We focus our intention and skills, as mental health peers and as neurodivergent individuals, on building communities designed to incubate lives experienced as worth living.
We especially invite individuals who have been discarded by society due to physical or mental differences...
...because we are the ones experiencing our lives. The buck stops with us.
I haven't been a mental patient and I only had a fifteen-minute session with a psychologist, after which she discharged me, saying that I didn't need her help.
I healed from two rapes, from 6 years of verbal and emotional abuse in a marriage, from a predator-prey relationship following that marriage, from the constant influence of a nightmare neighbor, and from the betrayal of a family member who offered to take care of my first-born while I finished my university degree...
As a peer support specialist, I’ve gathered over 30 years of recovery work from various mental health challenges. I offer my experience to you—who are yearning to survive and thrive in your own way.
I’ve completely recovered from chronic childhood abuse (due to substance abuse and mental illness in the family), PTSD, severe depression, anxiety, and bipolar II disorders...
By profession, I write and illustrate instructions for building and testing aerospace and robotics hardware. I also create knowledge sites for special projects.
I have struggled, over the years, dropping out of the workforce and then finding my way back in, multiple times. I historically attributed all of that to complex PTSD and major depression, but now I'm starting to understand a larger picture of neurodivergence...
As a poet and graphic designer, I have lived in Los Angeles for forty-two years, twenty-five of them as a "client" of the U.S. mental health system.
I was raised on the Navajo Checkerboard Reservation in New Mexico. My stage name, Blancabear2Feet, derives from my rather ungainly, probably comic, dance between cultures in the Western United States...
We are miles apart, yet so close
We are so different, yet so connected
We have felt so isolated, now we have a family
We set up a zoom meeting
We exchange greetings and news
Then each of us does her thing...
I think the toughest thing for me to survive has been something I share in common with refugees, migrants, immigrants, and survivors of domestic violence: I have had to juggle multiple sets of “social norms,” simultaneously, and the consequences for “messing up” have sometimes been dire, severe, and unforgiving.
It has been very confusing, even after accounting for my neurodivergent trait of not understanding some social cues because I no longer carefully copy the behavior of the people around me. I made this comment on Facebook, recently...
It seems that particles are waves that cause movement in other particles and waves. I don’t know. Just seems we splash.
Everything in the particle is in the wave it is, particularly in physical dance and physical poetry. Everything that we do is contained in the dance, in the activated muscle, the bone and the integration of the sensory neurons, within the context of arterial systems and the Vegas nerve. Maybe particles move the way the Father becomes the Son and the Holy Ghost, the way that ice melts to waters that become steam. The way gifting moves from stillness to energy.
I am definitely not a dancer, performance in the art sense, in the dance sense. So why is meditation and Medicine Dance so important to me? For 25 years I was lost in self-care, studying origins without ever being here inside my own body. I was taught, without feeling, that I could heal...
In my own generation, scientific research is starting to catch up with something that has always caused agony for orphans and adoptees, even if they could not articulate it. Humility and grief are my responses. I wish I had understood the experiences of others around me as I grew up. I wish I could have made a difference for them.
We, as adults who forget what it was like to be infants, are learning about the ways that our biological drive for human attachment impacts us.
Nicolae Cousescu, dictator in Romania for decades, had many orphanages, in which the orphans, including infants, received very little or no human interaction...
ProPeers Entry Network
Social norms are often unspoken and unforgiving. In our peer-curated support groups, we collectively choose and practice our own communication norms that keep each of us safe and included...
...while we compare notes and affirm that we are individual souls, separate from our symptoms and struggles.
ProPeers Entry Network
We hold virtual space on Sunday mornings, online, so that whoever wants to can connect and use our silent, collective presence to help them focus on chores, studying, relaxing, tedious tasks, zoning out, crashing, or anything they choose. We are here.
I want to write a lot, so I want to write many little booklets. But I have to begin with the music of poetry. And that, like most of my emails, is going to take us around through the rabbit hole to the can of worms. Sometimes our frequencies wriggle like worms or ramen or Jackson Pollock. But in about sixteen pages, I’d like you to notice the protein in the fractals.
Because, Baby, there is a beautiful music in poetry. We write it down easy on staffs, but the orchestration is complex. And stunning. Spoken word, like good medicine and good nutrition, is healing and empowering. And it can kill people—like pharmaceuticals as a business, or sweet and salty snacks for cash.
I started out in college as a piano major, and then dropped it and dropped out, grateful now—I don’t know how I would have carted a Steinway Grand around to about five different mental hospitals, a board and care, and dozens and dozens of bus benches with no shade and often no buses. Poetry is cheap and easy, it requires nothing but your life, your soul and your relationships. It takes bad credit...
I’d like to say something, very loudly:
If you struggle to use technological devices and software, it does not mean you are “stupid.”
It means you are left-out of a clique; excluded and left-behind by a human culture.
These days, there are options for learning that are somewhat independent of the clique and the culture.
But once you learn, will you repeat the cliquey behavior of the people who were perfectly content to leave you behind?
Originally posted by Rebecca Lewis on LinkedIn
“Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”
—Lin Yutang 1895-1976
