Meta-Power and Transformation
Excerpt republished with author’s permission.
American scholarship roots conceptual indoctrination in emancipation; I decree the English system of signification arranges regency period(s) hazardously cosign willfully in the term I dispense: (meta-power).
(Peters 2008) Contesting Admission
Meta-power, a term I use often in Contesting Admission, is a concept that exists only in the metaphysical world in which communication and language operate. Surrounding what I thought was the birth of my new word, the first and ultimate signified a cognitive distortion that got terribly out of hand. I fully believed that in the same way meta-power would disrupt, alter, and reverse the circumstances of my reality in 2008, my new word would change the English language forever. Language on notice comes with a connotation, implying that language is the object and my word is the subject.
This meant that language itself has no choice about the matter. Some people might call this my intellectual rape of the system of signification. As if, without consent, the imposition of my will to change meaning from within and carve out my own space as I choose and see fit is domineering, oppressive, and repressive to those who are the object of the gaze. For these people, I can only say I had no choice about the matter.
When it’s a choice between recovery or falling victim to schizophrenia, I choose creating a reality in which I could not only survive but rather thrive through the most radical determination of the self, a triumph over the limits of the mind and illness. Therefore, like the phoenix image I signaled to before, my body and language were not only bound together, but reborn together, joined at the very root of meaning making and perception. Like all living and evolving beings, language has no limits. And like all creatures bound by ethics, I have a duty to liberate my fellow man from inhumanity thrust on him by his fellow man.
This means that my decision to inject language with my own ethos must be free of pathos or any pathology that aims to restrict meaning and the very demise of language. In many ways, I am freeing people from the possibilities and risk of exposure to those who wield words and rhetoric for evil and cross-purposes of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of higher knowledge and meaning making. It begins by flattening the very structure of the English language and lowering it to the ground floor of the masses.
Everyone will have access to it. Restrictions, transgressions, and offenses are all obsolete in the face of a new chain of being for all men willing to follow freedom to the gates of tomorrow, and crimes against humanity and yesterday’s evils are never forgotten by those bringing about this new freedom to all people. Writing provides this universal access to language and with it comes perhaps not a new word, but new meaning. Every author has a new interpretive eye. Every blog post is an addendum on how to proceed with interacting and negotiating health, healing, and mental health practices.
Writing is the content, the audience, the object of new and limitless perspectives, ethics, cultural considerations, and every intersection of mental health with the world of the living. We all want to be reborn at some point in our lives. Whether it be out of necessity or a healthy, creative junction in your life, you too can discover the art and science of writing on mental health. Whether from the social work perspective, medical, psychological, peer, or anyone who has intersected with the mental health field and its practice in the provision of care, there is no mechanism with greater possibilities to recreate your future than writing and meaning making through language.
My education was something that I considered to be above reproach. It was indefensibly pure in nature, both noble and regal. The highest gift I could give my school was to continue on with my academic affairs. the content, the audience, the object of new and limitless perspectives, ethics, cultural considerations, and every intersection of mental health with the world of the living. We all want to be reborn at some point in our lives. Whether it be out of necessity or a healthy, creative junction in your life, you too can discover the art and science of writing on mental health.
This deepness of my belief in education still echoed in the chamber halls and libraries I passed through: those same halls where I would hang up signs, making myself out to be a victim of political academic games and unfair practices of higher education. The extreme nature of the victimization inflicted upon me by the English department went deep into the psychological wellspring of crimes that persisted to continue. They’d continued without retribution, the intervention of the law, or mediation by a party at the university or by friends and relatives.
Collateral intervention and treatment could have put everything into a more accurate or relative perspective. If they had been applied in a non-judgmental way to my situation, this might have helped in finding treatment for me sooner before my psychosis was in full bloom. Instead, the very language I was seeking—the completion of my unpolished rhetoric and years spent learning about how words work—would also fail me.
I lost contact with my friends, and my high command collapsed. My apartment mate imparted his last words of wisdom on my situation. He spoke to my parents, who came up to support the evaluation process. His words landed on deaf ears. Whatever he told my parents I dismissed out of paranoia and out of anger that our relationship had fallen apart at the very moment I needed help. One night, while I was on my computer, I thought I had discovered that my apartment mate was on my account and impersonating me in talks with my other friends. I was furious. I walked into the common room, picked up a chair, and threw it against his wall, yelling, “Coward!” Given that the situation in the apartment had unraveled so much, I went home to visit my parents.
This would be the last time I was in my family’s home until my future discharge from the hospital. I remember being so manic that I took frequent showers, and in the process of trying to self-soothe, I broke the hand bar in the shower when getting up. After I got out of the shower, my parents told me my apartment mate had called them. He told them he was afraid of me. He felt I might poison him or just plain hurt him in an uncontrolled rage. I was even more furious and, soon, depressed. I listened to music all night about abandonment and loss and connection, playing Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” ad infinitum.
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About the Author
J. Peters’s battle with Schizophrenia began at Binghamton University in his last semester of college. J. Peters was discharged from Greater Binghamton State Hospital Center in July of 2008, after spending six months there. His recovery was swift, but not painless, and certainly difficult. J. Peters refers to his stance on recovery in his journal articles as “Too big to fail.” No obstacle too big, no feat out of reach, J. Peters let nothing stop him in his path to recovery and healing. While J. Peters’s symptoms began during his last semester, he successfully graduated from college, and his diploma was waiting for him at home after his discharge from the hospital. On one of the newest intramuscular injections (IM) available, and after learning the true meaning of adherence, J. Peters later went on to publish articles about the use of injectable medications to overcome his own symptoms. Today, J. Peters teaches social work students at Fordham University to be leaders in their practice. J. Peters is the author of University on Watch: Crisis in the Academy, which is available through Authorhouse, and is currently in production with Austin McCauley Publishers. J. Peters blogs daily on his site mentalhealthaffairs.blog and for other sites around the United States and Europe, bringing his passion for mental health to consumers everywhere.