One of the most challenging moments of my life taught me resilience. We need that now more than ever.
by Ubax Gardheere
(CROSS CUT) Eleven years ago, I experienced a mental health crisis. After years of insomnia following PTSD and postpartum depression, I left my babies at home with my mother. I told no one, but at the time I had the feeling that I was in danger.
I found myself at a Metro bus stop. A school bus pulled up. I boarded. I watched myself as if watching someone else: asking for the police, saying what I thought could get me arrested, so that I could be taken somewhere safe. For three nights in jail, I slept more deeply than I had in years.
Recent news coverage has forced me to relive this painful moment, one of the most challenging of my life — this time through the lens of national right-wing media, which has unleashed vicious attacks on me. People have asked me to explain what happened. How does one make sense of the senseless? Why would I, who had seen how police in the United States treat Black bodies, ever think of jail as safe? I can’t make sense of it. All I know is that, at the time, getting arrested was the only avenue that made sense to me.
As a mother, I’ll never forget the faces of the children who were impacted by my actions that day. They could have been my own. Some were laughing at me, and some were truly scared. No one was ever in real danger from me, but how could the children on that bus have known?
Since then, I have paid the fines, sought counseling and acknowledged the harm I caused. The most healing and reparative thing I have done is something the court never asked me to do: I have continued to become deeply involved in addressing the societal root causes of the trauma that had manifested in me that day.Next: Fighting wildfires in western WA requires different approaches
It’s not easy to think about how I acted, or the compounding traumas that led up to it, including displacement and forced migration as a refugee; the financial and physical insecurity of living here as a Black, Muslim mother who has experienced houselessness; being physically attacked; and dealing with postpartum depression and insomnia without a safe place to turn to.
In the 11 years since then, our society continues to stigmatize mental health as an individual burden, when in fact healing happens in community. Compared with 2019, Public Health — Seattle & King County reports a 20% increase in calls to its behavioral health crisis line from June 2020 to May 2021. Healing, recovery and trauma work is daunting, and instead of encouraging us to care for each other in our time of need, right-wing media has incited hundreds of people to leave me disturbing and threatening messages, including from one man who said, invoking the N-word, “We’ll send that terrorist … back to her fucking country in a plastic bag.”
