This week’s Song of the Week is an original composition submitted by MIA Reader Jasmine Marshall: “I wrote this song largely expressing some of the darkest, yet most crucial, parts of my healing journey. Psychiatry had taught me to not trust my own brain, to trust blindly in their “faith,” to stay focused on a narrowly prescribed set of goals for “success” that could only be achieved through excessive control and fighting against my own human nature. Ultimately, psychiatry taught me to block out experience in order to block out darkness, but at the cost of also blocking out light and color; intense, vibrant, and passionate in every hue. I eventually had to contradict all conventional wisdom and give myself over entirely to my “mental illness”/madness in order to become truly free – to give in to suffering and desire, to give up control, and give into my nature. I had to lean into uncertainty and the possibility that I might be “insane,” after all, but so what? I must trust myself internally, and my experiences of the external world, for that is all I really have. I am willing to be the “sinner” – the heretic to psychiatry’s faith – if that means trusting in my own intuition and vision, and experiencing life more fully.”
-Jasmine Marshall
