Some of the most influential mental health writing we've published since 2024 were pages the writer cut irregularities of flesh for and we think thoughtful advocacy with honest word choice is sexy. Agency in a sentence feels like high school summer. When you coil and set text towards flight (the freedom of being read, of community healing via act of witnessing), you'll feel some somatic release. It's therapy, just free, you made it yourself. The injury is exposed and that's where resurrection becomes an option. Maybe there's catharsis in your story that you didn't know about. Write the end angrily, remember how it felt waking up after the terrible event. Before the disability, there was your childhood.
Potential contributor, leave fright behind. We'll be a safe place. Fear the internet but not here.
Memory retention's our best friend despite damage to our working memory. Pull threads towards scene, and find the old box of clothing wearing 2001's smells. You can write against the damage. You are so damaged and you don't even know it. There are decades of energy in our muscles. What's the matter with your matter? Pull it from your thighs with prayers to the keyboard. The writers who have married their trauma pull from the throat like divine sword-swallowers.
The politics of the body is a perpetual weather this country rarely keeps or prepares provisions for, and I’ve often thought about global psychiatry when publishing contributors from countries where democracy has different sway. Is it better over there? Political writing should be published topically around mental health, but Libre /Haunted will cry nightly over these artist's prophecies. Balance, and the lonely trauma of reading a voice in crisis, that's our pretense for a hopeful opening. We also hope for forgiveness. Second chances rarely come unless you're lucky or meant to be here. We don't know yet, and we leave the small sacrifice of our fate in your intelligent hands.
I tell myself: read some Jung first and maybe breakfast will choke less. Social applications are collective espies my own generation has taken to bathhousing our new, newly wrinkled angles against poppy-content. These are frames, popularizations of Freudian thought in vein of anonymous, witty avatar. I reference psych accounts and “smart-art” image macros. The memes we spammed through, butterfly-kissing to friendly PFPs of our casuals, shaking the digital lighting weakly. The lamp’s flickering the funniness of the 4D lol: hellos, expressions of a lo-fi lamb and text that prophecies, in slim font, its pop-psych bones. The inner child is conversing with the vapor-lamb and you’re smiling and transgressing old memory. Sobbing, six, inexplicably angry, the parental fight left pulling sheets in the kitchen air like the dead thing you’ve seen upstairs. The dead thing is your ghost and aged 29 and writing your essay for you... submit there, it laughs, they have bad graphics and a broken heart!
your editorial ghost,
mary b.