There's an art to everything she was saying and I understood the words, they rang true, of course they did, but I just didn't get it. Not yet. I was 18, sat in a lecture hall filled with mainly female students studying to become nurses and occupational therapists, listening to a ( very old, probably in her seventies ) psychiatrist explaining something through a personal anecdote about her own mother looking after the home, laying the table, decorating a cake etc and enjoying these things as a creative act thus finding her life fulfilling. Presumably.
I see that now. I saw it partly then because my own mother was the same, decorating the house, baking, making clothes and fancy dress costumes for us. Making the fruit and veg her husband, our father, grew into delicious dishes. Clothes and cakes, beautiful sweaters from complicated patterns, spreading the often inadequate earnings so dextrously we hardly noticed the weeks it wouldn't reach. It didn't prevent her having terrible outbursts for no apparent reason to us or going into long, dark depressions which left us all, or me at least, feeling guilt ridden and sad.
Everyone was creative in our house. Dad set a bench up in the garage and made things from wood, projects described in The Woodworker's magazine monthly, a bathroom stool, a pair of bookends, a tool box. Later he went on to make exquisitely detailed replicas of old carts, toys for his grandchildren and bowls on a lathe. For now, he also created nail and string pictures at work, probably with a mind to sell them, all the men in his quality control department at Fords would make things when there was some down time and sold them to whoever would buy them in the factory. My brother made wonderful go-carts as a young boy and then mobile disco decks in his teens. He hired himself out as a mobile disco for parties and weddings and made decks for mates to do the same. I sewed, cooked, baked, helped in the garden, made soft toys, drew, painted and decorated my bedroom with leaves and plants, poems and pictures. The whole house buzzed with the life of us.
So I understood a version of what the psychiatrist was saying, even at that age and stage of my life, but, here was the but; I wondered, why were we listening to the, albeit wise, lovely and experienced, thoughts from a retired psychiatrist. A retired person. Why, when we attended anatomy lectures were we expected to glean understanding from the overly-pickled dismembered specimens brandished from afar as we sat high up in the rising seats of the university lecture hall. Were we expected to. What was it we were expected to know and understand. What were we expected to be able to understand. It all felt like the surface skim of knowledge being passed on to us, the overly let down juice that would be given to a toddler. Something inside of me, from my own direct experience, knew there were hidden depths to people, to life, which I was not being invited nor expected to understand. Everything was being simplified, obscured, conveyed in some simplistic way from a long way off, having decayed and altered with the degradation of time. Of course, this is my analysis from here, at the long end of time too, a clearer view because I understand now why that felt so wrong, so inadequate.
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My whole family imagined that being an occupational therapist would be a ladylike and acceptable career for someone like me, who they perceived to be a caring and conscientious person, capable of being of some use to society but not someone they envisaged getting her hands too dirty in an occupation such as nursing. OT was a fairly modern kind of therapy then, an adjunct to physiotherapy and one they hoped would stand me in good stead, make me independent, a well paid job I could do in and around having a family.
The all women OT college was like a finishing school for lower middle class and working class girls like me. Most of us lived at home and those who didn't had digs or rooms within the school which was housed in two large lovely late victorian buildings on the outskirts of the city, in short, it was a very sheltered existence. My first work placement was in the busy Royal university teaching hospital in central Liverpool. There I met some of the patients who would remain in my memory even until now, over forty years later. The first, a couple, a husband who had suffered a stroke who I would spend a long time helping to get dressed each day, time through which we would laugh and struggle together, he, patient with my lack of experience, me, patient because I was full of admiration for his good natured fortitude, and his wife, who had suffered a heart attack, was on a different ward, more acute, who I only got to know because this lovely man, her husband, asked me to take a message to her. She was very poorly and on the first day I went to see her I went home completely devastated by their situation.
Another day I was assigned the task of helping a young Asian man, who'd recently had one leg amputated, to negotiate the seemingly insurmountable task of using the toilet. He was in such a huge amount of pain and distress he was apparently unabashed about a young female assisting him, but I felt bad enough for both of us as I helped him work out how to balance.
Then there was the young woman around my own age who had suffered a stroke and lost her ability to speak. Her aphasia, luckily, made her laugh more than it frustrated her and her prognosis was good I was told; youth, general health, being treated early enough etc etc. Nevertheless, I worried for her future and sometimes struggled to hold back tears when talking with her.
There were others and more who would come later in other hospitals I was placed in. Some whose conditions and prognoses haunt me still from time to time, victims of fire, major accidents in the workplace, road traffic accidents. One day of each of those person's lives transformed the rest of their lives in ways they could never have envisaged.
I took my people and my worries for them home with me but never discussed them with anyone. When I finally moved into a house with some fellow students, we rarely discussed the people we met in hospital placements, our conversations being usually about bills, food, cleaning, exams, boyfriends and things we were doing outside of college, not patients, except sometimes when we were helping each other revise conditions and anatomy, we might briefly refer to someone we'd encountered on a ward and such was the understanding of the shared experience, we spoke very little beyond the basics of the implications.
And it all felt wrong.
But I just couldn't put my finger on it at that time.
The day I started a new work placement in the art therapy department of a notorious local psychiatric hospital I began to see what was wrong. For me.
The art therapy department felt wonderful to me. At a remote end of the dark, imposing victorian establishment, the painted brick walls in this room without windows were covered in patients' art. I wandered in and took it all in with growing wonder and a shiver of delight. I poked my head in the open door of the art therapist's office and, the thin, besuited figure twizzling in the office chair ushered me in enthusiastically. We had a long, animated discussion about art and how it liberated the mind. I felt rather out of my depth but considered that appropriate since I knew nothing about art therapy. Art had been my favourite subject next to English I confessed to the erudite interviewer. I told him about travelling to Liverpool or London once a month to visit galleries and the sort of art that I loved. He listened with intense interest. I'd never talked like this to anyone before. I was revealing even to myself, the profound impression certain works of art had made on me, some of them religious and I found myself explaining that it wasn't the subject matter that moved me so much as the devotion of the artist to their work, which surprised me and animated him.
He suddenly went off at a different tangent, confiding in me his thoughts about the electricity which he said was running right under our feet and up the walls. He then stood up to show me that he was wearing wellies for safety. I felt only mild surprise, I was, after all, in a totally new situation so was open to most anything.
In my memory, it was at this exact point that the art therapist entered the room. A large, lumbering Tom Bombadil kind of a man, smiling, gesticulating for the other thin, besuited man to leave the room and offering me a cup of tea, like an apology.
The time I spent in this department changed my whole life's arc. I found it quite painful to watch some of the work that went on, for example, when the art therapist would bring in a patient who was emerging from a state of catatonia, and help them choose a postcard to copy. Some patients would absorb themselves for days in this seemingly laborious task and it filled me with a kind of terror that I didn't understand until much later in life. Sometimes people would produce amazing work to look at. For some of them, art was a truly therapeutic release of inner turmoil and confusion and they had a great aptitude for illuminating what was going on inside. The besuited thin man who had greeted me on arrival was one of those people. I hoped he would be able to live as an artist and show his work, but for now, this strange place, truly a place of asylum, seemed to be enough for him.
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As an OT student, I was being trained to assess and assist patients in making things like rope woven stools. In the outpatients department of a general hospital, this was deemed quite useful as a therapy specifically for those people who had suffered hand or finger injuries as it helped to improve dexterity and strength in the hands and fingers and for those recovering from other injuries, it was a gentle introduction to a work-like task and a good start to re-building stamina. In the psychiatric department, I suppose they would have been considered therapeutic in various different ways; a pleasant distraction that had a creative point; creating a useful and aesthetically pleasing object which accounted for one's time, perhaps giving some sense of fulfilment, a reminder of the joy of achievement. OT training involved developing skills in alot of such creative, work-like activities which combined mind and body and could be adapted for various needs and abilities and stages of recovery.
It became obvious to me during my time in the psychiatric hospital that it was states of mind which interested me personally, though not exclusively. I was all too well aware of how the two affected each other through personal experience of being frequently ill, being insomniac, becoming anorexic and through members of my family dealing with physical illness and disability like my beloved nana who became crippled with arthritis and also became depressed and mute as she got old, sadly the long-term effect of the toll that war-time took on her whole being.
But I didn't want to do work I felt at that point was superficial.
I understand the potential values better now than I did then but if I ever come across one of those stools, on eBay or in a second hand shop, they still make me shudder.
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A few years and quite alot of happy struggle later found me doing a fine art degree and sharing a flat in Moss Side, Manchester with my musician boyfriend. We had very little income and were subletting the flat from a friend who also had very little income and so most of the floors of this generously sized flat were bare. One morning, my boyfriend got up to go to the bathroom for a wee. I woke to his loud howl and he came running, gingerly, in bare feet across the wooden floor boards back to bed complaining loudly of how he'd just got an electric shock from the toilet. It wasn't the last time this would happen and a few weeks later, electricians were walking around our flat with heavy insulated boots on searching for the fault. I donned my wellies.
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The arc of my life ;
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