Image: The Phrenologer’s Window II (1966) by Betye Saar
Epilepsy and mental health campaigner cece alexandra on transcendental liberation following racial trauma and a suicide attempt
words Cece Alexandra
Trigger warning: Suicide attempt, racial trauma
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise
— Maya Angelou, 1978
The most uncomfortable thing about a failed suicide attempt, is having to then convince strangers that your reason, or reasons for trying to kill yourself were valid and concrete. Your decision to end your life may be perceived as binary to some, but to you, it was just one path of a million others to choose from.
I’ve recently finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, both of whose protagonist’s describe the same kind of anguish.
In A&E, I remember the first few nurses I saw - white women - were shocked at my reasons and sympathised with them: “oh gosh, that’s awful”, “no wonder you did what you did” were their responses.
Then the last nurse - a black woman - came along: “What kind of reason is that? Don’t ever let your life be defined by a job.” At first I felt reprimanded. Until I really began to consciously break down what she was saying - You’re more than this, there’s more to you than just a career.
And there was. Three years later I now realise that I definitely had so much more to give.
But I wasn’t there yet. I was still in a really dark place, accusing myself of screwing up really badly for making the wrong career choice and for wasting almost an entire year on training to be a teacher only to not even qualify. These nine months had been an entire write off.
I also doubted my own ability to be a teacher too. Had I just hallucinated being a good teacher? In my ability to cope with the bullying and pressure, I’d escaped into a dreamlike state of being. Perhaps as a result of my ‘not really being there’ I hadn’t done the job as well as I’d thought I was doing. My own sense of judgement couldn’t be trusted.
Through the process of therapy and training to become a psychotherapist, I’ve learnt that during that teacher training year I had dissociated, a defense mechanism I had learnt from a traumatic childhood. During these times, I often feel like I’m disconnecting from my body, so I’m watching my body be pummeled by abusers from an outside perspective, rather than being locked inside a body being ravaged by wild beasts.
As well as having an innate interest in mind and behaviour, my main reason for studying a Masters in Mental Health Psychology, was because I wanted to be a black therapist. I wanted to be able to help the people like me who had suffered racial trauma and needed a person who looked like them to talk to about what they had gone through. It was important for me to seek out my own black therapist. I couldn’t talk to white therapists about what I had been through without being shut down by a white wall of silence and left with the responsibility of holding their white fragility without having my own trauma held.
Exploring different psychotherapeutic approaches led me to seek out a Black, Gestalt therapist, who I found privately through BAATN (the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network).
The Gestalt understanding of human beings is based on four principles:
The [Authentic] Relationship (between client and therapist);
Awareness (of self, responsibility, process);
Whole-making (grounding, satisfaction of needs, wholeness and completion);
Embodied Self (Sills, Lapworth, and Desmond, 2012).
I was drawn to the Gestalt approach because I wanted to learn how to pay attention to what I was feeling, thinking and doing in the present and to focus on what was happening within and around me in the right now.
This soon led to my experimenting with mindfulness, retraining my brain to be with the moment, with the present. I couldn’t change the past - I needed to learn to accept that. I was learning to be more mindful, and also compassionate, not striving for perfection but being thankful for what I was able to achieve.
I have epilepsy and following my suicide attempt and some very bad medical advice from the on-call psychiatrist to stop taking my anti-depressants cold turkey, I had a grand-mal seizure which left me barely able to walk or stand for long periods of time for months. So when I became comfortable with mindfulness and more physically stronger, I joined a yoga class. It was frustrating that I still wasn’t able to go back to running, and that my body had changed so drastically, however yoga taught me to appreciate the things that my body could do.
Yoga was my way of escapism from living in the city, but it was also my way of taking back control of a body that was still very wounded. Yes, I was living in the city, and studying, but I was also unemployed because I was too sick to work. Yoga was my way of being kind to myself and showing myself love, being open to growth, to making mistakes and being corrected.
Slowly I was altering my negative cognitions. However, I was still struggling to sleep. I was having these recurring nightmares where I had absolutely no control of my situation and every night I was scared to go to sleep because I knew that I was going to be hunted down by the two people I was running away from in the consciousness of the day - my mother, who at the time I was estranged from, and the headteacher of the school I’d trained in.
As a way of coping through my teacher training year, I’d latched desperately onto artists who could express the emotions I couldn’t, one of those being Kendrick Lamar. When I had to go back to the school to collect my things, which had been thrown into a box and dumped in the reception area, Lamar’s ‘Damn’ was my soundtrack. It gave me the strength I needed to carry my legs past those school gates and back out again.
They say that courage is walking in the absence of fear.
It was only in hindsight that I gave myself the kudos I deserved for being able to do something so brave, and it was through taking back control in my conscious life that I was finally able to take back control from my persecutors in my dreams. And my nightmares ended.
I often wonder if my transcendental liberation - gaining the ability to walk in a higher realm where I offer myself unconditional positive regard and total acceptance, allow myself to be fully congruent knowing that I don’t have all of the answers and that I don't need to, and realising that I’m too precious to get caught up in the drama that often surrounds us - is just an altered state that is a symptom of my epilepsy.
I have focal onset temporal lobe epilepsy. My seizures deeply impair my awareness and can last from a few seconds to 30 minutes. The neuro physical explanation would say that these seizures are why I am able to enter into an altered state of being.
But saying that my epilepsy is the reason for my current altered state of consciousness feels like I’m giving the power away from myself’s ability to transcend to a higher realm where I can be happy and more compassionate to myself.
“This dualistic approach, where I can exist in two different realities, that are governed by two different laws, is the approach I feel most comfortable with.”
I also believe that my brain and mind are separate entities and where I cannot control my epilepsy - which resides within the reality of my brain - what I can control is my mind. This dualistic approach, where I can exist in two different realities, that are governed by two different laws, is the approach I feel most comfortable with. In my reality of the mind (and soul), I have control to also not always get it right. There are times especially now that I’m training to become a psychotherapist, that I have allowed myself to become caught up in the drama of being a black student in a very white environment and often feeling that although I have to work ten times harder, I still will never be good enough. But I am constantly learning that I don’t have to be perfect. And I never will have to be if I continue to focus on my end goal (qualifying and practising psychotherapy). I want to continue to strive to be in a higher realm and live a good life alongside like-minded people.
Esther, Plath’s protagonist in The Bell Jar, upon her release from a psychiatric asylum ponders on her metamorphosis from confused girl to independent young woman and says:
“There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road” (Plath, 2005, p.233)
I agree. Caterpillars are reborn into butterflies but go on to die shortly.
Those of us who have transcended through the dark realms of mental illness, go on to live life in a higher realm.
References
Angelou, M. (1978) And Still I Rise. Still I Rise.
Plath, S. (2005) The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber
Kaysen, S. (2000) Girl, Interrupted. London: Virago
Sills, C., Lapworth, P, and Desmond, B. (eds) (2012) An Introduction to Gestalt. London: Sage
Read more essays on transcendental liberation in Issue 4, The Reverie Issue.
Purchase a copy here.