No Escape – Barrier Series # 3

This post is the third in my photo/story series on my journey of healing and recovery. See the introduction and complete series at My Healing Journey.

Barrio Brewery

No Escape © 2012 Bo Mackison

“We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds.” ~ Pema Chödrön

The time comes when I need a safe environment. I need protection from myself. High away – no escape, no contact. High away. Plastic windows and bars to protect those inside from themselves, and to protect those on the outside, too.

Administrators make attempts to brighten our environment – primary colored lounge furniture, pictures on the walls – but none of that offers protection from the hurried words, the rigid restrictions, the mind-numbing drugs, the incessant blare of televisions and radios.

Or the voices that only I hear.

~ based on journal entries, 1990

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The photographs that make up the Barrier Series are a set of photos that symbolically follow the story of my mental and spirit breakdown and healing process. The photos are not related to any specific places where I might have had treatment. The series metaphorically correspond to the phases I moved through during recovery, as I focused first on staying alive; second on regaining basic functions, and finally on regaining my wholeness.

This photograph represents a difficult time in that process. Unrelated events led to an awakening, necessary but brutally painful, that led me to assess the reality of my past. It was devastating. I was suicidal and extremely ill; I required in-patient psychiatric care. And although it was a difficult time for me, it was excruciatingly painful for my family, including my husband and small children.

The place I stayed is a place no one would want to stay for any length of time. And yet, I was fortunate to be in a hospital that provided me with my greatest likelihood for survival. At the time, I was not appreciative of the efforts and time my caregivers expended on my behalf. But as I look back on those years, decades ago, I am overcome with deep gratitude for these people. They worked with dedication to keep me safe and protect me until I was ready to take over that work myself. It wasn’t an easy job for any of us.

Next: Four Walls and a Bright Light

Boarded Window – Barrier Series # 2

This post is the second in my photo/story series on my journey of healing and recovery. See the introduction and complete series at My Healing Journey.

Warehouse in Winter

Boarded Window © 2011 Bo Mackison

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ~ Viktor E Frankl,in Man’s Search for Himself

Cold.

Winter.

This barrier, a solid barrier.
No light, no sunshine, no blue skies,
nothing natural except the brittle vines.

Impenetrable barrier.
The frozen exterior the world perceives.
The bushes are skeletal in their winter bareness.

Dead vines cling to the bricks,
hang from the window’s edge,
collect in piles on the ledge.

The decorative bricks offer some respite,
though the window is covered with boards.

But wait, it’s been patched neatly, with blue painted boards.
Boarded closed, but with care,
Is there something inside worth protecting?

And the vines?
Dead for now, but the hidden roots,
alive, are protected under snowy depths,
warm enough in the warm earth.
These roots will send forth newly alive green shoots in the spring.

This phase, the deep winter of my spirit-break –
a period of dormancy.

A winter phase waiting for the thaw and spring’s return.

                 — based on journal entries, 1990

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The second barrier correlates to the time when I became unable to function, to keep up with life’s day-to-day expectations and demands. It was as if I constructed a barrier much like this one deep in my  interior, providing myself with space and time, waiting for the passage of winter and spring’s thaw.

It was a time of silent waiting.

Next: No Escape

Barbed Wire – Barrier Series, The Beginning

This post is the first in my photo/story series on my journey of healing and recovery. See the introduction and complete series at My Healing Journey.

Barbed Wire

Barbed Wire Barrier  © 2012 Bo Mackison

“Your life with its immensity and fear . . . is alternately stone in you and star.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from the poem Evening

Before there was a beginning, before the crisis and a diagnosis, there was a dream.

I see the world. It is there. When I reach up, I reach into the cool air. When I look up, I see a bright blue, cloud scattered skies. Yet the world is beyond my reach. In this dream I have repeatedly, I’m trapped in a tiny enclosure, an enclosure tall on four sides, but open to the sky. I struggle to  unlock the gate. When I try to move forward, I’m blocked by a cold steel fence and chain-link wire. Barbed wire adds an extra degree of isolation.

Barbed wire – a common fence, a stereo-typical barrier.

And then I am no longer dreaming. I am living my life in slow-motion, denying there is a problem.

I know I am in a separate place. I cannot reach out to my family and friends, I cannot communicate with them. They are on the other side of the barrier, and even if I managed a whisper, no one can hear me.

I am cast in fear, held down by a weighted stone. My only relief is a connection, however slight, to the natural world. When I look out the window, it is snowy and cold, but I do look up at the sky. I can always see the sky.

The human spirit focuses on that which is beyond vision.

         — based on journal entries, October 1990.

Part 2: Boarded Window.

Heading in a New Direction

23 Lizard in Bisbee Arizona

Threatened © 2011 Bo Mackison

Let go of the need for perfection – perfection bought at a high cost. Embrace imperfection, acknowledge mistakes, claim the lessons they provide. Embrace change.   ~ Bo Mackison

I’ve had an on and off affair with the label “mental illness” — a label that defined me for many years.

I hated it; I needed it.
I pushed it away; I pulled it close.

That label deprived me of the basic experiences of choosing life and living it fully; it also allowed me to abdicate taking full responsibility for my life and the choices I made.

Behaviors, lived over years, became habits. They settled deep within me:

  • as a child when I developed highly creative but pathological methods for body, mind, and soul survival
  • as an adult while I was in the throes of deep depressions and slow recoveries,
  • while I was fighting demons from my childhood,  searching musty rooms in my mind with a dimly flickering match light.

Defenses and behaviors I erected as walls of protection were no longer functional, viable, needed, wanted. Yet, it was what I understood.

I had to let go so I could grab onto a better way. Caught in the pause between the two trapeze bars, I was  dangling in a mighty discomfiting place.

Eventually I understood that letting go of the behaviors that mark even a functional mental illness would grace me with freedoms I wanted, but hadn’t fully experienced:

  • not as a child in a puzzling environment
  • not as an adolescent who carried demons in her hand luggage wherever she wandered
  • not as an adult trying to function in the challenging world of careers and marriage-with-children, while burying the past and eventually losing the ability to even acknowledge it
  • not as a woman in the prime-time of her life who suddenly crashed head-long into reality, suffered a total collapse, and a crushing breakdown.

I worked for years to repair my body and mind; I worked even harder to repair my spirit.

Living under the shadow of the statement “I had a mental breakdown” provides a certain cover. Even after the initial stages, after in depth therapy spanning two decades, and after reclaiming a life of wholeness, doubt lingers and unwelcome questions pop up.

There is the voice that harbors deep in my sub-conscience, occasionally breaking through to my awareness. It questions my actions, my motives, my plans, my challenges, my courage, my decisions, my art, my life. It questions my EVERYTHING.

I must then re-affirm my strength, stand on firm ground, and repeat:

  • I am responsible for my thoughts, my words, my actions.
  • There is no one else to blame for my failures, short-comings, errors in judgement.
  • I take full ownership of my mistakes and claim them,  but I also claim the lessons these mistakes teach.
  • This is no excuse living.

It is hard, excruciatingly so as times. It is necessary. It is the only way.

Because as long as I blamed the past for mistakes I made in the present, as long as I didn’t acknowledge the mistakes and accept them for what they were, I did not learn the lessons. I had an excuse to push away change and healing.

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Why am I writing about this? Because during the years I focused on creating photography for public display, photographs for art shows and festivals, photographs for art centers and museum shows. I also created photography and other art as a process for healing.

Creative activities are healing. I use art and nature as components of my healing practice. I want to share my art and my story with you, my dear readers.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  This is the first photograph in a series of twelve.