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Finding A Horizon

As a therapist I’ve had the honour of sharing many a client’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world since early this year. It is one of those rare experiences in my profession where everyone — client, client’s friends/family, and therapist — are all in the same situation, facing the same invisible antagonist.

One thing which began to sink in for me, probably around August where most people, including myself, despite being able to enjoy the peak of summer and the freedom to leave our homes and workplaces, each day and each week seemed to be a repeat of the last one. At the worst of times it certainly felt this way to me: Groundhog Day without the humour or inevitable expectation that, whether we like it or not, credits will eventually roll. Even with the chaos of the American election and the clown shows of our respective provincial governments’ COVID preparations as distractions, it became clear to me that part of our misery was in the sense that time itself wasn’t moving despite us objectively knowing that it was. And while it might have seemed an interesting question to ponder theoretically back in August, now, in mid-November with the cold weather setting in and winter’s icy grasp not far from us, I think it’s important to share something: we have to make plans.

One thing I have both heard and repeatedly felt is that there is nothing to look forward to. Yes, there are a few vaccine candidates coming down the pipe, but I think it would be unwise for us to lull ourselves into believing that anyone who isn’t a frontline medical worker or resident of a long term care home is going to see a needle until at least next summer (please prove me wrong). Until then there is, in other words, no horizon line for us to align our sense of perspective, our direction. And so, to combat this sense that we are all floating in a timeless vacuum — and, most importantly, its ensuing depression and existential anxiety — I strongly recommend that we find ways to look forward to things, even if we have to search them out. This occurred to me when I’ve spoken with people who were moving, either because they were taking advantage of lower rent at another location, or just getting out of the city for better real estate options elsewhere. I found myself feeling jealous. I was jealous because I could see that for the next few weeks or months they could set their minds to the myriad of things-to-do and anticipate when you’re changing your place of primary residence: insurance, mail forwarding, organizing with a moving company, painting the kitchen, new mattress, reimagining the work/home space. They had, in other words, things both mentally substantial and hands-on practical to look forward to, which also happened to be novel and even open-ended (all the things you want to do before you move to a new location vs. all the things you actually have time to do). It didn’t need to be sexy, or even expensive. And I could see the relief that this presented for them.

So how can we transpose this upon our present moment, say, for the rest of us who don’t have the ability to make such a broad change in our lives? Here’s what I might suggest: look at your calendar and start to think of some thing or activity that will allow you to look forward, that you might feel engaged with, so that you can feel involved. I just received a Toronto District School Board guide in the mail, filled with online continuing education courses ranging from learning public speaking to cooking Afro-Cuban cuisine. Now, imagine enrolling in one of these courses and marking down six subsequent weeks’ worth of regularly-scheduled events where you get to look forward to learning something new — wouldn’t that add some structure to your seemingly structureless life? Books are flying off the shelves of many a book retailer — would a monthly online book club organized between you and some (carefully chosen) friends be a good idea? Maybe instead of shaking your fist at our hapless politicians on Twitter you could get involved in the organization and publicity of local community events, political or otherwise. Perhaps things like these would help us feel involved in a world where it’s hard to feel seen and heard because of all the sturm und drang around us.

I suppose what I’m suggesting is finding ways, big and small, to create a series of horizon lines for ourselves — individually and as a community — until the day comes when we will be able to safely walk out of our homes and see each other, and hold each other closely. I would like that as much as the next person, but until then I feel it’s important, from a mental health perspective, that we find ways to keep ourselves focused by finding (or creating) structure for ourselves.

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Thoughts on The Queen’s Gambit

As someone who not only played a lot of chess in my early 20s (patzer-level) but read just as much about the players, I didn’t know what to expect from the Netflix production of The Queen’s Gambit. Here are some thoughts…

First, it’s a fine piece of entertainment. The pacing, casting, direction, and performances are pretty damn solid. Considering it centres on someone’s relationship with a game that has seen little popular interest in the last couple of decades since Searching for Bobby Fischer (with the notable exception of 2016’s Queen of Katwe, which didn’t seem to catch much wide attention) this is significant.

I love chess. I love it conceptually. I love it for its immense complexity, and its ability to appeal to audiences and players from a broad spectrum of society and aptitudes. There are many misconceptions and reductive hot-takes about chess out there: that it’s a nerd’s game, that it’s nebulous and reserved for STEM-types, that winning is strictly a question of whose memory is greater. There is passion in chess, as well as style and aesthetics. It ends up being a reflection of whomever is playing, whether intuitive or mathematical. As such The Queen’s Gambit does more for chess than anything I have ever seen portrayed on screen. Period. They nail it, and my gut clenched many a time watching the portrayal of championship matches.

But, it remains as entertainment, and by that I mean there are reservations I have about what is portrayed. First, a brief summary: the seven-part series portrays the fictional rise of a young ingenue in the 1960s played by Anya Taylor Joy, who, as an orphan, peers into the world of chess through the solitary practice of her orphanage’s janitor. As he invites her to play it becomes apparent that she is immensely talented, not only for her age, but far beyond the ability of adults around her. There is a struggle, however, in her unresolved neglect and abandonment as a young child, which leads her to dull/heighten her senses with pharmaceuticals. As she grows older and is adopted, both her chess playing and her relationship with substance-use becomes more profound. She eventually goes on to the world stage, beating opponent after opponent with ferocity. I leave it there so as not to spoil anything. The competitive action is riveting.

As I mentioned, it’s a work of fiction, which is neither here nor there, but it’s significant that the rise of a female chess player in a predominantly male environment is portrayed without much in the way of overt interference, sexism, or politics. Yes, it’s there, but it’s there in the way you might expect it to be portrayed in a breezy musical, not a modern dramatic production. Yes, there are disbelievers, there are doubters, there are frustrated male egos, but that’s it. I don’t want to be cynical, but I can’t help but think Joy’s character would’ve encountered much (much) more resistance in 1960s America than what is portrayed. There are no less than four consultants on the series — two general and two on-set chess consultants — and they are all male, and I don’t think it’s controversial to point out how short-sighted this is. To be fair, this is an adaptation of a novel, so I get the argument there is only so much the producers might have done without straying too far from the source material. Notably, the author, Walter Trevis, also wrote The Hustler, The Color of Money and The Man Who Fell to Earth, so there’s a pedigree to be mindful of — then again, how slavish was Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth? Could they not have brought on a woman (there are no less than 37 female grandmasters currently) to provide some perspective? This is not an insignificant question.

Another issue is that its lone supporting Black character, Jolene (played by Moses Ingram), disappears for over half of the series, only to pop up toward the end, ostensibly as The Wise Black Woman. Again, could this not have been better managed during script development? It ends up being feminist but only through an aspirational lens that doesn’t seem to be able to imagine a wider perspective, or audience.

These failures aside, my dear hope is that this reinvigorates interest in this wonderful game, and that we may one day see children from all walks of life inspired by portrayals such as what The Queen’s Gambit contains.

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Book #3 update

The pandemic has had a deleterious effect on many writers. Whereas it’s affected my ability to hold my concentration on reading (for pleasure), it has certainly proved to be an obstacle on the creative process of others. I’m grateful that I have, somewhat contrarily, thrived.

I committed to starting my third book in earnest, seeing as I had plenty of time on my hands — business was (and is) down, leaving me with large swaths of time during the week. Add to this the lockdown, which has affected my ability to plant myself in my familiar café/bar haunts, given that they have either been forced to close or restricted to only outdoor seating, I found myself working from home. And I’m not used to this, seeing as I share it with my partner. A good pair of headphones have helped.

My writing process is different this time. Typically, in the past, I’ve written most of my first drafts by hand in a notebook, then transposed to laptop. But that style was very much based on walking about town with my notebook and stopping off somewhere to jot down the skeleton of a chapter. This time, I’m staring at a blank screen on my laptop because somehow writing a rough draft in a notebook just doesn’t seem necessary (or, if I am honest with myself, perhaps less efficient). And, as it’s turned out, staring at a blank page on my laptop has become an invigorating challenge. I’ll know in my head the rough outline of what it is I’m supposed to write (i.e. This is the chapter were Marcus and Alex need to connect with one another), but aside from my marching orders I don’t really know what it’s supposed to look like. The advantage of handwriting is that there’s an implicit casualness — if I want to doodle in the margins then it takes the piss out of whatever I end up writing being somehow sacred, if that makes sense. And so I begin filling in the blank laptop page with tidy New Times Roman text and there’s a kind of rush, not unlike pushing off from the lip of a snowy hill, poles in hand, skis firmly strapped to my boots.

I wrote earlier about how I was considering Book #3* as a comedy. This has changed. There is plenty of comedic absurdity, don’t get me wrong, but I think The Point of the book has changed and developed, and clarified. This is the magic of writing: watching something that only exists in your technicolor imagination take shape imperfectly in the real world of the formerly blank page, and the more you write the closer it is you get — not to the technicolor thing you imagined necessarily, but what you learn it should be, if that makes sense. A novel is in some respects an argument for its own existence, and what exists only in your imagination is but an impetus. Once you begin to manifest it you discover that, like a legal argument, characters will demand that you justify what happens to them, what they say in the form of dialogue, so that you are ultimately being fair to the spirit of the material.

I suppose what I’m saying is that my relationship with writing has undergone a substantial shift between Radioland and now, and I think part of it is being more practical with my time/labour, and the other is finding a new way of focusing as I write, which I may write about in another post.

*technically this isn’t Book #3 per se. I wrote a novel prior to The Society of Experience, which I proceeded to put aside (if you read the acknowledgements in SoE you’ll get the story around this). Then, while waiting for SoE to work its way through to publication I began work on a spiritual sequel to SoE, which I also proceeded to put aside (short version: I had a better, more dynamic idea for a novel, and I didn’t want to feel trapped in the same narrative universe as SoE). Thus, my forthcoming “Book #2”, Radioland, came into being. So, Book #3 is really Book #5, which is some crazy backwards Star Wars shit, I know. It’s also, as some might realize, a lot of pages of writing that no one will probably ever see, and if any neophyte authors are reading this and wondering how I feel about that, my answer is that it’s part of the process. Just as musicians practice their brains out before going into studio to record, there’s going to be a lot of effort that your audience is never going to see that ultimately (and quietly) benefits the parts they do see.

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ANOTHER New Short Story Alert

When it rains it pours, the cliché goes. I found out over the weekend that I will have another short story published, this time in Fusion Fragment, a speculative fiction publisher based in Ottawa.

Two things about this announcement that are significant:

  • It’s going to be for their all-Canadian edition, to be released on July 1st 2021.
  • This will be the first of four interrelated short stories that I’ve been polishing for the last few years, so I’m quite happy that one will finally be released into the wild.

Once again, as we get closer, I’ll spill more about the story and the pub date.

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An Impossible Essay: “The Movement Against Psychiatry”

I’ve been wondering whether to respond to an essay that was posted on VICE Magazine a couple of weeks ago, and so this is my meagre attempt. The hesitation you are picking up is based upon the fact that it’s an almost impossible essay for anyone to attempt to write; impossible because its subject matter contains so many perspectives — ground level, professional, clinical; historical, academic, unacknowledged — that one would need to write a thick book in order to begin to encompass just a notion of the territory that is being covered. The fact that I’m blogging about it means it’s stirred up some feelings (some conflicted) that need to be put on paper. Mostly this reflects well on the piece, despite the fact I’m not exactly a fan of VICE in general.

The essay, The Movement Against Psychiatry, by Shayla Love, lays itself out from the beginning with a profile of two people with two very different mental health challenges: one of whom, it’s argued, might have been helped by being institutionalized (even if against her will) in order to prevent her downward spiral; the other sought psychiatric assistance but found herself over-prescribed with various medications, without a sense of there being an overarching logic or consideration for the underlying causes of her situation, or the side effects of what she was prescribed. In this comparison we are presented with an outline of the challenges facing mental health in general and modern psychiatry specifically.

We are then presented with three groups: the psychiatric orthodoxy, those who belong to what is known as the anti-psychiatry movement, and those who belong (or fall into) what is referred as “critical psychiatry.” The first glimpse of the impossibility the author faces — if using those two persons’ examples off the top didn’t do it — is that, if you stop and consider it, there are inevitably going to be many voices within each of these three groups, ranging from the open-minded to the downright neglectful. For my purposes, it is specifically with how those who belong to the last two groups are separated from each other that I think the piece finds its greatest challenge. A key problem is that there are those who are self-declaratively anti-psychiatric — ranging from wanting to abolish psychiatry altogether to those wanting to revolutionize the foundations upon which patients’ conditions are considered — and those whose philosophy might be considered by the establishment as anti-psychiatric, in a pejorative sense, but who for all intents fall into the “critical psychiatry” group.

To her credit, the author touches early upon the detractive nature of the term anti-psychiatric, however my criticism is that the essay misses an opportunity to convey the power those in the psychiatric establishment have who wield this term, compared to those who are not medical doctors (perhaps researchers, perhaps academics, or clinicians) but who nonetheless have pointed questions about the prevailing logic of certain psychiatric interventions (whether it be about overprescription of drugs, or the use of ECT). That term and its connotations, in other words, can be weaponized, whether or not it is used accurately or as an attempt to discredit or dismiss the person in question entirely.

But I want to be fair where fair is relevant: the author also correctly exposes the fact that the waters of the anti-psychiatry movement are muddied by the more than passive involvement of the Church of Scientology. They have a stake, albeit a selfish one, which is fitting for a cult. This does no one any favours in this debate, and only makes it easier (see last paragraph) to punch down from the psychiatric establishment with only the briefest mention that a critic may have ties to Scientology.

And I will admit that there are a host of well-respected voices who, if pressed, I might put in the “critical psychiatry” camp, who do themselves no favours by using only the most self-serving, one-sided Mad in America articles to labour their (otherwise respectable) arguments. I find by contrast that my professional perspective ends up being more nuanced (which gives me pause given my comparative lack of academic credentials). I believe in a biopsychosocial approach to mental health (whereby causation might be one, or a mix of all). I can tell you anecdotally that, yes, there are people who are temporarily helped by medication, who are able to use that stabilization to pursue non-biomedical interventions like talk therapy. It’s good to question the underlying chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression, but if someone achieves stability enough to be able to advocate for themselves (and to make choices such as tapering off said medication) then so be it.

I think what gets lost in the debate, which can often pit two highly qualified individuals speaking in terms that are highly specialized and often theoretical — and again, I think the author does their best to come back to this point — is that, at ground level, regular people who need help are harmed. Harmed, because their GP likens depression to something like diabetes, insisting that their patient will need to be on drugs for the remainder of their life, or puts their patient on a high dosage of a toxic anti-anxiety med like clonazepam without mandating regular check-ups in order to potentially lessen the dosage. Or they are harmed because community organizations are often ill-equipped to provide consistent space for people who suffer from psychotic episodes. Or they are harmed by an untrained psychotherapist who operates in a province or state where the profession is unregulated, thus allowing practically anyone, regardless of credentials, to see clients.

I keep hearing the word “patchwork” when the mental health support system is mentioned. That is what the average person faces: a patchwork of often disconnected resources with no sense of guidance about what is best for them and their situation. Moving closer to a system that has the capability to provide continuity for each individual within a public health system should be the priority. While there is a need for debate, the largely sectarian nature of it only seems to put that possibility further away.

 

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September 3rd

There is a buzz outside. Labourers work on condo construction but also nearby household renovations. Patios everywhere, sidewalks filling with people. The sun is out and it’s the peak of our sociability for this year, is it not? We all quietly know it’s only going to get colder from here, which means less people to seat on those patios, meaning eventually no patios, which means potentially no way for those businesses to stay in business.

That buzz is the sound of people whistling past the graveyard, wondering what’s going to happen when the kids go back to school. Wondering what the autumn will bring from the south.

That buzz is the necessary distractions we create for ourselves so that we don’t begin to feel like the world is caving in.

 

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Banks & Business

Last year I got a call from my bank informing me that I needed to open a business account if I was going to continue receiving payments from my day job clients (which, at that time, went into a personal chequing account). I suppose that’s one way to know that your business is doing ok. But what followed was instructive.

First, I called the bank in order to set this up. But when they asked what my registered business name was, it seemed to come apart. I told them I didn’t have one — I’m a sole proprietor, and my name is the name of the business. I was told flat out that they couldn’t process my request until they had proof of my business being registered. So, I thought I’d make it super easy and go in-person to one of the two local branches I have a decent relationship with. And there I sat, speaking with a representative — a man probably 15+ years younger than me — and sure enough the same question came up: what was my registered business name? I shrugged and said it was my name: Matt Cahill, Psychotherapist. I told him that my business was registered with Canada Revenue and that I’d been making HST payments for the last seven years. In other words, I was legitimate (especially by virtue of them asking me to setup a business account). He seemed unable to understand what I was saying and, you guessed it, insisted that he couldn’t set up a business account without a registered business name. Seeing a brick wall in front of me, I thanked him for his time and left.

I spent the next couple of days figuring out what was wrong and, importantly, why was no one listening to me given that not everyone who starts their business is using a name like Speedy Lube, or Debbie’s House of Cheese. There are plenty of other professionals, like myself, who must be going by their name, I told myself. I decided to give it one more try, and booked an appointment at the other local branch. This time I came with a printed page from my online CRA business account (yes, like something one of my parents would have done in the 90s), which displayed my name with my registered HST number. When the moment came for the representative, a woman closer to my age, to ask me for my details, I just handed her the page. She glanced at it and entered the information and everything went as I’d initially thought it would a week earlier.

I walked away from this experience wondering, given what I went through, how someone who isn’t a white guy in his late 40s, who doesn’t have a 20+ year history with their bank would’ve have felt. I sure as hell felt frustrated that in my first two dealings, neither of the representatives bothered to consider the context of how my business is set up. I’m not running a cleaning company, I’m not a numbered corporation. I thought to myself: what if I was some kid trying to start a business? What if I wasn’t already established, had income coming in?

So, when I read this article in The Star (apologies if it is paywalled), about Vivian Kaye, a Black woman who, when she tried to start a business, couldn’t find a bank or business incubator who could understand the context of her business model — in this case, selling hair extensions for a predominantly Black clientele — even in spite of her eventual success, I felt angry. Particularly at what she calls “the quiet racism we have here in Canada.” It is a perception I’ve long heard from BIPOC Canadians, and each time I come across it I feel ashamed. Why, in the 21st century, are people such as Kaye having to practically teach banks about certain products, not to mention profitable sectors, that aren’t but should be on their radar? What, in other words, are banks, who are most often de facto gate-keepers for small business owners, doing to modernize their ability to understand the many different types of businesses (and perspectives) that are out there?

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