Our columnist Nathalie Plaat publishes this month Chronicles of an outstretched hand published by Somme tout/ The duty. Here is an excerpt.
Before my illness, I thought of myself not only invincible, but immortal, filled with my beliefs, my benchmarks which then constituted my world of meaning. I was obviously already inclined towards the mysterious, the irrational and the profound, which made me choose psychoanalysis well before all other psychotherapeutic approaches. However, I moved forward in life with the audacity of thirty-somethings who, rightly, have nothing to do with everything that dies, immersed as they are in this need to realize themselves, to appease their existential questions. bursts of brilliance, performance, endless celebrations and small revolts of bodies and minds.
When I heard these words: “What I see is a tumor”, this woman in me died. On the clinic floor, my boots were dripping with January snow, echoing my world of senses which was also slipping away from me, drop by drop. I was 39 years old. It was 2020. I didn’t yet know that I would go through the worst ordeal of my life, in step with the rest of the world.
Between my first and second round of chemotherapy, the whole world, too, would hold its breath, lose it, along with its points of reference, its rituals, its blinders and its grandparents. So I spent the year of the pandemic picking up the remains of me that were littered on the floor, along with my hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows that remained there. I survived a few embolisms, a few hard knocks and several small ends of the world.
I walked along the floorboards as never before, to comfort my children, nestling them against my body, as if that was all that was tangible for us: the floor, my body, theirs, our still possible breaths.
In the hours spent painting the daylight on the walls of my room, my illusions in my hands, I spent time sorting. Sorting out what would no longer be part of the rest of my days, if I was lucky enough to have any, days. And that’s where the great possibility of inhabiting a space where I didn’t have to be in control of everything became not only obvious, but the only one that made sense. I now know that I am dying, although I am healthy again. I am dying now, simply because I belong to a species condemned to finitude. It makes me so alive, until the end.
In this sense, nothing is important. Everything is there at the same time. From then on, the words that come to rest on the keyboard between the readers and me can only be those that serve to inhabit this space of the search for meaning.
The search for meaning, however, is an angle that has been well evacuated from the current public discourse on mental health, whereas, for me, it has become the only one that I want to talk about, but above all to hear about from those who suffer. While, more and more, the psychological suffering inherent to our human condition alone is pathologized, perceived as lacking in this ideal of “happiness” erected as a performative standard, it seemed to me that we urgently needed to rehabilitate the tragic, the suffering, the possibility of the simple pain of living as being not only healthy, but necessary for our authenticity, for our deployment as humans.
The psychologist, in the Quebec media space, is too often confined to the one who distinguishes, for the public, what is healthy from what is not, who prescribes what must be done to be morally acceptable, adequate , consistent with what science defines as being “within the norms”. This “craziness of the norm”, to use the title of a congress of the French Psychoanalytic Association which I attended in 2016, is nevertheless very heavy in our clinics, as in the heads of many people, like a injunction of living well which, paradoxically, alone generates tons of suffering.
I did not want to be another cog in this reductive mechanism of human experience fitting into what, for me, constitutes one of the greatest abuses of “care for the Other” of our era. […]
One thing had therefore become certain, if I had to talk about “mental health” (even this term can be so simplistic), I was not going to do it by standardizing experiences, by evacuating the deeply intimate aspects of each story. of life, by establishing as a form of morality the “right way” to “manage” one’s anxieties, one’s pain, one’s loves, one’s children.
No.
The duty said to me: “We would like to take care of people. »
I said, “I don’t know any other way to care for people than to ask them to tell their stories.” »
The duty from the heart was born.