#this is personal and in no way romanticizing the idea of a psych ward

[kafus]

watching haibane renmei has me thinking about a very specific childhood memory.

when i was around 12, i was visiting my cousin around the same age as me who was part of a very, very religious and conservative part of my family, and i noticed a thought web she had written and put up on her wall of various sins she wasn't supposed to commit. apparently, one of those sins was suicide.

this hurt me very severely at the time. age 12 is when i was most suicidal in my life, the most detailed my ideation has ever been, and it is also the age that i got involuntarily admitted to a psych ward because my suicide plans were discovered. i am not and was not religious, but i asked her about it, like, "if i died you think i'd go to hell?" and without skipping a beat, she went, "yeah, it's a sin so if you kill yourself you go to hell." i didn't argue with her for long but i couldn't stop thinking that one of my relatives who i loved thought i deserved to suffer for eternity if i killed myself, and it did not make me want to kill myself less, but it did make everything hurt more.

it is difficult to interpret reki any other way than as a victim of suicide, and personally i also interpret rakka as a suicide victim, the difference between them being that reki was truly alone in her pre-haibane life, and rakka was not. and for me, it was comforting in a way to see that suicide did not end up in eternal suffering like the stereotypical idea of Hell for these girls that my cousin suggested over a decade ago, but i also really, really appreciated the nuance of having it not be... easy. it's not like these girls were rewarded with a paradise for dying, they still had to come to terms with their inner demons... just while not alive anymore. it is not a repeat of shitty suicide romanticization posts i saw as a young person that suicidal people are just angels that want to go home - it's a difficult and emotionally tough take on the subject, but one that is very grounded to me. and, in the end, genuinely hopeful and healing.

learning that you aren't alone, or learning that you have to trust in others to not be alone anymore, are two essential lessons that any suicidal or depressed person has to learn in real life while alive, speaking from personal experience as well. haibane renmei did not emotionally destroy me because any of these lessons were new for me, frankly i've spent the past four years learning joy in community and love and how to not be alone anymore. i'm not perfect at it, but i'm way better than i used to be. and i've also thoroughly confronted the idea of what happens when i die, what would have happened if i did go through with suicide when i was 12, and a whole lot of trauma processing that i continue to work on now. so the themes and messages haibane renmei presents didn't feel like they opened some new door for me, but it was weirdly familiar. it felt like a warm hug in some ways, and it was cathartic to cry so much over a genuine work of art that represents so many of my own emotions. the spiritual imagery was also utilized in a way that i found personally refreshing and provoking.

i'm rambling this directly after binging the whole anime in one sitting the same night i wrote it so apologies if this is a bit nonsensical or anything. i literally still have a headache from crying over the final episode so much. but i had to talk some about it because it was really good and really moved me

[magg0tkid]

If you'd asked me like six months ago I would've said the romanticization (I have no idea how that should be properly spelled) of mental illness and the desire people have for mental illness to gain internet points/win suffering olympics is one of the stranger and more idiotic things to come out of our time but now I'm like. I think it kind of saved me, back in the day anyway, before I had better knowledge and better coping mechanisms. Saved me from like. The worst of it anyway. She's in the worst of it and she just has no access or outlets to understand that she's not alone, that as odd as her thoughts and feelings are they're normal in the sense that they've all happened before to many people, and that insanity is just kind of like. A by-product of living in this world. Idk. I can't imagine how even harder it would be to go through all that shit with literally no knowledge that anyone else feels this way. Or I guess I do, because that's how I felt gr 7/8 before I really had internet access. And the internet is fucked but I'm seeing now how it helped me in some ways, through seeing how she has none of that help. And y'know what in gr7/8 I had literally no friends and spoke to almost no one, including my family, because I felt completely empty inside like someone had taken my personality and soul and I was just shell. I could think of literally nothing to say, like, ever. So painfully self conscious and it is a normal 7/8 experience but also everyone else in my class still spoke??? And they'd like joke to one another??? And I'd sit there and look at them and be like but how do they know how to talk??? I know other people were going thru similar things but like we were kids, we didn't know how to communicate that or how to find each other. And on the internet people the same as you are just there.

And I could read, too. She missed her eye surgery because she was in the psych ward and her eyes aren't even good enough to read, she can't read right now. That fucking sucks. Shes also had a harder life than me like. At 18 years old I was not driving to Yellowknife with my newborn daughter attempting to hide from my physically abusive boyfriend who then made me give away my beloved child and marry him like. Sure wasn't dealing with that at 18. And I still got fucked.

Idk. Like girl just go on tumblr and read some sylvia plath quotes or something idk

A weird wish I've had recently is that I wish my mom was a teenager on social media vibes because then at least she would romanticize her mental illness. Not the best but better than thinking it's demons and she's bringing evil upon the family and she's the only mentally ill person who's ever had these thoughts and she's beyond help.

[the-golden-fool-blog]

questions from the psych unit drift like downy feathers brushing my lashes but failing with each flap to feel real enough to faze me but the reality of smashed wings beaten against aviary bars is these brilliant birds with their broken spirits who withhold their trauma and their tension for fear of feeling small inside the birdcage of a building where they flock like injured doves in the collective hope that they’ll make it out bigger brighter and with their heads above water long enough to wade to dry land where they may once again manage to fly

[worried-dolphin]

Final Project Investigations, Reflective Overview (Part 1):

Venturing into the initial stages of research for my final project this year threw up many alternative paths of exploration which I found tricky to navigate. My initial concept for my project was built upon an aesthetic, discovered when my eye was drawn to various images on Pinterest.  A collection of these images is stored in a link in a previous post. While relatively easily to translate into my own work, I realised that it would be difficult to build and entire project, and publication, on such superficial foundations. I began to think about what it was that I wanted to create, and in turn, what I wanted that to say. Eventually I decided that like many people in the class, I wanted to try and capture something that was relevant to me. While further exploring the aesthetic that I had been first drawn to, I came across an image by Steven Meisel for Vogue (2007) named “Models Enter Rehab”. The problematic nature of Steven Meisel’s “Supermodels Enter Rehab” for Vogue 2007 is immediately obvious, particularly in the context of fashion photography. The romanticism of themes including rehab, addiction and mental illness for me, make the tastelessness of the series is undeniable. The conclusions I drew from the series are nevertheless very difficult for me to explain. 

 Regardless of all of the obvious flaws with the very nature of the series, (the more alarming of which being the heinous inaccuracy of it all. Had Meisel ever seen a rehab facility or a psych ward outside of a 90s Hollywood film?) I was not angry. In fact, I was surprised. I was surprised by something familiar, and something which I thought could no longer surprise me. I realised that the shoot had actually, in some way, made me feel introspective. It made me very aware of my gift of hindsight regarding my own experiences relating to such themes. All of the feelings that I had about the images were entirely personal, in a way that I think only painful things are, and so very difficult to articulate. 

 I understand that perhaps this is an unusual reaction to such imagery, especially having embarked on an investigation into the critical reviews of the series. Nevertheless, these feelings were important to me. 

 I should perhaps note that this reaction was undoubtedly entirely supported, and even created, by experiences that statistically most people do not share. I realised that I could not simply copy this concept to create the same feelings in others, and nor did I want to. The appeal of these images was how they touched me personally. I should also note that I did not feel, nor want to create pain of any sort looking at my work, but I did want to try and capture the complexity of my reactions, and so began to think about how. 

 I concluded that I wanted my project to be entirely personal, but certainly not drawing on the same concepts as Meisel. I knew instantly that I did not want to explore themes of mental illness. I wanted to explore, or even provoke, the complexity of emotional reactions, rather than simply emotions by themselves, as mental illness is so often interpreted. 

I came to the first class discussing the final project with no solid ideas. When hearing about the developments of other people’s projects I was extremely doubtful of any notions I had regarding my own. I was having a god-awful day, and it was dark outside. I hate that. I was struggling to sit still in my chair, and focusing on anything felt impossible. I became very aware of myself and suddenly began to realise how fidgety I was. I laughed inwardly at the realisation of this. I’d been spending so much time thinking about emotional reaction, and realised that I was being physically moved by emotions connected to... What exactly? 

 I hadn’t taken any photos yet, but suddenly that didn’t seem like as big an issue. I had been stressing over the impact of my project while ignoring the only 2 things that I did know: - I wanted my project to be personal - I wanted my project to evoke an emotional reaction. So, with the deadline drawing ever closer, my next conclusion? People were going to feel however they were going to feel. Even reactions have much less rhyme or reason than I’d considered. It was so obvious. But not to me. Not until now.

(Continued in next post)

Please note: Due to the nature of Meisel’s work, Tumblr has forbidden me from attaching the images, flagging and hiding all of my previous attempts. The “Supermodels Enter Rehab” series can be found here: https://trendland.com/supermods-enter-rehab-by-steven-miesel-for-vogue-italia-july-2007/