Origami

The enjoyment and satisfaction that I get from origami is through an appreciation of the materials in my hands and in the process of folding, pleating, pressing, curving, pinching, popping and playing. The end product is less important than the process even though I do enjoy the challenge of following complex instructions and quickly reach a state of flow if it's just complex enough not to be too daunting! Sometimes though, as I'm holding the paper, another direction will present itself to me and what I end up making may not be what I first intended. That's okay. Being flexible brings strength. The semi-abstract forms that result are finished when I find them pleasing enough that I want to photograph them. And I note that the act of photographing them changes them yet again. What was once a two-dimensional piece of paper, folded and manipulated into a fragile semblance of volume and space, takes on a solidity in its photographed form that was never really there. I am reminded of the deceptive nature of anxiety and depression which allows a mother to go for months not realising the pain that their child is in. The apparent robustness of the origami heart hides the empty space behind. We live in a time when mental health is mentioned daily, if not hourly in newspapers, on television, in schools and colleges and workplaces. And yet, in the face of crisis I still feel utterly powerless.

It's not though, is it? If you are tired, not eating well, in pain, socially isolated, suffering the effects of poverty or poor housing, the physical toll on your body impacts your mind. It's all tied up together.

Language and the way we choose to use it makes for a very powerful tool which should be handled with care. It might not be a global thing but in my childhood, if you were accused of being 'soft' it meant you had no backbone, couldn't stand up for yourself, crumbled too easily in the face of adversity, were daft for being too easily upset over trivial things. It was not a compliment. It fostered the idea that it wasn't okay to admit to being upset. It encouraged concealment and deceit and discouraged conversation, healing, or sharing. I prefer to think of 'soft' as comforting, warming, reassuring, welcoming.

Days go by and the immediate crisis has passed. There is ongoing worry and confusion, but normal things have to keep happening and so we do them and time passes and some days I forget to be concerned.

My husband wanted me to throw the tulips out. They were long past their best; the plump youthful petals had withered to old skin and the stems, no longer succulent, were stringy and brittle. It was when he mentioned it again, three days later, the tulips now bent double over the edge of my grandmother’s jug that I wondered if the effort of keeping up normal was having same effect on us. Would I turn around one day and find us withered? Or could we suffer this and outlast it?

Think about it. We all do it, to some extent or another. A different mask for each occasion; facets of our personality highlighted for this set of people, buried for that. Our masks allow us to move seamlessly between colleagues and friends and family, aquaintances or people we only ever see on the bus without letting any of them really touch us. But if we never let the mask slip, might we forget what lies underneath? When does the security blanket become a smothering device?

The first time I tried to take an overdose, I was 18. I don’t think I wanted to die, not really. But I had no idea how to live with the sadness and numbness and heaviness that shrouded me daily and made everything grey and unbearable. We didn’t talk about it. Nobody knew how. Nobody wanted to know how. The one time I tried to talk, to a GP, he sent me away with a prescription for laxatives and the sage advice that I was too young to be depressed. Things are better now. For me, and for those generally coping with mental health issues but there is still stigma, it is still hard to admit that you’re not coping and sometimes, for all the services available out there, encouraging us to talk, it seems easier to clamp your mouth shut, say nothing and keep that pain from escaping where there’s always the danger that it might be visible and grow so big that we can no longer keep it in check enough to be able to carry on.

Let me tell you a secret. Hold this hurt and pain, fold it over, and over, put it away, hide it and never tell. Absorb it. Become it. See how that sounds? It's not healthy. I don't believe in secrets. I don't believe in requiring others to keep things secret. Secrets don't help.

A casual comment thrown in my direction by my mother. It wormed its way into my head and with no other embellishment served to tell me that on the one hand there were expectations and on the other that I had failed to meet them. Unintended consequences I’m sure. but I was set up to think of myself as not being quite right, not being