All good and well, but also Mask Magazine’s bread and butter.

Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory at first appears to be the work of a chronically ill woman demanding to let the world know she mattered. They have attached many words to me over the years, and though some of these have provided articulation that was useful – after all, no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand – first I want to suggest some other ways of understanding my ‘illness.'” – Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory “I am antagonistic to the notion that the Western medical-insurance industrial complex understands me in my entirety, though they seem to think they do. Where was a sick person’s place in the Revolution? “I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight.' So I’m back at where this crazy ride all began, the same question Johanna Hedva’s essay sparked in my head only a few moon phases ago: Get well.īut I don’t want to be well, not if it means living and thinking as they do. Cops and Occupy-faithful tell me there’s something wrong with me, that if I could just “think correctly” I’d come around. I’m beginning to notice I’m a crocodile among alligators, similar yet not quite the same. Just yesterday I told an otherwise very nice Anarchist that he could take his rotating councils and shove them so far up his ass that consensus would positively drip out of his eyeballs. I’ve never felt more myself yet I can’t deny my behaviors are… anti-social. My wife says I’m sick, and this might be true. A new tattoo is itching on my arm and it won’t be long before I get another.

I’ve researched intentional communities, communes, and even building my own fortified compound off somewhere in the swamps, accessible only by airboat and protected by an army of voodoo dolls hung from every tree. I’ve developed an extreme aversion to therapy programs even though I’ve never attended one and mutter “sluggish schizophrenia” at odd, random intervals. I’m reading about Hell’s Angels, watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and struggling with a desire to load up my wife and cats in a camper and hit the open road. For days it incubated within me, feeding on previously held constructs and thought-patterns only to burst out of my chest in a bloody and new take on mental health itself. One essay, one little essay on a website I don’t even read has thrown me into the oblivion and practically ripped my head clean off my shoulders. Synchronicities are everywhere, so much so that I’m beginning to feel paranoid. What the hell have I gotten myself into? Does this happen to other people?

Sick woman theory