When is it ok for a woman to be angry?
You seem very angry.
You’re being quite aggressive.
You seem different.
It’s hard for people to understand because you don’t seem the same as before.
Everyone’s doing their best, it’s really hard to know how to deal with people with mental health issues.
You’re speaking really fast, you’re connecting ideas and it’s hard for people to keep up.
Various colleagues and friends have said these sort of things to me over the last few days. If you’ve been reading any of my articles, you’ll be aware I had severe post natal depression during 2017 and 2018, with a dose of psychosis and — in the last couple of months — a manic / psychotic episode. This last ‘episode’ (the least offensive euphemism I’ve found so far) was triggered by an incorrect dose of the anti-depressant drug, Venlafaxine. The irony!
(Can I just say, apart from a couple of scary days, the manic part was like a dreamy MDMA / ecstasy high for about 4 weeks, with an excess of ideas and creativity. More on that in another article.)
The topic of today is — how do we ‘handle’ women who (suddenly, it seems) speak their mind without apologising or qualifying? Especially if it goes against work culture or societal expectations (which, in the main, it does).
The problem I have is that I’m returning to office life after 2 years of being depressed / sectioned / at home looking after a baby / living in a hospital / spending my time among NHS staff and the mentally unwell.
A handy, if profane, phrase I keep coming to is that I now give ‘zero fucks’ what other people think of me.
Let me explain. I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings, or make people feel shit about themselves personally. That is the last thing I want. But I know that some of my opinions are hard to understand or seem a bit blunt. I’ve toughened up a bit.
Two years I was largely a person focused on trying to make sure everyone else is okay, that nothing goes wrong, avoiding conflict like the plague. That person had almost exclusively white, middle class friends and close family. I hated racism, sexism, prejudice. But I hadn’t been directly affected by it. Well, apart from the everyday low-level sexism. I was aware of systemic injustice and bias, and upset by it. But didn’t really see how I could play much of a role in ending that, apart from beavering away at my job in ‘sustainability.’
In the last two years I have been locked up in a ward with severely depressed / strung out / abused / abusive people / silent people. Black women, poor women, women with no teeth, women who have been raped, women whose family don’t believe in mental illness. I have had Christmas dinner with homeless men from Portugal, Romania, Russia, Jamaica. I have given money to people that have been raped in Finsbury Park and need to stay in a hostel, partly to stay away from their rapist.
I have had my rights taken away, my money, my freedom, for a time. I have had to try and speak, while consumed with depression, to a boardroom table full of ‘professionals’ during a weekly ward round. To the well meaning / bored faces of social workers, nurses, consultants, junior doctors, students. Trying to speak and hearing the junior doctor’s keyboard tapping as it records my every anxious, paranoid, hopeless word.
I have had to jump out of the shower in front of a ward full of mothers, babies and nurses, because the steam set the ward fire alarm off. I have had nurses come in and snatch the blanket off my just-sleeping baby because it was covering his face, to stop him from potentially suffocating. I have had my baby taken from my arms by a ward nursery nurse because I wasn’t yet good enough at soothing him.
I have had nurses and social workers and psychiatrists come into my home to assess if I need to go back to hospital. Back to the Gardner Ward where the nurses treated me with contempt, the first time I was admitted back in October 2017.
I have spent around 18 months getting over the shame and trauma of being sectioned. Sectioning is a barbaric process that is used to control and terrify people into compliance. I have spoken for hundreds of hours to psychologists and psychotherapists to come to term with the fact of trying to kill myself, with my own self hatred.
I have watched women poorer and less white than me get treated like shit by a system that professes to help us.
I am fucking angry.
I apologise if that anger offends people working in my ‘industry’ that is one of the most white privileged sectors I have come across.
Actually, I’ve had enough of apologising.
If what somebody says offends you, try and understand why that person is angry. Aggression comes from somewhere. Question why you are so calm. Question why you are silent. Is it because you don’t understand? Or is it because you don’t care?
Stop telling people to calm down. Everything is not ok.
