#mentalhealth – This Magazine

Holding it together

Sarah Ratchford — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 15:25:28 +0000

Photo courtesy Goose Lane Editions

“Bent out of joint / in order to hold every-thing together. Won’t snap, won’t dissolve in an acid bath.” These are the opening lines of Self-Portrait as Paperclip, from Fredericton-based writer Triny Finlay’s third book, Myself A Paperclip, in which she transforms an inconspicuous office article into a clever metaphor for those attempting to hold everything together. The queer writer’s first book-length long poem was published in October 2021 with Goose Lane Editions.

The collection details experiences with stigma surrounding mental illness, trauma, treatments, and life in the psych ward. With section titles such as “You don’t want what I’ve got” and “Adjusting the Psychotropics,” Finlay’s words serve as a call to action for mental illness and its treatments to be normalized, and for the needs of those living with mental illness to be met with more compassion.

The title Myself A Paperclip was conceived from her poem Self-Portrait as Paperclip, although the author admits she originally had another title in mind. “I had all these lists, dozens of possible titles, and the one that I liked best was ‘Nothing like a mad woman’ from [the song “mad woman” on] Taylor Swift’s folklore album, which I was obsessively listening to,” she laughs. Due to foreseeable copyright issues, Finlay had to abandon this option.

“I wrote [Self-Portrait as Paperclip] during a really fraught period of my life where I was struggling with a lot of changes in my life. I was going through a divorce, I was coming out more publicly as queer, I was just dealing with a lot,” she says. “So I went back to that poem … as a touchstone for the whole book and realized it said everything I wanted the book to say about trauma, mental illness, and treatment.”

The section of her book titled “You don’t want what I’ve got,” which was previously published as a chapbook by Junction Books in 2018, became the impetus for the collection. This section initially zoned in on unrequited love, with the author ultimately realizing that it was time to shift focus.

“I started to ask myself: why am I writing about unrequited love? What is it that I need to say about that?” It occurred to her that the parts of her “novel-esque” long poem involving the main character’s obsessions and compulsive behaviours arising from unrequited love were what interested her the most. Trashing the bulk of the manuscript she’d been working on for over 10 years, Finlay took another swing at the project. “I wanted to write about how a person loses their mind, and how people are treated when they lose their mind…” she explains.

She also found it important to incorporate humour into the collection. In the section titled “Psych Ward Types: a List,” she candidly reflects on her stays in the psych ward, bringing to life a list of characters who offer comedic consolation to a situation that Finlay recounts as absurd.

“You know, people with mental illness also run the gamut of emotional experience, so there can be humour.”

The writer hopes that her book has the potential to shine a light on the nuances of living with mental illness. From stunned silences to voiced concerns from loved ones regarding medication, Myself A Paperclip showcases ample instances of stigma-fueled behaviours and actions that need to be continually addressed.

“For me, one of the major obstacles when we bring mental health issues to the table is that often the people who are talking about it, writing about it, treating it, legislating it, trying to accommodate it in the workplace, are the people who are the least affected by it personally,” she says. “I think people need to check their beliefs. I think they need to check their values, change their behaviour, offer actual compassionate support…”

Finlay encourages writers to derive inspiration from their own lives, especially individuals belonging to marginalized groups. “I think the writing that comes from lived experience, especially of conventionally excluded groups—so communities who haven’t always been given the right to speak or the right to be heard—is often the strongest work,” she says. “For me, from an ethical standpoint, it is really important to consider the lived experience of the people who are going through these kinds of struggles.”

Tinder is Messing With My Mental Health

Sarah Ratchford — Thu, 16 May 2019 15:20:29 +0000

SUNDAY, 8:01 P.M.

For five days, I revisited—with rapidly increasing frequency— the WhatsApp “last-seen” status of a man I’d met on an online-dating app. I had taken note of it at first because it was, as timestamps go, significant: Sunday, 8:01 p.m. was the exact time our most recent date had begun. At first, I figured he was just busy—and, since most people don’t use WhatsApp as a default messaging application, I figured he just wasn’t logging on because he was conducting necessary communication elsewhere. But the timestamp stuck in my head, and so I couldn’t stop checking. I started checking too much. I told people I was checking. I deleted the chat thread. I deleted his contact. I re-added his contact. The timestamp was the same. I deleted everything again.

I did this two more times before he messaged me. And the emotional release—the decrease in anxiety—was palpable.
I began paying attention to other things because up until that point, for a span of nearly a week, a timestamp had taken over my entire life.

I started online dating in the summer of 2018, after becoming single at the end of a seven-year, mostly monogamous relationship. I am also clinically depressed and diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. While online mediums make it easier for me to communicate with others free of the gut-punch nervousness I often experience when interacting with people in real life, mediums like Tinder and Bumble are built upon a framework of features that can spike feelings of stress, insecurity and self-doubt as much as mutually swiping right can alleviate them. The primary difference, though, is that the latter has a short half-life (by design), whereas the dull, gnawing hangover of the former can linger and build. Online dating, no more or less than any other online medium, has the potential for long-term mental harm.

Peer-reviewed studies about the mental-health implications of online dating are as prolific, now, as were similar studies incriminating social media, at the turn of the decade, when Facebook et al. consumed our collective consciousness. The news is predictably grim: A 2016 study by the American Psychological Association found both male and female Tinder users reported less satisfaction with their physical appearances than non-users, while male users reported lowered self- esteem. A 2018 survey of Match.com users found 15 percent felt “addicted” to the process of looking for a date; millennials were 125 percent more likely to report these feelings.

But the problem, I’ve observed in my peers as well as in myself, is not so much in the transactional nature of the dating apps—the inherent affirmation/rejection that accompanies a swipe right/left—but in the tiny digital breadcrumbs that surround each interaction. Take Sunday, 8:01 p.m., for instance. For the most part, dating apps require premium membership to observe when matches were last seen; the heightened visibility that often begets heightened paranoia and anxiety comes at a cost—and those who find themselves unwitting masochists to the Orwellian design of dating apps are easy monetary prey. It’s self-harm by subscription. Tinder, the Mack Daddy of dating apps, allows users to see how far they are from one another; paying to “fake” your location—to pretend you’re somewhere you’re not, either to gather matches for when you’re in town or disguise your location from a particularly nosy match—will cost you. On Bumble, seeing who has liked your profile rather than matching by accident is also pay-to- play. Feeld, an app where users are more likely to be looking for no-strings-attached physical relationships, also has a paid tier; it, among other things, allows you to hide your profile from Facebook friends who are also using the app.

There’s a commonality to each online dating application’s premium features: They essentially provide windows into the types of anxiety that are stoked once users move the conversation off the app, and into other mediums. WhatsApp’s last-seen feature—plus read receipts; Facebook’s newsfeed and mutual-friends collection; the three moving dots of iMessage; the bright blue light of a message received—of affirmation, of validation—and the dead, black screen of “I guess I’m not good enough.” Each tiny digital sign of life adds to a growing network of anxieties; a new spore in a massive, brain-blanketing fungal network of what-ifs. It’s consuming. It’s gut-wrenching. And, for the most part, it doesn’t feel like romance at all.

If none of this is ringing a bell to you, good: it may be the case that you haven’t entered the perilous arena of digital romance with a preexisting mental illness. But for those of us who have, the confluence of our always-on digital lives with the sometimes-there sparks of online romance can feel heady at best, enveloping at worst.

And since the mediums—and their anxiety-inductors— are so disparate, coping mechanisms tend to be ad hoc. They often manifest as patchwork digital desire paths: A friend of mine swears by muting notifications on dating apps as well as the text threads in which she’s engaging potential partners. She says that visiting those mental stimulators only when she chooses to lends a sense of control. Another puts his apps in a folder that’s not accessible from his cellphone home screen. Dozens of friends have told me about deleting Tinder, reinstalling it, deleting it again, opting for a different app, opting for two apps at once, deleting both, then starting anew.

Dating apps, ostensibly, exist to facilitate human connections. And this is why it’s so difficult to apply the advice often levelled at those of us who find social media anxiety- inducing—“Just delete it!”—to Tinder and its cousins. We can still keep in touch with our friends and family without the helping hand of Mark Zuckerberg; our phones still have, um, a phone function. But we aren’t speed-dating anymore. Swiping right is the new meet cute. And if you already tend toward introversion due to mental health issues, opting out of digital dating may seem tantamount to joining a convent. Otherwise, it’s a precarious tightrope walk, attempting to balance the temptation of choice, the promise of sexual freedom and the desire for romantic intimacy, with the anxiety-riddled need for order and no surprises. So what’s to be done?

Two weeks after the Sunday, 8:01 p.m. incident, I blocked that match from being able to contact me altogether. I needed to give myself the feeling of being in control. Shortly after, I spent some time with a casual partner of mine, who apologized for having recently gone quiet on me for a few weeks. He said he’d been experiencing a minor mental-health crisis, and had to take some time off. I was taken aback by his candour, at once happy that he felt safe enough to share this information with me, and embarrassed at my shock that, even in such a casual context, openness about mental wellness could be so easy.

I texted Sunday, 8:01 p.m. not long after. I told him I had no way of knowing if he’d reached out, because I’d blocked him, because my anxious brain needed a bit of a break. He hasn’t replied, and I don’t care if he does. I feel honest and I feel relieved, and this makes me feel more in control of my mental health than checking status updates and muting conversations. It feels better than pretending to feel nothing at all.