I spent many years at the front of a classroom, first as a high school English teacher and then, after my children were born, teaching writing part-time at several community colleges.
I had the opportunity to return to the classroom as a student several years ago, to participate in a Writing Away the Stigma fellowship sponsored by Pittsburgh’s Staunton Farm Foundation. The program included a series of workshops where the twelve participants wrote about how mental illness affected their lives. We met one evening a week for five weeks and hammered out stories under the guidance of the director, Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Although our stories didn’t directly address the shame associated with mental illness, the hope was that by sharing our experience, we slowly chipped away at the stigma that shadows people with a mental illness.
The inspiration for my story was a simple family meal in which my husband, Steve, and I sat around the kitchen table with our three children eating hamburgers and French fries. I was at one end of the table, watching the kids as they reached back and forth grabbing condiments for their sandwiches. Steve sat opposite me, silently eyeing the ketchup bottle being passed among them. He’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder several years earlier, which greatly affected his self-confidence, even in his being able to ask someone to pass the ketchup. The moment touched me deeply, for it helped me see the depth to which he’d been affected by the illness.
Ten of our essays were compiled in the book Writing Away the Stigma, published in 2014 by InFact Books. The Children’s Mental Health Network, which shares information that supports the mental health and well-being of children and families, posted my story on its blog. You can read it here.
