#38 Mental health is "a contrario"

How the idea of "health" makes us sick

Morning morning. I write this to you from Fresno, California, where I’m celebrating the holidays early so I can go away for seven days over my chosen holiday (Christmas) to a silent meditation retreat. It’s the first retreat I’ve done since the pandemic, and oh boy am I excited to go and sit with “all this” and have absolutely no where to run except directly into my neuroses. A thrill.

Last week there was a small explosion outside my mom’s house (a power line or something), which scared the living shit out of all of us, and my nephew who is six said he was traumatized by it (many, many, many times, in a way that betrayed he was not, in fact, traumatized). I asked my sister where he got that from because kids are basically alien to me and she shrugged, said “other kids” and that’s a lead in to one of my great ongoing curiosities, which is how we got here, using words such as boundaries, trauma, and gaslight with the same frequency I use the word like in a podcast. How did everything be…