the woman and the psychiatrist + the abject
weather: ☀️ nice
critters: tiger swallowtails
the draw of a freakshow is older than writing, i'm sure, even if they didn't call them "freakshows" back the neolithic. the morality of looking is a perennial issue in our image-based world--bearing witness to keep horrors out of the memory hole vs. tactical ignorance as withdrawal from the immobility of despair.
i've come to terms with being someone who looks. i can't judge anyone else who looks. curiosity hasn't killed me, but it has hurt. maybe it even hurts what i'm looking at.
the latest entry in the visibly unwell online autofiction genre took off more than many of the others. one could chalk this up to the hot buttons this story presses: a white woman and a brown man, an astrology girlie and a muslim, a mentally ill patient and a mental health doctor, a false accuser and the falsely accused, the fixated and the object, callouts and HIPAA laws, infantilization and accountability. it's like a midterm exam on intersectionality.
the overlap with AI psychosis only solidifies the now-ness of the drama. a few years into the butlerian jihad, this facet will be both quaint and disturbing, like appalachian snake handling.
dino felluga by way of julia kristeva on the abject:
. . . the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The primary example for what causes such a reaction is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit, sewage, even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk.
i feel a kinship with a "concerned" faction of kendra's viewers. we're riding the same cultural currents that let us feel okay, or at least not evil, about gawking at and talking about people going through mental health crises where everyone can see. and a part of us looks at kendra and sees every beloved friend and relative and partner we tried and failed to help with their illness.
among these viewers, reading comments by others who've felt this pain, i think of linda bishop--determined by the legal system to have been well within her american liberties to refuse mental health treatment and starve to death in a cold house, waiting for rescue by a man her synapses invented.
writing on the public's fascination with the kendra hilty story, mary mcnamara says:
. . . when one of these types of videos pops up or goes viral, there’s no harm in asking “why exactly am I watching this” and “what if it were me?”
these are fair questions to ask of anyone who looks. the answer to the first one is the abject. the second...
i tend to have my breakdowns in crawlspaces or closets, like an injured cat. but maybe someday i'll have one in public. not impossible. if it's prolonged enough, someone will probably film it. and i'd be embarrassed and ashamed if it went viral. i would hope for compassionate responses and go looking for them and probably not find any.
i'd think about filming my own apology and putting it online. then i wouldn't do it, because i'd know how hollow it'd ring for anyone who watched it. the emotionally imbalanced lunatic they'd seen (moments ago, in the online spacetime collapse) would look exactly the same as me. and it would be me. it would be me at my least understandable, my most unlovable.
felluga again:
. . . we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject (much as we are repeatedly drawn to trauma in Freud's understanding of repetition compulsion). To experience the abject in literature carries with it a certain pleasure but one that is quite different from the dynamics of desire. Kristeva associates this aesthetic experience of the abject, rather, with poetic catharsis: "an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it."
something like kendra's story is happening in my mom's family right now. it's escalated to legal action. only difference is none of them are on tiktok.