On Entering the Earth’s Surface Once Again and Ending Time
Jacquese Armstrong
i am walking the gap
intended to envelop me
(i can walk on air)
i walk past the hungry lions/ ruffle
the fur on top their heads/ they
smile at me
we know who owns this jungle
the key to the labyrinth was placed in the heart
of a warrior
and even the king of the jungle recognises
what it’s taken four decades of psychosis
to uncover//
ever wonder
if the world would have been a different place if
you and not just you but
everyone else could’ve
made that last again right turn that
failed and
persisted and just
maybe
we
wouldn’t
be sitting
here
today
if you could have just held up your end of the bargain on one
occasion
the world
would be in a different place/
it’s the little things that confound a crock like the system…*
So, here I am in this ending, finally, this “different state” or so my therapist says given the description I provided earlier this day. I used to wonder if I just could have made other choices leading up to my 20s or done something differently, perhaps gone to another environment for college, I would not have been “trapped in liminal space” for four decades.
However, it was a massive transfer of energy through space and time that couldn’t distribute itself properly in that particular timespace. So, I had to traverse through many “sub”-liminal spaces over decades to reach the door to the “different state” a flashback opened for me earlier today. My ponder is if it’s the last. Just like the poem you query at the last line, or my memoir. My memoir is full of essays touting the fact that I’m back in real time, only to be back out on a limb again in some soul-shattering way.
I have been a traveller through time and space for decades through the galaxies and matter in my brain, breaking many “reality” barriers to reach this “different state” which I believe I will dub an ending.
Coincidentally, a week earlier, I summed up my memoir, though I couldn’t be sure I was “here” and admitted as much. And, I had finished and thought I had concluded many times before, but there was a difference this time. I felt less heavy and sent it straightaway to two publishers. Somehow, I knew this was a significant “reality stance” for me, closure. The closure I had been working, praying and hoping for since I first “lost my mind” at 20. I am 62.
The Ross Barnett Reservoir in Mississippi is the closest thing to an ocean I have, to watch water on and meditate as I write in my gratitude journal daily. I like to do this in the mornings. On the way today, I was playing an oldie from the 90s, the B52s, ‘topaz,’ and I was getting into it like it was 1990 something, when I got this flashback.
In the 90s, I had an extreme manic episode that got so out of control, I had to be hospitalised for months and the only remedy in the end was to administer ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). Many of my zany antics and delusional thoughts that took place during that time started flooding my mind. Also, I was made cognisant of the fact that my thinking processes for decades were really not based on 3-dimensional reality.
Usually when I think back on these thoughts I laugh, I mean they are preposterous when you are in the 3-D realm and not considering them as metaphors.
Today, I cried, realising that I walked the earth for decades as an “other” being. I realised I had been through many portals in time and space, a myriad series of endings and beginnings, and having done this, accumulated integrated knowledge no one understands but fellow travellers and a few mental health professionals.
This information was given to me by emotional download. I felt the unreality and delusional states and remember myself working most days and quitting and looking for jobs and trying to maintain jobs in that state. More than that I was trying to live a 3-D life when I was travelling in a 5 to 6-D strata. Essentially, I walked my entire adult life blind, impersonating a seeing person. It was then, in the words of Oprah Winfrey’s Sophia in The Color Purple, “I knowed there is a God.” Because that God carried me in the palm of his hand. It’s my only explanation for me surviving in the physical realm. The hairs stood up on my arms.
Evolution and growth are the byproducts that emerge from liminal space dwelling and thought. Resolutions and revolutions are born in liminal space, come to be when the space stops, comes to an end. However, they are born of that unsettling restlessness that seeks another state, another form, calls questions forth and demands answers. When no answers are forthcoming, they march into the future toward a door open or locked. That’s resolution, revolution…evolution. The process works with the political, spiritual, emotional and on.
Looking back in time, the 60s were very liminal in nature and the revolution some of us wanted to be the door we marched through, locked or open, never materialised. Instead, an ending of the anxiety energy was guided through diversion and evolution. As Gil Scott-Heron prompted, the revolution was not televised, it was live; meaning it was a revolution of mind. We all understood differently after the evolution and diversion and that was the ending.
Colonisation, much like madness, is clever. It will constantly redefine itself to stave you off from recovering your purest sense of self, which you are entitled to, however it will make you work, sweat and barter constantly for it. You will bargain for so long; you may forget that you are entitled and not the other way around. Colonisation thrives on this. Madness is at least not devious, it doesn’t care.
One would think that the treatment of trauma or “madness” would necessitate an environment free from colonial or imperial thought processes. One would think that to prevail from a traumatic space, freedom, creativity and encouraged autonomy would come into play. However, here in the western world, the ends justify the means. There is always some patriarchal figure claiming control over some said territory, be it land, your mind, your body. (Am I right or am I wrong?) And his prescription, diagnosis, decree will be the law of the land, unless you go through many court battles, or some blood is shed. But endings, thankfully, as long as you breathe, may progress. Nothing is set in stone.
My first psychiatrist was a white-haired white man with blue flecks in his eyes that dared to stare mine down as he told me my life was essentially over at 20. I was a chemical engineering junior at a major state university who had completed two internships and had mapped out my future for 20 years. I did not want to hear that. He said, “you will never finish college, and you will never work.” Those were the exact words that came from his mouth and when I went back to school anyway, he was of no help at all, just drugging me up more every time I had a problem or challenge. I soon got weary and gave up on engineering, it did take a lot of concentration. I switched to journalism. Imagine a journalism degree with chemical engineering, chemistry and calculus classes as electives. Well, I earned one.
It took me 40 years to see the total fallacy of the colonial psychiatric medical model which is imposed on almost every patient in this country, especially those of us with what they call SMIs (severe mental illnesses) like schizophrenia, bipolar or schizoaffective disorder. Before they can hear your challenge straight, they have the prescription pad, or a bed waiting in a hospital and if you stay a week or maybe a day too long, they’re ready to deliver the voltage to your brain. The pandemic helped me see this industry in a different light.
I reasoned that if after 40 years of shuffling pills no one could find a solution, why don’t we see what’s under there now? No one ever came up with that concept. It was a rough and arduous journey, but I made it. And I dare say I’m sane now. I’m not suicidal every morning, which is what I had been since the pandemic began and most of the time before. I am still under a PN’s care with minimal meds now, but hey, after 40 years of harsh psychotropics, this is an accomplishment.
There are so many of us in our 60s that have the diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, on tranquilizers still, going back and forth from hospitals and day programs still, being transitioned to nursing homes if they are on disability. They force an end on us. It’s as if in the mental health system, they stop trying to progress or better a client’s mental health after 50. This is my interpretation from observation.
Well, I wasn’t the one. Before I could get out of that clinical setting, I met my appointments with their therapists, however, I developed my own artistic therapies which led to me creating and facilitating workshops on self-care and mental wellness.
It’s time for us to force an end to time, the time of colonial rule in psychiatric care. There needs to be direct and serious dialogue between the psychiatrists of the world and the persons of lived experience. Psychiatrists need to realise it’s time for them to return to school and embrace people of lived experience into their practices to help them in decision-making processes and in communicating with their patients. They need to come to an understanding that these are lives they are holding in their hands.
As for me, I don’t know what the future holds, but like Whoopi Goldberg’s Celie in The Color Purple, “I’m here, thank God I’m here…”
i
am a woman who
has walked singular for decades
writing in isolation
peering between free verse and historical metaphor
using jazz/my rhythm & blues to
smooth rough edges
make a step toward real Freedom
all bold and unashamed
the rain shouts its evolutionary silence in
thunderous roars/beats down at times
rebirthing curl patterns/introducing growth
i welcome rain and shine
my hair is natural.
*excerpt from i am the light in the window/ detached
**excerpt from finding my write community
Both by author
Jacquese Armstrong, author of “blues legacy” (Broadside Lotus Press, 2019), was the recipient of the 2019 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and 2015 Ambassador Award from the State of New Jersey Governor’s Council on Mental Health Stigma for promoting wellness and recovery and reducing stigma through the arts. Recently published in “Black Fire – This Time Vol. 2” and African Voices, Jacquese was a 2022 “Black Fire – This Time” Anthology Summer Fellow. She has been a cast member of TMI Project’s storytelling performances Black Stories Matter: Every Word Spoken and Alone Together stories of COVID-19 in quarantine. Her work has been published in Valley Voices: a Literary Review, Torch Literary Arts, midnight & indigo, Mad Women in the Attic, MAD in America, Stellium, Black Magnolias and Black Ourselves among others. Jacquese’s new full-length poetry work, “survival as an act of resistance” will be available through Wayfarer Books in October 2025. The book chronicles poetically her mental health recovery journey spanning four decades.
*Image by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
