Ode to Wendela de Beaufort | Determined

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Dear Wendela de Beaufort,

More than a hundred years ago, seamstress Agnes Richter embroidered the words I am not big. I wish to read. I plunge headlong into disaster on the inside of her hospital gown. She had been admitted to a mental institution where pen and paper were forbidden to women.

The pen was seen as the weapon of reasonableness. Yet Richter - and with her many other women - found a creative form to avoid being silenced and claim her right to exist; she wore her words close to her skin. A century later, you did something similar, seeking a form of expression for things that normally remain submerged.

We met during a workshop as part of an exhibition I was making on the history of women in psychiatry: Wapen van de redelijkheid (5.9.23 - 13.10.23). From the archives of psychiatric institution Zon & Schild I had obtained a straitjacket, which was then embroidered by artist Beryl Cameron with texts by women.

A reference to something that was history - I thought. During the workshop we admired the jacket and I told about the ingenious clasps I had found with it and had not been able to place at first. Then you told me that you could still feel the sound of such a clasp vibrating in your ears, so many times they had put a straitjacket on you.

You had a lush head of red hair and wore a cobalt blue sweater that didn't quite cover the scars on your skin. As a small child you survived a fire, spending months in the hospital to let the skin the fire had scorched heal. Immobile and unprotected, you lay tied up staring at the ceiling. You could just count and so that was what you did: footsteps, coughs, seconds piled up. And you observed: which eyes hurt the least, who could sting the best. Every sigh of wind a shiver across your skin. If you move you will die, you were told.

What happened next is too long a story to put down on paper, and perhaps it suffices to say that you continued to live, though at a great many moments you yourself might not have been able to call it living. You lived a life in psychiatry, and in the moments when you wished for nothing more than a sweet person, a crayon to draw with, they hoisted you into a straitjacket, clicked the locks in your ear and you became that girl of five again: fixated, punished for your injuries and facing the eyes that looked at you through the window but never really saw you. You were given up by that gaze; had you never been saved retroactively?

Then you became a mother, something in which many women preceded you, and finally you felt normal. Your daughter grew and you grew with her. It made you a light and happy person. With the birth of your second child there was a relapse, you didn't sleep and were hospitalized again. You saw how history repeated itself: your children were too small not to have a mother around them, you couldn't explain it to them, it was determined for them. Your greatest source of joy suddenly became an imposed sense of guilt.

As I write this down, I think of the people who might also read this letter. Isn't it too dark, too sad, will they keep reading? If there is something I realized when I myself went through the darkest period in my life, is that many people can't take it. 'Are you on an upward trajectory again' they wanted to know, 'has the darkness been overcome'. 'It was nothing more than a bump on a prosperous path, wasn't it?' Thankfully, there is light coming into your story, but it is precisely the darkness we want to talk about, because we carry that - even when the heaviness is lightened - with us forever.

Just when the darkness seemed to swallow up everything, you were assigned a psychologist who, despite the stack of diagnoses in your file, saw no bumps in the road. “What can I do for you,” she asked a woman stiff on medication, feeling broken inside and out, ”what kind of woman would you like to be?

You are besides getting your driver's license, leading workshops where women paint their scars, taking a trip to New York, singing in a choir, still trying to formulate an answer, but the question has been asked and can and should never be undone. In the workshop where we got to know each other, you came up with a word that I'm sure is just the beginning of a beginning. Determined, you embroidered in thick red letters on the image of a woman on a horse daring to feel the wind on her skin for the first time.

Love,

Robin van den Maagdenberg