Welcome to the blog extension of this radical cedar project. While the 140 character limit on twitter has been a great creative challenge, there have been some longer things that we have wanted to write about.

We started the twitter feed at the recommendation of a friend that suggested it as a good outlet for the stuff we couldn’t post on Facebook (needing to be more anonymous). It has served as a good outlet for creativity, ideas, and a wide range of intense and complex emotions and experiences we felt a need to express.

This blog and twitter feed is about identity and radical mental health, and is also part of our own mental health strategy. Writing things down has helped us get out of our head, explore issues, feel productive, and feel that someone out there is listening, feeling, and understanding with us.

The internet generally speaking has been an extremely valuable tool for finding communities and reading about mental health experiences not found within mainstream western psychiatric and psychological narratives. These communities are found in various online discussion forums and chat groups, other blogs and social media. They have helped us feel less alone with our experiences that don’t quite fit DSM diagnostic criteria, and opened up the possibility of exploring these experiences through a less pathologizing lens.

Without these communities, we would never begin to understand ourselves as part of a plural system and feel legitimate in this. And we would never have an understanding of quiet borderline personality traits, an understanding that has helped us seek the right supports and navigate these tendencies. Before exploring things in this way, we always just felt off. Like we were atypical and messed up, but too functional to have a “real” disorder or anything to complain about.

These communities have empowered us and others to take charge of our own mental health. We have educated ourselves through sharing our experiences of our own minds and the world. We have come together to find mutual support and challenge the necessary pathologizion and stigma associated with our experiences.

This is our contribution, our reaching out to connect with others, to share our experiences and feel less alone.

See the About page to read more about us.