For more, follow: 

Krista @KLRCezair

Brittany @MsPackyetti

@KendallCiesemier

@Ms_Magazine

Transcript:

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:00:01] Welcome to United Bodies, a podcast about the lived experience of health. I’m Kendall Ciesemier, your host. 

Over the last number of years, we’ve made significant progress in destigmatizing mental health care. Many of us openly talk about going to therapy, follow therapists on social media, and even trade tips on dealing with side effects of taking popular medication for depression and anxiety. However, this de-stigmatization hasn’t reached all kinds of mental illness or all kinds of people who struggle with their mental health. Some people are even criminalized for how they struggle with mental illness and their inability to access treatment. 

Living with a mental health condition can even get you killed. Research shows that nearly half of people killed by the police have a disability, most specifically a mental health disability. When we add race into the mix, the picture is even worse. 

So today we’re going to talk about the ways that our carceral system criminalizes black and disabled people and how, unfortunately, our system of policing isn’t an aberration, but instead a direct reflection of society at large. We all have a role to play here. 

Krista Cezair knows the negative ramifications of our attitudes towards mental health care and those who need it firsthand. As a writer, researcher, poet and recent graduate of Harvard Law School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she’s on a mission to fix our legal system’s knee jerk reaction to criminalize those who live and struggle with mental health. Her experiences in school showed her that even among the ivory tower of Harvard, her classmates still weren’t educated properly on mental health and disability. 

One day in a Harvard Law School class, Krista and her classmates were reading a case about a client who had bipolar disorder, the same disorder that she has been living with. The client in the case was struggling and their erratic behavior had endangered the company where they worked. Krista’s classmate, upon reading this case, said, “Oh, this is the case about the crazy guy.” Without knowing, her classmate had just implicated her in her struggle. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:02:34] It was completely disappointing because, I had thought that we were past this. And I especially have thought that with people who are as smart as the people who attend Harvard Law School, they would be aware of ableism, they’d be aware of just knowledge about mental health. And it really isn’t universal. And there’s still so much stigma. So it just really horrified me to think that this is what this person would be thinking about their own client. 

And if they had this client in real life, they would be treating them this way, knowing that they or expecting that they probably couldn’t care for themselves or they wouldn’t respect their client. And it just made me feel like we were back in the sixties or the twenties, you know, And it’s like, was there any progress? Has there been any progress when people who are this educated still think this way?

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:03:46] That moment othered, Krista, in a way that she knew was wrong and it propelled her to come forward with her own diagnosis, giving a talk to all of her classmates at Harvard Law entitled “From Psych Hospital to Harvard Law: One Black Woman’s Journey with Bipolar Disorder.”

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:04:03] I just felt like it was so important to do that for the student who was sitting there like me, who was thinking to themselves that like when their professor talks about the defense by reason of insanity and they’re thinking, oh, I could have qualified for that at some point. I’ve experienced psychosis, I’ve experienced hospitalization. I know that there are other students like that, whether they identify themselves to anyone else or not. And I knew that I had to tell my story in order to reach those people. I also felt like if there were any people who would hold it against me or think differently about me in a negative way because I disclosed those are people that I wouldn’t want to associate with anyway, I know that they would probably commit more microaggressions like that one classmate, and I wouldn’t want to be in the company of those types of people anyway. So really it would help filter out the kind of people that I don’t want to be around because every time I have disclosed that I have bipolar disorder to a close friend, it has been nothing but a response of support and real care. And that’s what I’ve gotten from my community. And in response to that speech, I heard nothing but good things. And if anybody have anything bad to say, they didn’t say it to me. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:05:44] I’m so glad that that was the case. I’m so glad that you have such a support system around you. And I know that in a lot of ways that still feels very rare for folks. And I’m really glad that you, especially in deciding to use your voice more broadly, have that real support network. I was wondering, you know, to that end, if you would trace some of your mental health journey and share that with us and how it’s led you to this this point in which we are talking. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:06:17] Absolutely. So I would say that it’s––the story starts really in middle school where I knew something was off and that offness was depression. I know that now. But at the time I just really felt like this was something to shoulder through. Maybe I just felt weird for a little while and things would get better and, you know, there really wasn’t anything to do about it. What could I do? Especially coming from a Trinidadian culture where mental health is not accepted very well in the culture, especially from a parent to a child, there’s very little emotional understanding, and the care that you get emotionally isn’t as supportive as it could be. And that, I think, is why a lot of times in those immigrant cultures, you kind of hide those feelings that you have and you just keep excelling in whatever you’re doing at school so that your parents, you know, just stay off your back. And so that’s where I was. And it really felt like as long as I was doing well in school, then everything was fine because how could I, you know, how can anything be wrong if I was getting straight A’s? And so that kind of continued through high school. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:07:45] It’s such a common misconception too. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:07:48] Exactly. Just because you’re high functioning does not mean you’re not struggling. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:07:52] Mm hmm. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:07:53] And that’s for everyone. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:07:54] And I can understand how it would be hard for people to then identify who’s struggling, like to give credit to the fact that then that makes it challenging. But it’s such a misconception that if you’re high functioning, especially in the work that you’re doing at the time, which as a child is school, that means there’s nothing else to look into there. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:08:17] Right. And it’s definitely a coping mechanism. It’s a form of masking where you’re just making sure that everything looks as okay as possible, even though you’re falling apart inside. When I was in high school, I started having suicidal thoughts, and even then, I didn’t think that I had to tell anyone. I thought everyone dealt with it and it was just something that, again, I had to push to through and it would wane and wax and, you know, things would would get better and then worse again. It wasn’t until 2015, which was a year after I graduated college, that I first sought any mental health help. And I was working at Google and I was as depressed as I had ever been. And I finally realized that this was something that I couldn’t deal with on my own. And I needed help. And they had on site free counselors. And if the counselors weren’t free and on site, then the difficulty of finding a provider probably would have led me to delay care even longer. But I was so privileged and so lucky to have that that resource. And I saw a therapist. And very quickly, within days we got a diagnosis of bipolar two disorder. And bipolar two disorder is marked by hypomania instead of mania, which is like a lesser form of mania. And longer and deeper bouts of depression. And it wasn’t until a couple of years later in 2017 and 2018 that I had my first manic, full blown manic episodes. And that’s when my diagnosis changed to bipolar one. And it was after these these manic episodes completely blew up my life. Every single part of my life that you think of as an area that can have some type of health, my financial health, my spiritual health, my physical health, every part of it was completely affected by having these manic episodes. I was hospitalized several times. I experienced delusions and psychosis and hallucinations, which people some people don’t know that people with bipolar disorder can experience those as well during the mania. And so I really needed a lot of time to recover from those episodes. And I ended up having to defer my acceptance to law school. I was accepted to law school around the time that I was experiencing those episodes. And in in the midst of the episode, I had to figure out what law school I was going to go to. I had to get them to defer my enrollment. And I managed to do all that. And I moved back home and I worked on my recovery for two years. And then after that, that’s when I started at Harvard. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:11:39] Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that. It’s such a story of resiliency. I can imagine how distressing and difficult it was to say, I’m going to take a step back and wait. You know, I know from my own health challenges that I’m really stubborn and would have really, you know, I’m always like, I’m not taking myself out until my body takes me out. You know very much that that would have been very difficult to make that kind of a decision. And it’s always an obvious one when you have to make it, because it’s usually that significant where you know that it is the right choice. But it is difficult nonetheless to to feel like you’re being held back by something like this. So I just want to say kudos to you for making that call and focusing on yourself and look at you now. You’re still finished and you still got it done and maybe even better than you would have if you hadn’t taken that time. In this episode, we’re focusing specifically on the ways that mental health issues, and particularly when they’re experienced by people of color, are criminalized or punished. I’m wondering what kinds of experiences, if any, you’ve had feeling like you were being criminalized for having bipolar? 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:13:06] Oh, absolutely. Throughout the two years where I experienced my major manic episodes, I ran in with the police. More than one hand, more than I can count on one hand. And I think to myself, what would have happened if I wasn’t a black woman? Because I think that, of course, we know black people are criminalized at higher rates than white people, and people see black people as a threat already. So when another stigmatized identity is placed on top of that, having bipolar disorder and not just depression or anxiety, which I think people have become a little bit more accepting of, but something that’s a little scarier that people think are attached to violence. And you layer that with something like the angry black woman stereotype, then people become scared and it’s at that point that police are called. So several times I had the police called on me and not once did a crisis intervention team come or a social worker or someone trained to deal with someone who was having a mental health crisis. I experienced the police and they would at several times have handcuffed me and put me in the back of their cars to take me to mental hospitals. But I was treated like a criminal. I felt like a criminal. After one particular instance, I was taken to this mental hospital that was very bare. Like the walls were bare. There were lockers. Like it just seemed to me like I was in jail and they had cots on the floor for us to lay on. So they weren’t even, you know, there were chairs. But if we wanted to lay down, then we had to lay on the floor without a sheet or anything like that. And after a while, I asked, am I in jail? Because I thought that they had taken me to jail. And they said, No, you’re in a mental hospital. And I was like…. that’s better, but the fact that my entire experience I thought that I was in jail is huge. And there were some positive elements of my experience. I never had guns drawn. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:15:47] I mean Krista, that that’s the positive experience that you you say, is that you didn’t have guns drawn on you. I mean. I can’t. It just. It just is so awful. And I’m so sorry that that that’s what you experienced because no one who’s suffering a mental health crisis should be handcuffed and treated like they are a criminal. There’s a lot to say here about the criminal legal system. I think often it implicates exactly just people of color who are suffering, but specifically thinking about people experiencing a mental health crisis. The idea that police are even part of the equation is is wrong from the very beginning. The way that you’re transferred in a police vehicle, you are handcuffed like you have committed a crime. These are all things that shouldn’t have been a part of your experience and and are things that, my goodness, like we definitely need to change. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:16:57] Absolutely. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:16:58] Yeah. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:16:59] The biggest thing is that when you’re going through these experiences, you’re scared and confused. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:17:06] It’s so traumatic. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:17:07] It’s so traumatic and you don’t understand what’s going on. So then of course, I was confused as to whether or not I was in jail or in a mental hospital. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:17:18] Yeah. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:17:19] Especially since I’m going through psychosis. I have––I’m having delusions of people persecuting me. And then here you go. Treating you like. Yeah, right. Exactly. Hmm. And Elyn Saks is a law professor who lives with schizophrenia, and she wrote the book The Center Cannot Hold. It’s a memoir. And in it, she says that people with psychosis do scary things because they’re scared. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:17:52] Yeah. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:17:52] And you think about what could be different if we treated this person like a human being who is scared rather than a person who is dangerous. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:18:08] It’s this gross and inaccurate perception of danger that leaves so many struggling with mental illness, especially Black and brown people struggling with mental illness at risk for being met with violence and brutality when they need help. This is our problem to fix both within the criminal legal system and more broadly. To learn more about how we address our explicit and implicit biases and build alternatives to policing, I spoke with Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist who works at the nexus of policing and racial justice, among other things. 

BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM [00:18:48] I am Brittany Packnett Cunningham. I am an activist, a writer, a podcaster, a mama, a wife, and a black woman who believes in justice. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:18:58] Hell yeah. I want to start our conversation off talking about what you wrote for The Cut in the wake of the murder of Jordan Neeley, a black man who was choked to death in broad daylight on the New York City subway in May. The piece was called “The Cost of White Discomfort.” Reports show that Jordan had been living as an unhoused person, and as he showed up on the subway that day, he was expressing distress for both being hungry and thirsty, something so human and basic. Why did his expression of need move some to look away and others to react with violence so, so much as to to kill him? 

BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM [00:19:39] You know, it is unfortunately a danger that unhoused people, that people with mental health needs live with every day, especially when they are in bodies of color, Black bodies like Jordan Neely. Knowing that our discomfort damns America. Right? That our hunger, our thirst, our needs, our challenges, our concerns, all of the ways in which we have been let down really have been manifested so often because of an amalgamation of systemic oppressions and so whenever we yell out of our pain, right, whether it’s on the streets of Ferguson or marching for Breonna Taylor or Jordan Neeley that day on the subway, people don’t hear a human being in need of somebody being neighborly. What America, what the world in its anti-Blackness and its ableism and its belief that comfort is something entitled to them if they’ve been living a life of privilege in that, through that lens, people hear the cries of somebody like Jordan Neely as a threat to their own comfort, right? As something that will take them out of the comfort that they think they’re entitled to. And that’s not seen as an inconvenience or as an annoyance. It’s seen as a threat. 

In a societal way, you can see it mirrored in the response that was had when the idea for Obamacare was first proposed. Right. I mean, this wasn’t even universal health care, right? This was just more health care for more people in ways that would hopefully be less expensive and have fewer obstacles to actually access it. And in response to that, people were like downright angry. And I was like, Why? Why does somebody else being able to go to the doctor and be able to get preventative health care and people not being thrown off their health care for preexisting conditions or disabilities that they developed over time. Why does that make you so angry? It has nothing to do with you or your health insurance. And I, you know, in wanting to answer that question and then doing a lot of reading, I encountered the work of Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, who write about the elements of white dominant culture and in examining those elements and really spelling them out for people like me who saw something weird going on but needed the language to identify what it was. They talked about these elements, things like power hoarding, things like either or thinking, and similarly things like believing that there is a right to or an entitlement to comfort and understanding white dominance as a culture, right. And not just having to do with white people or white supremacists means that it’s a smog. To borrow a term from Dr. Tatum that we all breathe in. Right. And so even you don’t have to be white. You don’t have to be cisgender. You don’t have to be straight. You don’t have to be Christian. You don’t have to be male. You don’t have to be wealthy to exhibit the behaviors of that culture because it’s all around us. And for so many of us in America, it’s all you ever learned. So that’s why you can have a train full of people looking away. That’s why you can have a train full of people feeling like, “Oh, I wish he’d shut up.” That’s why you can have somebody on that train think that it is within his rights to wrap his hands around Jordan Neely’s neck for reportedly some 15 odd minutes and four people in response to literally either do nothing or not know what to do because they were worried that they could then be under threat of violence, too. So that’s why we get that kind of response, because when you have become accustomed to privilege, not only do you think that equity is oppression, you think that someone else’s need is a threat to your own comfort and you are willing to do anything to preserve and protect that comfort.

What is actually true in a situation like Jordan Neely’s  is that he is statistically oftentimes under much more threat than he could ever be to the people who were on that train. Right. From police violence, from as we saw, community violence. You know, people keep calling his killer a vigilante, but vigilantes go after people who committed crimes and Jordan Neely didn’t commit a crime, he just existed and spoke to his own need. Right. And so. You know, a I think we have to understand the truth of that. I think we have to understand that one third to one half of all of the people who are killed by police every year are people with disabilities. Right. I think we have to understand that we come from a culture that has historically terrorized people who have shown any sign of mental illness or mental health distress. Right. I mean. Thankfully, we’re not in the era anymore where there was that widespread torture being seen as medical attention. Right. Where people are being…I don’t even want to describe it. All right. But we’ve seen some of the horrors in films … the institutions, you know, Right. Strapping people down. I mean, giving people things that are truly poisonous to having your body and saying that we’re doing it to help. Right. Saying that the doctor is doing it to cure. And yet, even though we’re not performing some of those same barbaric actions, that doesn’t mean that the mentality behind those actions has disappeared from culture. Right. Because if we see people as monstrous or threatening or not human. Right, then it is much easier to excuse the way that we ignore people or the the poor ways in which we treat them. Right.

I will also say and admit to some internalized ableism here, right. Because I’m a person with mental health challenges that are easier to disguise. Right. I have dealt with diagnosed depression and anxiety my entire life. I literally just scheduled an ADHD screening because I probably have it and was talking with my therapist about all of the ways that I had masked it for so long. And it turns out I’m probably one of the growing numbers of black women who got missed in these diagnoses because we’ve been so high achieving and have had to carry so much that people were not looking for signs of anxiety or hyperactivity or attention deficit with us because we were, we were, you know, carrying the world on our backs. Right. So everybody was just thinking, she’s strong, she got it. And so but my own internalized ableism says, I’m able to hide those things. Right. You’re not I’m not I’m not experiencing public psychosis. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:26:42] And that I should hide them. 

BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM [00:26:43] And then I should hide them. Right. That I should mask them in order to keep myself safe, in order to stop myself from being judged. And then I transfer that judgment on to other people. Right. Because I’m like, oh, well, I’m not as bad as that person. Right? That that ain’t me on the subway talking like that. Right. And it’s like, No, no, no, no, no. I’m better or worse than them, right? I am somebody who’s also been able to access quality health care my entire life. I’m also somebody who’s never experienced being unhoused. I’m also somebody who’s always had at least a couple of dollars in my bank account and can get from point A to point B and had somebody to call if I was truly destitute and needed something right, who would answer the phone and not treat me like I was quote unquote crazy. So there is a seduction that happens to create that us versus them paradigm, even if we are really the them that we’re talking about. And I think that when we recognize that folks experiencing mental health challenges of all kinds to all degrees across the entire spectrum include folks that we love, folks that we respect, folks that we admire, folks that we care about, folks that we lived next to, folks that we ride next to, folks that we look in the mirror at, then we can recognize that all of those folks are human and that the same things we want and deserve for ourselves are the same things that they want and deserve for themselves and that we should want for them. There is no threat to me in trying to make sure that anybody who needs something for their well-being has it. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:28:25] And yet and yet, I mean, you mentioned so clearly that, you know, this intersection of ableism and racism is so deadly both by the police and by just passersby. Oftentimes, police are called in moments of medical crisis. So that’s why we see kind of the strong correlation there. Right. But kind of all over, we are so predisposed to criminalizing disability and race as opposed to providing care. And this starts even as early as in in school. And one of the things I wanted to connect, you know, with you because you are a former teacher. When we talk about things like the intersection of race and disability, we don’t have to look just as adults, right? The school to prison pipeline is actually full of children who have been determined by educators, as, you know, quote unquote, bad kids. And the punishment and the criminalization is started from such an early age. I’m wondering, you know, from your perspective, as someone who is an activist, as a former educator, how do we make alternative paths for folks? How do we make alternative choices even, you know, let’s just like assume good intent for both perhaps police officers or public safety officers and people in the education system? 

BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM [00:29:48] I mean, there are so many answers to that question. One of the things that is being emphasized more and more in education spaces, especially when it comes to training teachers, is to not see discipline as a separate skill from teaching. Right. Because when people like if you really think about good teaching as discipline, providing compelling, culturally responsive content such that young people are engaged, they’re challenged, they’re experiencing rigor, they’re experiencing support and nurturing and affirmation. A lot of the things then that you call discipline problems disappear because there are young people who are bored. There are young people who are not challenged. There are young people who are not getting the support that they need to rise to the occasion when those things are happening. Right now, we’re down to maybe 20% of the things that folks will call discipline problems, quote unquote, happening right. From there, if we’re really thinking about viewing children as people, not as little empty vessels in which to deposit all of our own opinions and thoughts and feelings, but as full human beings who have thoughts and emotions needs wants desires independent of any of us, then we can invest in the kind of solutions that we’ve seen work across the board. Things like restorative justice, right? Taking police out of schools, creating school environments that don’t themselves feel like prisons are institutions, but feel like fruitful places of learning, inviting community and right engaging parents in the classroom day. And when I say parents, I mean all the kind of parents that there are, right guardians, aunts, uncles, you know, pastors, imams, like whomever is influential in those children’s lives. They can be in that classroom providing that additional adult wraparound. Right. It’s ensuring that where there is disability, that the solutions are truly culturally responsive and that we are not inventing challenges and issues where they don’t exist simply because we don’t speak the language of the community in which we’re operating. Because, again, when we create a society that has everybody in mind, including people who live at these intersections, it is truly actually beneficial for all of us. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:32:17] Brittany is right. We can build better solutions in education and health care and in our criminal legal system. But we have to pay attention to how our proposed solutions play out in the lives of people who live at the intersections of marginalized identities. 

This is the only real way to stem the tide of violence and discrimination against black and disabled people. When we do pay attention to disparate impact and outcomes, we can develop meaningful solutions, solutions that work for everyone. 

One exciting example of a solution making a difference is the program CAHOOTS out in Eugene, Oregon. CAHOOTS has begun to show that by dispatching mental health first responders to get this respond to mental health crises instead of police officers, they’re preventing violence and providing better care for folks who need it. It’s a win win, win, win win situation. Everyone benefits with smart alternatives and a real mental health care. 

While the normalization of mental health conditions is starting to break through culture and prompt meaningful alternatives in our legal, education, and health care systems, there is still far to go. Krista believes that storytelling has the opportunity to further unlock empathy and prompt action. She’s committed to that effort and calling on others to join her. She understands that it can take a vulnerability to share our stories, but also believes there’s a purpose and a freedom available to all those who are safe enough to share their stories. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:33:48] If we can tell the story just right, if we can tell the story in as many different ways, then maybe we will hit upon something within somebody and they’ll think, Oh, I get it now. I think that if we can do as much like first person storytelling, putting people in our shoes, and that’s another reason why I’m so adamant about sharing my story. It’s because I feel like there are a lot of things about me that people can relate to. The privileges that I have and people can see another person with some of those privileges and think, okay, that person is kind of like me. But then I also have experienced bipolar disorder, mania, psychosis. So maybe then it brings them a little bit closer to getting to that experience. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:34:40] To that end, I really wanted to ask you about how you reconciled your own experience. You know, I think that in so many of our own personal journeys, there exists a lot of shame or even a struggle with the stigma of it all. How did you shed some of that for yourself? How did you deal with perhaps having some shame around your diagnosis? 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:35:07] So the first day I came home with the diagnosis, I cried the entire night, just wailed. And then I was just thinking, you know, this is the end. What am I going to do with this diagnosis? How can I live my life with this thing? And little did I know the diagnosis would get even more severe. But at the time, I was just thinking like, how can I deal with this? The bipolar two diagnosis and what really helped was finding those stories of people living with bipolar disorder. My favorite book about bipolar disorder is called Marbles. It’s by Ellen Forney. It’s a graphic novel. A graphic memoir. Love it. Everyone should read it. And it just describes so many things about my experience. And I can point to her and say, okay, she’s living with it, she’s successful, she’s fine, and maybe I can do that, too. And so I just continued to read more books and experience more people’s stories. And I even met more people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. And it just really helped me conceptualize in my mind the fact that this is not the end of anything. It’s the beginning of a new and different life, a life in which I care for myself more, and a life in which I make sure that my health is the highest priority for myself because I wouldn’t have lived like that before this diagnosis. And I think that that helps me prioritize myself fully in my own life. I’m like a recovering people pleaser. So that’s helpful. And now I’ve come to think of it as this is something that saved my life. It’s saved me from living a life that I wouldn’t have wanted to live, living a life that would have been empty. And now I’m going to live a life that is full. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:37:29] I think that oftentimes people don’t really understand the implications of health on the fabric of our lives. And I guess I was wondering if you could say anything to folks about the implications of mental health on and on your lived experience. What would you want to say that would maybe help shed some light on what it’s like to live as Krista? 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:37:55] Yeah, this might be trite, but there’s the saying that a healthy person has a thousand wants and a sick person only has one. And that’s to be healthy. Yeah, I like it. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:38:08] It’s a good one. It’s a good one. Krista, that’s accurate. Oh, I felt that. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:38:16] When you’re sick and when you’re that sick, that it debilitates you and it is affecting your daily living. All you want is to be well. And you’ll do anything that you can to be well. And that is how people, you know, say, like, “Oh, it’s an inspiration.” Or, like, like looking at a disabled person and how do you get through the day? And it’s because you have to like there’s there’s no other option. And so for me, as much as I appreciate being called that or, you know, being recognized for my resilience, I think even more you should look at me and see that if you were in my situation, you would be doing the same thing. You would just be getting on with the business of living. Because you have to. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:39:09] Mm hmm. Yeah. And what a beautiful articulation also of why we shouldn’t be criminalizing disability, because it’s it’s really just people who are just trying to make it through their life. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:39:23] Exactly. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:39:24] They’re just trying to get healthy. And when you’re stuck in a moment of illness, it’s all just… the only thing that person wants, the only thing I’ve wanted in those moments is to be healthy. That’s really the driving force of everything in those moments. And I wish people understood that dynamic better. I think that we would meet people who are experiencing mental health crises in a different way. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:39:57] Yeah. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:39:58] Right. Oh, this has been wonderful to chat. I just so appreciate you sharing your story with us and taking the time and chatting with me. And I am so excited to see all the things that you do, because I think between your professional expertise in your personal experience, it’s going to be really cool and really powerful to watch. 

KRISTA CEZAIR [00:40:21] Thank you so much. 

KENDALL CIESEMIER [00:40:24] Thanks so much to Krista Cezair and Brittany Packnett Cunningham for joining me. And thank you so much for listening. 

You can subscribe to United Bodies wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be so helpful to us if you would rate and review the show that helps more people like you find us. We’ll be back next week with more. 

United Bodies is a Ms. magazine and Ms. Studios production. The show is created and produced by me, Kendall Ciesemier. Michele Goodwin as our executive producer.