Two Queer Housemates dialogue about mental health
For Cal and Erica, spending lockdown together was an opportunity to talk often about emotional wellbeing, as both a personal and political issue
By Cal & Erica
Cal and Erica are two housemates who formed a collective household during the autumn of 2020. They shared the pandemic’s emotional rollercoaster of anxieties, highs and lows, within the perimeter of a house in North London, cooking, planting, dancing, singing, and organising small moments of joy for each other. Their house-share was built with intentions of sustainability, community, social justice, and radical reimagining of relationships. As Covid-19 restrictions tightened, the days became darker and life more difficult. Under these trying circumstances, Erica and Cal found themselves speaking with each other about emotional wellbeing more and more often — both as a personal and a political issue.
Months down the line, after having explored many ideas around mental health together, they decided that the most natural way to open up about their journey was to share a conversation.
This is a stylised summary of informal dialogues they had whilst spending time with each other.
Erica (she/they) is a queer, gender-questioning person, living with ups and downs in mood and working as a clinical psychologist in the NHS. Cal (they/them) is a queer, non-binary babe, new to London and low on serotonin.
E: It’s a weird time to have moved to London. How have you been coping with the start of a new life in the middle of a global crisis?
C: I’d been planning on moving to London for a while. I needed to be closer to some family members and to my partner, but my community, my chosen family, is in Leeds. My trans siblings are there, we transitioned and came out together and supported each other through that process. We’re siblings now because of it.
I’ve been coping with the loneliness and isolation by writing letters and having long phone calls. All socialising is happening at a distance so these forms of communication have become the norm for me and others in this pandemic. I’ve been focusing on reading queer books, learning about police and prison abolition and finding community organising here in London (I used to organise with Sisters Uncut in Leeds). I’m trying to figure out how much energy I have now and how to best apply it.
I started taking Sertraline [a type of antidepressant known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)] in February last year, which I feel conflicted about – partly because of the stigma surrounding medication and antidepressants – but also because, and I’m only speaking for myself here, but I feel like I experience depression and anxiety as a symptom of the capitalist system we live in. I’m on a waiting list for therapy, but I’m not confident. I know other queer and trans people who have had bad experiences with therapists who are prejudiced or just clueless about issues that affect queer and trans people.
What’s it like for you Erica, as a queer person working in mental health services?
E: I agree with your point about therapy. For queer, trans (and other marginalised) folx, mainstream services are like a double-edged sword: you feel like you need something from them whilst fearing they might be harmful. I’ve definitely experienced and witnessed homophobia and transphobia in my workplace, despite all the training on it. There can never be enough workplace training to eradicate transphobia, homophobia, racism, sexism and so on whilst they exist in our society.
It’s definitely a double edged sword for me personally, not just as a queer person but as someone with lived experience of mental health difficulties applying a critical lens to some of our professional ideas and practices. Sometimes the whole system feels broken and harmful, with professionals experiencing the harm from the inside whilst feeling complicit. Working on psychiatric wards means witnessing things like restraint and forcible medication, which especially affect black people, who are also more likely to be brought in by the police. I feel complicit whilst trying to work towards change from within. Every day we witness anger, frustrated hopes, disappointment, and desperation from people who come to seek help, because we can’t offer them enough support due to austerity and the shameful under-resourcing of the NHS. We are forced to shut the door on people, when we desperately want to do more.
These sorts of things really affect my own experiences of depression, and made me realise how often depression is so closely linked to powerlessness. The pandemic has made it all the more challenging in both my professional and personal life, having felt more powerless than ever and with fewer resources.
C: Yeah, many degrees of oppression have been shown so clearly at all levels of our society during this pandemic. That can be overwhelming and make us experience even a deeper sense of powerlessness. There are so many things that I want to change in our society it’s overwhelming. I’m connected with people and groups who are working towards change and that makes me hopeful. But there’s a lot to do, and there are people everywhere working to get bits done. Something I learnt from adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon, on their podcast ‘Octavia’s Parables’, is the importance of thinking about the long vision: what are we doing now that will make things easier and better for future generations?
E: Yes! As small as the achievements might feel sometimes, working towards change in systems and being involved in activism helps me to feel less hopeless and powerless, which can be toxic to our mental health. Getting more involved with Psychologists for Social Change in recent months has helped my own mental health, as well as trying to give back to the community more generally.
C: I've only just recently got back into organising. I was unwell, mentally, at the beginning of the year. I guess I had a burn out. I'm not sure how to avoid getting to that breaking point again. I know that being connected with activism helps me and is important for my mental health. It reminds me that progress is being made every day, that people are working against the powerful and violent system and getting results. I’m really inspired by organisations like SOAS Detainee Support (SDS) and Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE), two London organisations working to support people held in detention centres and campaign against prison expansion. The Racial Justice Network is running the Stop the Scandal campaign at the moment, against technology that would give the Home Office access to fingerprint data collected by the police. Knowing that people are working towards a better world, and being a part of that process helps me feel less powerless, less hopeless.
E: Totally! I go through cycles of energy and burn out and I’m trying to find a better balance with that. Something that really helps me to get through depressive feelings when problems in the world seem insurmountable is to remember that nothing I can do (alone) will ever be enough. I’m a droplet in a wave — but every little act towards change matters. That gives me perspective and frees me up from the paralysis, it helps me to get moving.
I really hear you on the “long vision”, but have complicated feelings about what therapy, which is always in higher demand after a disaster, can achieve. I don't mean to undermine people's experiences of therapy, because they can be life-changing, but I question if more individual therapy is the best system we can imagine for emotional wellbeing in the future. We will never be able to deliver that on the scale that people require, and we know that the most powerful part of therapy is the healing that happens in the relationship, so why does that always occur in private rooms with a stranger?
People come to therapists with the same stories: they feel alone, they feel like there’s something wrong with them, they feel that other people don’t understand them. How can more individual therapy help us move beyond this? What kind of alternative systems can we imagine for the future and how can we move towards these instead? For example, networks of people that organically support each other. We shift a lot of societal ills back on to individuals to take responsibility for mental health, and that serves a political agenda.
But this is what we're stuck with for now and we try to survive it as best we can. What other things in your life have sustained you during the pandemic?
C: Yeah, you’re right about systemic oppression being blamed on the individual. Oppressed people are blamed for their oppression all the time, we see this with the way black folks, people of colour, disabled people, trans and queer folks, poor people are treated by the system. Capitalism makes us suffer and then pay to ‘get better’.
E: But this is what we're stuck with for now and we try to survive it as best we can, whilst we also try to change it slowly.
C: Something that helps me survive daily, and has helped me especially during the lockdown is reading. I read a lot. I read queer fiction and nonfiction mainly, but my favourite genre is feminist sci-fi. I find it so energising. The first book I read that really woke me up to the state of the world is called 'The Fifth Sacred Thing’, by Starhawk, full of gorgeous utopian sex, magic, and communication! Recently I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ and the ‘Parable of the Talents’. I love feminist sci-fi for its ability to dream of new worlds, and its vision of the future. These authors provide critiques of the way we are heading and offer us ways out. They’ve given me a way to be spiritual, to connect more deeply with myself and the earth and the people around me. They lay out a way of creating community.
E: Yes, I think spirituality means something different to each of us. You’ve been introducing me to the importance of connecting with our ancestors, we’ve set intentions and danced with grief together. My form of spirituality, in the sense of connecting to something greater than the self, is connection to nature. Paying closer attention to nature has helped me immeasurably during lockdown; to watch the changing seasons and the cycle of life and knowing that the world carries on in the face of everything. Just the beauty of it and the peace that it brings me is enough.
I don’t read sci-fi but I think ideas of utopias are vital. If we cannot dream, we cannot create new realities. At the same time we need to do more than dream. You have to live as if you were already in a utopia, to bring about the changes you want to see in the world. How would I be acting differently in an ideal world and how can I do that today? And I guess we’re trying to apply this way of living in our house together. We’re overthrowing ideas of confining intimacy to romantic/sexual relationships and deliberately setting aside time to make space to talk about our emotions. It means that this is the first time I’ve lived in a shared house where I will actually come out and ask for care when I’m sad or struggling, rather than hide away in my room. This environment isn’t something that just happened to us, we intentionally created it. Recently I read this quote by Sonya Renee Taylor, “Liberation is not a thing we will be delivered unto. It will be the act of daily creation”. I really feel like we are doing that together and I am so grateful to you and the rest of our queer family for creating that with me.
C: I really believe in peoples’ abilities to create radically caring communities. We have to listen to marginalised communities and respect that they know what they need best. We have to challenge ourselves and our communities to keep changing and growing and put those changes into practice in our lives in the best ways that we can.
