Reflections

When I joined Alabama Appleseed as the organization’s first researcher seven years ago, I expected to learn a lot about Alabama. What I didn’t realize what how much I’d learn about myself. As I take my leave, some reflections on what I hope I’ll leave behind.

By Leah Nelson

When I was 10 years old, the mother of a girl in my fifth-grade class took her own life.

I’m not sure how I know this. A kid who knew the girl better must have whispered it. I do remember my fifth-grade teacher telling my class the girl’s mother had died. I remember raising my hand and say I heard she had killed herself. I remember my teacher telling me that wasn’t something people talk about.

I remember turning the idea of suicide over and over in my head and knowing that inside my head was where it had to stay—because, as my teacher told me, it was not something people talk about.

And so I grew up assuming everyone thought about taking their own lives. That’s what I thought about. And since most people around me seemed OK, I also assumed I was the only person not up to the task of managing my feelings.

It was a lonely way to feel.

My work at Appleseed, where I researched and wrote about people’s experiences with violence and the criminal legal system, has focused on what happens after people have experiences that are unmanageable. How they carry on in the wake of trauma and loss, humiliation, fear, setbacks, mistakes, and loss of liberty. What they do with themselves and to themselves—and with and to their communities—in the aftermath.

I am not a survivor of violence. I have never been incarcerated or charged with a crime. I do not have those experiences in common with the people whose stories and experiences I sought to elevate in my work at Appleseed.

What I do have in common with them, I think, is the experience of feeling something unmanageable and also unspeakable, and ultimately being at a loss to handle it on my own. I know what it feels like to be set apart by something that people do not talk about.

Throughout middle and high school, I hid my depression as well as I could. It was in college that I started opening up about how I felt. But I quickly realized my friends did not feel the same way. They were conflicted and moody and anxious and weird the way young people often are, but they didn’t feel the way I felt. Realizing this made me feel so overwhelmingly alone that I dropped out of school.

I was lucky: My family and a handful of very good friends realized that I needed help and had the means to make sure I got it. I spent some time in intensive psychiatric treatment. I was one of the youngest people there. I saw things that terrified me. I saw a woman try to choke herself by swallowing a ping-pong ball. I met the same woman a few weeks later after she’d had electroconvulsive therapy. She was so cognitively impaired from the treatment that she didn’t recognize me.

But I also met people who had things to teach me. There was a woman in her 50s who had struggled with serious mental illness for decades. She was also a photographer. I bought a photo from her that still hangs in my home. It shows a tree in the middle of a flooded field, so flawlessly reflected in the water that it’s hard to tell where the tree ends and the reflection begins. I believe the photographer’s illness impelled her to seek that beauty and stillness, and take a minute to notice it so she could remember it later. There is something to learn from that.

I eventually got better, though it took all of my 20s. Eventually I moved to Alabama and found myself writing about, and sometimes working with, people who had been involved with the criminal legal system.

Some of them had hurt other people, though most had hurt only themselves. Some hurt no one, but were trapped in a cycle of debt and incarceration as a result of poverty-based offenses.

All of them were haunted in tangible ways by a system of punishment that is designed to make itself difficult to overcome and which is taboo to talk about. They had felony convictions and outstanding warrants and suspended drivers’ licenses. They had mandatory drug tests and probation appointments and monthly payment plans that meant they couldn’t always feed their families, or themselves. They had education and ambition and intelligence and warmth and drive.

I have never been convicted of anything more serious than a traffic violation, but my experience with mental illness left me with some sense of what it is like to be reduced to, and haunted by, just one thing about you. Though there have been some changes in recent years, social stigma around mental illness remains intense. There is a reason I don’t often talk about this part of who I am.

But people are complicated and uncategorizable—and that, fundamentally, is what the work I did with Appleseed was about.

It can be difficult to absorb information that complicates whatever narrative we have constructed or adopted about individuals or places or the way the world works. But when we learn things that complicate our understanding of the world around us, the question is what we will do with them. Do we have it in us to change our behavior in response to nuanced and challenging realities? When it comes to how we respond to violence and brokenness in Alabama, that is a question that we have to ask ourselves.

For me, this work has been an attempt to chronicle and demonstrate that our lives and communities are more complicated than the reductive narratives so often handed to us, and that it is worth delving into how we are all shaped by the hard parts. It has been an attempt to create space for those who need it to process, manage, and come to terms with grief and the aftereffects of trauma, which—much like mental illness—is something that is acknowledged and worried about in the abstract but for which very little space currently exists.

I started this essay with a sentence that’s hard to write, about a terribly sad and also terribly common event that I was told not to speak of. I wrote about how I internalized the message that certain things are too awful to talk about, and how the isolation of being unable to talk made it hard for me to know how to keep going.

Working at Alabama Appleseed was not supposed to be about me. Yet reflecting on my years here, I can’t help but reflect on the self-knowledge I’ve gained by paying attention to the people it’s been my privilege to work with. Community Navigator Callie Greer is a chef and a singer, a mother and grandmother, a “delivered drug addict” and a world traveler and an inspiration. Re-Entry Coordinator Ronald McKeithen is an artist and an enthusiast who, everywhere I’ve been with him, dashes over to any art that might be on display and closely examines what I might have barely glanced at. Birmingham Re-Entry Alliance Case Manager Stacey Fuller is a plant-lover and a veteran and a nurse and a person in recovery from a town called Bugtussle, who knows how to wield her complicated past as either a sword and a plowshare, depending on the room. Sometimes both. Callie and Ron and Stacey’s openness about the difficult parts of their pasts inspires me to better mother and a more thoughtful person; to integrate parts of myself that I thought were incompatible and walk forward, whole.

I don’t believe my experience of mental illness and recovery is the same as the experiences of the people whose lives I have chronicled in this work, including those I have worked with most closely and love. But I do know what it is like to be deeply affected by experiences that so often go undiscussed and unacknowledged because they are stigmatized. Because we, as a society, do not much like to talk about hard things.

I know what it is like to need space to connect and space to reflect. And as I leave Alabama Appleseed after seven years, I hope this work has gone toward creating that kind of a space—not only for me, but for everyone across Alabama who needs it.