Life As Performance Art 166

Yesterday I wrote an email to one of my supervisors where I have threatened to resign. Here it is, Gentle Reader: "I am not comfortable with our conversation today about the second last meeting. I feel that you overstepped, as my mental health is for me a personal matter, and I do not believe it is your place to bring this up with me. I have thought carefully about how I conducted myself and I see nothing wrong with anything I did or how I expressed myself. I simply asked if it would be okay to do some art during the meeting, as I have been having a strong creative impulse lately (not at all related to anxiety), and had anyone expressed discomfort I would have had no problem with not doing it. Concerning asking someone to move their paperwork. there was no room for me at the table, and I was polite. Concerning the window blinds, I simply thought it would be pleasant for everyone to have some daylight and to be able to see out the window. It really perplexes me that you would find cause to pathologize any of this, and this actually makes me want to tender my resignation.... This is not certain yet, as I would like to continue to work with my current client as long as he can benefit from my support, then perhaps you and I can discuss it from there. But I cannot work comfortably with colleagues by whom I feel pathologized. I thank you for your understanding." I had been showing some of my drawings to my colleagues during check-in that day as part of letting them know what I have been up to. Since I find it easier to focus during meetings and listening while drawing, I didn't see any harm in asking if I could continue doing art during that particular meeting. I don't know where the supervisor got the idea that this was somehow associated with me having anxiety but this assumption is very insulting, and coming from a coworker, inappropriate. Understandable, of course, because at the mental health team where peer support workers are employed, we are considered and treated as damaged goods, as not quite equal to union staff and they really do look down at us. It's inevitable, along with the offensively low pay that keeps us marginalized and stigmatized as workers. Likewise about asking for room on the table. There wasn't any, given other people's natural tendency of taking up as much space as they can. I simply politely asked the coworker next to me for a little room, and no problem. Why would the supervisor conclude that I was having a mental health crisis, when had it been regular union staff doing the same thing she likely wouldn't have batted an eye? But because we are already labeled as mental health consumers, we are also considered damaged goods and this stigma never quite escapes from us, nor us from this stigma. Neither can I figure out why anyone would take offence that I would open the blinds to let in some daylight and so people could see out the window. To me, if there is anything questionable about someone's mental health, my concern would be about the mental health of the person who would prefer that we have our meeting behind closed blinds in a darkened room, shutting out all the beauty of the sunny day outside. The problem here is very simple. When you have been identified as having been diagnosed with a mental health issue, and your employment as a peer is defined by this diagnosis, then that is really all that you are going to be to others in the workplace: a life-support for a mental illness being controlled and managed by medications and approved therapies. I am none of those things. I was never even mentally ill. The PTSD diagnosis was just and only that, Gentle Reader. A diagnosis. I was never on medication, never hospitalized. I was emotionally exhausted for a few years due to such shitloads of trauma as I have already written about in these pages, and now I am completely recovered from all of this, and I am not going to be quiet about this.