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đ§ Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured:
At a tennis center on Chicagoâs southside, my sister and I wait for my nephewâs game to start. Courts of teenage boys face each other in singles and doubles matches. The whack of tennis balls hitting racquets echoes through the space. It smells of sweat and dirty socks.
My sister has found me a chair, so I donât have to put weight on my broken foot. When she invited me, she was clear: âYou need to get out of your apartment, even if just for a little bit.â
Itâs not going wellâall the healing Iâm trying to do. I keep walking on my broken foot. And then thereâs the whole recovering-from-twenty-five-years-of-serious-mental-illness thing. My new psychiatrist, Dr. R, recently spoke to me about recovery. In all the years I was in the mental health system, not one clinician mention getting well; the best I could do was âmanageâ my symptoms. My diagnosis was biological and lifelongâinside me, never to be resolved. Which would have been fine if it were true. Turns out no psychiatric diagnosis is purely biological or necessarily a life sentence.
Three-quarters into the qualifying match, heâs losing. The other player is good. If his first serve hits the net or goes out, he lobs his second, which throws off my nephewâs rhythm.
This tournament will affect my nephewâs ranking and determine whether he qualifies for the state championship at the end of the season.
My nephew is best described as solidâemotionally, physically, mentally. He loses, is disappointed, and gets over it. Within hours, heâs cracking jokes and smiling. Not that things donât get to him; they just donât absorb him.
Itâs pretty clear heâs going to lose. He uses his shirt collar to wipe the sweat from his forehead and under his glasses and mutters in frustration.
Then he regains focus. Everything comes together: his serve, his backhand, his agility. He plays loose and light as if heâs never had a momentâs frustration or doubt the whole game.
During match point (in my nephewâs favor), they volley for what seems like a very long time. Then he wins. I want to leap out to my feet with joy but canât.
Before leaving the arena, my sister and I stop to talk to his coachâan older, chubby, balding man. He gushes with enthusiasm over my nephewâs win. âAmazing. He crushed it.â The coach holds up his phone. âThis is what we listened to in the van on the way down here. And it did it.â
Onscreen is a YouTube videoâblack and whiteâof a guy wearing headphones speaking into a mic. His head is shaved. His face is acutely square, his jaw severe. He has the neck of a serious weightlifter.
My nephewâs coach says, âJocko Willink. Heâs why your nephew won today.â
I get home, google, and learn that âJocko,â as heâs known, is a phenom. A retired Navy Seal who served in Iraq, heâs published books on leadership and runs a company that serves as a pseudo-military training ground for businessmen who want to lead as if theyâve once been Navy Seals even though havenât. Jockoâs passion is Jiu-Jitsu. His YouTube motivational speeches and interviews get millions of views. His podcast has tens of millions of downloads.
If he helped my nephew, maybe Jocko can help me.
Within a week, Iâm deep into the world of Jocko. I dip in at first, catching clips of his motivational speeches on YouTube. Soon, Iâm listening to the full one-to-two-hour podcasts. My fascination morphs into infatuation and then fixation.
Most of his guests are soldiers or leaders whoâve experienced hardships I couldnât begin to fathom. Jockoâs three-hour interview with Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Ron Shurer, a staff sergeant who served as a medic in Afghanistan and then in the secret service and was also battling cancer, holds me rapt. On another episode, Jocko interviews a vet whoâs a quadruple amputee who runs a center for other quadruple amputees and their families. Another interview is with a vet whoâs a double amputee and runs multiple marathons each year to raise money for a nonprofit.
When Jocko addresses us, his devoted listeners, heâs all grit. He says life is war. We need discipline and to take responsibility for our actions. In his gravelly voice, he tells us to âcrush itâââitâ being any project or task. He urges us to âget after it.â We have to be ultra-aggressive, ultra-confident, and uber-in-control.
Jocko is problematic in many ways. He refers to women as âgirls,â talks way too much about Jiu-Jitsu, and often comes off as melodramatic. At the end of his show, he sells Jocko-sponsored-and-made merchandise like T-shirts and krill-oil supplements and (for reasons I canât begin to grasp) soap.
Itâs bro-culture in the extreme, but in a way, it works. Telling myself to attack, push, pursue gives me the courage to stop obsessing over my broken foot, my broken brain, my brokenness. When one of his listeners emails to say that heâs considering suicide, Jocko says that suicide is never an option because when youâre on your last bullet, you shoot the enemy, not yourselfâthe enemy being something along the lines of whatever difficulties youâre facing.
Sitting in my apartment with my broken foot elevated, unable to walk (my long, long walks were the one thing helping me in my mental health recovery), he becomes an abrasive balm. He seems to have what I want: the power to heal.
*
According to mental health professionals and patient advocacy groups, Jockoâs toughen-up approach is ill-advised when it comes to mental health recovery. The patient advocacy group Mental Health America (MHA) warns that âtough loveâ can backfire. Pushing through is the equivalent of walking in the boot, putting weight on a broken bone.
Self-love, self-compassion, and vulnerability are the preferred methods of mental health care. I learned a lot about this triad in my first partial hospitalization program (PHP). In the PHP, weâd sit in a circle in a frigidly air-conditioned therapy room and learn âskillsâ to deal with our respective issues or mental illnesses. The staff recommended books by self-help gurus, psychologists, and researchers. The favoritesâand I mean favoritesâwere self-compassion icon Dr. Kristin Neff and vulnerability guru BrenĂŠ Brown. Neff defines self-compassion as âbeing warm and understanding toward ourselves.â Self-love has lots and lots of definitions, most of which have to do with âan appreciation of oneâs own worth.â Brownâs version of vulnerability entails embracing uncertainty, allowing weakness, and revealing our inner thoughts and emotions to others.
But herein lies the crux of the vulnerability paradox: those who visibly embrace their weaknesses are strong whereas those who donât are weak because we donât expose our weaknesses. And it seemed easy for Neff and Brown, two privileged women whoâd never experienced a mental health crisis (let alone too many to count), to tell us to embrace what American culture deems weakness and make ourselves vulnerable. As far as I was concerned, Iâd been weak and vulnerable enough.
*
My nephewâs tennis season continues and heâs on a winning streak. I get texts from my sister telling me how heâs won this match and that match.
When a black wave of depression comes over me, I harden against it. No, I say. Not happening. When anxiety seizes me, sending sweaty, sickening rushes of panic through my body, I do the same. No. Not happening. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesnât. But I say it every time until it works more often. When darkness envelopes me, I donât stop to show myself compassion. I donât âturn towards it.â When I feel afraid, I donât âlean into it;â I steel myself and move on.
Healing is in my control. Iâm going to do it despite the hum in my chest and surges of energy and the dark pit in my stomach and my pounding heart and my numb lips and cheeks and the sense that Iâm not really there.
*
Iâm in my apartment grading essays when a text comes in from my sister. Itâs a photo of my nephew. Heâs outside, a tennis court in the background. His green T-shirt is soaked with sweat. In his hands is a trophy. Heâs won the conference title.
I donât know what he thought or said to himself to win all those games. All I know is that every day, he was on the court, playing.
I hobble to the kitchen and fill my espresso maker with water and coffee grounds, seal it, and turn on the stove. My ankle aches. Teaching the day before, I stood too long at the podium, wanting to give the presentation standing up, the way I would have before I broke my ankle.
Later, Iâll realize that I was already toughâlong before Jocko; Iâd just lost sight of it. People with mental illness are seen as weak by those who donât understand what itâs like. People with mental illness are some of the strongest people on earth. You have to be fierce to be in that struggleâregardless of whether one heals.
Enjoying âCuredâ? Read the prequel, âPathologicalâ (HarperCollins):
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