We live in a culture that has engrained some pretty whack-ass notions of what emotional strength, fragility and success look like. Even when it doesn’t serve us, it often feels less risky to pretend everything is fine, hide what’s hurting us and push through. Mental health is an awkward subject in the workplace.

An organization called The Stability Network is shifting the narrative. It sends out speakers who live with mental health conditions to tell their stories in workplaces around the world, and to demonstrate that it’s possible to have an episode, recover and continue to thrive in all manners and ways. TSN’s tag line says it all: Changing the way we talk about mental health, one story at a time.

Twenty years ago, I took a five-week medical leave from my job because of depression. My immediate teammates were amazingly supportive, but I remember feeling anxious about what the rest of the office thought about my absence, and whether I would retain the respect of my peers when I returned.  

On my first day back, I heard many kind greetings, but the reason for my absence was carefully avoided. You know how when someone returns after a surgery or a heart attack, everyone has a similar story to tell? Either theirs, or someone they know? No one had a story to share with me. Stories of mental illness recovery just weren’t the kind of thing people talked about.

Unsurprisingly, I felt shame around my illness. For the next 15 years, I played my mental health cards close to my chest, until I understood that greater power came from speaking the truth. Changes in perception don’t come from statistics and reports, they come from seeing, knowing and hearing from people with lived experience. Discomfort is dispelled when the people with the lived experience make it okay to talk about it. Silence begets more silence.

I’m grateful to The Stability Network for its commitment to creating a space for mental health stories in the workplace, and in partnership with them, I’ve committed to telling mine. As a speaker for TSN, I hope to stand in front of audiences large and small and show that any dodgy vibe from me is completely attributable to the fact that I’m a Pacific Northwesterner who likes neither sushi nor salmon—utter heresy—and not because I live with Complex PTSD and depression.  

If you would like to help us create a world where workplaces are supportive of people experiencing mental health challenges by inviting a speaker to yours, you can let me know, or you can click here.

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Aside from one five-hour stretch of vomiting (on which I blame Senegalese box wine) and a few rough transit days, it was exactly the trip I needed to help me get up and dust myself off from a couple of soul-crushing events in December. I plan to write about the adventure in some shape or form; for now, here are a few observations.

Being 50, with a newly shorn head and an androgynous travel wardrobe, will not prevent African men from propositioning you.

People maintain a beautiful commitment to family, rest time and community. But having a close-knit family doesn’t negate the stress of a lack of a reliable income and opportunities to earn money. Their governments have failed them in this regard, and hence they migrate. I met a trio of Gambian migrants—a married couple and another woman—in the immigration office at Mauritania’s northern frontier. They’d traveled 1,200 km before being caught. They later rode in my mini-bus, with a police escort, to the jail in Nouadhibou, where they would be processed and eventually deported. The wife was six months pregnant, and could only watch out the window as their steps were erased, the scenery she thought they’d left behind flying by once again. When I told the other woman that I liked her scarf, she offered to give it to me.

Morocco is the ninth-largest world producer of Mandarin oranges, and exports them regionally. Mandarins are abundant. I ate them the whole time.

Kids are kids are kids. Bright eyed. Precocious. Full of possibility and potential. And yet still annoying when they call me “toubab” and ask for money.

My T-Mobile partner cell service is considerably better on a one-lane highway in sparsely populated Western Sahara, with no towns for miles, than it is in Bellevue, Washington, two miles from T-Mobile headquarters.

China has a heavy presence in much of Africa, as it has for two decades. Its expats and companies are grudgingly tolerated in Mauritania. They build infrastructure in exchange for export contracts and access to natural resources, such as exclusive fishing zones off the Mauritanian coast. One byproduct of Chinese capital is that the Bay of Nouadhibou’s infamous ship graveyard is disappearing. It once held up to 300 corpses. Now there are about five left, the others having been cut up for scrap metal.

Sex tourism isn’t only in Thailand. Some fifty-plus-year-old French people hook up with young locals in Senegal. It even happened at my European-run auberge.

The restaurant doesn’t have to be fancy for the food to be really damn fine. Example: Chez N’Tifi in Dakhla, Western Sahara. Also, I love that Dakhla has a fast-food joint called Bivouac Express.

There will be a lot of police checkpoints, and at many, they will ask for your passport and spend 10 minutes writing down the relevant data. In Mauritania, you can get ahead of the game by creating a “fiche” with all of the needed information. Once you find the only shop for miles that makes photocopies, run about 20, then hand one over to the checkpoint officer before he even has a chance to finish his sentence. As the only foreigner in the vehicle, watch your popularity increase among the other passengers when your rad prep skills spare them the extra-long stop.

It’s disheartening to see my share value drop in everyone’s eyes as soon as I tell them I don’t have children, and they almost recoil if I include that it’s because I don’t want children. It’s disturbing and heartbreaking to hear stories of ongoing female genital mutilation and child marriage. I pray for a day when girls and women around the world have full agency and equality.

The post Ten Things I Learned in West Africa, 2019 Version appeared first on Laura Zera.

The distance between the two points is 438 kilometers, which is 1,314 in Africa-travel kilometers. Following is a breakdown of how I passed eight hours in transit.

The post Atar to Nouakchott: A Mauritanian Minibus Odyssey appeared first on Laura Zera.

I’m not completely surprised. After my essay was published in the New York Times in June (and I promise you, this is the first and last time I’m going to use that line), in addition to the hundreds of online comments, I received about as many reader emails (I’m waving at y’all who signed up to my list after that). What I heard, over and over again, was that those who had traumatic childhoods are still working on their stuff, still figuring it out, in their 60s, and 70s, and 80s.

For those of you in your 20s, 30s and 40s, please don’t let this bum you out, although it may. I was a bit overwhelmed initially by my realization. There’s a relief in knowing, though, because then you can do something about it. In so many ways, when we’re dealing with trauma, the knowing is half the battle.

For example, I went to therapy regularly from 1985 to 2002. It wasn’t until 10 years ago, however, when I was at couples therapy with the hubster, that I heard the word “trauma” applied to my childhood experience. “That must have been traumatic for you,” the therapist said, in response to an anecdote I provided. A jolt went through my body. No truer words had been spoken, and my body recognized that.

When I think back to what I talked about in those other 17 years with five or so therapists, it was mostly about how to keeping myself functioning, because sometimes, I wasn’t. I’m not sure I ever told the stories of *exactly* what happened when I was a kid. I talked about “crazy mom” and “she yelled a lot” and, later, “she’s mentally ill,” but I never got into the details. I’m not saying that details must be shared in therapy in order to access healing and integration, but when they aren’t shared, I’m wondering if it’s because there’s a “glossing over” that’s happening. A minimization.

I believe that a lot of trauma survivors unconsciously minimize what happened to them. It may be because of dissociation, or shame, or as a coping mechanism for pain. The end result, though, is that our bodies know what happened, and that it was some serious shit, even if our minds are all like, “yeah, so, then Mom stalked me for two years, but whatever, it didn’t stop me from doing anything I wanted to do.”  Our bodies will respond in myriad ways. I’ve had back pain for three years that no well-trained and highly paid professional has been able to figure out. How’s your body doing?

While annoying, my back pain is actually the lesser of my concern. I’ve also still got fight-flight-freeze responses to even teeny-tiny things, and that kind of ongoing stress-hormone release is just not good, especially when it’s been repeating for 50 YEARS. (Frig, how did that happen?) The stress response wears down the immune system, and has the potential to cause big problems. Something tells me I’m not the only trauma survivor in this catamaran.

So happy birthday to me, I’m back in therapy, and I might soon be booking a little holiday to EMDR land, because I’ve heard firsthand from friends and peers that it’s an effective therapy for PTSD and complex PTSD. And survivors of horrible childhoods, if you’ve never heard of complex PTSD before, please click this Wiki link. Again, I was late to the party in learning about what it is and how it differs from PTSD, but holy smokes, it really fits the bill.

I’m also reading Bessel van der Kolk’s groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score. I’d used a couple of chapters in it as part of my research for a piece I wrote on neurofeedback a couple of years ago, but this time I’m going cover to cover. I highly recommend this book. It’s like a best friend that totally gets you. I could almost hug it. Maybe I will tomorrow.

Have you had any a-ha moments about trauma, how to integrate it, and why for fill-in-the-blank years you’ve downplayed the trauma of your childhood experience as less than Cleaver-like but not fully Carrie-ish?

The post When the Trauma You Thought Was Resolved Isn’t appeared first on Laura Zera.

It’s okay, this “do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home” approach. It’s miles better than the “lynch anyone who is different” approach. But it’s a viewpoint that comes from a place of never having had to fight against exclusion or discrimination. And my quick response has become this: put yourself in our shoes. Imagine what it’s like to have to hide who you are, every day, everywhere, because you’ll be punished by some sector of society if you don’t. That’s why we talk about mental health in May and LGBTQ rights in June every year. We’re not oversharing and being show-boaty. We’re fighting for our lives. That’s not a dramatic overstatement.

A few spin-off thoughts and somewhat-related notes.

My nephew alerted me to the fact that one day, we may be going on a magic mushroom trip to cure depression, a treatment I’m more than willing to be a study participant for, in case anyone is looking for guinea pigs.

I’m coming out soon about having depression and fronting as a high-functioning adult in a very big publication that will possibly be read by every potential future employer of mine, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ll share it on June 22.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help children who are in vulnerable situations – troubled families with dysfunctional parents. If we don’t help the kids, they become adults who, best case, develop resilience (after a ton of work), or, worst case, major health issues (and never live their best lives), or sometimes both. The Hart family murders has been a trigger for me, because it was preventable.  I don’t have the answers, but I’d like to hear ideas and anecdotes from anyone who has experience in the space of working with children from troubled families, and how to help them without necessarily removing them from their family.

How ‘bout that gene testing? Is 23andMe setting itself up to be a next-wave health diagnosis and treatment tool? It’s certainly been a discovery process for me, once I uploaded the raw data from their site into a couple of third-party sites. This is where it gets parsed into readable reports with much more info than what you get in the canned 23andMe reports. And this is where I discovered I have a double mutation of the MTHFR gene, something that’s linked to — drumroll, please – anxiety and depression. My learning from that, including treatment protocols, will be part of a future blog post.

My final thought. We’re in fraught times in parts of the world. Lead with love. Even when you want to punch someone. I bought slippers to remind myself.

Your thoughts? I don’t like to have the last word.

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