on digging into the deep well within

I've just spent a good four hours or more in a horrible headspace. I've cried, ranted to a friend, downed a couple shots of brandy neat, and am finally stopping to take a deep breath and start afresh in the place I love best: writing with words.

A few months ago I reduced the hours at my job, in order to free up space for the work I feel called to do. I've put myself into precarious financial circumstances so that I might invest my time and my skills and my energy into what I believe is real work. But the thing about real work is that it is so very rarely paid well, if paid at all.

There is no doubt that the mainstream mental health system (eg psychiatry) is under attack by campaigners within the various strands of the mad movement. Radical, fringe groups of mostly crazy people are together gathering their forces and pushing at psychiatry's door, with critiques of the medication culture, the diagnosis culture, the incarceration culture and the culture of widespread epistemic and social injustice. They are calling attention to how suffering is pathologised, sufferers are traumatised by so-called treatments, and individual lives are destroyed by the demands of sanism and conformity.

And then there is the whole landscape of collapse. It is becoming fairly common now to find references to the collapse of civilisation and even impending human extinction. Fifteen years ago, my concerns about collapse were considered extreme, unstable, emotive, fringe, radical and yes, cause for sectioning. Yet here we are. My own mother has recently suggested I read a book called Life After Doom. FFS.

So when I declare that my work – the real work - is to bring these contexts together, I find myself again on the fringe. Go back to fulltime, I've been told. Pay your bills. Stop idealising. We don't understand what it is you do. We don't understand what you're on about. The mad movement? Can you get a job in that??

So this is me, stating my vision, and caution be damned. Our world is in collapse, breakdown; it is coming apart at the seams and shedding off the skin of its false, fake lies; madreality is emerging in its stark naked truth. A friend of mine has wondered if psychosis occurs when one touches the real too closely, and I concur. What do we do when we stop pretending, indeed? We step into madreality, that's what.

I can only do my own little piece of the real work, and the only way I can do that is to live out my truth. And goddam it, I swear by Spirit, Anne Frank and my own beautiful soul that I will do just that. I'm not giving up and I'm not giving in.