Cages, Borders, and “Wall Sickness”
Last night I had a dream that I lived next to a large family who migrated here. They had lots of children and their house was vibrant and full of love. They were all taken in the middle of the night by unmarked and unannounced agents of the state. The whole neighborhood cried the next morning.
This is a thing of nightmares, but it is also, unfortunately, a thing of reality in these troubling times. Images creep into our thoughts at night just as ICE agents creep into houses.
I had just moved back to Florida when the first string of anti-trans laws were passed back in 2023, ripping our medicine away from so many of us overnight. There was an immediate material effect, but the thing that caught me even more off guard was the psychological effect.
I felt a visceral shift in my ability to move my body around town, a fear lingering that hadn’t been there just days before. A mistrust of my neighbors. A flinching of my muscles when a pickup truck would drive by. It took me a while to understand the experience. There were ways that my town did become less safe, but there were also things that my body started to believe in the wake of trauma, that were not actually true. Even though my experience of living in Florida for my most of my life told me that pickup trucks are not the enemy, my body still flinched. The declaration made in Tallahassee had creeped into my thoughts, and into my body, and into the air around me.
In the 1960's, German psychiatrist Dietfried Müller-Hegemann began widely diagnosing his patients with something called “Wall Sickness.” The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had a profound effect and correlated with increasing rates of severe depression, isolation, psychosis, and a felt-sense of constriction and containment. It changed the way people saw each other, and it changed the way people saw themselves.
A wall is not just a wall, it is a symbol and a strategy. It restricts and polices bodily movement while setting up a binary of us versus them, in or out, this or that. Whatever your politics, one thing we know from history is that it is hard, if not impossible, for our thoughts, behaviors, and embodiments to not be effected by the logic of a militarized border.
It took me several months to rebuild an internal sense of safety in my body after the first attacks on trans Floridians. I used practices of somatic awareness and re-centering under the pressure of perceived threat. I did not leave Florida, though many did, because I came to believe that the vast majority of people around me care about my humanity. I came to believe that the vast majority are also worried about rights being taken away, and access to healthcare, and economic security.
I came to believe that there are far more of us than there are of them. According to historian John Washington, The Berlin Wall ultimately fell because people began to see through it. It wasn’t a bill or a law that was passed, he says, it was that people began to see through the logic and it stopped working.
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How is this moment shaping you? What needs to heal or mend in you that will allow you to see though the veil? What collective and embodied practices will allow us to break though the Iron Curtain of our times? Somatics teacher adrienne maree brown famously said, things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.
