Look Ma! I’m a Top Writer in Mental Health!
Thoughts on my family’s legacy of mental illness and writing
I open my Medium App at the Caffè Nero in Brookline Villages as I begin my hourly ritually of neurotically checking all my notifications. I then notice something on my profile that wasn’t there yesterday—at least, not that I noticed. “Top Writer in Mental Health.” It says just under my hodgepodge bio and website.
Damn. I think to myself. I really did it.
But, I suppose what helped to make it possible was the pages upon pages of writing passed down to me from my ancestors. In fact now, I page through my great-grandmother’s memoirs. Stories of pain and loss, World War I, World War II, the Dust Bowl and the death of a son.
There are writings from the perpetrators in my family and that of their victims. Stitched all together, we form some complex portrait of the legacy of mental illness and the enduring heritage of putting words on paper.
Mental Health is a Family Affair
I sit on the floor of my therapist’s office. She is having me draw a genogram. It’s a family tree with the emotional and psychological dynamics included. “My family permeates love,” I say as I pick up a bright red marker “I’m not sure where this fear you’re picking up is coming from.” And then I violently scribble all over the page.
Trauma is intergenerational and inherited.
Luckily, I never met the perpetrators of that violence, but as I continue the genogram, it soon becomes apparent that this doesn’t mean I didn’t inherit the anger and the fear they left at their wake.
Inherited Trauma
As psychotherapists trailblaze through the much more complex world of trauma, something readily becomes apparent. Trauma is intergenerational and inherited, it is passed down with just as much power as genetics.
Even as a child, before any exposure to events deemed traumatic, I held a lot of fear. I was often brave, yes, climbing all over Yellowstone and declaring myself King of the Rocky Mountains, but if someone didn’t announce their presence or accidentally slammed a door, I would jump out of my skin.
So, as I scratched frenzied into my journal, it became apparent. My jumping and flinching reflexes didn’t come from my own trauma, it came from those further up my family tree.
Healing is intergenerational
Home has always been murky for me. New England feeling closest, but I was raised in rural Pennsylvania. Home was also the frontier, where my grandfather’s family worked tirelessly on an experimental farm growing crops that could survive the Dust Bowl. Some of my family came from the first colonies, one of them was hung as a witch in Salem.
Healing is not just about our ancestors, healing is also about our descendants, our unborn cousins, our nieces, our spiritual successors.
So for me, finding home is not just about finding a space of my own, it’s also about finding a space for my family’s memories for many of them never had a safe home of their own.
A friend of mine, Max, wrote a beautiful article on the nature of healing. You see, when we heal ourselves, we heal our ancestors—whether we knew them or not. They say:
“How much of our truth is casualty to our shame? How much of that shame doesn’t even belong to us, but are relics from past generations we just never put down?…You get to redefine home for yourself and to your family.”
Healing is not just about our ancestors, healing is also about our descendants, our unborn cousins, our nieces, our spiritual successors.
When my mother sought help for her depression, it was an act of healing not just for herself, but for her children. Just as fear and trauma are passed down, she also became an example of what setting yourself free can look like.
Max goes on to say:
This is the inheritance I make for my brother’s future children. My cousins’ children. And an example to others in the community I left. Of who we can be. Of who we don’t have to be.
So how do we heal?
Creative Expression is a Family Affair
My grandmother plays on her near ancient piano and begins to sing. I join in on the harmonies and for a brief moment, we have left behind the unique horrors of our even more unique childhoods. We enter a space of the sovreign and creative. I don’t know how long we are here, it doesn’t really matter.
Soon enough, we fade out of the music and into reality.
These two things often go hand in hand. Fear and creativity.
These vignettes of creative escape dance around in my memories. Sometimes it is with my father, his bass voice echoing the cavernous notes of the organ. Sometimes it is holing up with my sister with the bizarre playlists of Barnes & Noble and our writing strewn out across multiple tables.
As much as fear seems to seep into every fiber of my family, there is an equal amount of creativity. As illustrated in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. These two things often go hand in hand. Fear and creativity. It is just a matter of not letting the former conquer the latter.
Inherited Genius
My grandmother has perfect pitch, my father has a Ph.D. from MIT, my cousin has published four books, my great-great-grandfather made instrumental contributions in the realm of agriculture.
I resent us being called a family of geniuses, though. We are a family plagued with imposter and interloper syndrome. I believe what has helped us all create with such magnitude is what Austin Kleon calls a “scenius”. Individually, we are lone sufferers of mental illness and abuse. With each other, we stitch our troubles together to create patchworks of brilliance and resilience.
Creation is intergenerational
Jim Rohn once said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. While I agree with this, I would also like to add that we are the average of our ancestors(genetic, spiritual, creative)—the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. They are there for us to call upon. To honor, to admonish, to heal, to stand up for/to.
I leaf through my great-grandmother’s memoirs. Yet through her writing, I feel as if I knew her well. There is a cadence to her writing, emblematic of the era in which she grew up. Filled to the brim with memories, lost hopes, a life well lived. I read them over and over, not to learn anything new but because they tap into this…this divine source of inspiration.
Sometimes when I write, it feels as if she and I are in conversation. Not even in a necessarily spiritual sense, but in that certain understanding and empathy that comes with reading someone’s life story.
In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says of ideas:
Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse, to be made manifest.
In many ways, our ancestors are like ideas. Most of them have faded into nothing but stories, legends, photographs and memories.
So when I write about OCD, I write for unmet great uncles. When I write about belonging, I write for my grandmother. When I write about imposter syndrome, I write for every woman in my family, living and gone. When I write about age, I write for my unborn nieces and nephews.
I am the average and extrapolation of all these people. So when I write all these things I write, about all, for myself.
