Transcript 01- Jade

These transcripts deal with themes of mental illness and trauma

Cassandra interviewed Jade in their home late at night. Jade was knitting a blanket and Cassandra was eating food. They met through school and have been close friends for three and a half years

Ok, so… please state your name, age, and your gender identity and presentation.

This thing (gestures to blanket) started as this (gestures to ball of yarn).

That’s impressive.

My name is Jade Cool and I am 22 years old and I am non binary and tend to present on the masc side.

Is that how you’ve always presented?

In fact it is not (both laugh). In fact I presented as femme for the first 20 years of my life.

Have you been diagnosed… I’m (Cassandra laughs)… I’m now going to assume familiarity….. you’ve been diagnosed, what are the things you’ve been diagnosed with?

(Jade laughs) Um, all the things? Well I was diagnosed with asthma when I was 7 (both laugh).

Ok, no, you know what I…. you’ve been diagnosed with mental illness.

That’s an accusation.

Oh my god (Cassandra laughs).

Well let’s see…. Dysthymia, Severe Recurrent Major Depression, Gender Dysphoria, Anorexia Nervosa, PTSD, Generalized Anxiety, Social Anxiety, though I don’t really have that anymore.

As a broad question, what has been your experience with mental illness so far? You can take that …. as you want it.

(Jade laughs quietly)

Um… it’s definitely played a… huge role in my life, um… are you good?

Yeah.

Ok, um, it has shaped who I am, like…. Probably more than most other things.

(crunch from Cassandra eating celery)

(Jade laughs)

Munch!

Sorry!

(Both laugh)

It’s because I have spent so much time in treatment like, literal years just in IOP levels and more intense levels of care, um, it’s kind of where I’ve developed community and that translates to like my regular life as well where, like, I connect with a lot of people through our shared experiences with mental health, um, and also like with my youtube channel where I make mental health videos and so most of my audience are people who are dealing with similar things, I can connect with them.

What relationship would you say you have with your mental health right now and how would you say that it’s changed?

Well, I first started developing mental health issues when I was twelve, when I was in seventh grade, and at that time I didn’t really know anything about mental health so I…. I mean I didn’t know how to ask for help, I didn’t know that there was something like…. wrong with me, or that what I was experiencing wasn’t what everyone else was secretly experiencing, and it wasn’t until I was literally forced into a hospital that I kind of was forced to acknowledge that, like, what was going on with me was actually serious.

When was that?

That was when I was eighteen, I was a senior in high school so for like…. six years I was cutting and, like, dealing with depression and dysthymia and anxiety, uh, and kind of just thinking it was normal for me…. I mean it was normal for me, but like, I didn’t think that it was something that needed intervention, or it even occurred to me that I could ask for help, until I was forced into treatment, and after that I started… kind of shifting my perspective but I mean I was pretty resistant at first to doing any of the… the difficult work beyond like, following a meal plan and gaining the weight they wanted me to gain. I’d say it’s been in the last year and a half maybe (celery crunch) that I’ve actually started, like… doing the work of… of trying to change the way I see myself.

In those first six years, like… how, did you view your mental illness? You kind of seem like you were in denial about it but what role do you think it played in your life?

It played a big role, I derived a lot of my identity from being depressed, being suicidal, being a self-harmer, um, and my closest friends were— at least my best friend at the time was  also going through an eating disorder and self harm and depression so I think because neither of us felt comfortable enough to reach out for help, it kind of just… reinforced our beliefs that this was normal.

So…. over the past few years, you’ve come to understand that you need… and have come to seek help and have maybe become willing to take on things that are required beyond just the exact things that are dictated to you. So how have you come to view your mental illness, like…if you were to make it tangible or describe it tangibly, how would you describe it?

Uh… I meant that’s hard because (celery crunch)… I’ve been trying to move away from personifying mental illness and seeing it as a tangible thing.

Ok, why?

Because I feel like for… for a lot of people– and I guess what I’ve tried in the past, especially with the eating disorder is externalizing it, so I could feel anger at how it affected me and fight it without feeling like I was attacking a critical part of myself. You hear it a lot in treatment, people separating themselves from the eating disorder, which works for a lot of people, but I think for me it caused me to hit a wall where like, if I was treating my mental illness as its own entity then I would never come to terms with the deeper issues that were going on within myself.

If I ever want to heal myself from my own destructiveness, I need to take responsibility for what I’ve done in service of my eating disorder and forgive past me for turning to such destructive means to handle life, since these measures were all I knew to survive each day. I never had any healthier strategies modeled to me, and no one really taught me how to get through the situations I was experiencing for the first time in my life, so it’s not really a surprise that I turned to the strategies I did and I have no reason to feel ashamed for coping in the most effective way I could think of at the time. So I try to take a more integrated stance toward my mental health of like… all of these maladaptive behaviors and coping mechanisms I’ve developed…. developed for a reason and… they’re things that have become integral parts of my life and who I am and I’m trying to now not to like… get rid of them so much as I’m trying to replace them so that I’m not like pushing them out, but I just don’t need them anymore.

Yeah,  that makes sense. What… I guess, do you… do you have a sense of what sort of role you could put on them?

On my mental health?

On the coping techniques that are unhealthy that you’ve developed.

They’ve kind of become a catch-all, or they have become a catch all for everything, like, with self harm, that started (celery crunch) when I was twelve and I was doing it all the way up until Septemb– August of last year, and it started out, it was me, um… expressing frustration (celery crunch), like frustration with the things that were happening around me, and then it moved to like… expressing frustration that I felt within myself and then it spread to just… being the way I coped with any emotion that I didn’t know how to handle, which was every emotion. So like, I would be really happy and not know what to do with that emotion, and so I would get urges to self harm.

Ok… just, any excess?

Yeah.

(Note from Jade: examples of other roles self harm has played in my life include a release of internal tension, a physical manifestation of emotional pain, self-punishment, taking control of my body, and a distraction from something even more distressing in my internal or external environment)

In terms of your eating disorder… how has that experience been, considering that it’s something that is generally femme coded, especially considering that you are not someone who identifies as femme and how has that played into gender and gender expectations?

It was really interesting, um, the first time I went through treatment–I did identify as female at the time and I did dress femme, not so much because I really identified that way but because I hadn’t thought about my identity, um, and that first round through treatment, I met someone who was trans and they, um, kind of…. voiced their frustrations at the contradictions within the recovery community and the challenge that trans people – particularly trans masc people because that was their experience – face within the healthcare system, of like, so many people in the recovery community preach that you should love your body the way that it is and that your body is perfect the way it’s supposed to be naturally and that’s obviously not helpful for trans people because our bodies are the things that are causing us so much pain.

Yeah.

Um, and…  that invalidation can come from professionals as well because no one’s done any research on why trans people would develop eating disorders for any different reasons than cis people, so they don’t know how to treat it, and so when they try to take the same approach it’s…. it’s like counterproductive because it reinforces this belief that I think a lot of trans people have internalized already um, that they’re wrong for wanting  their body to be different and needing it to be different to live, like…. a remotely comfortable life.

So the second time I went through treatment – I’d started identifying as nonbinary and playing more with my gender expression towards the end of my first round of treatment, um, and the dysphoria that I started feeling played a huge role in (celery crunch) my relapses because… honestly, partly because of what that person that I met the first time through treatment had told me about like, how the eating disorder had helped them with like alleviating dysphoria because they would lose their period, they would lose their curves, um… and I found that to be true for me as well when I started using it in that way, and it made it really difficult to want to recover because when you go to treatment, there’s only so much that your providers can do to motivate you to want to recover…. and, none of the consequences that they were able to give for like, not complying and not eating and stuff were sufficient to balance out the pain I felt from abstaining from eating disorder behaviors to repress the dysphoria, so it wasn’t until I was able to start transitioning medically that it was even possible for me to consider recovery.

Why–

Did that answer the question?

Yeah!

I forgot what the question was.

So did I (both laugh) but I’m assuming you answered it (Jade laughs).

Ok.

Um….

You know where to find me.

(Cassandra laughs)

I was going to say, why do you think eating disorders are generally coded as femme? I mean, I think there’s an obvious answer of like, oh, y’know, the media has ideas about body standards for women but like, do you think there’s like something more beyond that?

Mmmhm, um, I mean, obviously if eating disorders were caused by the media then every woman in the world would have an eating disorder because everyone’s exposed to the same media since we live in an age of globalization, um, but I think that a lot of why eating disorders affect women in particular comes from how we’re socialized – I say “we” because I was socialized as female –

Yeah.

Um, so I have this upbringing too where you’re expected not to be aggressive, you’re expected to be passive about (celery crunch) your needs and desires, um, and that can, I think that when you try to repress all of that, or keep yourself from expressing it with your words, it comes out sideways and one of the forms it can take is an eating disorder because that’s a way that you can…. really manipulate people and hold power over people who care about you, um… without having to…. like, directly ask for what you need.

So it’s a way of achieving power by holding your own body for ransom?

Yes.

What things do you think change your mental state on the day to day? Like, what makes your mental illness worse on the day to day and what makes it better? So it’s not a long term change but very specifically like, right now, what are the specific…..

Um, well usually the most common things are… PTSD triggers since, that’s something… that’s an area I haven’t really touched on in therapy, aside from with Paul.

Where do you tend to encounter the most triggers?

I encounter the most triggers when I am at home in Walnut Creek because that’s where all of my memories are of, um, various traumas, like the abuse and memories of my friend who died, um, and…. oh I messed up (referring to knitting)…. um…. but I mean the triggers are everywhere, it’s in the particular phrases people say that are just like normal phrases but might remind me of something.

Mmhmm.

It could just… it could be anything and there’s no way that I can avoid them all, aside from like, just…. shutting myself away from the world, which is kind of what an eating disorder does.

Mmmhmm.

Um, so I have to (celery crunch) just learn to live with it.

What about the things that change it positively? What are the things that make you feel better?

Ah, that didn’t even occur to me! (Both laugh) Um…. definitely…. I feel like I have a really good support system, between my friends, roommates, people I spend the most time around, um, especially while I’m at school in Chicago. I feel like I’m always with people that I can talk to at any moment whether I need advice about something or I just want a distraction.

Mmmhmmm, so generally … using the community that’s around you, um, and experiencing…. positive human interaction?

Yeah, and I’m generally not a big proponent of… well….. I personally do not always seek human interaction, but when it’s people that I’m close to and when it’s something that I’m seeking out then it is helpful and it does positively impact my mental health. But also like… spending time by myself and just like… I don’t know… playing word games on the internet can be really restorative so there’s a variety of things that I’ve kind of learned about myself over the years that help me with my mental health.

Mmhm…. how much do the people around you know about your mental health and mental illness?

Well… (both laugh)… I always assume they know an awful lot (Cassandra laughs) because I’m sick and tired of pretenses or…. generally I do feel affected by stigma and feel self-conscious about sharing things about my mental health, both because I’m uncertain of how others will react and also because it just feels like it’s something that I’m not supposed to talk about… but then I have these moments where I just like… will post on facebook for the entire world to see that I spent my summer in intensive treatment for anorexia and…. everyone in my life has the potential to find out about that so I have to go into interactions assuming that people know everything. And… and generally if they’re the ones to bring it up, it’s because they can relate to it or they have something specific they want to talk about, um, and they’re open to it and have a positive reaction to it and I’m pretty open to having discussions about it. It’s not like I want to hide it from the world. I just wish I didn’t feel like I have to keep it secret because it makes some people uncomfortable.

How much do you feel like your mental illness colors your interactions with other people, whether that’s their perception of you or whether that’s… you…. experiencing interactions in a certain way? Which is kind of a two part question, because I think those are two different things but..

Yeah I mean I think it really affects my interactions with people, especially like when I’m meeting people, if I’m wearing something that exposes my scars, I’m generally pretty conscious of the fact that they are on display, and I never really know unless someone comments on it if they have noticed them… because they’re quite obvious to me so I think I overestimate how often people pay attention to it, but since it’s always on my mind it always comes into play on some level when I’m getting to know people. And also I… just…. am tired of… pretending to be someone I’m not and… if someone else has experienced mental illness, frequently that can be a common point for us connect over and so I find that if I let myself be a little vulnerable that I open the door for whoever I’m talking with to be vulnerable in return and if it’s reciprocated we kind of play a game of like seeing how much each person is comfortable with sharing and how comfortable we can be with each other and that really builds a lot of intimacy in my relationships with people.

How do you feel like– people who don’t experience mental illness– how do you feel like their knowledge of your mental illness changes their interactions with you, whether for better or for worse.

Y’know I don’t….

Unclear?

I don’t know if there’s anyone in my life, aside from family and one of my roommates that… doesn’t have a mental illness because I just… relate so much more and I’m able to connect so much more with people who can understand it, um…

Well then what about your family? How did that change the way that you interacted?

Oh boy… um… as far as I’m aware no one in my family has ever (celery crunch) seen a therapist, aside from being in family sessions with me where I’m the identified patient, so yeah the dynamic is really like I’m the one with the problems and therefore everyone else is like… taking care of me and they obviously don’t have problems of their own which is difficult because I can tell there are dynamics certainly that haven’t served me well through like, my childhood and development and some of those have kind of been influenced by relatives….. not being entirely mentally neurotypical, um, but you can’t really force someone to see that about themselves…. but I guess like most of my interactions with neurotypical people are just like… I dunno, just having a conversation with some random person for some random reason, um, and sometimes I might make an allusion to my mental health, usually in like… a more subtle way to try to test the waters and see if they reciprocate and if they can’t, um, I generally back off. I think I kind of note them in my head as someone who probably won’t be able to connect with a lot of the things I need them to connect with in order to be a… valuable resource in my life.

Um….. shifting gears to gender things…

Woo

(Cassandra laughs)

Um… what… was your experience when you were identifying/ being perceived as femme. I guess… you know how it changes now that you don’t identify/present as such…what…. what was that transition like, what was it like beforehand, what have you noticed that is different?

Well it’s interesting because… I’m still, I think more often than not, read as female, and there’s definitely a difference between being on campus here, where I feel like my identity is respected a lot more than in the outside world, where people just aren’t generally aware that there are things people can be that aren’t male or female, um…. or even that people can have a gender that’s not what they were assigned at birth.

Yeah.

What a concept!

I know!

(Both laugh)

Um…. but…. I mean, there’s a lot of…. like sexism is a double edged sword, and that’s not to say that there’s parity between what a woman experiences and what men experience, but there are definitely certain things that I’ve had to come to terms with losing by choosing to go through transition and accept that I’m going to be perceived by the world as male. Like…. the intimacy of a female/female relationship, um…

Like… friendship or romantic or what do you mean by that?

Friendships, like….where it’s more acceptable for women to show affection on a platonic basis. I think that’s slowly shifting, which is good, and then also being around children is a lot easier when you’re read as female… not that I really have many children in my life or have a desire to have children in my life, um…. and so those are probably the main things that I’ve kind of had to grieve as I’ve accepted what I want my life to look like… but, y’know…. there’s….

A lot of benefits.

(Jade laughs)

Infinite benefits! Uh… like… just, being taken more seriously…and I haven’t honestly experienced any of the benefits yet because… even people who do read me as male usually can tell that I’m not a cis male or they think I’m like fifteen because I look like I’m going through puberty, because I kind of am, um…. but like… oh I’m very much looking forward to having my opinions be respected.

What a concept!

And…. not being harassed by strangers who like… want my number and stuff.

Yeah. Um… what does…. femme-ness –so these are generic questions that I wrote down so they like… the wording is trying to be vague to try to be relevant to a wide variety of gender identities, so…what does femme-ness mean to you, how do you define it, and what is your relationship to it?

I guess I define femme-ness… well, I mean with any gender-related term, my definition is whatever the person who identifies with it thinks it should mean.

Yeah.

Um, which is to say that I don’t think there is a stable definition for any of these terms, um, it’s what feels comfortable for people, but generally, in my observations of people who identify as femme…. um, it’s kind of a tendency to present in ways more consistent with what our society expects women to present as…. not just in terms of clothing and looks, but also like, the roles that…. are…. more expected of women in society than of men….

What would you qualify those as?

Um… like…. I think that the intimacy of relationships is a big difference, the level of comfort with expressing emotions, um, who you choose to spend more of your time around.

Fair enough! Um…. so, the question I have written down is: is there anything about femmeness or mental illness that you have struggled most with. So… being trans and NOT femme… anything else?

Oh yeah, and like especially with eating disorders because it’s so coded as, uh, a woman’s illness, like, you can’t escape from in treatment being… like… like… providers just assume that their clients are going to be female. And so most of the groups and stuff are aimed at that demographic, and um, in the case of eating disorders… most of the people who seek treatment are female so it is… I think beneficial that treatments are specified more towards people with femme identities, but it does leave out a significant portion of people with eating disorders and also makes it more difficult for those who don’t identify as femme to seek treatment in the first place because either they think they won’t be taken seriously or they think they won’t be given help that is relevant to them, which I think are both extremely valid concerns.

Yeah. Ok… um…. how do you feel like femme-ness and mental illness have interacted with each other? Do you feel like they’ve interacted with each other?

Like in my life?

Yeah.

Um…

This is very specifically about you.

Yeah, like… absolutely, but I don’t know if it’s femmeness so much as it’s the dissonance it creates in me presenting as femme because of my actual gender, but the dysphoria that I felt when I was presenting as femme was like I could choose to be seen as more conforming in society’s eyes and deal with all of the internal dissonance that happens with that or I could be true to who I feel I am and… have to deal with the world not validating me.

Yeah… well so the lack of validation… what interaction has that had with the mental illness?

I think that a lot of my mental illness came from lack of validation in my experiences because… oh god, getting into childhood shit.

(said singing) childhood shit, doop e doop e doop.

because like… in my family, uh, it wasn’t encouraged to express emotions that are generally coded as negative, uhm, it was kind of like you were just supposed to deal with that shit on your own and maintain a happy, peaceful, stable family dynamic, um, what was the question… I was going somewhere with that.

The world not validating you as someone that it perceived as femme and how that interacted with mental illness?

Oh yeah… yeah, so, I mean that kind of led to me seeking validation in other ways that were also unrelated to being femme, um, but I think that a lot of what has perpetuated my mental health issues, like, as I’ve been questioning and coming to terms with my gender, is also coming to terms with the fact that the world isn’t at a place where they are able to accept my gender, like, when people see someone on the streets, they don’t think of nonbinary as an option, they think that that person’s either male or female and those are the only two options, and so what I have to do is decide whether I… though I identify as nonbinary, if I am less uncomfortable being seen by the world as female or being read as male, and when I was identifying as femme and presenting as femme, it didn’t feel comfortable, it didn’t feel right to be seen as femme and labeled as female so now I’m kind of in the process of experimenting with if I’ll feel any more comfortable with being read with masculine and male.

Um…so we’ve talked about transness and femme identities and mental illness so… what, like… how do you think your being non-white in this society has interacted with either your mental illness or in your experience when you were presenting as femme?

Yeah I think that it’s not so much me being not white in a white dominated culture so much as, um… kind of the traditions of Chinese culture that have permeated through the generations. There’s different values of what’s expected of children, especially in terms of like their relationships with their parents, um, so for me, my upbringing was like…an interesting mix between chinese culture and, y’know, the predominant culture in the united states where I think I feel like my mom – she was raised in the united states and her parents were like trying to assimilate and stuff, but, like… her parents couldn’t fundamentally escape from the values that they’d internalized as children and I don’t think my mom, as much as she tried to run away from her upbringing, has been able to break free from some of those ideas as well… so it’s… it’s interesting where on one side of my family, I have issues expressing emotions and the issues expressing emotions is kind of what led me to developing mental illnesses in the first place as like a substitute for appropriate communication, um, where on my mom’s side of the family, it’s hard for me to express myself because it was so ingrained that you put the… the wellbeing of the family first, whereas on my dad’s side, um, who grew up in a very white american household, it was like there was the same repression of emotions, but more… from like an individualistic perspective of like, don’t bother your parents because you should be able to do it on your own. I don’t know if that made sense.

Yeah, that made sense, um… and so you feel very much affected, like… I guess the way you developed coping mechanisms maybe, or the way you interacted with other people when it comes to your mental illness, at least in the beginning?

Yeah.

Ok… um…. and so… are there any other… major factors that you feel have contributed to your experience of these sorts of identities? That have had intersections with them, that have like changed the way that you felt about them or the way people treated you?

Well being mentally ill in an east asian family is particularly difficult because it’s not generally… mental illnesses aren’t seen as things.

Yeah, it’s not as talked about?

Yeah, so…. no one in my family had any clue, like, what a mental illness was, um, or how to handle it, so my family has had to go on possibly an even bigger journey than I have, um, just to be able to support me, which, I mean their ability to do that is limited, um, but…. I mean….

How has it changed your relationships with each one of them?

It’s…. not so much changed my relationships as made me realize where I stand in those relationships, um, because my parents very much want to be involved in my life, and be like… I don’t know… be able to cure me, but neither of them are very capable of tolerating, like, the deep emotional things that have caused my mental health issues in the first place and so… a lot of the work I’ve had to do, especially recently, is coming to terms with the fact that when I’ve done family therapy in the past, it’s been for my parents’ benefit and not because I actually want them to be playing a larger role in my recovery or because I have any faith that they will ever be more ok with the feelings that I need to experience, um, and… like, I’ve had to come to the realization that I don’t want my parents to be supports in the way that they want to be supportive of me, um…

You just don’t feel like they would be the kind of supports you would need?

Yeah, they’re not capable of it and even if they were, like, the amount of work it would take to get them to that point is just not worth it to me when I could outsource those needs to friends who are much more understanding, capable, and willing to do the work and know more about what they’re getting into when they choose to support me.

That makes sense…. um… do you have any other thoughts that didn’t really fit into any of the questions that I asked?

I might think of more tomorrow when I’m more awake.