‘culture’; ‘society’ is a loaded word, It hangs over me with a heaviness I am not sure I want to look at. Currently I am sitting at a desk in a tiny room at Moniack Mhor Writing Centre in the Scottish Highlands.
Here, a group of diverse writers are working on their writing; such a wide variety of subjects, graphic novels about the book, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, poetry, writing on the housing crisis, crime novels and prosaic but essential applications to Creative Scotland for money to allow people more space to write their thoughts stories and maybe even their visions and dreams down.
I did not know what I wanted to write about until I got in the car and drove north from Argyll through Glencoe and up the Great Glen to this lovely place near Abriachan. I had vaguely thought of detailing a life time of helping people and myself speak out about our lives with a mental illness. I wanted to be critical of some of the assumptions we make as a community. I wanted to make the rather tired point that our community will have a voice that is genuinely a voice when people who are capitalists and who hold a range of challenging right wing views are as much a part of our community as those of us used to the co-operative and the participative and the communal and I also wanted to challenge some of the people who it is my job to challenge as to why they need to do so much more than listen to us. I have been doing this for forty years and feel I have things I might helpfully share.
I do not feel part of the writing community, it is not the society I mix in. I do not know the rights and wrongs of conduct, what you should say and shouldn’t, what comments would cause someone to wince and which they would lean forward to catch with delight.
Neither do I really consider myself part of the lived experience community anymore; certainly not the survivor community. I have the credentials though. Forty years ago I helped set up a drop in centre run by young people with mental health problems for young people with mental health problems. Predictably we called in McMurphy’s and maybe even more predictably, we banned all professionals from crossing the threshold. But now I do not know if we even have a community and certainly not if I am part of one or welcome in it. Six months ago my second memoir was published; its about lots of things but key to it is my continuing compulsory treatment for Schizophrenia which has now lasted for fourteen years. Once I was visible in this community and we ate together, talked together, celebrated together. It was fun. At the book launch a number of people who claim they are from that community were there to heckle. Two had travelled the length of the country to make clear their displeasure that I had a platform to tell my story. This small group of people have caused me more distress and driven me closer to suicide in the last few years than either my illness or the attitudes of some of the practitioners who are in my life.
Once such people were the people I immediately trusted, confided in, wanted to work alongside. Now they are sworn to attack me; my crime is that I know my CTO keeps me alive, I do not know if this is a good thing, but for me and maybe only for me it does. Each time I stop my medication I try to kill myself, even I have to acknowledge this. I may not think I deserve to be alive but I currently do have a wonderful life with my partner and her young children, our dog and the rabbits. I am enabled to do all the things society expects we should be able to do and supported to do. I work, I walk in the wild wind besides the Firth with spray and shrieking birds and I amble in the same place in sunshine with the coconut smell of gorse and the chatter of children with their parents.
That word society, it preys on me! It’s expectations, you need a community with its own values and expectations to know the society you are placed in and I fit slap bang into the middle of mainstream society and yet also lurk right on the edges in a dark lonely place. It challenges me daily.
My fellow writers. I have an author page on Insta and Facebook. I am on our countries Live Literature Data base but I am as unconvinced I am a writer as anyone else. I am not entirely sure what an adverb is far less what the purpose of an oxford comma is. I do not earn enough to live on from my writing and at writing events I am horrified; people try to include me but I mumble and stare at my feet, seek the furthest darkest corner of the room.
Here, on this week away, people draw me into conversations but I believe, when I say to them that I write about psychosis and intimate partner violence carried out on men that I identify myself as alien to them. Maybe they do too. I wonder what makes for connection and what makes for difference? There are three people in our small group whose pronouns are ‘they/them’ and three people from the Black community, who also readily admit to sometimes not feeling they fit in and being a part of.
One of them this morning was so kind. I was talking about my work this morning where amongst fifty other staff, four of us are employed because we have lived experience, or learning disabilities, are carers or neurodiverse and again I talked of feeling alien among the admittedly delightful nurses, social workers and psychiatrists who are my colleagues. I will be forthright here; I very much believe in employing people with lived experience and sometimes in making it an essential quality of a job application if the role merits it, but it comes with its own burden. Our very own job marks us out as different, our job description is about challenging, using our personal experience; an experience others are mainly expected not to have. It separates me, makes me self conscious. The trite words that I am no different rebound with a viciousness that was unexpected because I am different even if people like to pretend I am not. Maybe there is no such thing as a norm but there is a difference that people notice and even if we dress smartly, or speak articulately, or know as much or more than some of our colleagues I will be different and will always be the person who just doesn’t quite get it.
I notice I have made very few friends at work, there is one person I could definitely say is a friend. Before covid I was at her house a lot, then there are two others I would like to be friends, but they aren’t; not quite. Maybe that is just me, maybe my sense of belonging needs to be elsewhere. Maybe, I am being too precious to say it bothers me that in the eight years I have worked in my present job I have been in only two colleagues houses and with the exception of my friend to only one outside social event. To me it makes a statement and reminds me of past nurses of mine who have told me they would be sacked if seen giving me a hug. Do my colleagues unconsciously or consciously see people like me as not part of their community not from the society they mix with and laugh with? That person I was talking with this morning? I was saying it is exhausting being a visible agent of change, having to constantly challenge in such a way that people listen rather than resist and exclude. It is exhausting, not belonging. She said “Of course it is.” and she also said “We do this in many communities of exclusion and seem to expect individuals from those communities to be keys to change.” She said; “To make individuals responsible for changes in the attitudes towards their communities is misguided, we need systems change and that is why even though suffrage happened one hundred years ago women are still not in the position of equality they should expect to be nowadays.”
So far I have been talking about the attitudes and indeed the prejudices that mean we are a part of society or are not part of it. The things that mean we walk into a room full of confidence and sure of a welcome, compared to those times when a place is not made for us when we come to sit down or when we come to share our life’s story, the heckling I mentioned from small sections of our own community, means we need escorted out of the back of the bookshop on the main street of Edinburgh with the possibility of the police being called.
I know those times as will so many of you. I know the difference that happens when we are publicly asked to give the Lived experience perspective as if there ever was one perspective that applies to us all.
But society is about friends and acquaintances and it is about being a part of. It is knowing the rules our friends, lovers and relations abide by and knowing how to live by them too. I get this and don’t at the same time.
Once I wrote in a memoir about the expectations placed on us. To dress within a certain norm, to mix with people it is acceptable to mix with, so if we are adult males; not with children in the playground. To act the right way, so if we are at a conference not to start a loud conversation with our neighbour or if we are looking for a seat not to just lie down on the pavement. It extends to the gardens we keep, the way we decorate our houses, when we eat breakfast, or go to bed. It includes how much we tell people about ourselves and how little and combined, it is a great big spiderweb of interaction governed by so many rules that some of us just don’t notice. If we wriggle in it too much by being too loud or too bouncy or even too quiet or too smelly then all the other parts of the web will become aware of us and we will be poisoned and wrapped up and put somewhere terrible away from those we had hoped were our friends. We will realise that inter connectedness has rules and if we break those rules, our friends will stop visiting, our neighbours refuse to talk to us, children will be asked not approach us and our relatives will say they cannot deal with us and we will become apart and alone and find the most company we have is our telly or if we are lucky a practitioner but we know they are paid to see us so we will doubt they really want to have us in their lives or personal circles and we will become alone and sad and we will lose hope and joy and belief in a better world and that breaks my heart; I know too many people like that.
Sometimes it is as simple as not having the understanding about how to communicate. I don’t know if it is my anxiety or my schizophrenia or indeed the autism some friends claim I have but in company and with chit chat I struggle – I find it hard reply to people, I try to be funny and see puzzlement on the faces of those around me, I find a silence and do not have a single thing to offer that silence; where my partner can speak in any situation it is rare that I feel safe enough or able enough to do so.
There are places where I find this does not apply, among my friends and my partners friends, people are used to my silence. They are kind with it and do not dismiss me or avoid me; many of them seem to regard me with affection and some go out of the way to provide the springboards to conversation that mean I can reply to them.
We had one couple who took direct action. I could have been offended but was not. After a number of visits to their house where I rarely talked even though we drank far too much and everyone else was chattering and laughing, they began to give me things to play with while we were there; small spinning tops, or blocks of clay, a pencil and coloured paper, matches and puzzles. I liked that very much. We could joke about it, “Oh! Graham has escaped to the wrapping paper!” or equally I could get absorbed wrapping up the proffered sweetie wrappers into decorations while the others wittered around me. They did it with kindness and for that I am grateful.
Lastly we have our own societies in the places we frequent and go to. Forty years ago I was creating places for young people to meet in and support each other, thirty years ago I was meeting people in drop in centres, twenty in resource hubs, ten in recovery cafes and five in wellbeing hubs; all really, exactly the same thing. You get the picture?
I don’t know whether you have them where you live and I don’t make distinctions as to whether they are user run or places to give purpose and meaning and employment. Key to them for me is that they are places where we can be and can belong and be accepted. They are places where we can drop the mask and know we are understood and in that understanding, find the ability to talk and laugh and joke that we do not elsewhere.
Currently I go to Jeans Bothy Community Mental Wellbeing Hub when I am free and not working or occupied with my family. It grew from our local community and is not as exclusive as some places are. It is open to anyone who would like somewhere to go and though it is mainly people with poor mental health or people who are neurodiverse who go to it, others who do not identify in that way also attend. It aims to ultimately be run entirely by us, its members, but we are in no hurry for that. The very, very, small number of workers provide continuity, safety and organisation, they make sure the things we want to do get done and are possible.
We have many groups that run here and this is the bit I like. Here the groups are a mish mash; some were started by popular demand and a sessional worker was brought in to run them but some of those sessional workers said “I don’t want to be a worker I want to be a member” and stopped being a paid worker. Others were set up by members themselves who had the facilitation skills and the skills for whatever it was the group as doing and they ran the groups, paid or not, I do not know. I like that. I like that the boundary between worker and member is constantly blurred and that the workers do not see us in any way as other or less than. We have such a variety of things to do. I go to the photography, writing and book club and an occasional member’s meeting but I have also been to the upcycling group, the men’s group and the walking group. I have helped design posters and write articles for the newsletter and sometimes pick up food that the local shops donate. Other people go to the bingo or the art or the resin workshops; the chair yoga or the fitness centre sessions that are set aside for us in town, others go fishing or to the Bothy only cinema sessions for those who cannot manage a public showing. We have been sailing, cycling, gardening, we have held exhibitions and had politicians support us.
This is my haven. Usually I try to appear to fit in but here I do not have to even trouble myself about fitting in. It’s norms and ways of being, its values and its support are just what I want and am used to. I may speak at conferences and committees and in parliament and in work but those places are where I am other. The bothy and numerous others like it across the world are where I feel I can go and belong while managing the precipices of expectations I have to cope with, usually unsuccessfully, in mainstream society.
(photos : Hollyhock Seaford July 2023, Jeans Bothy 2022)