Aphantasia is a little-known condition that affects the mind’s “inner eye.” While most people are able to close their eyes and have real-feeling sensory experiences (visual, aural, and otherwise), I am without this ability. When I close my eyes, I see only darkness. And while others dream in full color and hear sounds, I only dream in words and feelings.  

I used to think that my experience of darkness was like that of everyone else. We often use the same language to describe our thoughts and feelings, with there being no differentiation indicating our individual experiences like that in the mind’s eye. Once I learned about my difference of perception, I had vivid conversations with others who thought that my experience was foreign. For a while I felt broken and incomplete because I was missing out on something that was so basic for others, but these days, I do not feel so bad about it. It’s hard to miss what I have never had, and the idea of suddenly seeing pictures in my mind actually scares me.

Aphantasia exists on a broad spectrum. Although aphantasiacs experience a lack of sensory imagery in the mind, many with the condition still dream with full sensory imagery. Others experience face-blindness, struggling to recognize the most familiar of people. It is estimated that about 2% of the general populace are on the aphantasia spectrum. For me personally, I am 100% sensory-blind when both awake and asleep, but I do not have problems with recognizing faces.

It is widely accepted that aphantasia is a congenital condition, manifesting from birth onward. According to a study by Joel Pearson at the University of South Wales in Sydney, those without aphantasia have more activity in the prefrontal cortex in the brain. “The visual cortex is like a sketch pad; it’s where you create images,” said Pearson in New Scientist.

Given that the prefrontal cortex controls the visual cortex, this allows for what we call the mind’s eye, an ability to create visual images. Pearson’s same study found that electronic stimulation can enhance activity in the prefrontal cortex with technology called transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS), which can potentially allow for an aphantasiac to experience imagery instead of darkness. He posits that science’s ability to manipulate the mind’s eye—increasing or decreasing its strength—could affect everything from learning new ideas and making “moral decisions” to potentially decreasing image-based trauma or hallucinations among those who are schizophrenic.

I am definitely a sexual person, and desire sex in my life. However, due to my complete mental darkness, I am unable to have any visual sexual fantasies about future and/or possible sex. I always have known that my approach to desire is different from others, but could never put my finger on it until discovering I have aphantasia.

In my teens, while my peers began discovering their own senses of their sexuality, I remained—quite literally—in the dark. I always wondered how people just “knew” they were gay, or “knew” what they liked sexually. When people talked of having fantasies, I could not relate because I had none of my own.

As a teen, I had my own crushes and senses of attraction as well—albeit in a unique way. I focused on intellectual capacity and creativity, and found people attractive in the way one would marvel at an excellent work of art. While I many pined after handsome faces, I fell in love with a British theater actor from “Topsy Turvy,” a film about the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, a Victorian librettist and composer duo who wrote famous operettas such as The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. For me, creative expression and artistry are the bedrock of my sense of romance and sexuality.

Due to my complete mental darkness, I am unable to have any visual sexual fantasies about future and/or possible sex.
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Yet as years passed, I still felt extreme anxiety because I had no sexual fantasies. I started to fear that I was gay because I did not fantasize about men, but there were never any thoughts about women either. I felt tremendously insecure in pursuing any sort of serious relationship. What if I choose a person of the wrong gender or gender identity?

Regarding my insecurities with sexuality, I have confided in close friends over the years, trying to gain perspective about what I really am. My friends always reassured me that whatever my sexuality is, it is a beautiful thing to celebrate and express. Yet it did not feel beautiful to me—it felt like a scary, gaping hole.

Beginning in 2015, I began browsing the online forums on the website of the Asexuality Visibility & Education Network (AVEN) to try and find answers for myself. It is a great place for me to visit when I have my questions about sexuality, where people are friendly and able to write without being under the influence of sexual excitement. It was not until 2018, at the age of 33, that someone mentioned that my lack of fantasies may be due to me having aphantasia. After briefly investigating the condition, I immediately realized that this was my experience and reality!

I inquired about aphantasia on AVEN, and some members professed having similar experiences to me. A casual poll in 2017 on AVEN asked members about having aphantasia, and 42.5% of 54 respondents said they were on the spectrum. This is far higher than the purported 2% in the general populace.

I then went on Facebook to join aphantasia groups for additional support, writing about how the condition gives me an experience similar to asexuality. Most people vehemently responded that they are absolutely not asexual, but that they experience sexuality in non-sensory ways. It appears there isn’t a reciprocal correlation—while asexuals may be more likely to have aphantasia, those with aphantasia are not more likely to be asexual.

What if I choose a person of the wrong gender or gender identity?
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After discovering that I have aphantasia, I am now investigating ways for me to adapt and adjust. With my boyfriend—whom I find attractive both aesthetically and intellectually—I now keep my eyes open instead of closing them when we’re intimate. Seeing him visually helps me feel in the mood, and now I realize what my sexuality really is. I’m heterosexual, but also feel like I’m on the asexual spectrum by default. The term “demisexual” seems to suit me—I only experience attraction with someone I am profoundly emotionally connected to.

While my experiences are unusual, I do not believe my aphantasia is any sort of deficiency. Instead, I’ve grown to view it as something that makes me unique, and believe that my experience is just as valid as those of others. I also feel that my aphantasia allows for me to have heightened senses in other areas. I find joy in contemplating life and the people around me as philosophical fodder, all describable with florid language. I journal and write constantly, putting these feelings and observations down on paper. I like to imbibe my words with a rhythm and lilt that feels akin to music. I know that I approach writing in a unique way.

As I talk to people about my aphantasia, many people express intrigue about my condition. It can be a mind-bender for non-aphantasiacs to try and fathom my world of darkness, just as their vivid sensory imaginations are equally as foreign to me. Honest conversations allow for us to share our world views with one another, practice empathy, and celebrate our differences.

Imagine that.

Liberated from the “feminine care” aisle, you take a little pink box into the bathroom. You remove the device from its packaging, urinate, and wait for those tell-tale pink lines. As an expectant parent, everyone will wonder, girl or boy? Pink or blue? Because when it comes to the color pink, whether used traditionally, humorously, or ironically, pink remains emblematic of the double X chromosome. It is associated with babies, little girls, femininity, softness, and superficiality; hence the “feminine care” aisle’s pink palette.

Pink is associated with genitals, sexual intercourse, and sexuality. While the pink packaging on that pregnancy test don’t tell you if you are having a boy or a girl, they do tell you one thing: pink is a physically charged color. Pink is a sex symbol.

In the 1980s, with the advent of prenatal testing, parents quickly became fixated on their child’s sex (or really, their genitalia), and this foreknowledge fueled existing sexist color coding. In 1985, Luvs introduced pink and blue disposable diapers that featured slightly different padding for “boys” (in-front) and “girls” (in the middle). Prior to 1900, most infants in the United States wore white clothing, regardless of sex. These white ensembles signified a child’s age, while colorful accents were often based off of a child’s physical characteristics—brunettes wore pink; blondes dressed up in blue.

With the twentieth century’s infatuation with colorful baby clothes, the emphasis shifted from age to sex. As the blogger “Distracted Daddy” wrote in a post on his daughter’s all pink outfits, “hopefully once she is no longer a baby and any stranger can guess her gender at forty yards away, we can move on from this color.”

Pink, as a color in fashion, first appeared in the French royal court of the eighteenth century. From the Palace of Versailles this color spread throughout the Western World and was regarded not as an infantile color, but a “courtly and royal” pigment appropriate for clothing elite men and women alike. Ascending the throne in 1715, Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, cultivated pink as her favorite color.

In her portrait by François Boucher, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, is at her toilette in the act of “pinking.” This facial flush, usually associated with sexual arousal or intense emotion is, however, painted on—Madame Pompadour’s compact of blush and powdered brush reveal that her appearance is cosmetic and manufactured, however desirable. 

Following the synthetic production of very bright, almost garish pinks, pink became a color at home in both “high” and “low” culture. Costume designers throughout the 1950s and ‘60s utilized pink in musicals as chromatic eye-candy, outfitting the sexually confident female or traditionally feminine woman in pink clothing.

The 1957 romantic comedy Funny Face, features a stalwart magazine editor directing “women everywhere to ‘think pink.’” In addition to handbags and shampoo, “think pink’s” song and dance sequence included an homage to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), with a slow-motion shot of a girl on a swing dressed head-to-toe in—you guessed it, pink.

A positive pink theory was studied in the Baker-Miller experiment. Baker-Miller, a shade of pink created by mixing red and white, was painted in the holding cells of naval facilities in 1970 by the biosocial researcher Alexander Schauss. Also known as “Drunk Tank Pink,” the experiment showed that the color lowered prisoners’ heart rates and decreased physical aggression. Centuries later, scientists and social historians remain obsessed with pink’s capacity to activate the human psyche, or produce psycho-emotional responses.

Also known as “Drunk Tank Pink,” the experiment showed that the color lowered prisoners’ heart rates and decreased physical aggression.
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Hollywood’s infatuation with the potentiality of technicolor was one part of larger national sentiment; America was “in the pink” with postwar prosperity, giddy that the war was over and ready for some serious shopping. The same year Funny Face premiered on the silver screen, Hollywood’s bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, purchased “the Pink Palace,” complete with a ceiling-to-floor pink shag carpeted bathroom. But Mansfield wasn’t the only celebrity being enveloped in pink. Singer, songwriter, and actor, Elvis Presley, not only wore pink suits, jackets, and trousers, he also drove a pink car and slept in a pink bedroom.

Sex icons, both male and female, were channeling pink’s promise of prosperity and positivity. When asked why pink, Mansfield reflected, “because it made me happy.” This “pink effect” materialized at a party celebrating Mansfield’s pink swimming pool, in which she filled it to the brim with pink champagne.

Within that year, An Affair to Remember starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr premiered in cinemas with a pink opening title sequence and a featured specialty cocktail: pink champagne. The film begins with Grant and Kerr on a cruise from Europe to New York, and despite being engaged to other people, they decide to have an affair on board with all the characteristics of pink champagne, “fun, light, and enjoyable.”

But even with the nation’s collective intoxication with this rosy hue, pink was, and remains, a divisive color with contentiousness, coloring newspapers throughout the mid-twentieth century.

In 1950, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a blue-blooded Broadway star turned politician, would go head-to-head against Richard Nixon for a seat on the U.S. senate in the state of California. During the political campaign—due to her close ties with communist sympathizers within the movie-industry—a San Jose newspaper reported that if Douglas was not exactly red, she was “decidedly pink.” Pinko quickly became a noun for someone soft on communism.

Throughout the election, Nixon’s team printed damaging propaganda in opposition to Douglas on pink paper. These “pink sheets,” along with Los Angeles Daily News’ printing of the nickname “Pink Lady,” colored Douglas’ political career. Tricky Dicky famously declared that Douglas was, “pink right down to her underwear;” his off-color comment positioned pink as both a political pejorative (communist sympathizer) and illicitly sexual.

In 1991, Susan G. Komen handed out pink ribbons to runners in the New York City Survivor Race. The ribbon, designed by Evelyn Lauder of the Estée Lauder Companies in collaboration with an editor at Self magazine, was influenced by HIV and AIDS organizations’ red ribbon. That same year, 1991, the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus created “The Ribbon Project.”

The artist driven organization had tried to stay away from colors traditionally associated with homosexuality, but in Germany, male sex workers were referred to as Rosarote, which literally translates to “pink-red.” This colorful nickname was also the inspiration behind the pink triangle assigned to gay and lesbian inmates in concentration camps during World War II.

Over the years, the connotation of pink with the sexually transgressive has been reclaimed by activists (queer and straight), into a symbol of resistance. Yet, Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health sees pink as a reinforcer of  “the notion that breast cancer is a danger only because it threatens women’s sexual identity and men’s access to their breasts.” 

Breast cancer’s pink ribbon not only defines it as a woman’s disease, it emphasizes notions of traditional femininity as it relates to the female body, specifically the nipples on a white human female’s breasts. As Gemma Tarlach writes, “nowhere, perhaps aside from Hooters, is the equation more ingrained than in the breast cancer industry…woman=breast=pink.”  

This juxtaposition of pink’s association with heightened femininity and underlying sexuality was embraced in “millennial pink.” The early 2000s saw female empowerment books employ pink in their cover art at around the same moment women were being taught to wear pink on Wednesdays.

This “ironic pink” attempted to extract the sugary sweetness of Malibu Barbie and replace it with the girlboss attitude of the Plastics from Mean Girls. Despite the rebrand, millennial pink’s not-for-little girls-ness carries with it the color’s storied sexual past.

On January 21st, 2017, 500,000 men and women, young and old, walked in The Women’s March on Washington, D.C. Throughout the day, news channels and social media sites broadcasted images showcasing the diversity of the march’s participants, but the photos also captured the movement’s clearest demarcation of empowerment and protest: the color pink. The leading article of clothing that contributed to this “pink effect” was the Pussyhat.

When asked about the pussy hat’s signature color, co-founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, said, “wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.” But not everyone felt the choice of pink, or the “pussy hat,” was the ideal icon for the Women’s March. Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak wrote a public address to her “sisters,” stating, that the “cute and fun” color threatened to trivialize women’s issues

In an effort to belittle President Donald Trump’s proposed Southern border wall, a group of interns at the architecture film Estudio 3.14 created 3D renderings of the wall. The “Prison-Wall Project,” allowed the public to see just what Mr. Trump’s “big,” “beautiful,” and “physical,” wall might look like. The designers’ concept? A bright pink wall that doubles as a prison.

As the President stated that Mexico will pay for the wall, the designers’ model pays homage to the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, most known for his pink-colored geometric buildings throughout Mexico. Barragán once referred to his pink floorplans as “architectural stripteases.” At Estudio 3.14, the pink design is not only nationalistic, its color undresses the American dream. It is the embodiment of Trump’s wall in all “its gorgeous perversity.”  

Pink, as a wall, or a mark on a pregnancy test, is a contentious line carrying alone within it the diacritical distinction pink/blue. Girl or boy. As the beauty expert Eve Nelson wrote in her novel, Take It From Eve, “while it’s true that she [a female infant] cannot actively appreciate a pink ribbon…these things set the mood.” This belief in the formation of a feminine personality from early childhood exposure to pink, was condemned throughout the uni-sex era of the 1970s by mothers who viewed the gendered clothing of their early twentieth century upbringing through the lens of second-wave feminism. Despite these anti-pink crusaders, pink’s stereotypes remain salient, even when contradicted in practice.

The Pink Tax, named after the color of products that are marketed to attract women and girls, refers to the price difference for female-targeted commodities compared to male or “gender-neutral” goods. On average, products for women or girls cost seven percent more than comparable products for men and boys. The Bic pen “For Her” is just one example of this prevailing sexist consumer culture. Designed for women, with a comfortable rubber grip for “female hands,” the pen demonstrates pink’s complex cultural history built, in large part on, sexual biology.

This “pink double-standard” found adoring fans in the American animated television series Jem and the Holograms. By day, Jerrica Benton was the owner of a music company, by night, she was Jem, lead singer of the Holograms. On television and on toy shelves, Jerrica and Jem wore pink.

Within the show’s narrative, pink linked Jerrica and Jem’s secret identities, and boldly showed pink as a color like none other—an innocent, yet honest representation of pink’s dualism in art, fashion, cosmetics, politics and pop culture. This notion of a color having two sides (natural and unnatural, virginal and virile, or male and female) was parodied in a 2005 Robot Chicken episode where Jem, dressed in her iconic pink wrap dress, is caught using a urinal in the men’s restroom.

As a color frequently found in flowers, alcohol and sweets, quartz crystals, a setting sunscape, genitalia, skin tones and discoloration, pink’s connotations take inspiration and innuendos from the physical world—it is a color with physicality. The use of pink as a current political statement in response to our contemporary government or as the latest trend, draws upon the versatility of pink’s associations, it’s intrinsic connection to the human condition, and its ability to arouse our sense of smell, alter our outlook, tantalize our taste buds, evoke our childhoods, or elicit a sense of touch.

It’s truly an outrageous color.

*This article has been edited to remove a quote from “sexologist Damian Jacob Sendler, PhD, MD” who was revealed to be a “serial fabulist.“

In October 2013, shortly after I moved to New York, a hot Londoner struck up a conversation with me in Starbucks. We had dinner that night and met up for breakfast two days later, then I followed him back to his Airbnb while he packed.

I didn’t want to get too involved because he was leaving, and I barely knew him. So, when he leaned in to kiss me, I said, “Let’s not go further than this.” When he took off my shirt, I said, “No further, OK?” He didn’t seem to listen, because he then took off my bra and started kissing my chest.

Although I didn’t agree to what was happening, I was physically getting aroused by it. Once it became clear that my attempts to stop it weren’t succeeding, I figured all I could do to make the situation less unpleasant for myself was try to enjoy the arousal I felt mounting in my body.

So I laid back and made little sighs of pleasure. It was only when he grabbed my hand and put it on his crotch that I jumped up and told him to stop. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess it’s a guy thing.”

“At least he apologized,” I thought. I didn’t want to believe I’d been violated. And because of the satisfied noises I’d just made, it was a difficult thing to convince myself of anyway. Telling myself I’d just engaged in a normal, consensual hookup, I made out with him and gave a heartfelt goodbye as he hiked his bags onto his shoulders and caught a cab to the airport.

But I returned home confused about what had just happened. I had not consented to parts of that encounter, but I had gotten pleasure out of it. I didn’t want to go that far for emotional reasons, but physically, I wanted it.

My mind raced back to that infamous line from Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”: “I know you want it.” Perpetrators often justify sexual assault by saying the victim secretly wanted it. But did the fact that part of me desired his touch mean I had consented to it? Even if I hadn’t wanted to act on that desire?

As it turns out, many individuals describe feeling arousal and pleasure during sexual assaults. In one study—“Problems With Sexuality After Sexual Assault”—21% of women said they had a “physical response” to their assaults, and 10% felt attracted to their perpetrators. Additional research and clinical reports suggest that four to five percent of women have reported orgasm during sexual assault, but the numbers could be higher because people may not report this, according to a paper in the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine.

“I didn’t think of it as sexual assault for years because I had an orgasm, because I didn’t try harder to stop it when it started to feel good,” says Stephanie, a content creator in her 30s. “To this day, I call it ‘nonconsensual sex.’ And I’m a former rape victim advocate. I know what assault is. I didn’t want this to happen, I said no, I was very drunk and past the point of consent—there are so many ways I know this was assault.”

I had not consented to parts of that encounter, but I had gotten pleasure out of it.
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And it’s not just survivors themselves who discount their assaults because of their bodies’ reactions. The professionals charged with the task of helping them often do the same.

The Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine paper quotes a doctor responding to a post in an online forum about a survivor who orgasmed during her rape by her estranged husband:

“For a woman to have an orgasm, she needs to be at least on some level, mentally and emotionally invested in the experience…Fear, repulsion and pain are not conducive to orgasm. Psychological acquiescence or complacency does not mean the woman did not enjoy the experience, and on some level, love her husband.’’

Similarly, male survivors of assault are very often doubted due to the misconception that if their penis was erect enough to have intercourse, they must have consented. I once told a sex educator about how I’d guilted an ex-boyfriend into sex, and she replied, “Guilted? Really? Was his dick hard?” 

“Survivors’ genital response has quite literally been presented as evidence in court that they ‘consented,’ even if they said no, even if they were too young to give consent,” says sexologist Emily Nagoski, PhD tells me. This type of thinking is proffered all over the media as well. In 50 Shades of Grey, Christian claims that Ana’s wetness shows how much she enjoyed a spanking that she wasn’t actually into, Nagoski points out.

Such depictions reflect a widespread myth about how sexual arousal works: that in order to be physically aroused, you have to be mentally and emotionally into the whole experience.

“‘Liking’— pleasure—is one system in our brains, the opioid system; ‘wanting’—desire—is another, mediated by dopamine; and ‘learning’—physiological response to learned cues—is a third,” explains Nagoski.

“Genital arousal is the third—a learned response, the way Pavlov’s dogs salivated in response to the bell. The salivation didn’t mean the dogs wanted to eat the bell or that they found the bell delicious. It just meant that the bell was a cue that was associated with food. Genital response can happen in response to sex-related cues, whether or not those cues are wanted or liked. I’ve been doing work related to sexual violence for over two decades, so I’ve met many, many survivors who’ve experienced arousal and even orgasm.”

In fact, because fear activates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing blood flow throughout the body—it’s possible that it could even facilitate genital arousal, according to the Journal of Clinical Forensic Medicine paper.

Sometimes, perpetrators make a calculated effort to turn their victims on. “Pedophiles often groom children for sexual assault by first using ‘appropriate’ pleasurable touching (stroking hair, rubbing a hand) and then pushing and pushing boundaries, working up to sexual assault,” educational psychologist and sex educator Kathryn Stamoulis, PhD, LMHC tells me. “I have heard accounts in which a rapist tried to give their victim pleasure, perhaps as a way to rationalize their crimes.”

It’s even common for people to have feelings for their perpetrators, especially if they’re assaulted by someone within a romantic relationship.

“It is possible for two opposing feelings to coexist: on the one hand disgust, rage, fear, or terror, and on the other, a genuine desire to merge with the assaulter, feelings of desire for them, and even longings to be taken care of by a person who seems more powerful,” psychoanalyst Claudia Luiz, PsyaD says. Sometimes, getting aroused can be a defense mechanism when the painful feelings resulting from the assault are too much to bear.

Many survivors feel as if their bodies have betrayed them for responding to unwelcome stimulation, says Nagoski. Some even view it as a moral failure to get turned on by something so horrific. “Can you imagine, walking around all day, every day, inside something that betrayed you? Needless to say, it comes as a tremendous relief for them to learn that their genital response just means something sex-related happened.”

Many survivors feel as if their bodies have betrayed them.
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Often, people don’t even realize they’ve been assaulted, since they assume their physical pleasure must be evidence of consent.

“[People] have told me about an experience from childhood or college and what they are describing is rape, but they never viewed it that way before because of the physical response they experienced,” Stamoulis explains. “In fact, some straight males have wondered if they were gay because they had a physical reaction during an assault by a male abuser.” Even when people recognize the event as an assault, they may hesitate to report it out of fear that their arousal could be used against them.

This shame, self-blame, and confusion could be avoided if we learned about the complexities of sexual violence: that it doesn’t always involve a morally unambiguous criminal who the victim despises, and the victim can experience emotions other than pure disgust.

“If, while in sex education teaching people about sexual assault, we were taught about all the varied reactions to assaults, both physical and emotional, we would normalize this and people wouldn’t have to suffer in silence,” Stamoulis says..

Sometimes, getting aroused can be a defense mechanism when the painful feelings resulting from the assault are too much to bear.
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Because I hadn’t learned about any of these aspects of sexual assault—physiological or psychological—I, too, thought my encounter that day in New York was consensual. I Facebook messaged with the man who violated my boundaries and felt a mixture of excitement and anger as he talked about potentially moving to New York and seeing me again.

But when he actually got a job offer there and proposed we meet up when he arrived, something clicked inside me. “Actually,” I replied, “what happened at your Airbnb last time wasn’t OK with me, and I’m not interested in seeing you again.”

“You’re joking, right?” he replied, as if my attraction to him made that statement unbelievable. But then, I thought back to his apology after that incident. He knew he’d done something wrong. And I wasn’t going to let him use my physical desire to eclipse that knowledge. I may have been aroused, but arousal is not consent.

No amount of blood flow to someone’s genitals should override what their mind—and mouth—is telling you.

Content warning: disordered eating

The first time I left my body, I was 15. It was revelatory. For no particular reason, I looked in the mirror and suddenly was meeting someone for the first time. It inspired me, with my adolescent faux-profundity, to write a poem about the illusory nature of the self.

Then things got…creepy.

It went from spiritual revelation to identity fragmentation. I became more and more conscious of the split between the image and the self it represented. I’d decide to move my hand and marvel that it moved in response to a mere thought. I wondered why my thoughts could control Suzy’s body and nobody else’s. I wondered how I even had access to Suzy’s thoughts. As I floated further and further away from Suzy, I felt invasive for even knowing she existed. I felt like a fraud for masquerading as her.

Then I felt misunderstood for being seen as her. I hated her.

I feel the same sickening severance when I look at a picture and think, “Who’s that ugly girl in the front?” only to realize it’s me. The same sensation occurs when I hear my own recorded voice, when I wonder why I see the world through my own eyes and nobody else’s. You may say—and I understand it feels obvious—because they’re your eyes. But they’re mine only because I see through them, because an optic nerve connects them to my brain — and what makes that brain mine? This feels like a similarly disturbing problem.

My brain is usually too tired to think about itself, but when it does, I feel like a snake eating its tail, so wound up it can’t escape its own belly, so thick from self-consumption that it chokes.

My childhood fantasies of the future always contained the hidden assumption that one day? I would leave my body. Sometimes my future self was a Maybelline model with luscious lips flanked by equally model-esque man-candy. Later, I envisioned myself as one of the giants of poststructuralist philosophy, sitting around a table with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Rolande Barthes—anachronistically—all at once.

I did not become a supermodel, and I did not become a French man.

I developed a devalued and objectified body unfit for a philosopher. Seeking an exit route, I grew so airy and detached, I felt my mind might expand like a balloon and float into space. Maybe it already had. I could be going about my daily routine without consciousness—like a very advanced robot. For all I knew, I was already floating in space, connected via some wireless network to my body, perceiving its immediate surroundings only by collecting data from its sensory organs.

For a while I forgot I needed to eat, or perhaps convinced myself I didn’t need to. My mind had no idea what my body wanted and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to associate myself with something as base and material as food. My body felt too heavy to express my inner ethereality. This asceticism bears similarities to anorexia mirabilis, a condition different from, but debatably a precursor to, anorexia nervosa, which afflicted several medieval holy women.

Saint Margaret of Cortona, who died of starvation in 1297, wrote:

“I have no intention of making peace between my body and my soul … allow me to tame my body by not altering my diet; I will not stop for the rest of my life, until there is no more life left.”

Saint Catherine of Siena claimed that she did not need food because she ate at the Banquet of God; she was above embodied existence. She renounced all carnal pleasures and had visions of marrying Jesus with a ring made of his foreskin, which some might say resulted from sexual repression, just as some might say her mystical visions were starvation-induced hallucinations.

But what I find more interesting is the possibility that it worked the other way around: She didn’t want food or sex because whatever satisfaction she could get from them paled in comparison to the fulfillment she got from her inner spiritual life.

My body felt too heavy to express my inner ethereality.
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The main difference I see is that the out-of-body experiences of St. Catherine consisted of self-discovery whereas I discovered a non-self. Rather than saying “this is what I am — an ethereal soul!” I felt as though my mind had no identity inherently coupled with my body.

It could attach itself to anyone or anything, a parasite surviving off its host. I couldn’t help but think of Voldemort on the back of Professor Quirrell’s head, feeding off his body until he gained the power to grow a body of his own. Perhaps my image of myself as a male poststructuralist philosopher came from this belief that my mind would eventually sprout a body to better fit its self-conception. But could a mind sans a physical body ever express itself? Maybe not.

Still, I can’t help but wonder whether, if I lived in a body less fraught, less subjugated by my mind — in other words, less female — the task would feel less impossible.

One account of disembodiment that sounds more akin to my experience came from Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memory of Anorexia and Bulimia:

“I suddenly felt a split in my brain: I didn’t recognize her. I divided into two: the self in my head and the girl in the mirror. It was a strange, not unpleasant feeling of disorientation, disassociation. I began to return to the mirror often, to see if I could get that feeling back. If I sat very still and thought: Not me-not me-not me over and over, I could retrieve the feeling of being two girls, staring at each other through the glass of the mirror. I didn’t know then that I would eventually have that feeling all the time. Ego and image. Body and brain.”

Like Hornbacher’s, my mind-body splitting was the precursor to an eating disorder, an auxiliary self that took up residence in my mind when I was 15, the age I first left my body.

Carolyn Costin, a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, articulates this phenomenon in The Eating Disorder Sourcebook: “Eating disorder symptoms are the behavioral component of a separate, split-off self, or what I have come to call the ‘eating disorder self.’ This self has a special set of needs, behaviors, feelings, and perceptions, all of which are dissociated from the individual’s core or what I call ‘healthy self.’”

I (the observer, the mind, the eating disorder self) stifled and silenced the other voice, “my” own, until I (the observed, the body, the healthy self) became a mere body used to fulfill my sadistic desires, or perhaps masochistic ones; it is hard for someone split in two to tell the difference. But I don’t think this sadomasochist was the only voice in me, or else its pleasures would have been fulfilled and it/I would have been happy. I imagine another voice calling out to me as I walked through the halls of my high school, a voice within my gut that grew softer as I floated away and away from “my” body.

Unlike my initial airy-fairy mirror split, this episode didn’t feel like a mystical revelation. It felt like the debilitating self-consciousness and self-objectification characteristic of this condition. I am not just talking about the condition of disordered eating; I am talking about the condition of being a woman. I am talking about internalizing an outsider’s image of my body until my face feels like a mask — all decoration, no sensation. I am talking about sensing that I can’t occupy the word “I” and thus becoming “you” to myself.

When I say “I,” I’m not sure whose words I’m using or who I’m referring to, but I’m sure that the speaker and the object of speech are not the same, and the words that define me are not my own. I cannot speak without splitting. Each “I” is a line drawn between me and the self I speak of. Each eye stares back at the other. Each act of speech masks me with another face, and through this mask I look down on my body in scorn, or at best, alienation.

“Given the coupling of mind with maleness and the body with femaleness and given philosophy’s own self-understanding as a conceptual enterprise, it follows that women and femininity are problematized as knowing philosophical subjects and as knowable epistemic subjects,” Elizabeth Grosz writes in Volatile Bodies.

Women are defined by materiality, men by mindedness. This is to say not that women are earthly, but that Earth has been made womanly; it is not to say that men are Godly, but that God has been made male. So many things have been imbued with references to men and women that we can’t speak of everyday concepts — presence and lack, hardness and softness, ether and earth — without speaking of gender. Man created God in his own image, and God created the world. It follows from this syllogism that man created the world in his own image.

I am not just talking about the condition of disordered eating; I am talking about the condition of being a woman.
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Just as St. Catherine of Siena configured her soul as a transcendent substance trapped in the confines of Mother Earth and her body, I am a masculine-coded mind trapped in feminine matter/mother, both from the Latin root mater.

I’ve chided myself for behaving as if the Cartesian illusion of mind-body separation is more than an illusion. I should know better, I think; I’ve studied the neural mechanisms of thought and emotion, the embodiment of cognition, the situatedness of knowledge, and how Descartes screwed us all over with the mind-body duality. Yet while I know this separation is merely symbolic, I can’t think away my own experience, an experience driven by symbolic distinctions: mind vs. matter, male vs. female. Our culture’s conflict between mind and body is raging inside me.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, entry into language requires an extra step for women: the adoption of a male perspective, a perspective outside her own body, looking at her own head through eyes foreign yet all too familiar to her. To accomplish this, language relegates her to the object of an action, or at best she is written as a subject in the passive voice. It is said that women are more empathetic, that women spend more time considering what men think than vice versa, that women have more understanding of the male mind than men do of the female mind.

That’s because our culture has no concept of a female mind. If there is one, I leave it on the ground every time I float outside my body to think about it. Lacan famously stated that le femme n’existe pas; there is no such thing as a woman. I believe I am a woman until I catch myself uttering such a statement, and once again, the “I” who steps outside my head, sizes me up, and classifies me as a woman with impossible certainty is not the “I” who is a woman.

After years of therapy and months in treatment centers, the only way I’ve managed to maintain my recovery has been to forget that the woman I observe and classify is, by most definitions, me. Disembodiment can be your worst enemy and your best friend if you take it far enough. When I ate foods I’d deemed too meaty and fatty and fleshy, I convinced myself it wasn’t really me eating; it was just a body that happened to be attached to me.

When I couldn’t bear the weight I acquired in recovery, I told myself my body was just a temporary vessel for an everlasting soul anyway. When I finally got my period back, I reminded myself it was only by chance that my soul was born into a menstruating vehicle.

When I felt defeated by the regrowth of curves I’d resolved to remove since they transformed me from a human into a piece of meat, I made extra effort to use the vocabulary of the male intellectuals I admired so I could catch people off guard with discussions of postmodern theory before they had the chance to peg me as a potential conquest.

Le femme n’existe pas; there is no such thing as a woman.
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My mind is a magician, making the body invisible while chattering at the audience so they don’t notice it’s still there. This defense may have even spawned the essay you’re reading — though my body’s having the last laugh now, because this piece is from and about it.

The split is inevitable, necessary, even: without detaching from and observing our bodies, we would not be self-aware. There are just more and less unhealthy ways to deal with the detachment. Freud contended that the world’s greatest artists channeled physical desires into intellectual pursuits. Like solid matter evaporating into weightless gas, this is called sublimation. He deemed it the only successful defense mechanism. My immediate reaction is to agree; I’m happy this way, I think. But which “I” is saying this? What would the other “I” say if she could speak? Where is she? Asleep until thinking-I wakes her with a kiss? Trapped in a cave with Antigone and all the other traitors of the male I?

Luce Irigaray claims that since language is fit only for a masculine subject, women must speak a different language to connect to their own bodies. But that can’t happen if there’s no woman in the first place, and as empowering as it is to hear about vaginas engulfing penises, it isn’t making me feel more embodied. So I’ve tried yoga, but every time I get down on the mat, I know it’s just a matter of time before I start sublimating. What comes down must go up. Everyone’s in downward dog and I’m in la-la land trying to solve the problem of induction. Any bit of mind left on the ground gets so engrossed in the movements that it merges with the body and loses consciousness.

Irigaray says women defy language because they’re so close to themselves, and one needs distance from something to speak of it. As I write, I approach the object of inquiry, myself, but I will never reach it. If I arrive at my destination, I will have to abandon it. By the time I reach myself, there will be no self to reach. There will be no “I;” I will be too close to speak.

The sentence implodes, subject and object meld together, and the split disappears. I cannot speak without splitting into the self that speaks and the self that’s spoken of. So I float off the page, and in the distance I see a girl with a face.

It is a pretty face, but I take no pride in it; it is not mine. The most it is good for is to represent me so that I can float further and not be bothered. If I don’t become a Frenchman, I’ll get back to you when I get back to my body.

By Julia Christensen, Guido Giglioni, and Manis Tsakiris

The Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer was regarded by his friends as a master in the art of mind-wandering. He could become “enwrapped” in his own pleasant reflections, wrote the German humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, at which times Dürer “would seem the happiest person on Earth.”

Many of us are familiar with mind-wandering in a number of guises: procrastination, reflection, meditation, self-flagellation, daydreaming. But while some mental meandering seems fruitful, on other occasions it has the unmistakeable bite of a bad habit, something that holds us back from reaching our full potential. Reverie can be a reprieve from reality and a font of inspiration, yes. But equally familiar is the mind’s tendency to devolve into sour and fruitless rumination when left to its own devices, especially when we’re in the grip of depression, anxiety, or obsession.

Can art itself be a useful catalyst for nudging us towards more helpful emotions and mental states? Whether in the form of literature, rap, or abstract oil painting, many of us know we can improve the tenor of our thoughts by contemplating art. The Germans have a lovely saying for the benefits of keeping an idle (or idling) mind: “die Seele baumeln lassen,” meaning “let the soul dangle.” Now, the emerging science of neuroaesthetics is beginning to reveal the biological processes that sit behind such “dangling.”

Many of us know we can improve the tenor of our thoughts by contemplating art.
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To begin with, contemporary cognitive science has presented a vast amount of evidence that mental states send and receive ripples of cause and effect across the rest of the body. Think how your mouth might water when you look at a photo of a tasty chocolate cake, or how tense you feel when watching a suspenseful TV drama. Thoughts, feelings and emotions, whether aimless or deliberate, are a somatic cascade of multiple biological events. And it’s this cascade that art somehow taps into.

Galen, the second-century Greek physician, was well aware of the connection between mind and body. He believed that mind-wandering was the result of physical and mental lassitude, and so prescribed a regime of logic and hard, structured work to avoid it. “Laziness breeds humours of the blood!” Galen is believed to have said. The assumption here is that concentration is a kind of psychobiological discipline, something we have to work at to stop our wayward minds and bodies from veering out of our control.

However, there’s an even older tradition from Ancient Greece that views daydreaming as a boost to our wellbeing. Galen’s Hippocratic forebears argued that mind-wandering was in fact the best strategy for guiding us back into healthy states. And modern-day research in developmental psychology has shown that children and adults who engage in certain kinds of mind-wandering actually display more cognitive flexibility, and perform better when called upon to exercise “executive” functions such as problem-solving, planning, and managing their own thoughts and feelings.

Neuroimaging — a method of “seeing” the brain in action — has started to reveal the brain processes that correlate with these mental states. Far from falling idle, the brains of people asked to stay still and think of nothing in particular continue to fizz and pop in patterns of activity known as the default mode network (DMN). These activations are closely related to those engaged during self-referential thinking, the experience of the self, and intuition. Moreover, they are observed alongside activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — the area typically associated with those important “executive” functions. Strikingly, the greater the strength of the relationship between these two domains of the brain — intuition and executive function — the more creativity a person tends to display when asked to solve a problem. Brain scans demonstrate correlation, not causation; but even so, they hint at the possibility that reverie might help to prime us to think both productively and creatively by somehow cementing our sense of self, drawing body and mind together in a train of thought and biological action.

Modern-day research in developmental psychology has shown that children and adults who engage in certain kinds of mind-wandering actually display more cognitive flexibility.
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Art can be a catalyst for this sort of reverie, as well as a tool to regulate and control it. Both the basic properties of art (whether it’s in a minor or major key; the colors of a painting), as well as the complexities of its content (the lyrics of a song, the facial expression of a person in a painting), can induce reflections and emotions — and will invariably affect our body’s physiology. Thinking creatively, and engaging with works of art, have both been correlated with DMN activity — especially when people report that the aesthetic experience was particularly strong and meaningful to them. In these moments, our encounter with art seems to trigger an autobiographical daydreaming, a flow experience with a “me factor.”

Of course, art can also provoke unhelpful ruminative urges. Listening over and again to that song might not help you get over a heartbreak. But art-induced sadness doesn’t always make you slide into negative mental loops. In fact, art can help us adapt to the immediate source of pain by acting as a prop for emotional catharsis. We all know the strange, pleasurable, consoling feeling that comes after having a good cry. This experience appears to be precipitated by the release of the hormone prolactin, which has also been associated with a boosted immune system, as well as bonding with other people. The arts are a relatively safe space in which to have such an emotional episode, compared with the real-life emotional situations that make us cry. Even sad or otherwise distressing art can be used to trigger a kind of positive, psychobiological cleansing via mind-wandering.

What Role Should Art Play In Presenting Mental Illness To The World?

History is full of examples of the relationship between reverie and creativity. Here is one, idiosyncratic example: The German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) organized his library of 50,000 books with the aim of promoting mind-wandering. His collection was the kernel for the Warburg Institute in London, where we now work as researchers. Each of the library’s four floors is devoted to one of four themes — image, word, orientation, and action — and separated into sub-themes, such as “magic and science,” “transmission of classical texts,” and “art history.” Guided by Warburg’s ideas about what makes a good neighbor for a book, this unique approach to classification allows a withered 17th-century medical tome to cluster next to texts on mathematics, the cosmos, and harmony. The shelves promote intellectual serendipity as you skip from the book (or thought) you thought you wanted, to another intriguing idea or topic that hadn’t even occurred to you.

Art can help us adapt to the immediate source of pain by acting as a prop for emotional catharsis.
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Art appreciation is held in high esteem in most cultures and societies. It is often portrayed as a laborious cognitive exercise, but this is to forget that the arts provide an opportunity for intense emotional experiences, positive mind-wandering, and psychobiological self-regulation. Dürer perhaps captures the activity of such inactivity best of all. “If a man devotes himself to art,” he wrote, “much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.”

This story first appeared at Aeon and is republished here with permission.

A dream analyst named Bob Hoss tells me that very few people actually dream about flying. He’s studied the 20,000+ dreams held in DreamBank, a project by UC Santa Cruz, and has concluded that supposedly common dream images like soaring through the air — or showing up somewhere naked, or losing teeth — are actually much rarer than we think. Far more people dream about circles instead; almost 30% of the dreams in the database feature circular shapes or motions.

Why our collective unconscious obsession with the spherical? According to Carl Jung, the circle symbolizes the unified self, when both consciousness and unconsciousness come together as a perfect whole. A dream in which circles appear just might be your unconscious self urging you to slow down and pay more attention to your dreams.

Hoss himself dreams of boats. His dream-boats represent his creative life, so if the boat is zooming across the water, his creative practice is buoyant. “If I’m under too much stress or ignoring that creative side, my boat will be taking on water, or the engine won’t run,” he says. But other than this boat imagery, Hoss rarely experiences the phenomenon of the recurring dream. He has this in common with many other dream analysts; as a group, they rarely dream in copies, because they’ve figured out how to unlock the nagging messages that recurrent dreams come bearing. “As soon as I do my dreamwork on [the recurring dream], it goes away instantly,” Hoss says. The rest of us might be haunted for years by some pestering missive from the unconscious world — a dream where we can’t find our shoes, a dream where it rains on our wedding day. But the dream analysts have managed to catch their dreams and pin them down, like so many butterflies. And they’re much happier for it.

You know that Family Guy clip where Stewie yells “Mom, mom, mom” for a good 30 seconds? That’s how I imagine our recurring dreams. They’re little psychic nags from our unconscious, begging us to pay sharp attention to something or to finally resolve some sticky issue. Recurring dreams might feel annoying — I often wake up exhausted from yet another round of my Trying to Throw a Party and Everyone Arrives Too Early dreamscape — but they’re actually trying to help us. “There can be some unresolved emotional issue that your dream is trying to get you to face,” says Hoss. Dream analyst Jane Teresa Anderson believes you can rewire your very brain by attempting to analyze these sorts of dreams:

“When you analyze a recurring dream, you identify the issue and the underlying mindset patterns that are keeping you stuck in the pattern. You can then change the patterns through a combination of awareness and…reimagin[ing] the dream to change the outcome. It’s an art and a science, and what this process does is reprogram the unconscious mind for better outcomes.”

It should go without saying that any dream analyst worth their salt already knows how to do this for themselves. And so by and large, their recurrent dreams are safely in their past. In fact, many of them look back at particular recurring dreams as the Xs that marked a dark epoch in their life — an epoch from which their own self-analysis rescued them.

Lauri Loewenberg, a dream analyst who remembers her dreams from the age of two onward and always recites them to her husband over morning coffee, used to dream every week — for years! — that she was walking through her childhood bedroom and discovering aquariums full of dead fish. In the dream, she knew that the aquariums had been there all along, but realized that she’d forgotten about them until that moment.

“The dream was about something in my real life that I’d neglected: my art,” she says. “I’d put my art aside in order to build my career as a dream analyst. My subconscious didn’t like that at all and it nagged me to death.” The issue came to a head when Loewenberg had a lucid dream about a woman with no face — her neglected artist self, she believes — who told Loewenberg, “You need to paint, and I need to sow.” These days, Loewenberg has a thriving pin-up art business in addition to her dream work. “I finally listened to the dream. And I haven’t dreamed of dying fish ever since,” she says.

Another dream analyst, Layne Dalfen, used the message inside her recurring dream to save herself from making a huge mistake. In the dreams, Dalfen was always alone in a shaky freight elevator, unable to touch the sides. The dreams started 44 years ago, a few months after she gave birth to her first child, Tina, who was born with Down Syndrome. Her doctor advised Dalfen to place Tina in a home and “forget you had her.” Dalfen listened to him — in those days, she says, it was a fairly common practice. “Three months later I woke up crying and couldn’t stop,” she says. Shortly after that, the dreams started.

Her trick as an analyst is to take the problem presented in the dream and ask herself what she’d do if it were happening in real life. If she were alone in a freight elevator in real life, she says, she’d “bring people into the elevator to put weight on the floor so it stops wobbling. And now you’re not in this huge space alone. You’re not flailing by yourself.” Dalfen realize that the dream was begging her to ask her parents for help — to bring them into the elevator, so to speak — so that they could all attempt to find Tina again. (Not coincidentally, Dalfen used to play in the freight elevator at her father’s workplace when she was a child.) She acted on the dream, and Tina ended up being a joyful part of her family’s life for the next four decades.

“I never had a freight elevator dream again,” Dalfen says. “Once your conscious understands what your subconscious is trying to say to you, the dream ends. You’re just having a discussion with yourself, but you’re speaking another language.”

Can You Make Donald Trump Resign From Your Nightmares?

It’s not that only dream analysts can cure themselves of their recurring dreams, but it’s mainly dream analysts who have the tools to do so. Many of the analysts I spoke to expressed a great sense of relief at having figured out the insistent dreams of their younger days. “I used to have a lot of recurring dreams, as a child and young adult, until I learned to understand them and pay attention to them,” says Anderson. “The only recurring dream I sometimes have now is looking for a public toilet and, at first, seeming like I’ve got to walk a long way to find one…suddenly I see a perfect toilet close by and I can empty my full bladder in peace and quiet.” She says that when she dreams this, it’s a nudging reminder from her unconscious to take time for self-care.

Another thing dream analysts have in common? Many of them know how to lucid dream. More importantly, they know exactly what to do when they find themselves dreaming lucidly. They know that these dreams are not the time to gorge on an entire dream pizza or fly above Kilimanjaro. That’s low-level stuff, they say. Lucid dreams are for learning the secrets of the universe, or at least exploring the nooks and crannies of your own wild mind. “The real fun is exploring the wisdom behind the dream,” says Hoss, who advises lucid dreamers to stop what they’re doing and tell the dream, Show me something I need to know. These dreams are like therapy on steroids — a (possibly) once-in-a-lifetime chance to discover something major about yourself.

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Lucid dreams are for learning the secrets of the universe.
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When dream analysts are lucid dreaming, they will often look for a person or animal within the dream and interrogate them, as dream characters tend to have all the wisdom. “If you ever get a lucid dream, ask a question, because you’ll get a really cool answer,” says Loewenberg. Says Hoss, “I’ll ask a dream character, ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’ They’ll usually say, ‘I’m a higher level of consciousness.’” Just don’t expect them to pat your head and explain the meaning of dreaming itself. “They don’t think they’re characters,” says Hoss. “They think they’re dreaming you.”

Get a bunch of dream analysts talking about their lucid dreams and you’ll find that things get extremely meta. Hoss once lucid-dreamed that he was lecturing a bunch of dream characters about what it’s like to be in a dream. Loewenberg will often analyze her dreams while she’s still in them, and says that when she wakes up from a lucid dream, she’ll sometimes fall back asleep and dream that she’s telling someone about the dream she just had. Dream analyst Craig Webb has even had lucid dreams that seem to mysteriously reflect his clients’ waking reality. “I often dream with and even ‘for’ my clients,” he says. This can lead to strange parallels: One night, Webb dreamed he was swimming and frightened by nebulous shapes around him that seemed to be sharks. He purposefully shook off the fear and swam toward one terrifying shape, finding out that it was simply a log. He later learned that around the same time he was dreaming, a student of his was panicking underwater in Hawaii, sure she was swimming next to sharks. “She said she then remembered our class discussions about being able to lucidly choose her emotional state and mental focus,” says Webb, “and so she decided to continue snorkeling.” Shifting her perception of her waking reality, the student swam toward the mysterious shapes, just as Webb was doing in his dream. It worked: They weren’t sharks, either.

“Even with upsetting dreams…I know that I can turn them around and bring a better ending if I can become more lucid next time,” says Webb. “So I am never afraid to dream.”

It feels a bit mystical to say that dream analysts have tapped into a higher — or deeper — relationship with the unconscious, but their stories of dreaming seem to support that theory. After all, they work with their own unconscious mind every night, poke around it in, play with it like clay. Dreams may feel as personal as a fingerprint, but they have rhyme and reason, if you know where to look. “Since I began to study dreams, my relationship with them has changed…my dreams have become a partner to me,” says Loewenberg. “We work together, me and my subconscious mind, to make my life better in every possible way.

It’s a partnership not to be taken lightly, though. Angie Banicki, who reads tarot for celebrities like Jamie Chung and Sophia Bush and occasionally does dream analysis, has found herself slipping into a new sort of dream lately. She’s had an intense and fairly psychic dream life for a while now — a friend who works at NASA has an email from Banicki hanging above her desk in which Banicki correctly predicted her NASA job — but her latest dreams are something different. Something darker.

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Dreams may feel as personal as a fingerprint, but they have rhyme and reason, if you know where to look.
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It happened last year, when she did a tarot reading at Paltrow’s house and came home buzzing with intense energy from the party guests. That night, she had a dream about death. In it, her friend Dan — who’d died on Mount Everest — acted as her spiritual guide, and the dream itself involved two women and a man who were near a forest, dead. Something in the dream had to do with drugs.

The next morning, as Banicki drove along a highway that she rarely drives down, she saw a cluster of 10 police cars, and learned that two women and a man had been hit by a girl on drugs who lost control of her car. The three victims had gotten out of their car to take a closer look at the nearby forest, and the accident happened at the exact time that Banicki woke up. “I cried all the way home,” she says. “This is a whole new level of dreaming that I don’t know if I’m ready for.” The hills and valleys of the dreamscape may contain the sort of guidance we’re searching for in our waking life, but perhaps it’s best that not all of us know how to access those shadowy realms.

We can’t banish Trump from the real world. But we may be able to rid him from our dreams.

Illustration by Katie Tandy

The terrifying specter of a president unhinged to reason or morality has consumed our collective days; one would hope there’d be respite, at least, come nightfall.

We should be able to dream about a life without Trump.

And yet, so often, Trump remains in our subconsciousness as we slumber, waiting to terrorize again. Before the election, people were already dreaming of Trump — and since he assumed office, he has taken ever-more prominence in our nightly narratives.

Politicians making appearances in dreams is, of course, nothing new. In an interview with The Daily Beast, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley reported an uptick in dreams about politicians like Ross Perot, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton during their respective runs for office, calling their dream appearances “metaphors for a feeling or a relationship in your life.”

But Trump dreams seem to be particularly common, and chilling; people have documented Trump torturing them in front of a group of white people, stiffing them on a date, and chasing them through a Walmart in their nightmares.

We should be able to dream about a life without Trump.

As Dr. Sue Kolod told Vice, the continued presence of our commander in chief has made it hard to know where the lines between the conscious and subconscious even exist anymore. “One of the things I’ve heard more recently than I can ever remember is a patient saying, ‘I feel like I’m in a nightmare, and I can’t wake up.”

So why are we dreaming of Trump? It’s hard to know for sure, but there are plenty of theories that can help answer that question.

Dreams happen most vividly, but not exclusively, during REM sleep, when our brains are almost as active as they are during wakefulness, but our bodies are usually in a state of temporary paralysis called atonia. But while the when of dreaming is clear, the what, how, and why are subject to fierce debate.

The Parallels Between Social Media And PTSD In The Age Of Trump

In the 19th century, dreams were often thought of as a “delirium.” Russian physician Marie de Manacéïne, however, theorized that dreams are a way to exercise the parts of the brain unused by our conscious selves. In 1899, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams first published his theory of dreams as wish-fulfillment and symbolism full of sexual hangups. Carl Jung, initially a supporter of Freudian dream interpretation, later argued that dreams are a function of the imagination, a way to explore universal archetypes; he also said that while dreams do not need to be interpreted to perform their function, they exist to unite the conscious and unconscious mind.

Today, many argue that the purpose of dreams is to process memories and emotions — perhaps a subconscious imperative for Trump nightmares. “Dreams are many times a relief of fear, anxiety, or depression,” says Dr. Nancy Irwin, a Los Angeles-based therapist and dream expert. “If you are distressed by Trump, then know that your psyche is attempting to release those unpleasant feelings at night because it cannot do so fully enough by day.”

‘Dreams are many times a relief of fear, anxiety, or depression.’

Some argue that the presence of Trump is not just about the man himself, but about a cultural awakening to the fucked-up power dynamics that have existed since long before his election. Racism, classism, sexism, and other systems of privilege are nothing new, but they are still painful to confront viscerally — so instead, we may confront them in our dreams.

Cathy Pagano, a Jungian psychologist, astrologer, and soul coach, told me that Trump can also reflect our own fears about ourselves:

“When we dream of Trump, he symbolizes our collective Shadow: the parts of our American patriarchal psyche which has been ruling us for a while now. He represents the truth of what our leaders are really doing in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the boardrooms of all our corporations. He represents the hypocrisy, lies, and deceit that power holds onto.

The Shadow is the part of our psyche we don’t want to recognize, but which we ‘see’ in others. So if I dream of Trump, he symbolizes that part of me that I don’t like or want others to see. He might symbolize the bully, or the misogynist, or the racist, or the childish, entitled, delusional part of myself.”

Personally, my dreams are more confusing than heavy with symbolism. I do not suffer from frequent nightmares that re-enact trauma, or if I do, I don’t usually have them in my last REM cycle. When I recall my dreams, I recognize the nouns in them, but the narratives bear little meaning to my life.

The same has been true of Trump’s appearances in my dreams. Unlike in real life, he is not evil, but a benign-if-annoying figure, usually part of a troupe helping me look for something I don’t understand. His malice in waking life gets jumbled into well-meaning clumsiness — distinct from his usual bigoted, megalomaniacal, narcissistic incompetence.

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It could be worse: If you search “trump dream last night” on Twitter, you’ll see many accounts of people dreaming of being fired or experiencing violence at his hands. And it could be better: Some people dream of his impeachment, or that he was never elected at all, or that they screamed at him and flicked him off.

I wish I was giving Trump the bird in my dreams, but I’m not. Instead, he only appears in those frustrating dreams where I have to figure out some kind of shape-shifting puzzle. But even if Trump is not, in my subconscious, the monster he is in reality, I still don’t want him disturbing my sleep.

Some people dream of Trump’s impeachment, or that he was never elected at all, or that they screamed at him and flicked him off.

Happily for me and others looking to banish Trump from their sleep state, there are some strategies for mitigating nightmares. One heralded approach to addressing traumatic dreams is a cognitive behavioral therapy method called “image rehearsal therapy” (IRT). The sleeper writes down or recalls the dream for 10 or 20 minutes during their waking hour, but they change some key part of the narrative so that it is now positive. “IRT acts to inhibit the original nightmare, providing a cognitive shift that empirically refutes the original premise of the nightmare,” writes the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

The University of California, Santa Cruz School of Oneirology proposes that while dreams may help us make memories and have significant cultural purpose, there is no symbolic connection between our dreams and our life. If we like our dreams, there’s no harm in looking to them for inspiration and guidance, but if they’re upsetting, we should forget them as soon as we wake up instead.

How My Abusive Father Helped Me Understand Trump Supporters

According to Pagano, if you dream you’re involved with Trump, the best thing is to work on your Shadow — which, she says, “isn’t so bad once you recognize it and work with it. Recognize your own part in what makes your life chaotic or selfish or frustrated and make some changes. This is the best option since you actually change your life.”

Pagano also emphasizes self-care as a way to productively address disturbing dreams. “The patriarchy wants us to ignore our feelings and repress our instincts and intuitions. You are a specific person, with specific needs and talents. If you get too caught up in the outer world’s chaos, and you don’t give yourself enough self-care and explore your own depths so you ‘know yourself,’ your mental health will certainly suffer.”

‘The patriarchy wants us to ignore our feelings and repress our instincts and intuitions.’

To successfully engage in self-care, you may want to recede from constant engagement with the news. Since I pitched this essay back in February, my political dreams have receded a great deal — they’re still creepy, but Trump is in them less. The change, I think, comes from my being less fixated on the constant low buzz of political minutiae. I don’t want to suggest that this is the way out for everyone — as a white cis woman with family resources, my livelihood is not as much under siege as it is for others. But personally, I can’t keep up with the fuckery anymore. So I’ve stopped reading obsessively of every actor and their place in this hell world.

According to Dr. Irwin, this approach is sound:

“Ceasing watching the news right before can help greatly. Stay informed, but do so a few hours before sleep. Allow your mind to decompress with funny, light entertainment, [but] nothing distressing, because your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between real or imagined danger.”

While taking some time off from Twitter can be helpful, what can be even more conducive to reducing distressing dreams is actual productive political action. “Dreams are informing you of your feelings about a situation. Taking action to do damage control is ideal in turning powerlessness into power,” says Dr. Irwin. “The answer may be in taking some sort of action to make a difference in any way that you can — calling your state’s senators and representatives, joining protests, [or] helping get petitions signed.”

Trusted Resources For Your Resistance Against Trump

For the first few months of Trump’s presidency, I couldn’t sleep through the night. I woke up almost every night from confusing dreams or dire thoughts. Now when I awake, I try take care of myself and call my senators instead of getting pointlessly angry about Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Russia or whatever Mary Shelley-esque health care bill is on the horizon at the moment. Instead of refreshing Twitter when I’m mad right before bed, I seek out a local protest and take a little time to relax. I’ve stopped passively taking in the terror of his reign, and starting actively getting to work, and I’m dreaming a little better for it.

No one can deny Trump’s prominent space in our reality, but letting go of trying to keep up with every speck of spittle from his lips has relaxed some of my mental energy. I’m not trying to keep up as much anymore, and I learned long ago not to hold onto my dreams — even if he’s in them.

Donald Trump cannot be banished from my dreams anymore than he can be evicted from the White House, but I can refuse to let him ruin my sleep, my health, my life.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/what-can-laughter-do-for-social-justice-4875b260311c/ Fri, 22 Sep 2017 21:47:10 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3093 Read more]]> Basic human biology makes humor an effective tool to fight oppression.

The feminist scholar bell hooks wrote a passage on laughter that I still think about regularly. The paragraph is from her 2004 book The Will to Change. In it, she tells the story of standing up in front of an audience and using the phrase “white-supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our social system. Her listeners burst into laughter. It would be easy to take their reaction as a gesture of mockery, but bell hooks doesn’t. Instead, she observes, “No one ever explained what about the phrase was funny…I choose to interpret their laughter as a sign of discomfort.”

According to scientific research, she’s right. Studies show that “endorphins secreted by laughter can help when people are uncomfortable.” Because laughter is a social lubricant that strengthens human bonds — an evolutionary advantage our primate ancestors developed 10–16 million years ago — Homo sapiens are especially likely to laugh when they sense a threat to their social order. Of course, as bell hooks points out, our current social order grants more power to white people, wealthy people, and men. By naming these phenomena for what they are — examples of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy — hooks distances herself from these social structures and suggests a division between caucasians and people of color, the wealthy and the poor, the male and the female. The easiest way to smooth over potential ruptures in the audience as a result of this statement? Laughing.

Why It’s Important To Admit That Being Trans Can Be Funny

The irony is that in attempting to laugh off distress, humans often become complicit in the social inequalities that create friction in the first place. The philosopher Henri Bergson considered laughter a social corrective, one that people use when they sense someone deviating from communal norms. For instance, if a communal norm is for men to wear pants, and one man walks outside in a skirt, laughing spectators just might drive that man back inside to change into his jeans. Nobody likes the humiliation of unwanted attention. And so, by laughing at “deviants,” people with influence can corral straying group members back into “acceptable” boundaries. This kind of social policing gives “deviant” community members a choice: Obey the rules, or become the group laughingstock. In this way, laughter works to uphold norms that harm the marginalized.

But while laughter can be used as a tool by the powerful to keep the powerless in line, it can also be used inversely: as a way for the marginalized to reclaim power, while engendering a crucial dialogue around social justice. Two comedians of color — Aziz Ansari and Jessica Williams — have been particularly deft at using laughter to communicate thorny messages about racism, sexism, and all the other -isms — and the way they’ve done it is rooted in basic human psychology.

Take the “First Date” episode of Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None, in which his character Dev, a New Yorker of Indian descent in his thirties, meets a white woman on a dating app. They end up back in her bedroom, where she asks him to get a condom from the ceramic jar on her night table. He turns around to find that the jar is fashioned as a cartoonish-looking black woman in a red dress and white apron: a racist image of the black “Mammy.” The camera zooms into the jar in a series of exaggerated close-ups, with dramatic non-diegetic sound effects. The cinematic flair makes Dev’s predicament obvious. As viewers, we laugh to relieve our own sense of uneasiness with the scene.

A few cuts later, Dev explains to his date that the jar is offensive. “Isn’t it a little racist?” he asks. “You can’t use that shade of black to depict African-American people.” When she protests that nobody else has ever been offended by the jar, he wants to know if any black people have seen it. She says no. Dev raises his eyebrows. “So, I’m the person with the darkest skin tone that’s seen it, and I’m the most offended. Don’t you see a correlation there?” It’s a hard moment to swallow, but Aziz Ansari had preempted his viewers’ discomfort. We’ve already laughed out our tension. And now we can truly hear his point about racist paraphernalia.

Our increased receptivity post-laughter has a biological explanation. Laughter decreases cortisol levels and other stress-producing hormones. As a result, humans become more amicable and less confrontational after some chuckles. According to Psychology Today, “laughter seems to be produced via a circuit that runs through many regions of the brain,” including those involved in phenomena like friendship, love, and affection. All of this softens our fight-or-flight instinct and lubricates otherwise strained interactions. If only Dev’s partner observed the scene from the TV viewer’s perspective, she might have been more open to his criticism.

Jessica Williams pulls off something similar in Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere. The video is a 2014 parody on street harassment, based on a Fox newscaster’s claim that America’s “feminized atmosphere” is demonizing men. In the video, Williams prances by Manhattan construction workers while singing You’re a Grand Old Flag, trying to ward off their inevitable catcalling. She gushes sarcastically that her commute is like “competing in a beauty pageant every day!” Her satirical portrayal of catcalling shows how irritating and even frightening this harassment can be for women on the streets.

I laughed aloud watching Williams’ video. I could relate to it all. Her jokes were empowering for me, because they gave me permission to laugh at a daily frustration. Although there was a screen between us, I also felt a bond with the women Williams interviewed in the skit. We had similar trials, and we were laughing about them together. As evolution would have it, my social bonds felt stronger.

Philosophers studying laughter might have attributed my feelings to superiority theory. This theory states that when somebody laughs at another person, they feel superior to the party who’s the butt of the joke. In cases where the people laughing are more oppressed than those they’re laughing at, the solidarity can bring with it a sense of power. As Jazmine Hughes wrote in The New Republic, “By making fun of white people, people of color can, in a small way, push back against stereotypes, opposing racial humor by inverting it.” Hughes gives an example: “If you are a black person in the 1800s, and there’s a white man who owns you, beats you, and tears your family apart, then it’s totally fine to crack a joke about his waistcoat to your friends.” If you’re a woman, you’re allowed to make fun of the men whose stares creep you out as you’re walking home. The women in Jessica’s Feminized Atmosphere are inverting sexist humor, comically rebuffing the male newscasters who think sexism is overhyped.

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In cases where the people laughing are more oppressed than those they’re laughing at, solidarity can bring with it a sense of power.
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There are real emotional benefits to group laughter, as well. Laughing with friends for 15 minutes can raise pain tolerance levels by 10%. Whether it’s women like me laughing at Fox News commentators with Jessica Williams, or people of color cracking up with Aziz Ansari at white people’s ignorance, the opportunity to make fun of an oppressive force is cathartic. Considering how many people feel oppressed by Trump’s presidency, it’s no surprise that viewers are finding ablution through the late-night skewering of Donald Trump by Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert, two comedians whose ratings have surged since Inauguration Day.

When bell hooks lectured on our “white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy,” I suspect she was sincerely naming the hierarchies that organize American society. But on some level, I wonder if she knew her string of multi-syllabic words would get some laughs. Trying to label our flawed social system only emphasizes exactly how flawed it is. It takes 17 syllables just to name the problem. The power imbalances are so great, that describing them sounds unintentionally hyperbolic. In a reality so ridiculous, there’s hardly any room for exaggeration — and even the most liberal audience could find that funny, in a self-deprecating, shared misery kind of way.

Perhaps this laughter was something bell hooks intended. Just like comedians set the stage for earnest discussions, so bell hooks might have been breaking her students’ apathy by giving them an easy access point. Laughter doesn’t necessarily lead to understanding, but if some giggles help students open their ears, it’s a step in the right direction.

Unexamined bias and privilege play massive roles in not only who gets to diagnose mental health disorders, but who defines their criteria.

I grew up in a household full of people who were emotionally volatile and abusive. At any time, for no particular reason, I could be screamed at, guilted, shamed, or bullied — sometimes all four at once. I survived this by adapting, as humans do, to my environment, becoming hyper-vigilant, avoidant, and very anxious. I walked on eggshells at all times, constantly analyzing every slight change in a person’s facial expression, body language, and tone of voice. My alert level was always at orange.

Now, in adulthood—and generally surrounded by people who are not terrible—these habits and impulses still interfere with my attempts to build a happy life. Unfortunately, they’re very hard to break, and my alert level can’t just be turned down. I am, officially, mentally ill.

If this all sounds familiar to you, I’m not surprised. I’ve met many people who have had very similar experiences and now suffer from anxiety and/or depressive disorders. It’s to the point that the people in my life who don’t struggle with mental illness are out of the norm.

Speaking of “out of the norm”… Donald Trump is president of the United States.

For the past few months, nothing has seemed normal. He breaks well-established political norms on a regular basis. He says terrible and blatantly cruel things. He lies all the time. He puts completely incompetent people into positions of power.

In short, he’s not behaving at all like he should.

Speaking of “out of the norm”… Donald Trump is president of the United States.
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And as a result, since his rise to leading Republican presidential candidate, the thinkpieces and compulsive conjecturing on his mental health have been published with increasing frequency and alarm. Paul Krugman has called Trump “obviously mentally ill” on Twitter, #DiagnoseTrump campaigns and petitions have gone viral, and last month California congressman Ted Lieu made news when he pushed for legislation requiring a psychiatrist in the White House.

In attempts to make sense of Trump’s abnormal behavior, journalists and assorted other media figures have scrambled to ask any and every person with any kind of background in psychology what they thought about Trump’s mental state. Such inquiries and articles have only intensified since Trump took over the country’s helm.

To a point, I get it. The United States appears to be in chaos and human beings have a need to make sense of things. Further, mental illness has a long history of being used as a handy scapegoat to explain Bad Things. In particular, it’s been increasingly used to explain away the mass shootings committed overwhelmingly by white men. Before that, it was routinely used to describe anybody who committed a heinous enough violent act to get in the news.

The president is behaving in a way that lies far outside the boundaries of what we conceive of as “normal,” particularly for a person holding the highest office in the land. His actions are scary, and collectively as a society we are attempting to make sense of something that seems to make little recognizable sense.

Some Arguments Against Calling Trump ‘Crazy’ Do Added Harm

Around Inauguration Day, speculation that Trump has Narcissistic Personality Disorder seemed to reach a fever pitch. But Dr. Allen Frances, M.D.—who contributed to developing the criteria for the disorder in the the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — weighed in, tweeting that Trump does not fit the criteria for the illness as he is not impaired. Highlighting his expertise in this area, Frances claimed that Trump was “bad, not mad.”

Indeed, it is difficult to say that someone is impaired when they can reach one of the greatest achievements in the world.

This got me thinking. What is mental illness in a society where someone like Donald Trump could become the U.S. president? How can someone who behaves so badly—so consistently inappropriately and erratically—be considered mentally healthy, or at least mentally competent enough to become the leader of the world’s biggest superpower?

It is difficult to say that someone is impaired when they can reach one of the greatest achievements in the world.
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I posed these questions to Dr. Allen Frances himself over email. His response smacked me right out of the bad path I was going down of framing Trump’s behavior in terms of mental health.

“It is a great, and frequently made, error to equate bad behavior with mental illness. The mentally ill only rarely behave badly and people who behave badly are rarely mentally ill. And as many people have pointed out, talking about bad behavior as though it’s an inevitable quality of the mentally ill does us a lot of harm.”

This was certainly true in my experience. As a kid and as a teen, I was so terrified of getting in trouble that I never so much as shoplifted a candy bar, I didn’t try weed or alcohol until I was in college, and I drove myself into the ground to get nearly all A’s throughout middle and high school.

Still, concerning Trump, my initial question hadn’t been answered. What does “mental illness” even mean in a society that elected Donald Trump to the presidency? What is it in a society that’s sick enough to have put an administration into power that ticked off most of the hallmarks of fascism off in less than a month?

New research into stress and trauma is leading a number of psychologists to believe that many incidents of mental illness are the result of behaviors and stress responses learned during traumatic incidents and/or abusive or highly stressful environments that are maladaptive in one’s larger society.

Again, this resonates with my own experience. I now work in a place where I have never been treated badly or screamed at or even scolded, yet I still feel like I have to walk on eggshells. Despite all evidence that it’s a safe place, I have trouble asking for help or admitting to making any kind of mistake, which impedes my ability to work.

The role of trauma and stress in mental illness formation was further explored by psychology professors Bruce J. Ellis and Marco Del Giudice in the 2013 paper “Beyond allostatic load: Rethinking the role of stress in human development.” In it, they argue that the standard idea that the intense stress responses learned in a volatile childhood environment result in toxic and maladaptive behavior patterns in adulthood is too simplified. They explore the idea that what are considered to be “maladaptations” could instead be viewed as differences in skill types—and at times even represent advantages:

“…maltreated children score lower than comparison groups on standard tests of intelligence and executive functions. Yet such children may show enhanced ability to detect, learn, and remember stimuli that are ecologically relevant to them. This includes enhanced perceptual sensitivity to angry facial clues, increased anticipatory monitoring of the environment in the context of interpersonal hostility, greater accuracy in identifying facial expressions of anger based on degraded visual information, greater speed in accurately labeling fearful faces, enhanced recall of distracting aggressive stimuli, and greater accuracy in identifying an adult in a photo line-up with whom they previously had a stressful interaction.”

Sounds like me.

But, of course, not all stress is caused by family. What if all of society is a highly stressful environment for someone? What about, to name just a few groups, black Americans, trans people, and Latinx immigrants? Could they ever be considered “truly” mentally ill while living in a society that openly treats them far worse than my family treated me? If members of various marginalized populations are highly anxious, stressed, suspicious, or even hostile all the time, is that not a normal, adaptive response to the threats they’re under just by existing?

Why I’m Done Being A ‘Good’ Mentally Ill Person

To glean more insight on the matter, I spoke with sociologist Dr. Nancy Heitzeg, author of The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards, on how white privilege interacts with the diagnosis of mental illness. In her text, she demonstrates how white people tend to be “medicalized,” or diagnosed with some kind of illness that renders them not responsible for their actions — let us not forget the infamous case of “affluenza” in which a wealthy teen was sentenced to rehab after killing four people on a drunken joy ride — while people of color, particularly black individuals, are “criminalized.”

In the introduction of her book, she says:

“This trend toward criminalization for people of color and medicalization for whites provides the larger socio-political context for the school-to-prison pipeline as youth of color, particularly Black males, are increasingly ‘criminalized’ within the context of schools, while their white counterparts are ‘medicalized’ for the same disruptive behaviors.”

Dr. Heitzeg expanded on this in our conversation, explaining how even when black and other marginalized children are diagnosed with illnesses rather than being immediately funneled into the juvenile justice system, a diagnosis is more likely to function as a stigma than as a way to excuse behavior.

“When you look at black children, there’s a tendency to label them with learning disabilities and behavior disorders or disturbances,” she said. This kind of diagnosis only serves to label them as ‘problem children’ who should be given up on, rather than sick kids who just need some extra help. “The medical model is helpful for some but can be a double whammy for others.”

This further complicates things. If there’s so much bias in how people are diagnosed, how can we know who is ill and who is not? What about the fact that many of the people who do the diagnosing are privileged white people? How much privilege do the people writing the criteria for diagnosis have?

Dr. Heitzeg’s response to that question told me enough: “Don’t get me started.”

If there’s so much bias in how people are diagnosed, how can we know who is ill and who is not?
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It’s not just about race, either. Women, for instance, are often misdiagnosed with personality disorders for being “overdramatic” (thanks to a generous dose of medical misogyny from the historically male-dominated field of psychiatry) and autistic kids are often initially misdiagnosed with mental illness. And it’s important to keep in mind that higher level mental illnesses such as personality disorders and schizophrenia are significantly more stigmatized than my mood disorders.

In the broader social justice community, talk of mental illness still seems to be fairly surface level, rarely taking these many nuances into account. Mental illness is considered to be an axis of oppression, and neurotypicals — people without mental illnesses, autism, or any kind of “intellectual” disability — are the oppressors. But I feel a bit weird talking about “those neurotypicals” because who actually is neurotypical when our system of diagnosing mental illness is so imprecise and so subject to prejudice?

Not only can you not tell if someone has a mental illness by looking at them or how they behave, they themselves may be mentally ill and not know it. And some of us who have been labeled with an illness may in fact not have one, either because we were misdiagnosed for being female and upset, because we’re actually autistic but present differently because we’re not white boys, or even because we’ve fully recovered but can’t shake the stigma.

So is Donald Trump mentally ill? That’s not the conversation we should be having.

We should be talking about his white-supremacist-backed bigot horror machine administration and how his policies threaten the lives and livelihood of millions of people globally. And while we’re at it, we also need to have a deeper conversation about what mental illness is, including how it’s defined, who gets to define it, and how that definition changes with privilege — or a lack thereof. It needs to be a lot more than just “don’t use words like cr*zy” and “don’t compare us to Donald Trump.”

Although seriously, please, stop doing that.