The Sunflower Lanyard Program Helps Travelers with Invisible Disabilities

My Symptoms May Be Back, But I’m Not Ready to Give Up on Life

THE AMSTERDAM DISPATCH

By Lisbeth Coiman

I arrived at Amsterdam’s doors with a last name rooted in the shameful chapters of her story. My ancestors were traded across the ocean to places where the sea offers all shades of blue. They contributed to the wealth of world trade, with screams for mercy muffled in the humid cellars under those majestic windows. But I don’t come here looking for my past. Rather, I come here to find the tools to continue living my complex life. I wonder what I can learn from Amsterdam about navigating life with bipolar disorder—although some doctors have said schizoaffective disorder instead.

As I pour myself a glass of water from a jar that contains an orange rind and mint, I muse about what I have learned of Amsterdam so far. 

Amsterdam is a 700-year-old hipster woman, in leather jacket and jeans with rivets who throws 18,000 bicycles into the canals on her wild nights. Amsterdam is the weed waft hitting my nostrils in the Vonderplas. Amsterdam is the smell fries topped with melted cheese and ossenworst. Amsterdam is grey skies underscored by the greenish canals of the Amstel River and a dam. 

Amsterdam welcomes you with a cold embrace covered in flowers marking the narrow doors of centuries-old apartment buildings. Amsterdam is Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Mondrian, Anne Frank and their struggles. Amsterdam is a multicultural woman ready to reveal the invisible in the golden sunflowers and the yellow room of Van Gogh last days. 

I arrived at her doors with a last name rooted in the shameful chapters of her story. My ancestors were traded across the ocean to places where the sea offers all shades of blue. They contributed to the wealth of world trade, with screams for mercy muffled in the humid cellars under those majestic windows. 

But I don’t come here looking for my past. Rather I come here to find the tools to continue living my complex life. 

I wonder what I can learn from Amsterdam about navigating life with bipolar disorder—although some doctors have said schizoaffective disorder instead.

I had a late onset of my condition when I was 32 years old and a recent immigrant to Canada. As a mother and wife, I devoted my energy to managing dissociative episodes and occasional hallucinations to shelter my children from the potential harm of growing up with a mentally ill parent. 

I had to learn every coping skill on my own. Only recently, 26 years after that sad summer, my new employer has offered me mental health days as part of my benefits. I am 59 years old now and in no financial situation to declare early retirement. I must continue to work while this world still considers me functioning. Psychiatric treatment and medication are costly. Other than that, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a grassroots organization that provides education and support to those afflicted by mental health, is my only backup plan in case I need assistance in my daily life.

While I enjoyed seven years medication-free and almost asymptomatic, now the dissociations I experience have begun to interfere with daily activities, such as cooking and driving. One morning making café de olla, I burned the pot to a black crust at the bottom. I didn’t smell the burning coffee, but at least 20 minutes must have passed with me disconnected from reality for the pot to get to that point. These brief episodes pose a significant risk for accidents whether I’m at home or on the go. But I’m not ready to give up on life. I make every effort to enjoy what I consider pleasure: hiking, gardening, dancing, and traveling. 

According to the WHO, 1.3 billion people—16% of the world population—suffer from a disability. About 27% of the European population have been affected by at least one mental disorder in the last 12 months. The Center for Disease Control in the US says that about 10% of disabled Americans suffer from invisible disabilities. These are not immediately apparent chronic illnesses and conditions, but significantly impair normal activities of daily living. Mental disorders are the most common invisible disabilities currently recognized. 

While disability inclusion ensures access to all aspects of societal life, special services seem to focus on survival: health, employment, or education. Often inclusion disregards the need for pleasure, entertainment, and the “pursue of happiness”—to state it in American terms. 

When I looked for services for solo travelers with invisible disabilities, the silence I heard back seems to scream that I should be content with taking a heavy cocktail of psychiatric medication, stay home, breathing heavily through an open mouth, and taking care of the neighborhood cats. 

But I refuse to be reduced to survival. I want to enjoy what a middle class, professional woman my age can enjoy. I will not be rendered a robot by medication even as I hear the word “privilege” spoken in my direction so many times because I’m not crazy enough or poor enough or destitute enough. Nobody else is in these shoes. I own this experience, this condition, the limitations, and the bravery it takes to cope with them. I don’t need the approval of able bodies/minds to determine what I should or should not enjoy, what I have the right to define in my own terms. 

For me, disability inclusion means offering spaces and support for people like me to achieve our goals and sustain a healthy, well-rounded life independently.

I tried to avoid overwhelming schedules in planning this trip to Amsterdam. I made that mistake in another century, when I was married to a man who disregarded my need to stop and reflect and included every museum and monument in the itinerary, exhausting my emotional tools. This time I have decided to visit just one museum. With over 60 in the canal city, the decision was hard and obvious at the same time. The Van Gogh Museum offers the largest collection of his paintings in the world, but also sheds light on the emotional struggle of the great impressionist artist.  

At The Van Gogh Museum, people like me, who get easily overwhelmed in crowds or by sensory stimuli, can request a lanyard printed with sunflowers at the information booth. The Sunflower lanyard program shines visibility into the otherwise unnoticeable ailments, mostly afflictions of the mind. 

The lanyard makes me as noticeable as somebody in a wheelchair. I focused on the most famous paintings and read all the material on the wall. Then “The Yellow Room” catches my attention. I noticed the distorted furniture cramped in the tiny yellow space, dark lines outlining the bed, Van Gogh’s own paintings hanging on the depicted walls, as if out of focus.

I start feeling uncomfortable in a crowd oblivious to my personal space. I step on somebody’s foot and apologize profusely, which makes me lose focus. I get disoriented, turn my head left and right, unable to see the “The Yellow Room” past somebody’s back in front of me. Centering on my senses, I try to regain my footing. The man smelled of stale bread, liquor, cigarettes. I needed air and turned to look for help. I made eye contact with the museum guard. One look at the lanyard and he said, “there is a quite space at the end of that room. You can have a break there.” Simple. No explanations needed.

Van Gogh brings it home for me. Although an entire psychiatrist convention couldn’t agree on his diagnosis, Van Gogh possibly suffered from Bipolar Disorder, the same diagnosis I’ve carried for 26 years. Bipolar Disorder includes, but it’s not restricted to, mood disorder, psychotic episodes, grandiosity, delusions, dissociations, hallucinations, self-harm not exclusive of suicidal intent, and suicide ideation. Some of the symptoms overlap with schizophrenia; however, schizophrenia does not give any respite. In contrast, those who suffer from Bipolar Disorder can experience asymptomatic periods of recovery.

In front of the self-portrait collections, I ask myself, “What could Gaugin have told Van Gogh that he couldn’t unhear? Was Gaugin’s toxic criticism the reason Van Gogh cut his ear? Were those circular brush strokes in his most famous painting, The Starry Night, the result of the visual distortions typical of a psychotic episode?

That’s when I realized I’ve made the same mistake of so many before me. I have looked at the artist through the lens of his disability and not at the art he gifted the world. In my quest to gain my own visibility, I have reduced the artist to his emotional pain. 

Vincent Van Gogh completed several masterpieces, and his most recognizable paintings, 74 pieces in total, in the two years leading to his early death by suicide—all of this despite suffering from a mental disorder, not because he was mentally ill. He painted self-portraits not because he wanted to document his suffering. Rather, he couldn’t afford to pay models to sit for him.

He used mostly color and light to take us to the places he loved. I have not visited the fields that inspired the sunflower series, but I have a pretty good idea of what they might look like because of Van Gogh.  Whether a painter or a writer, the artist opens the world to others through their personal interpretation. Once I looked at The Starry Night, I have always seen starry nights through that distorted lens. Van Gogh’s interpretation.

Amsterdam is my brother sending desperate messages for help when I’m chatting with a fellow writer at De Hallen. Amsterdam is arriving somewhere that feels like home because they use words like “barbero,” which takes me back to Caracas, with its coffee shops and flower vendors.

Amsterdam is morning coffee at Hotel Abba and afternoon workshop at Bar Bario. Amsterdam is vintage stores in Kinkerstraat, and hot cocoa at Kattencafe Kopjes, crab soup at Pension Homeland, and riding a bicycle next to a tiny red car. Amsterdam is taking pictures of Picasso’s fish, although he intended for it to be a bird.

Amsterdam is the sunflower lanyard program post outside the Maritime Museum inviting me to find out how my ancestors got to the Caribbean. Amsterdam is the KLM crew of my flight back home who, with a look at my sunflower pin told me, “you are my number one priority in this flight.” Amsterdam is a tension between the desire to search for my ancestry and a need to be understood without explanations.

—Bakkagerði, Iceland 

June 5, 2023

Lisbeth Coiman is a warrior of internal battles and a trekker of intersecting paths in the route to becoming a word artist. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Her poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021) raises awareness of the humanitarian crisis in her homeland. Coiman lives in Los Angeles, CA where hikes, dances salsa, and writes erotica for fun.