Navigating the Spaces In Between

How do you find harmony amidst the chaos of our 21st century lives? How do you coordinate the notes and nodes of your life? What makes your heart sing? Helps you forget or remember? Where do you go to heal? Or when you are hurting?

For me going on three years, it has been about horses. Being in the presence of an animal so majestic yet so fragile, learning to be present and exchange reassuring energy and seeing my own humanity, my strengths and weaknesses in the mirror that is their eyes is where I’m finding harmony despite the disharmony in the world around me. Time and worry disappear when I stand beside them or look out at the terrain ahead between the reins and two attentive ears.

When I sit down to write or work with our Please See Me writers, I experience a similar sense of flow, a concept that Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi first studied at Claremont University. Flow is a state of consciousness that is often described by athletes as “being in the zone,” where time passes in seconds and skills are heightened and seem limitless. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a place and time where skills meet the challenge at hand and you effortlessly achieve a high level of concentration, a sense of control, and decreased worry, with a clear goal and immediate feedback. Letting myself become so absorbed in the work—with writers and with horses—makes way for patches of harmony in between the obligations and challenges of the day to day whatever they may be. Writers and artists in Issue #15 used the theme of Harmony as a springboard to show readers new pathways to harmony as well.

Our Creative Nonfiction authors showcased their talent in truly creative writing styles and over a wide range of health-related narratives. In A New Story of Family Illness, Mallika Iyer finds her way to transcend the stigma and shame associated with being diagnosed with bipolar disorder:

“Each pill, each visit to the pharmacy, to the psychiatrist, each workout, meditation, healthy meal, phone call to ask for support, each breath, sunrise I live to see, may not heal my bipolar disorder, but heals the shame that is thicker and harder than the diagnosis itself, thicker than the cells and bloods in my genes that may always get passed down. But the shame doesn’t have to. With each pill, I say a prayer for everyone who was obscured before they were helped.”

In Breathing Water at the Bottom of the Ocean, Pamela OHara struggles with her husband’s death by suicide to show us there are times that, no matter how hard we try or want it for those we love, disharmony cannot be resolved for others:

“But love wasn’t doing it for Geoff. In some ways it was making him feel worse: what I needed most profoundly, unconditional love, seemed to almost inflict pain upon him because he didn’t feel worthy of it. And no matter how much I empathized, I couldn’t know how much pain there was deep inside him.”

Kieran Malovear’s, Hedgewalking, is a beautiful acceptance and window into the ways in which mental illness can blur the lines of reality:

“Is there a word for the opposite of “aphantasia”? The images in my mind are strong enough to pull me under reality’s surface. They shift in ways I can’t control. I can only tread water for so long before I’m gone again. Sometimes, I love it. Sometimes, I drown.”

And the creative confessional submitted by our Creative Nonfiction Mental Health Awareness Writing Contest winner, Jody Brooks, provides readers the gritty images of what postpartum depression looks and feels like and the strength it takes to ask for help in Post Partum:

“I feel like ghost peppers behind a mint-fresh smile. Like a rabid beast hiding behind honeysuckle. Like the running of the bulls in a porcelain doll.”
And…
“Please answer your phone because I’m not sure I have what it takes to call again. I’ll have to start all over. It’s just a phone call. It’s just an appointment. It’s just Everest in the dead of winter. But I can do this. I can practice. I can train, I can breathe, but please answer your phone. It has taken everything for my numb fingers to reach out.”

In our Fiction Section, Tiffany Chaloux uses flash fiction to write about the weight and limits of obsessive compulsive disorder in It Goes On:

“If you don’t do this, your parents will die. Something bad will happen. It will be all your fault. The anxiety nearly crushes me. And so does the anger. At myself, at my inability to let this go. Why can’t I stop? Briefly, I wonder what people at work would think if they knew. They always joke about my fastidiousness, calling me “OCD.” They don’t know how right they are.”

In Andrew Eastwick’s short story, Housewarming, we see the role of birth order, role reversal, and ultimately how the love between sisters can be a lifeline:

“When Phoebe was angry, the veins at her temples grew brighter, like streaks of blue ink. Bridget couldn’t tell who Phoebe was mad at—her roommates for kicking her out, or Bridget for bringing it on herself. Either way, she was surprised once again that someone so small could be so fearsome.”

And our Mental Health Awareness Writing Contest Fiction winner, Morgan Christie, provides readers with a soft, subtle yet strong, picture of how race, a lack of acceptance, and the environment we live in can impact our health and well being in “The Last Black Woman on Eglinton”:

“Okri never came, and neither did anyone else. She looked around at the pale bodies whizzing by pretending not to see her lying there. She looked around and felt like she might die, right there on the street, the last Black woman on Eglinton. Odetta nearly passed out before someone came over and called for help.”

Our Mental Health Awareness Poetry Co-Winners Bobby Bradshaw and Kelly Cass Falzone use this opportunity to paint pictures of both disharmony and resolution in their resolve to write about two very different and difficult life circumstances both out the speaker’s control except for how they use their voices to ultimately respond in the narrative. Bradshaw’s Slipping Away is a love letter and release of sorts in the telling of watching a spouse disappear to mental illness: Depression runs / in my wife’s family / like banks along a river, / the chance of being overwhelmed / always there.

And Cass Falzone takes head on what is enraging and, in my opinion, the ultimate violation of women in Trigger Warning: Just seeing the word— / the reach of that R / A’s legs pulled open / (a forearm to brace them) / the vag at A’s upended v / the stiff shaft of the P.

To read more about our Poetry Section, see Stephen Granzyk’s Editor’s Letter.

And finally, take a look at the photojournalism narrative, 20 Minutes or Less, gifted to this issue by Jordan and Anna Rathkopf, who show us the obstacles encountered and overcome by their small family while searching for harmony during Anna’s HER2 diagnosis, treatment and recovery.

Ultimately harmony, in my experience, is about opening your heart to people close to you and different from you and seeing them for who they are not who you want them to be. Harmony exists when we give one another space to be one’s true self. Harmony exists when health systems provide care and not just deliver a service in its best interest, and when patients and providers are allowed the time to forge a partnership in care.

I wish you strength and hope that you too can find your own flow state as you navigate the spaces in between harmony.

Tracy Granzyk is the editor in chief of Please See Me.