Cultivated Compassion

I was introduced to mental illness at a very young age long before a strange visit many years later. I do not know whether it was the sexual victimization or the poverty in a vicious violent community, but my childhood was marred with trauma. This trauma gave me a sadness inside the depths of my soul that took many decades to heal. This sadness manifested later into depression then into manic depression with suicidal tendencies. This was a scary thing for my family in particular, and many gave up on me, but my mother refused and used a mix of prayer and tough love to keep me from going over the deep.

It was particularly scary because my mother’s family had a severe issue with mental illness especially a high incidence of schizophrenia. My mother’s mother, several of her aunts, uncles, brothers, and many other relatives had become mentally ill. It seemed like there was always a couple in each generation who became ill. She even had a cousin who had disappeared because of it and was never found, and his three children all had the same issue leading to early death. Others even making decisions that led to their early death as well. Mental illness was an issue that was and still is very taboo in Jamaica and many other countries. People with mental health challenges face serious discrimination and even abuse and violence which lead to exclusion from many services and opportunities. So, this fear for them about me was real and must have haunted them often.

This suffering for me was a sorrow for my family especially with my eccentric personality. But somethings reached out to me more than my siblings and I was just harder to control and more rebellious. Being the youngest Generation X child in a house filled with old and young Baby Boomers gave me the title of being the ‘handbag’. The one that would accompany my mother everywhere all the time. This was purely protective, but I learnt a lot and my mothers’ heart was exposed to me, sometimes through the activities she did. She was a hardworking dedicated mother who cleaned people’s houses for a living. And she was a dedicated daughter and while she did not have any relationship with a paternal family, she was a good daughter to her mother.

My grandmother was a farmer and pretty much single parent of nine kids. She worked hard night and day. Never resting or even living, just working, and surviving so she could make her kids survival a little easier. She became mentally ill and after two nervous breakdowns she was admitted permanently into the place that while was not a prison, nobody usually came out except in a pine coffin reserved for nobody paupers. So, being the handbag, it was no surprise my first introduction to my grandmother was a Sunday afternoon at the insane asylum. And that became the Sunday evening ritual I knew until she died when I was in my twenties.

After her death I wanted to share the compassion I developed from my experience at the asylum. I had gained a lot of knowledge from conversations with what the world called crazy people. To me they were interesting characters, each with a story and just in need of some attention beyond basic medical care. But be careful of what you ask for because you just might get it, and that I did. I got the opportunity to volunteer with some faith-based volunteers at a drop-in homeless shelter next door to the asylum a few years after my grandmother died. It was perfect for me, because I did not have or care about the stigma and discrimination attached to being associated with the homeless or mentally ill. I loved my grandmother and intended to pour that love out on everyone that needed it. Because her illness and my own inspired me to not stay silent in fear of becoming the next her. Instead, it fueled me.

That shelter moved from being a small building offering meals, bath and a change of clothes to Kingston’s most poor and in-need, to providing support to at times to one hundred clients in a residential setting. A group of people who saw a need and just started to respond how they could, until it became more. Truly the definition of the evolution of good deeds, I think. And every year when we are all off from work, my family, close friends, and I spend a whole day there. We get there early to get make breakfast, then dinner and we play games, laugh, and eat together. These the outcast of my society became my family with a common issue uniting us. This same issue which is scorned at and frowned upon by many but one that a little love can help to support as a part of healing.

On my lunch break sometimes, I would make a stop in at the shelter in-between my trip into Kingston. To sit and have a conversation with a friend, ‘Hutchy’. He was a mentally ill man who had an altercation with a child and was beaten senseless by community members. When he just came to the shelter, he could hardly walk and definitely could not talk. He shuffled and would grunt and scream. When we had group sessions, the other men would ask that he be removed. I repeatedly told them, “this is the best place for him, hearing the word” and I would just rub his back ever so gently to calm him down. He has calmed down over the years and would be the first to get up and share about God’s goodness even if we could only make out only a few words. He was a walking miracle and an inspiration to me. When I left for a few months to give birth to my daughter, I missed them so much and despite being cautioned about taking my baby there, as soon as I was strong, I was right back there. He greeted me that day with a big hug and a clear and well-articulated “TanYah I missed you” this was gasoline to the fire of my compassion that has kept me burning.

I never felt any fear having my kids there but one day when my daughter was about two years old, she held on to the very dirty, stinky skirt tale of a mentally ill woman who lived in an underground gully. And for a second I flinched, but I was comforted by the compassion within me to let her be and let her love another human being purely. And that she did. She was a compassionate girl not like any toddler or young child I knew, she cared and saw the needs of others. She was always sharing food, toys, and kind words. My grandmother’s legacy of inspiration had been passed on to the next generation.

This compassion has become contagious and has led to an over twelve-year gathering of family and friends using personal resources to just be for a day with people that have little to no family. Nothing like being labeled crazy or falling into homeless to get cut off from loved ones. There is no media or promotion on that day by us, because real good deeds from the depths of compassion is never for acclaim, it is to just respond. It is like a dog whistle sound that only dogs can hear. I think responders hear on a vibration of love many do not and that is the reward, or honor even.

I was inspired to love because their situation could easily be my own and I take the time to listen to them because there is a wealth of knowledge hidden in the many insane asylums, homeless shelter, and drug rehabilitation centers globally. They are people who are blatantly honest and even in deception there is truth. They will lie to eat but will be truthful to stay friends. They treasure friendship and I have been exceedingly fortunate to spend many hours talking and sharing with them.

Good deeds never start out grand for the most compassionate responders and sometimes it is not even thought out. While in hindsight I am able to articulate the moments well back then I really just did it, moment by moment, as did the other volunteers. The need grew and it made demand on our response, so it then grew too. But it does start with a need and beyond the need someone to respond to it. The trigger for my response was my background and the unintentional facilitation of compassion in an extremely taboo setting by a poor mother broken hearted from her mother living over three decades in a mental asylum. And not a grand, clean, or well-kept place to say the least. But a place with cages and concrete cells and with naked dirty homeless people living in the yard in self-made dwellings. People sometimes being treated like animals by those who take oaths to take care for them not out of any evil intent but just an overworked under resourced lack of compassion.

They were just people like me and you former teachers, nurses, doctors, the elite and then farmers like my grandmother. People who the society wants to be invisible and remain unseen. Maybe that’s why people like me suffering with mental illness got ideas that death might be an out. Thankfully, I had that moment at twelve years of age, when I met my grandmother small, thin, and frail but able to recognize and talk with her daughter. And the stressed-out mother I knew who was always screaming had warmed down and was a small child by her mother’s side, sometimes she fought the tears and later she expressed wishing she could have given her more. She took that pain and regret and proudly held my hand over the years I was at the shelter and even in my absence and more aged she makes her way there once a week to have devotion and just encourage the residents there. It warms her soul, and it keeps her connected to the needs of humanity. And what she could not have done or provided to her own mother she does unrelenting to those that have become family. Most importantly, she helped a small sad girl find her way in never being afraid to give and share and just be, with anyone especially those living in the underbelly of the society. I found my sanity in the heart of insanity by society’s standard and among the so called insane and what years of therapy could not achieve was achieve from a good deed. And while I no longer struggle, I am always available to support those that do. I cannot help it it’s just how I am wired.