Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods [publisher link]

Read. This. Book.

Or, if you’re not a reader: listen to the episode of The Gray Area called “Seeing ourselves through darkness.“ [Apple Podcasts link] It covers much of the same ground in a conversational format.

There is almost nothing more important than what Alessandri is saying.

And I don’t say this because she says a lot of the things I’ve been saying. I say this because this book matters.

While she is saying many things I’m saying, she also issues a fatal critique of the thrust of the chiaroscuro-themed poetry I’ve been writing for the last five years and she’s actually destroyed my worldview-focus on light over darkness.

So we didn’t agree on everything, but she presents such a compelling case that I found myself rethinking the way I’ve been thinking—something that doesn’t often happen for me. [Said not with pride but frustration: I want to be challenged by a book I pick up; I need it to expand my worldview.]

I am saying this book is important because it is, objectively. This book changed how I think of the world and myself in it; let it change you.

In fact her ultimate message is that we must change the way we are thinking of dark moods, these are not disorders but symptoms of a larger systemic disorder. If we are going to make things better for ourselves, we must change the way we think of our darkness. It is not a disease to be sad, anxious, enraged or depressed; these are important indications that something is wrong with the world around you and yourself within it. With this book, Alessandri has given us the tool we need to think more deeply about our responses to the world around us.

I am hesitant to summarize the book. Her writing is as urgent, necessary and eager as the ideas her words convey. But, in the spirit of movie trailers, here’s a highlight reel: Rage is not a disease. Anxiety is not a disease. Depression is not a disease. Grief is not a disease.* But neither are they “gifts.” They cannot be “cured,” because they cannot be removed. These have specific functions. You feel these emotions for a reason.

*. Yes, grief is being medicalized [link to the DSM-V factsheet], provisionally for now, as Alessandri discusses (84-85). One of the chief “symptoms” in DSM-V being mourning for longer than two weeks. As if our loved ones were so cheaply loved our grief just dissipates so suddenly and we can get back to selling our labor.

Among much else, Alessandri traces the intellectual history of our present push for positivity in the wake of Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, and finds it squarely in the Stoics, overprivileged men of the ancient Mediterranean who argued long ago that an individual chooses their emotions and can control them, which is in fact the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a connection explored by Alessandri at length.

Notably, she leaves room for psychiatric care and therapy. The contrast between the into-the-darkness approach she is outlining here and her occasional statement to seek medication and talk therapies as needed if they work is stark. This is an important caveat: psychiatric medication may be able to get you through a moment of acute turmoil. They have saved many lives. I would not argue against them if you feel they are necessary. But don’t take anything because you think other people think you should.

IF YOU ARE DEALING WITH THOUGHTS OF SUICIDE, THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO HELP YOU. PLEASE ACCEPT IT! CALL OR TEXT 988.

I take issue with these half-hearted insertions because they reveal (1) that the psych-industry’s goal is not healthy human beings but productive workers in this exploitative system in which we find ourselves and which we perpetuate often despite ourselves; and (2) that the best to be had from a psychologist or therapist is methods of social masking, that thing autistic folks like myself learn to do from early childhood, that thing we autistic folks end up having to unlearn once we’ve reached a breaking point. Masking is not healthy. Take it from me, an autistic person who is currently engaged in years of effort to unmask myself: if a therapy is intended merely ‘to make you functional again’ or something like that, ‘to get you back to work’ or ‘to get you back to homemaking’ or whatever else, this is all merely another way of saying, ‘to get you back into the exploitive and oppressive systems of labor that led you to this moment of breakdown.’ Without realizing it—I definitely acknowledge their good intentions—current therapists/etc are not only betraying their patients’ trust (when a patient trusts that their therapist/etc has their individual best interests at heart, that their therapist/etc only wants them to be healthy humans), they are actually propping up these systems that must be changed if we are ever going to thrive.

The main target against which Alessandri writes is the metaphor of light vs dark wherein light is day is positive, social, productive, good; dark is night is negative, antisocial, destructive, bad. Happiness is light; everything else is dark. This metaphor comes in tandem with The Brokenness Narrative, as Alessandri calls it, that so many of us have come to tell ourselves (including myself).

You are not broken. You are a human being trying to get on in systems that maintain oppression in a disguised manner, and not of racial ‘minorities’ only but of everyone who is not of the 1% capitalist class. We don’t have to live like this.

Darkness is important. Anxiety and depression come on in order to prod us on to other pastures. We are hurting ourselves by trying to ignore it and get on with the situation that is provoking anxiety and/or depression. In our hurt, we feel rage as our most potent defense mechanism.

Anxiety is a response. Stimulus, Response. What is stimulating this response? Alessandri takes up Kierkegaard’s insistence that anxiety is a sign of emotional intelligence.* It is not we who experience anxiety, but those who do not, that ought to be considered for dysfunction. How can 2/3 of us in the US not see, not hear, not notice? It is objectively impossible to see, hear, notice, and not be disturbed. We are living in disturbing times. We must sit with that distress and think through what we can do to stop the source instead of medicating away the distress.

*. This book also has the added benefit of serving as an accessible introduction to some of the most popular ‘mainstream’ intellectuals of the last century (Kierkegaard, CS Lewis) and others who will probably be mainstream by the end of the decade (eg, Anzaldúa). But it’s not about their highfalutin ideas; this book is not a philosophy course. Alessandri brings in these figures as full human beings, as people who suffered and thought deeply about their suffering.

On an individual level, your anxiety is a motivator to ameliorate your conditions: something is wrong in your life and some part of you knows it; the work needed is getting the rest of yourself to hear out that knowing-part. The problem here, that will be obvious to many disadvantaged people, is that there is only so much an individual can do. If I know that where I’m at is not good for me, but I cannot get out of there, things will become much worse for me. Again, even the bolded formulation at the start of this paragraph relies on an individualized notion of change; but this is mistaken: as many disadvantaged people know it is not the individual that needs changing. Our society, we as a group, must change the way we have been taught to view the world. This starts with how we talk about things like depression, grief, anxiety and rage.

Like trauma, the darkness does not dissolve into nothingness. Healing doesn’t mean losing the memory of the wound; it means a scar. That’s the way it is. Unfortunately positivity pushers keep telling us to smile, be happy, think happy thoughts and unburdened happiness will come, all the usual well-intentioned platitudes. But this only makes the suffering person feel worse. It makes us feel shame on top of everything else, which Alessandri defines as “feeling bad about feeling bad” (58): the cycle is non-stop once it starts, negative response meets critique meets shame meets negative response meets critique meets shame meets negative response… We all deserve better than this. But we have to accept our darkness for what it is, we have to be willing to learn from it; all of this begins with how we talk about it.

Read. This. Book.