The Scarring

Stigma is a form of marking, a branding, a tainting, an involuntary scarring whose repercussions are profound and vast. It is a sharp and equally insidious force that befalls those whose ways of being and whose very existence challenges what is deemed normal and acceptable in the context of white supremacist, ableist, capitalism. It is a poison that is too often imbibed without question, including by those who themselves are stigmatized. It is a force that corrupts families, communities and entire societies. It creates distance, divisiveness, it propels the construction of binaries, of “us versus them” dichotomies.

Stigma is a painful poison to bear. It is a poison that is nearly impossible to purify due to its depth, history, and complexity. It is a web of fear, shame, guilt, and disgust. It is a room of mirrors where illusions, distorted reflections, and projections run rampant. We are all susceptible to being stigmatized, yet only some bear its true weight: those living through serious mental health realities; those living with complex addictions; those living in poverty; racialised groups; Indigenous people; queer and trans folks; people living with disabilities, and any other group or person whose mere being threatens the power of dominant cultural and economic practices.

Stigma can be ignored to a certain extent, but its reverberations are felt, vibrating under one’s skin, in the chamber of one’s heart, complexifying one’s ability to form trusting, equitable social relations where all parties are appreciated in the fullness of their inherent beauty and humanness. People who are stigmatized are too often overlooked, dismissed, ridiculed or systematically alienated from society. A person may have been deemed worthy one day, but as soon as something takes them, whether an addiction, a crisis, poverty — their value is put into question; their worth derided. They become a memory that people wish not to remember. They become objectified as a case study, or as an important life lesson. They become a taboo, not to be named or seen as anything but the object of the stigma.

Stigma can be a collective reality for some groups, and it is often experienced individually depending on what and who are being stigmatized. I am most familiar with the double edge of being stigmatized as a member of the trans community, and as a person labelled as having “Bipolar Disorder”. Although these stigmatizations overlap, they cut in different ways. The former makes it hard to fully engage in cisheteronormative contexts; the latter makes it hard to fully engage in society as a whole, including within trans and queer communities. When I say “fully” I mean to live and move through a space without being consistently destabilized by the potentiality of stigma and its ripples of shame. This is particularly difficult for those of us who have experienced prolonged altered states of consciousness (i.e. termed “psychosis” by the biomedical model of disease) in which we may have engaged in behaviours, practices and ways of relating that seriously disturbed the relational order within and beyond our immediate social constellations.

I am horrified by the ways I acted and engaged with others during my altered state. Such events are inherently traumatic for the person experiencing them, but they are also deeply traumatic for the families, communities and loved ones surrounding the person. When you are in an altered state, you are hard to reach. It is like witnessing a friend die, yet their physical form remains active. And there is no assurance that the person’s “return” will be timely. My intention in this piece is not to delve into a detailed account of my experiences with altered states, but to lay down the context from which stigma is borne using my experience as an example.

People react differently to such experiences depending on innumerable factors: their own experiences with stigma; their positionality; their attachment to the biomedical model of “disease”; their own mental health; their spirituality and ancestral lineages; the ways they prioritize comfort and order in their lives; the stories they construct to make meaning of the event; the ways the event exposed them to their own fallibility and vulnerability (the mirror), etc.

Stigma reshapes a person’s position in their social context in the aftermath of a crisis, such as experiencing an altered state. Some loved ones completely disappear and halt all communication (ghost). Others are open to reengaging with the caveat that they have no desire to process what happened (reengagement-taboo). Others are willing to reengage in the relationship, however the texture of the relationship has momentarily, at best, or forever, at worst, changed; the stigmatized person is perceived as inferior in some way for having fallen victim to the unacceptable behaviour or experience (reengagement-inequality). Other folks are just not yet ready to engage or repair the bond because the experience triggered or traumatized them in some profound way (reengagement/repair-deferred). Finally, there are people who are open to the repair process soon after the event and have consistently maintained a relational connection to the person grounded in deep empathy, love and humanization (repair-humanness). They tend to be loved ones who were able to feel the humanity and heart of the person experiencing an altered state amidst the chaos. Some have themselves experienced forms of ostracization due to behaviours they’ve engaged in or states they’ve endured.

How do we counter such a poison? How do we re-remember the humanity and worth of those who have been tainted? How do we cultivate alternative narratives and relations that liberate, at least to some extent, stigmatized persons from the scarring?

These are complex questions that I will continue to ponder as I become more intimate with the particular ways stigma has infiltrated my life.