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Embodiment Saved My Life
Living in your head isn’t really living
The Western world approaches mental health like a math problem. If you’re depressed, you’re missing x chemical in your brain, so go to a psychiatrist, get prescribed a pill, and this will make up for the lack of serotonin, or whatever it is, and you should be good to go!
We treat mental health like a riddle. When we are stuck and keep coming up against the same problem, we’re encouraged to talk to a mental health professional, discuss our problem to death, analyze it, poke it, prod it, relive it, find out where it came from, how it shows up, and on and on and on.
But what if mental health is really more like a creative project? Something we show up for to express, make meaning, and alchemize into something else? What if there are a million different ways to approach it, different mediums to use- whether it’s paint or dance or film, and it’s never fully “solved.” We go on to create sequels, second editions, new projects that reflect new versions of us as we evolve.
Maybe the human mind cannot be medicated and disciplined into submitting to a broken system.
In other words, if you’re facing food or housing insecurity, or recovering from trauma, working a job you hate to make ends meet, maybe you aren’t a math problem that needs to be solved with a pill and…
