Like most people don’t like to admit this, but one of the reasons a lot of us have so many mental health issues is because we live in a world that has basically become untenable. People can’t afford basic necessities, let alone to cultivate their interests or take breaks and rest or do any of the things necessary for good mental health. People my age are wracked with debt, working at jobs they hate or studying topics they hate, living in a shitty apartment with five roommates. We live in a world that’s very hard to be healthy in. So while yeah, a lot of people obviously do have mental illnesses that would need medication no matter what, they are greatly exacerbated by these issues, and a lot of people have basically just been thrust into an eternal situational depression. So if that doesn’t change, medication is just a band-aid.
“In 1986 Grandma was worried I wasn’t settling down. So I told her I was having a relationship—with a woman. “I am settling down, in my own way.” And the sunlight settled on the dust on the mantlepiece and the cat settled in Grandma’s lap and Grandma said there were two nurses boarding in her mother’s house in Yorkshire in 1916. And Grandma said she was in love with one of them.
70 years later, she still remembered waiting at the bottom of the boarding-house stairs to blush and smile hello at the funny, dark-eyed nurse she loved.
Love between women? Unforgettable.”
— Eleni Prineas, in Finding the Lesbians: Personal Accounts from Around the World (via oikabooks)
