"I have a life partner that is anxiety, although I like the term madness more, because it has a historical and literary part that has served as a refuge for me."
Literature has always accompanied Mar García Puig, who is an editor. Her anxiety may have already been there, but it kicked in when her twins were born. It was December 20, 2015. The same day that David and Sara arrived in the world, Mar was elected a deputy for Podemos in Congress. A radical life change that brought her wonderful things, but also that depression that she has fought for years.
Therapy and books helped her because "they contain similar experiences of women who have been insane." So García Puig collected material, a lot of material to contribute to her healing. Hundreds of stories "that dialogue with mine, stories with which I have established a link, a thread that I have joined and feel the debt of continuing to build it."
And also to share it. The history of vertebrates (Random House) is the formula with which García Puig has given to transfer her experience and that of many other women from ancient Greece to the present day through the Renaissance or the Victorian era and that have been reflected in poems, novels, medical treatises, paintings, philosophical theories, mythological narratives...
It all started with the desire to have children: “I didn't have a genetic need to reproduce my genes, but I did want to have children and I couldn't. I tried avenues such as adoption, but they turned out to be impractical. In Spain it was a very difficult road and the international was closed. So I resorted to assisted reproduction”, explains García Puig in an interview with La Vanguardia.
Perhaps that was the moment when anxiety began to take shape because "I felt a great self-imposed pressure that I wanted to have children, it was not a call from my body, but I wanted to have a family and it is true that, no matter how feminist we feel , the idea of the family is built through the children”.
García Puig assures that she went crazy on the day of the delivery, but her new life was not easy at all: two children to take care of, the trips to Madrid to work in Congress, the stress of a new profession... "I was a mother and a policy that wanted to control everything and it is impossible to have everything under control. But there are other things. Politics is still difficult for women. It blows up in your face. It is still a very macho world and it is not strange that women are not forced to choose. Many end up retiring."
That is one of the thousands of reasons why madness visits women more, "we are much more medicated than men, perhaps due to precariousness, discrimination, sexist violence, contact with death and vulnerability or the care of the elderly. We go crazy in the face of injustice.”
Added to all this is "the responsibility and guilt that mothers feel," says the writer. “I was tortured by the idea of having to part with my children one day. That gave more importance to death and caused me the pain of also having to accept the fragility and sadness that comes from knowing that there are things that do not depend on us”.
But everything comes out and García Puig left the acute phase behind thanks "to the medication, the psychologists, my affective networks and also the most philosophical, poetic and literary part." A help that he has embodied in the pages of The history of vertebrates.
