I am geriatric millennial who was born in 1982, which means I barely remember the ‘80s (hello, trauma!), I have memories of the ‘90s, and the ‘00s are a vague blur of pain and anguish (not being dramatic, but it was hard). As I get older and become more thoughtful and acquainted with my identity as a person with disabilities, I’m also becoming more aware of how trauma intersects that identity, especially how it intersects with my mental illnesses.
I want to first acknowledge my privilege to live in the twenty-first century, and I do own that privilege. I’m a historian, and I study the history of music and its relationship to the social construction of disability and gender, and I know it was worse for mentally ill women (‘hysterical’ women) in the medieval and early modern periods (for instance). Hell, you don’t even have to go that far back, you only have to go to the nineteenth century, or really even to the twentieth century, to see examples of women being locked up for mental illness: the tropes of madwomen in the attic in the nineteenth century, 1967-8’s Girl, Interrupted, a woman locked up for borderline personality disorder who then commits suicide (like 10% of people with this condition).
But I also want to say, shit. Growing up as a millenial, with undiagnosed borderline personality disorder, it was hard. It was very, VERY hard to be mentally ill. High school was hard. I really felt shit. The girls in my homeschool co-op (I know) who compared their weights with me on our group phone calls (remember when we figured out three-way phone calls?!) and laughed when I was always the heaviest. The boys who laughed at me for having a crush. My piano teacher yelling at me for not remembering the fingering. My youth group leader preaching about sin and lust and controlling ourselves. My parents insisting that our shorts and skirts be knee length because we were too sexual and our bodies were somehow causing impure thoughts. All of this had a huge impression on me and I couldn’t handle it. I really thought I was bad and that there was something wrong with me, and that I needed something external to make me right. And the fact that I couldn’t handle things, that I would get so upset, so aggravated, so dysregulated, so sensitive—this was my fault, I needed to be tougher. And if I couldn’t stop eating, this was my fault, I needed to have better willpower. Or if I couldn’t stop exercising or couldn’t stop throwing up, I needed to just STOP. BE STRONG ENOUGH. Or if I was too anxious or too stressed or too sad, also my fault, I needed to calm myself down, or cheer myself up. Or, even better, I wasn’t doing the right things to allow GOD to do that for me. But somehow, it was always ME that was the problem.
I know that some of this seems very trivial (OK, not the eating disorder stuff, FFS, why wasn’t anyone getting me help?!). I look back on it now, and of course, none of the stupid friends BS would bother me now. But now I’m 39 and I have a career and a spouse and REAL ACTUAL friends and I’ve done things in life. As a growing, emotional young person, having abusive and shitty friends, well, that was hard. And it laid the groundwork for a lot of the trauma that would overwhelm me later in life.
And this narrative of me needing to do things for myself and needing to take ownership for my own shit and my own problems and to not ask for help nor lean on others nor think that perhaps others could in any way, shape, nor form be responsible persisted through the 2000s. In fact, I would say most of the self-help movement is like this. Trying to do better, be better, make yourself better. A lot of modern psychology is like this. I wouldn’t say it’s all bad. I find a lot of good in cognitive behavioural therapy. You can have a lot of agency in the idea of ‘manifesting’ things for yourself or owning your own shit and taking back your life or whatever. But there are cure narratives embedded in there, too, and it also takes away other people’s culpability. Sometimes other people are assholes. Sometimes other people weaponise their privilege and take advantage of helpless marginalized folks like people with disabilities, BIPOC folk, LGBTQ+ communities, and poor folk. Saying to a person with a disabilities that they need to ‘own their own shit’ is completely ludicrous. OK, Sally. I own that I have a chronic disability. I still need money to pay for my medicines, and in the United States, a job that will supply me with health insurance so that I can go to a doctor who will prescribe me with medicines that keep me alive. OK? ‘Owning my shit’ gets me nowhere.
This made living as a person with a disability during the late 1990s and 2000s, at the dawn of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ironically, incredibly hard. Obviously there are also subversive ableist narratives here. BE STRONG. BE TOUGH. DO IT YOURSELF. JUST STOP. This is the antithesis of disability. When you have disabilities, you can’t do things by yourself. You need to go to doctors, you need medicine, you need people to help you with daily chores, you need therapists, you might need people to help you with daily self-care, etc. etc. I mean, come on. And the mystery surrounding therapy and mental illness, especially in religious communities. Looking back on my childhood, especially with my trauma history (I am the victim of childhood sexual abuse), I should have been seeing a childhood therapist at an early age. But in many religious communities, especially amongst the Christian communities I grew up in, adults did not see psychologists, much less children. Or if they did, they saw Christian counselors, who were often trained through Christian licensing boards. Any sort of problem, even sexual abuse in churches, is handled within the community (similar to the Roman Catholic church sexual abuse scandals). When I did finally go to see a therapist, in my twenties, it was in graduate school.
I firmly believe that the narrative of STAY STRONG, TOUGH IT OUT, DO IT YOURSELF is routed in ableism, and persisted throughout the 2000s to the detriment of the mental health of many millenials. Thank goodness that this has seemed to have waxed and waned at this point, although I do see that there is still a traditionalist mindset in some baby boomers, gen x, and old millennials that therapy is only for the mentally ill, instead of just a great thing to do for self care.
There is, however, a brand of ableism even in therapy, and there is another brand of ‘DO IT YOURSELF’ mentality. I’ll get further into this in my next post.