Lisa Congdon, from 365 Days of Hand Lettering
A friend asked recently: ‘What is your state of mind?”. Not “how are you?” or “how are you feeling?” She’d managed to find a way into a conversation that I needed to have about what was really going on with me. But it also struck me that maybe we (in that larger society sense) were shifting to being able to discuss our psychological, as well as emotional, states in a more open way. Is it now starting to be possible to have conversations about our mental health, in the same way that we’d talk about our bodies (gym, yoga classes, dieting), our time (how we spend it and with whom) and our plans (for weekends or lives)?
And I started to think about the language that we do use to discuss mental health. Do we even have one, in an everyday, down the pub, thrown into conversation way? Even that term ‘mental health’ smacks of something distant and clinical.
Lisa Congdon, from 365 Days of Hand Lettering
So what are our options? There’s the language of lifestyle: wellness and wellbeing, which seems to have gained currency and is banded about quite naturally now, but its sometimes feels like a language of coaches and spas. A new service industry. Happiness and positive psychology have their territory firmly staked out, and we’re all becoming more comfortable with the former and knowledgeable about the latter. But I think I still trip up if someone discusses them in a social context.
Personal growth makes me think about that line in When Harry Met Sally ("Someone is starting at you in personal growth") and maybe we've left that behind in the eighties. Self-care--of massage and nails; self-help-- brings to mind books I’ll, secretly, skim through and never implement, which might also become a movie that I’ll, equally as secretly, see (He’s Just Not That Into You) – all much too convert and a little bit icky. Sometimes a language of mental health can tip into spirituality, in finding our true selves, all meaning and purpose. Then there’s the sheer kookiness, which in San Francisco abounds.
During yoga class last week I realized that I didn’t yet have a fully-fledged language for mental health. My teacher has that grasp – she can speak of compassion, love, trust, gratitude, joy, hope and optimism, of a life well-lived and kindness in our approach to the world and ourselves. It trips off her tongue. She grew up in California, not Manchester, so there’s a natural disconnect in our language, but I realized that I wanted to learn this dialect. Because the words we use contain the strategies for how we deal with the world, see ourselves and connect with each other. And self-deprecating, cynical northern, isn’t quite going to cut it .
Lisa Congdon, from 365 Days of Hand Lettering