‘Every single person needs to have their story heard’

At the end of 2023, Johann Hari connected me with V, who was eager to chat about a new mental health project she was diving into. When I saw her name in my inbox, I nearly fell out of my chair. I've admired V's work for more than three decades! As the author of The Vagina Monologues and the powerhouse behind V-Day and One Billion Rising, V has been a relentless global activist against patriarchal violence for some 40 years. Her work has inspired countless people and sparked movements around the world. Now, she's turning her creative energy towards exploring responses to emotional distress and starting new conversations in mainstream mental health. It's beyond exciting. I'm absolutely thrilled to have connected and to have her warrior voice and energy in this book. – Jo 

Jo: Hi V. Thanks for joining me. You have such an impressive catalogue of examples of activism that all add up to your total dedication to social justice, and obviously to ending violence against women. You've inspired and continue to inspire so many people from around the world. We connected last year over this very exciting new project that you've been working on, which we'll talk about later. It's specifically concerned with challenging mainstream thinking around mental health, which is really relevant to our book. But first I'd like to ask about your activism generally over the years – how did it all start for you? What inspired you to take up a life as a performer and activist?

V: I think everything started when I was young, because I was in a really violent and terrifying situation as a child with my father. I began early to discover methods of survival. I remember in fifth grade I tried to organise all the unpopular girls in my class, because we were all desperate and needy and very unpopular, and I invited them all over to my house and I said, 'We're going to form an Unpopular Girls Club and we're going to take back the power.' Unfortunately, they were all very socially challenged people, and they had no interest in being part of any club. So, my first organising effort was a bit tragic. But I think even at a very young age I knew two things would save my life: writing and organising, writing and showing up for other people, writing and trying to get out of myself to do something that was beyond myself, whether it be for the planet or for women. I just knew instinctively that was survival.

I can remember being 16 and marching against the Vietnam War and feeling like finally there was a place to focus my rage, both at my father, who was so oppressive and was such a fascist, but also at the world of the fathers who had taken us into this colonialist war. I learned early that, if I can do something that will make me feel useful, that will make me feel as if I'm transforming something for the better, I won't slip into darkness. Writing and action have always done that for me. Writing can be a way of telling the truth, unveiling destructive secrets, sharing stories that break taboos and challenge power. 

Jo: To me, your work epitomises what Judith Herman (1992) calls the 'survivor's mission' – you've turned your experiences into just such a powerful force for change. I was a young feminist when The Vagina Monologues was first staged, and the Rape Crisis Centre where I worked at the time went as a group to see it in Birmingham. It was the most radical and validating thing I'd seen, as it was for the women with me. We left so inspired and even more furious! When you think of all your work, your projects and campaigns, what stands out for you in these decades of activism? 

V: I think all our books and plays are like children. They each reflect different aspects of ourselves at different points in our life But recently I've been thinking a lot about my book The Apology (V, 2023), because I really believe so much of what is happening in the world is a result of men's inability – patriarchy's inability – and refusal to reckon with the past and to take responsibility and to make true, deep apologies. This leaves everybody who's been abused absolutely screwed, gaslit, unable to believe that what they went through is real, struggling to trust their own experience, never getting justice, which is the deepest form of healing, and, as a result of all these things, unable to move forward.

When someone owns the truth, becomes accountable for harms done, it is pure liberation. I waited so long for my father to own what he had done to me. I guess I believed that when he got older his heart would soften and his mind would open, and he would apologise to me before he died for sexually and physically abusing me. But it never happened. And at a certain point I realised I was caught inside his narrative – I was either responding to my father or reacting to my father, even though my father had been dead for 31 years. I was proving to him that what he thought of me wasn't true or I was angry at him. My whole life was lived inside his story, and I didn't want to be in his story anymore; I wanted to be in my story.

And I started thinking, in all of the #MeToo movement, in all my years in V-Day, I have never heard a man publicly apologise for sexual abuse – well, really, not for anything but particularly for sexual abuse. I decided, well, maybe I just need to write my father's apology to me and say all the things that I need to hear and also allow myself to go inside my father to try to understand why he did what he did to me. It was utterly terrifying. I want to make a clear distinction between understanding and justifying. In no way am I justifying what my father did. But understanding is liberating. I wanted to try to understand what led my father to do what he did to me: why why why would my father want to rape and batter his own daughter? I wanted to understand what happened to him that would make him like that. And I have to say, the exercise of writing the book was far more than an exercise – it was a shamanic experience, because I had to go inside my father. And I think most survivors know their perpetrators far better than perpetrators know themselves. They live inside us. When I began to write the book, my father showed up as an ancestor and he was present throughout. He stayed until the end, and I swear he wrote the book with me, and I know he's in a better realm than he was when we began.

And it was just so profound, because I really began to see what patriarchy had done to my father; the ways it had divorced him from his own feelings and detached him from himself so that he was unable to express any feelings other than rage. I began to see all the pressure put on him to be a certain kind of man, and then the abuse he had suffered but never ever processed, and I finally realised that what my father did to me really had nothing to do with me. I was just there; I was the thing that was in his way; I was just the thing on which he visited his trauma, his sadness – all his unexperienced and unprocessed feelings.

I really do believe, and it may sound like an oversimplification, but I do believe that, if men could begin an apology process, begin a deep, four-step process where they examine themselves and look at what went into their childhood and their upbringing that made them become who they are, and then to look at what they actually did to someone, the details of it, and then to look at the impact of that on that person, and then to apologise, I believe the world would be radically altered overnight, because an apology is an act of humility; an apology is saying 'We're all equal, we're all here together. We're all flawed and human.' If you don't apologise, you always remain above; you maintain control and power. So, I'm really obsessed right now about apology and how we create platforms and ways for perpetrators to begin apology processes, to go deeper into themselves. We teach prayer and meditation. We need to teach apology as it is the path to freedom.

Jo: Absolutely. Having worked with survivors for the best part of 30 years, I've not heard one example of an apology. So, when you think back at all your work generally, what have been the moments that you've really been able to connect with tangible examples of how the activism is changing society, people, the world? What are the examples that have stayed with you?

V: One of the thrilling things about The Vagina Monologues is it's the gift that keeps on giving. It doesn't matter where I go. I was just in a small town outside Austin Texas speaking at my grandchild's graduation and seven different women came up to me and said that play was the 'beginning of my life as an activist'; 'I'm a social worker because I saw The Vagina Monologues'; 'As a result of seeing it, I told my rape story'… I'm so moved to know that that play has freed women to tell their stories, to become activists, to know they're not alone, to know they're part of a sisterhood that is transforming our pain into power.

I dreamed that the play would become dated; I dreamed the play would become irrelevant. But recently they've asked me if I would consider bringing it to Broadway for the 30-year anniversary, and unfortunately we need it now more than ever. The pushback on women's rights is just unbelievable. Who could believe in 2024 we would be seeing reproductive rights threatened in this way? A man running for vice president of the US calling women without children 'cat ladies'? But the thing about patriarchy is, we've never dismantled it. And until we dismantle this system, this ideology, this way of thinking, this notion of hierarchy and dominance, we will constantly be three steps forward and two steps back. Under patriarchy, our rights are under forever under threat. And patriarchy is like herpes – it lives dormant in the system; it's always there, and when the conditions are ripe, when we are vulnerable, there are outbreaks of it. We need a global Marshall Plan to dismantle and uproot patriarchy. I believe the majority of people in the world are exhausted, stressed and devastated by all the ways patriarchy destroys us – racism, capitalism, fascism, imperialism, colonialism, the hatred of anything feminine, the earth, women, LGBTQIA+, disabled people; the fundamental belief that only certain men matter. But the rest of us are the majority and we must become radical artists – bold and creative in birthing a new paradigm. 

Jo: Yeah, absolutely, we are up against it for sure. There are those who benefit from these oppressive systems and that suits them. And it's the same with psychiatry – lots of people want that still in place, which brings me on to this whole new project that you're doing, which is what connected us in the first place. 

V: So yes, I'm working on this new play about 'mental health' that the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in the US has commissioned me to do. I've never understood how people can treat people outside the systems and culture that they're living in. None of us are monoliths. We're completely interdependent and everything in our culture is determining us and feeding us and diminishing us. And if we don't change those conditions, it doesn't really matter how well we get on on our own; when we're back in that toxic water, we are made sick again, over and over by it.

One of the beautiful things about City of Joy, which is this extraordinary centre and sanctuary that we have opened in the Democratic Republic of Congo that treats women who have been sexually abused and violated, is that we don't have any individual therapy. There is a belief that you cannot heal outside of the community; that the community is what heals you and you heal the community. The recovery that is based on a group process rather than an individual process is so radically different, because you actually are recovering with people. You can see how, when one person grows, the whole group grows; when one person has a breakthrough, the whole group has a breakthrough. You are responsible for each other, and you are inspired by each other, and when someone gets free, you're thrilled they're free and you see that it's possible for you to get free.

We're constantly told, 'You're the problem', 'You need to go to therapy', 'You need to take drugs', 'You need to fix it', 'Make yourself better.' This is crazy and impossible. The only way we ever get better is through each other and with each other.

Maybe I'm a dreamer, but my experience has shown me that we can change. I think it's so important that we 'drop the disorder'. We must see each other as flexible, evolving, creative beings. 'Mental health' is a collective ozone layer and it's very toxic right now because of all the 'isms', whether it's sexism or racism or neoliberal capitalism or… we can just go down the list. And I think each of us absorbs it in our own particular way, whether it's 'depression' or 'obsessive compulsive disorder' or anxiety or all these other things that we call it. But we're all creating this ozone together and it's our work to clean it up so we get to be feeding off a healthy collective consciousness. 

Jo: I know you've said that drugs can sometimes be helpful, and that you'd never want to take away that option, but do you think they also have disadvantages? 

V: Of course, there are situations where people absolutely need psychiatric drugs. It can be life-saving. But I think in many cases drugs are a way of dismissing people. I know so many people who went to psychiatrists and got drugs and never had therapy, never got any analysis, never got help – they just got drugs. And for me, it can't just be drugs alone; it has to be an examination of what's underneath. What's the cause of this? What happened to you? When did the pain begin? What's the origin story? How far back do we have to go to understand where this began inside you? I believe, at the heart of it all is trauma, and my experience is that you can release that trauma when you touch the wound. The wound is the portal, and when you can go through the wound, you often get free from a lot of the 'mental conditions' that this non-examined wound is causing in your life, and sometimes drugs can be a way of keeping you away from the wound, which keeps you fixed in your pain and in that identity. I think we live in a culture, particularly in the West, where we just don't have time for each other. We don't have time to listen, really listen, to each other; we don't have time to cry with each other; we don't have time to grieve; we don't have time to share joy with each other. We want people to get over it quick, to be done with their pain, and so drugs are a perfect remedy for a fast culture like this.

Everything's about consumption; everything's about the capitalist wheel of 'fix it', 'get better', 'get back out there', 'get into the consumer market and buy, buy, sell, sell, achieve, achieve, consume, produce, win'. If that's what your life's about, okay. For me, life is about care; life is about connection; life is about poetry; life is about sitting with trees; life is about spending time and getting lost with my friends and having beautiful evenings under the stars and sitting by fires and knowing my heart or sleeping with my granddaughter in the same bed and holding hands as we fall asleep.

Jo: Exactly. What if everybody was to be granted the space to tell their stories? It would be such a massive threat to the patriarchy that you were talking about earlier. 

V: I think every single person needs to have their story heard; every single person needs someone to sit with them, to be held. Every single person needs to be seen and valued and loved and cared for. No drug or diagnosis can replace that. Also, people are often right to be anxious or scared due to the conditions of the world, and our therapy and care needs to respond to that.

I remember in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, I was going to therapy because I was having nuclear nightmares all the time, and my therapist was telling me it was my trauma, it was my early childhood, and one day I just looked at him I said, 'No, I'm scared of nuclear war. That is real. This president actually said a nuclear war was winnable.' And I went out and I became an anti-nuke activist for many years, and my anxiety went away because I put my fear and dread into action.

Jo: Absolutely – it's all sanitised to take that threat away. Such powerful words. Talking of activism, I want to ask you about the power of performance as a way of doing something to make change happen. What makes poetry and performance so powerful when it comes to sharing these important messages?

V: I think art is the antidote to trauma, it really is. It's when we can begin to express what's really going on in our body, in our heart, in our spirit, that we can break through binaries. We begin to feel comfortable living in ambiguity, magic, wonder and complexity. I learn over and over that, when you reveal your deepest truth and secrets, you help everybody get free.

When I was going around the world with The Vagina Monologues, and I would be in Croatia, I'd be in India, I'd be in Bangladesh, and I'd be listening to the play in all these different languages, and I'd close my eyes and I could hear how people would laugh at the same place and cry at the same place. And I came to realise, we're in this struggle together; we're in this dance together; we're in this madness together. And by sharing the truth and by putting it into poetry, into drama, it ends our separation; it breaks us out of right and wrong, good and bad, diagnosis and non-diagnosis; it just frees us into the heart of our emotion and the heart of the possibility of evolution, of change. And it dissolves the fake boundaries between us.

We need to open our minds to a much more creative and expansive analysis of everything and not be locked into this medical model that can be so reductive. By giving our conditions a name or a frame, diagnosis can be momentarily soothing and comforting, but it can also become a container that sums us up and reduces us, that freezes us in an identity where there are built-in limitations.

I think that art for me is the key to our salvation – performance and poetry and music and dance, particularly for survivors, which is why we started the One Billion Rising global dance movement against violence. When you dance, it is the most genius thing because you free up the energy. You're in community and in yourself simultaneously. You get to experience yourself as alive, as a person who is beyond yourself and at the same time you are alchemising your trauma into movement and light. Like the lotus, when you dance, you are blossoming, as you are simultaneously seeding your future.

Jo: Thank you so much, V. As I think you've said, 'Each struggle for justice is a piece of a whole struggle.' When you told me you were turning your creative talents towards challenging what's going on around 'mental health', I was really excited because I thought, if you can do with 'mental health' even a fraction of what you've done with violence against women, we're going to have some serious change-making activism coming our way. So, yeah, watch out psychiatry!

Drop the Disorder + Do Something! edited by Jo Watson is available at www.pccs-books.co.uk 

To get an extra 15% off use the discount code DOSOMETHING! at the checkout.

References

Herman, J.L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books

V (formerly Eve Ensler). (2023). The Apology. Bloomsbury Publishing.