pain Archive

The Window At Night

Trigger Warning: alcoholism, addiction, mention of drug use

How many of my own garments shuffle
with the scrubs and hospital gowns
They feel disposable
But so do mine
As I prepare
As I prepare to leave the hospital
As I prepare to go to rehab
I listen to Amy Winehouse on my headphones.
She is dead.
That is enough
I say yes to everything but is it enough

My Experience With Anorexia (Yael)

Trigger Warning: Mention of suicidal ideation

I don’t recall exactly when my battle with anorexia started, but I seem to remember other people noticing it when I was about fourteen. Maybe the fact that I had always been unhealthy due to multiple medical conditions that caused me to have to travel to Vancouver, British Columbia, almost monthly for often painful or at least uncomfortable tests to try and give a treatable diagnosis; a process that seemed to always be in vain.

Crisis Checklist

Inspired by work people have done on madness maps and mental health first aid kits, I decided to make a checklist/flowchart to use when I am having a particularly hard time or am in crisis. It was a good process for me to make because it helped me to really think about what has helped me or caused me trouble in the past. I really like that we can make these sorts of tools for ourselves instead of relying on more general (often judgmental) dos and don’ts or advice from people who never know us as well as we know ourselves.

My Experience With Recovery (Breyonne)

Seven years ago I got tired of living my life the way I was. I couldn’t stop drinking, smoking, eating or doing drugs. I was sick constantly. I was living in harmful situations with toxic people, and each and every day was exactly the same. My only respite was to go out and get loaded again.

My Experience with “Bipolar Disorder” (Corvus)

I have the innate human longing for community and love, and also decades of experience that teaches me about group dynamics and human behavior and interaction. I know what I am susceptible to, who and what can trigger me, and who can lead me in the direction of becoming someone I am not, or someone I do not wish to be. I have embraced the autonomous individual from a social species. And that is who I am.

For me, being “bipolar” is about my environment as much as it is about my mind. Almost 30 years of experience to put into words… It is impossible. So I am spitting out the feelings instead.

Sick of capitalism: The chronically ill body as a site of resistance.

I’m sick. I have chronic illnesses which cause me lots of pain and fatigue. The specific names and causes of my illnesses are not important (and not even totally known by me or my doctors). I spend a lot of time in bed. Sometimes even weeks at a time. This is not something I have […]

Emily Carr, I Love You

I would like to welcome the newest member of our writing team, Winter Hammell. Her first post with QMH.org is an elegant story about pouring her feelings about mental illness into a single portrait.

i drew the #6 sable brush across the canvas with the steady hand of a cartographer, laying down a bold stroke of phthalo blue lightened with a tip of titanium white.

Holding the palette on my left thumb, clutching three brushes between my fingers, and one clenched in my teeth, i could taste the rich, luxurious oils. Drunk on the exotic perfume of linseed oil and rectified turpentine, i stroked and dabbed the canvas of gesso-primed Italian linen.

Homophobia and Other Bullshit

Most of us can recognize homophobia in everyday life in certain situations: derogatory remarks, violence in newspapers, magazines, and headlines, perhaps something that has been done to us personally, like bullying, loss of a job, friends, family, or exile from communities and homes. In a lot of these cases, it is pretty clear what is happening and why. But when some of this stuff happens as a child, or can have another context put to it that makes the lines a little blurry, it’s more difficult to separate fact from fiction, and to identify behaviors and incidents for what they really are.