Yesterday I posted by sixth story on the Deadlines for Writers website. I had a lot of difficulty with this month’s prompt, hysteria. I did a lot of brainstorming and had many different ideas to run with but none seemed to be a story I could figure out enough to write. I think it’s because where my mind went in the beginning felt a little “heavy” and “dark” for a short story. You see, I couldn’t seem to figure out how to talk about hysteria, extreme emotion, when I felt like more difficulty seems to come from anhedonia, an absence of emotion.
When I sat down to write, this was where my free writing took me.
You expected hysteria. You wanted tears, anger, hysterics – anything but my calm disappointment. I needed to show you crazy in order for you to think that I wasn’t.
Through my brainstorming, a few different things had stuck out for me. Hysteria was the name given to an ailment, beginning in the 1800s, that was only thought to plague women. The word itself comes from the greek word for uterus and was believed to be caused by a wandering uterus. It was used to describe a plethora of situations, the consistent aspect of the ailment being that a woman was acting in a way not considered to be “normal” in the eyes of men.
There’s a lot of history that makes us cringe now about what was thought to cause hysteria in women and the solution to it. It almost seems laughable until you realize that Freud was still considering hysteria in his work in the early 1900s and it only left the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980.
Things boil down to the use of this “condition” as a way to hospitalize and control women who weren’t seem to be acting in a way consistent with the expectations or needs of men. When women were emotional, wanted a life different than they were living and struggled with this, it was decided that something was wrong with them and they needed to be fixed. It was the early version of gaslighting.
When I found the quote from Naomi Wolf, it really hit home. It summed up an ongoing struggle for me, being invalidated when my experience was not shared with others. Growing up in a home where I never felt the connection of interests, hobbies or aspirations of those around me, I often felt like I must be wrong or different. Whether it stems from ADHD and not feeling like I can accurately explain what’s going on for me or realizing that my brain acts so differently from others that they may never understand, I have questioned the “validity” of my feelings because they didn’t seem to make sense to others.
Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.
Naomi Wolf
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The Beauty Myth
When I sat down to write my story for November, a story of invalidation when behaviour is not matching other’s expectations, the words came quickly. It was the first attempt at a story for November (I often have a few fits and starts before “finding” my story) but when I finished it, I didn’t think it was something I could publish. I worried about it being triggering or misunderstood and just thought it was a little heavy and depressing. I struggle with that in my writing, knowing that people like a happy ending.
Over the course of the month, I started four other stories in an attempt to find on, on theme, that I felt I could publish. I could never get any past about 500 words without wondering what I was really trying to say. I kept going back to the first line from my first attempt – “you expected hysteria” – but still couldn’t bring myself to finish that story. Finally, with 48 hours left to the posting deadline, knowing that I wasn’t passionate about any of my other ideas, I decided to go back and review what I had written.
The more I read and edited it, the more it felt right. I knew it wouldn’t be right for everyone’s taste but I also went back to the fact that I am writing for me, not for anyone else, and this was a story that needed to get out. Writing has been therapeutic for me, an effort to stop the overthinking and recycling stories in my head. Putting them to paper seems to help distance myself from them and give me the opportunity look at them from a different perspective. The process of over-writing, editing and adjusting and rewriting seems to help my neurodivergent brain distill everything into key thoughts and themes for me.
So, here it is, Never Free. Please note that it talks about depression and suicide and if either of these triggers will impact you, please be cautious in reading it. It will not be a story for everyone and I hope that you will read it in the spirit that it was written, to bring awareness to the lack of proper resourcing for mental health and that many in the mental health field are operating only from a perspective of what society deems is correct without really understanding the perspective of those struggling,
We hope to end the social stigma of mental health but still do not resource the solutions to help those who are suffering. We teach them to fear the system we think is in place to help them.
If you are, or know someone who is, struggling with depression, please find help. If you want to help someone with depression, please don’t assume you know what they need but instead, take the time to understand their world as they see it. Validating their experience will go a long way to helping them heal.
L.J. Lawson
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My hope for new approaches to supporting Mental Health
That said, everyone’s experience and illness will look different and if you take only one thing away from this story, let it be that if you really want to help, put aside your norms and expectations and just listen. You don’t have to agree or believe the same things as they do but you can’t help until you can understand what they feel.
Do you have an experience where you started to doubt yourself or the legitimacy of your experience because others didn’t share your point of view? What do you wish had happened at that time?
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