Artful Return: Mental Health Recovery and the Architecture of a New Year

To recover from the labyrinth of the mind is not to erase its maps but to learn, agonizingly, how to traverse them without falling prey to their distortions. It is not the brute act of “getting better” as some external verdict, but the gradual unlearning of misdirections that have made the self an enemy. Here, recovery becomes an architecture of subtle adjustments, a rebuilding without blueprints, an exercise in remembrance without indulgence. To face the arrival of a new year — clean in its linearity, hopeful in its promise — is to confront the terrible seduction of rebirth. That word, rebirth, with all its literary glitter, holds within it both danger and possibility. It demands a reckoning with what must be salvaged and what must be left to drift away, unmoored in the fog of forgetfulness.

Mental health recovery, like the trickling reappearance of daylight after a polar night, is more process than epiphany. The shift is not explosive; it arrives on padded feet, half-hidden in mundane rituals, in the smallness of things: an unsolicited laugh, the strange texture of morning sunlight through curtains, or the surprising weight of a silent afternoon without anxiety. This kind of recovery is intimate, whispered, perhaps even imperceptible to others. It is not unlike walking through a field of snow, where the mere act of moving forward alters the landscape — footprints testify to both the journey and its burden. And so, every step through mental turbulence, every thought reoriented away from self-undoing, demands a new choreography of existence.

The transition into a new year is a mirage dressed in the symbolism of blank slates. Yet this illusion, too, can be harnessed if handled with care. The act of beginning again is not the obliteration of history but the reorganization of time. It is not that the past dissolves in the ticking seconds of midnight — memories are stubborn and coil within us — but that we are given license to curate their influence. We cannot, and perhaps should not, forget the structures that formed us, but neither must we live eternally as their consequence. The new year, then, becomes a mental and temporal canvas not of naïve optimism but of deliberate reckoning.

The fantasy of rebirth often arrives with the implicit promise of shedding one’s burdens like a snake discarding its skin, sleek and renewed beneath. But the mistake lies in believing that the old skin — the scars, failures, and traumas — was ever disposable. One does not simply slip out of suffering; one absorbs it, metabolizes it, transforms it into something else. This is no grand metamorphosis but a slow alchemical process, where even pain may become the substance from which a new architecture of the self is built. What lies ahead in the calendar is not so much a clean beginning as a variation on a theme: a life already lived, now rearranged.

The new year, for those navigating recovery, becomes both an antagonist and a muse. It tantalizes with possibilities of pristine beginnings, yet it must be greeted with suspicion. To surrender entirely to its promises is to court disillusionment; to refuse its allure altogether is to linger in stagnation. The task is to greet the new year not as a redemption but as an invitation — a beckoning into the uncertain art of becoming. Each day marked on the calendar becomes not a checkpoint to gauge success or failure but a space where presence is negotiated anew. The resolution to continue — quiet, persistent, and devoid of grandeur — becomes its own subtle triumph.

It is here, in these quiet negotiations, that the future opens up like a landscape seen from a train window: blurring, shifting, always in motion. The momentousness of life is rarely housed in singular moments; it is instead stitched together from the overlooked, the recurrent, the banal. To recover is not to chase peaks but to inhabit these valleys with something resembling grace. The mastery lies not in escaping but in learning to live within the contours of what remains. The new year is not a door swinging open onto perfection but a passage through which one learns to carry oneself differently.

One must be careful not to seek too much closure in the past, nor too much certainty in the future. Both are seductive delusions — one laced with the comfort of finality, the other with the intoxication of potential. Recovery teaches the opposite: that healing is a practice, not an achievement. The mind, in its fragile brilliance, does not respond well to ultimatums. It craves the elasticity of hope rather than the tyranny of expectation. And so, the task of facing the new year becomes not one of conquest but of craftsmanship — of weaving together disparate strands of being into something resilient, even if imperfect.

To recover, to begin again, is to embrace the paradox of living fully while acknowledging that one may never be fully whole. The world demands resolutions, while the self asks only for continuance. In these moments, we must sidestep the cultural obsession with goals, endings, and transformations. We must learn, instead, the subtle artistry of staying alive — of being gently astonished by our own persistence, however clumsy, however compromised.

Perhaps the greatest gift the new year offers is not renewal but permission: the permission to exist as one is, in flux, incomplete, unfinished. The promise of rebirth, then, is not perfection but possibility. And this, too, is a kind of freedom: not the freedom from struggle, but the freedom to navigate it differently, with curiosity rather than fear. As we step into the unknown corridors of another year, we do not discard who we were; we carry those selves forward, refracted through the soft lens of time. And perhaps, in this careful carrying, we discover that life — like recovery — is not something to be mastered but something to be lived.

 

Longlegs (2024)

Longlegs touches upon profound psychoanalytic, philosophical, and social themes, which elevate the film beyond conventional horror. The narrative’s exploration of repression and identity operates as an intricate palimpsest, reflecting personal trauma through public concealment. Oz Perkins engages with deeply philosophical questions concerning the interplay between knowledge, power, and societal invisibility — a concept that Foucault unpacks in The History of Sexuality. For Foucault, repression is not a mere act of negation but an active force that reconstructs truth into elusive, spectral fragments, constantly seeping through the cracks of discourse and interaction. In Longlegs, this philosophical insight becomes the film's heartbeat: horror is born from what is hidden but never fully obliterated.

At the narrative’s core is the notion of the mother’s “protection through denial,” which serves as a parallel to Foucault’s concept of bio-power — the subtle, pervasive management of life through institutions, norms, and interpersonal control. Perkins’s personal reference to his mother shielding him from his father’s hidden life mirrors the larger societal mechanisms of containment. This resonates with Judith Butler’s critique of normativity in Gender Trouble, where identities that challenge dominant discourses — whether queer, monstrous, or deviant — are culturally suppressed to preserve stability, yet continue to haunt from the margins. The mother’s concealment of truth creates a liminal space where repression transforms into a ghostly presence, an “undead” identity that returns with terrifying insistence.

Perkins’s artistic choice to weave the narrative around “psychosexual tension” recalls Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Freud suggested that repressed sexual desires, when denied conscious expression, resurface in altered forms — dreams, neuroses, or, in the case of Longlegs, horrific apparitions. The film leverages this psychoanalytic insight by constructing a labyrinthine plot where the monstrous is never external but is always an expression of the suppressed. The film’s antagonist is less a villain and more a manifestation of unresolved desire and guilt — an embodiment of what Freud calls the return of the repressed.

This psychological reading also extends into the Lacanian domain, where identity is formed through an interplay of desire, fantasy, and the gaze of the Other. In Longlegs, characters navigate a world marked by obscured truths, encountering horrifying reflections of themselves in those truths. The repression of identity — whether Cage’s character’s fragmented self or the hidden desires of other protagonists—creates not liberation but alienation. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, where the self is formed through identification with an external image, parallels the film's use of reflection, deception, and duality. In Longlegs, mirrors and doppelgängers do not just reflect but distort, forcing characters to confront an uncanny version of themselves — a process fraught with dread and ambiguity.

Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the Other also provides a lens through which the film’s horror can be understood. For Levinas, the encounter with the Other disrupts the self, challenging it to move beyond narcissistic isolation. In Longlegs, encounters with hidden identities — those forcibly relegated to invisibility — are traumatic because they compel recognition of a part of the self that has been denied. The horror emerges from this forced reckoning, where individuals are confronted not by alien monsters but by their own repressed alterity.

This interplay between repression and revelation extends to the film’s social commentary. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the film examines the tension between public persona and private reality. Just as Goffman suggests that social actors curate their appearances to align with societal expectations, Longlegs demonstrates how these performances can become prisons, limiting authentic self-expression. The mother’s concealment of her husband’s sexuality aligns with Goffman’s idea of backstage spaces, where hidden aspects of identity are stored away, emerging only under moments of crisis.

Yet Perkins pushes beyond the merely psychological or social, hinting at a metaphysical horror that recalls Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of dread. For Kierkegaard, dread is the vertiginous sensation that accompanies the recognition of freedom — the realization that beneath the surface lies a terrifying abyss of possibility. In Longlegs, the repression of identity generates not just social discomfort but metaphysical disorientation, as characters grapple with the limitless possibilities of what they could become if freed from societal constraints. This metaphysical unease is heightened by the film’s nonlinear narrative, which mirrors the fragmented nature of consciousness itself.

Perkins's decision to cast Cage — a performer known for his ability to blur the boundaries between realism and excess — underscores the film’s philosophical investigation into identity. Cage’s performance as the titular character transforms him into a liminal figure, operating at the intersection of sanity and madness, control and chaos. His character’s grotesque body, as described by Bakhtin, symbolizes the breakdown of stable categories, embodying both the abject and the sublime. The mother’s attempt to shield her children from their father’s truth can be read as an attempt to preserve a “clean” social narrative, but Cage’s monstrous presence reveals the inevitability of contamination.

In the end, Longlegs leaves us with a paradox reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology: the idea that the present is always haunted by what it seeks to exclude. The film suggests that no repression is absolute; what is denied will always find a way to return, distorted and amplified. The characters are haunted not just by their personal traumas but by the cultural and historical legacies they inherit—a theme that resonates deeply with Derrida’s reflections on the spectral presence of the past within the present.

Through this web of references and ideas, Perkins crafts a film that transcends the typical boundaries of the horror genre. Longlegs is not merely about a lurking monster but about the monstrous process of becoming — of confronting the repressed parts of ourselves and our histories. It is a film that unsettles precisely because it compels us to acknowledge what we would rather forget: that beneath every surface lies a labyrinth of truths, waiting to break free.