Tag: art

Emily Wu Truong

From Lady in Green to Psychiatric Survivor:
How 988 Shattered My Trust in the Mental Healthcare System

By Emily Wu Truong

For over a decade, I devoted my life to mental health advocacy. I believed in change — in compassion, in awareness, in recovery. My journey began with my local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), where I first found community when my family did not know how to be a support to me. Later, I connected with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH) and joined the California Mental Health Movement, back when it was still called Each Mind Matters.

As part of their campaign promoting the lime green ribbon for mental health awareness, I became known as the Lady in Green. They featured my story. I felt validated. I spent years fighting stigma, amplifying AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) voices, delivering nearly 200 talks, and working within a system I believed could help people heal.

In 2022, when the national 988 crisis line launched, I called and texted the line to test it — to better understand what others in crisis might experience. A year later, I called again. But this time, it wasn’t a test.

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Mia Pandey Gordon

The Sea Balloon

Monday, 7.47am: Water, water.

My throat itched — not where it meets your tongue, but further down. Then, the itchiness started snaking up. When it reached my mouth, my head started swaying, back-n-forth, back-n-forth, like a beach ball at sea — buoyant on gentle waves, back-n-forth, back-n-forth.

The itchiness reared its head, making my mouth dry. I need water. I had water. Water all around, but none to quench the thirst. And all the while my head went back-n-forth, back-n-forth.

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Carol Krause

Love Letter for the Broken

When you’ve lost every hope, give thanks. For we will be waiting, with bouquets of light. In your grief, we will rest beside you. We will weep with you, without saying a word. You can cry out in desperation. We will cry out with you. Even if you bury your eyes in the darkness, we will not forsake you. I tell you this, because I know there is a hole in your soul. And I know the world gets inside the hole. Then you feel everything that is outside, inside. This is why you break. I could offer to fix you, but then who would break for the world? Instead, we have come with empty flowers that you can hold in your hands. And a lullaby that can last a lifetime. If you open the bottom of your ear to the sky. We have come to tell you not to change, not really. For the hole in your soul fits our world inside. And when you weep, we rejoice. Instead of making you into something that does not break, how about we show you how to shatter without restriction? Then we can cry out together. For life is cruel and unjust. While every day asks much of the heart. We will hold your hands, in the shadows. And you will hold our hands, in the light. That’s what love is. There’s not much else to say. Just thank you. For the hole in your soul. That tends the whole world, inside. 

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Angelina Tang

Art to the Senses

                  Huà ěr meets her at the corner store.

                  She hadn’t intended it, of course. She’d wished only to pick up dinner after work, absentmindedly enjoying the crinkle of saturated, plastic packaging under her fingers. But she is accustomed to the little pains of the world, to catching and picking out injustices; she cannot help but catch the rise of harsh, male voices crowding around the corner of the store, a writhing mass of dissonance that leaves the taste of rubber on her furu-soft tongue.

                  She does not understand the words, and yet the wiry inflections, as flimsy and prickly as the cheap shelves the goods stand upon, make the message clear. Huà ěr would turn tail and run if a man spoke to her with such mocking, such jeering contempt.

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Glynnis Reed-Conway

“Why Do We Whisper Our Stories?”: Disability Frameworks and Multiply Marginalized Subjects 

I start this essay with the question posed by Jennifer Eisenhauer (2010) in their article “Writing Dora: Creating Community Through Autobiographical Zines about Mental Illness”: Why do we whisper our stories? They propose this question in response to a student with a mental health disability who approached Eisenhauer after class, speaking of her hospitalization in hushed tones. Those hushed tones address the shame, invisibility, and silence suffered by neurodivergent people in the quiet, in the dark, in the back, unseen, and rarely heard in their own voices. I begin my writing with this quote because my own silences about my personal experiences as a neurodivergent person have come to their limit and I am now in the place where I choose to speak louder, to articulate more of my truth. Why do we whisper our stories? Because we are shamed by the normative, ablebodied world to the madnesses we inhabit. 

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