“Hi. I’m a painter.”
“I’m a drag queen.”
“I have a master’s in education.”
“I’m a nymphomaniac.”
How do we choose the words we use to describe ourselves? In these settings, introductions are one of the few instances in which mental health care consumers can explicitly articulate their identities for themselves. Our trip was ostensibly to see New York as a study in stigma, but it became a study in the formulation of identity beyond diagnosis.
The painter came from the Midwest, and he had traveled around the United States taking photographs of himself in crummy hotel rooms and spent seven years painting only with the color red to try and understand the nature of the color’s intensity. His paintings from this period were pulsing and biological. He had had a severe episode of mental illness that he was hospitalized for prior to coming to the art collective, which he credits with saving him from indefinite hospitalization. He had only recently started adding other colors to his palette.
The drag queen was also a talented book artist. He had “self-medicated” — a common term used by mental healthcare consumers — with crack cocaine for many years to manage the crippling lows of his bipolarity. Community Access, the organization that provides subsidized housing and sponsors the art collective, is far sighted in not kicking out residents for substance abuse, which, it reasons, would add the burden of homelessness to a person when he or she is most vulnerable.
The man with the master’s degree in education was a former small business owner from Israel, and his first episode of mental illness had been triggered by a tempestuous divorce, during the course of which he lost his business and custody of his son. He was taking courses to become an advocate in New York State’s mental health courts.
At age 12, the nymphomaniac was the first African-American ballerina admitted to the Martha Graham School for Dance, and the struggle of fitting her body and spirit to the strictures of American ballet took an incredible toll on her psyche, already affected by her bipolar disorder. Her medication made her gain weight, and it took decades for her to come to terms once more with her body, but when she did, it was with assertive style. “I call myself the black Elizabeth Taylor,” she told us, “and my husband is my Richard Burton. I’m a real nymphomaniac.”
She wanted it made clear that her sexuality was a part of her bipolarity that she embraced as part of her own identity, but she wanted to be understood on her own terms, not those imposed by psychiatry. The artist and the drag queen also considered their illnesses to be important parts of their experience, but they did their best to reject any attempt at understanding them solely through the lens of their medical diagnoses.
The Breakout trips allow students to encounter narratives like these that are really the essence of the issues we set out to explore. In the spring, I also led a group to Salt Lake City to learn about the dynamics of religion, society and politics. I’ve found on all the trips I have taken, the truth about the social issues we set out to investigate reveals itself most fully not in diagnoses or dogma, but in the paradox, irony and contradictions that individual stories reveal.
On the train back to Princeton, we were still wrapped in our journey. We came back, and the hardest thing, the translation of what we had touched, began. Some parts of the trip will emerge on Facebook albums. Others will be found in the sharing of stories about the places we went with our friends and family. Still others in a Daily Princetonian column. Other parts will manifest themselves in a changed conception of our own psyches, about what informs the parameters of our own identities. The success of Breakout trips lies in the same spirit of exploration in T.S. Eliot when he writes:
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
We may or may not have medical diagnoses that either complicate or simplify our understanding of our own identities. When we hear stories in which we encounter novel ways of perceiving the world, we are required to go beyond ourselves to truly understand them. A part of us remembers what it felt like to extend ourselves empathetically, and so when we return to our own, familiar stories at Princeton, we ask, critically, what would it mean, then, to be a human being here?
Sophie Jin is a Wilson School major from Salt Lake City. She can be reached at sjin@princeton.edu.
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