A Drinkable Beauty
susanne paola antonetta
MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles to the north, by Canada. It’s a place of beauty that’s a bit prickly in its heart. Our water numbs and the beaches are stone and pebble. The mountain—Mount Baker, or Kulshan to the Native people whose unceded land we live on—is volcanic. Striking out in most directions is an act defined by the necessity of turning back.
Heading south down our Chuckanut Drive, fossil leaves and ferns from the Eocene peel off the banks of shale that line the roadside. Sometimes I pull over on the steep roadside to pick them up. They remind me that we always live with the possibility of becoming something that peels.
As a neurodiverse person, I can find the totality of the world overwhelming, though I love it still. I’m bipolar and my mind is generally a rushed and fermenting place. When experiencing psychosis, I experience the world in a way that is intimate and unique to me. I’ve heard radiators speak and seen my walls tremble. And I’ve learned to respect how absolutely the world and its many provocations sink into me. Imagine seeing all that you can see—everything, horizon to horizon—and needing to know it all, share joy with it all, grieve with it all. So although nature is one of my great loves, I live much of that love in the small piece of earth I call my own. Here I can hold the wonders of growth and maturation and the great profusion of life familiarly, a drinkable beauty. Though I might sometimes dial down my consciousness, I have no desire to tune my mental state to anyone else’s station. I value the way I experience life. My Twitter handle is Madwoman Out of the Attic, a reference to the locked-away Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre. I embrace the term mad.
Our psychiatry’s diagnostic manuals and hundreds of categories of “disorders” treat a chunk of what happens in my mind as a symptom to eradicate. After a lifetime of evaluations, overmedication, and outright abuse, I reject the model of my mind as ill. Call me mad, in the common sense of the term, about my madness.
Our property is five thousand square feet, about seventy feet by seventy feet, or just a bit above Bellingham’s minimum lot size. It jostles into its footage our small house. Nevertheless, I keep the whole place almost comically overplanted. Two mini-cherry trees in the back, hovering over kale and blueberries. Raspberries, strawberries, and raised beds of greens and tomatoes, sage and sorrel, wherever I can stash them.
When I ran out of space in the
