Toast & The State of Mental Healthcare
Rebuilding Society
It’s been a little while since I thought about Toast. I remember learning about the story, probably from the This American Life episode since I was a fairly regular listener in the early 2010s. It’s not the fault of Ira Glass that the series has succeeded to the extent that there are so many episodes it has become daunting to find a reentry point. But I digress. Back to Toast.
The story I remember was about a person who was down on their luck and out of money. She decided to open up a shop selling toast—just toast. In my recollection this was in Portland though that doesn’t seem to be the case, or else there were multiple people having similar ideas at the same time (which historically is common for big issues (see: debates over who discovered X theory first or who invented X first)). In any case, what I remember is this person, down on their luck, out of money, opening a shop to sell toast—and everyday people came to the rescue. But not just out of the kindness of their heart. No, in fact, people were finding solace in having someone do the relatively simple act of making toast for them.
Trying to re-find the story today, I discovered what was probably happening at the time and maybe is a bit of a historical rewrite. I don’t know. One of the more astonishing aspects of revisiting this story is learning about Giulietta Carrelli, who is downright inspirational as a human being.
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Check out Carrelli’s ‘My Story’ for Trouble Coffee, which has sadly closed after 15 years. Though it sounds like in this case she may simply be moving forward.
The story is so good, I’m simply going to copy a version of it read right here:
I STARTED MAKING MIX TAPES IN THE 80'S AS A TEN YEAR OLD. MY SISTER SHAVED MY HEAD TO MATCH TONY HAWK. WE PAINTED THE DEAD MILKMAN COW ON MY JEAN JACKET. I WROTE "I HATE YOU RONALD REAGAN" ON MY TSHIRTS. THAT LITTLE PUNK WANTED TO OWN A COFFEE SHOP. THAT LITTLE PUNK WANTED TO LIVE IN CALIFORNIA BECAUSE BLACK FLAG WAS ON THAT COAST.I WAS GONNA MAKE IT. I WAS RAISED WITH THE AMERICA DREAM IN THE RUST BELT OF CLEVELAND, OHIO BY AN IMMIGRANT FATHER AND AN EX NUN. FAILURE WAS NOT IN OUR VOCABULARY.
BUT ONE DAY I FELL DOWN. I WAS FIFTEEN.
I SEARCHED FOR TWENTY YEARS IN NINE CITIES. LIVING ON THE STREETS WITH A FEW COUCHES IN BETWEEN.
I AM NOT HERE TO TELL A SAD STORY.
I AM HERE TO OPEN THE DOOR TO A BEAUTIFUL LIFE BASED ON THE TRUTH THAT LIVES IN YOU THRU MY STRUGGLES AND MY HOPE.
TROUBLE IS NOT ONLY A COFFEE CO IT IS A COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE AND POWER THAT KEPT ME ALIVE.
I WAS DIAGNOSED WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA BY STANFORD UNIVERSITY AT THE AGE OF 33.
18 YEARS AFTER MY FIRST EPISODE.
THE SALT AND THE COLD SEA KEPT ME ALIVE LONG ENOUGH TILL I FOUND THE HELP I NEEDED.
MY NETWORK IN THE BAY AREA IS THE REASON I HAVE MADE MY LIFE AS A WORKING ARTIST SELLING BEAUTIFUL HAND-CRAFTED COFFEES IN THREE OF MY INSTALLATIONS.
YOU WILL MAKE IT. WE WILL HELP. BUILD YOUR OWN DAMN HOUSE.
GUTS AND HONOR AND A LITTLE BIT OF JUDAS PRIEST IS THE TRICK.
STAY TRUE TO YOUR HOUSE. FABRICATE CONSCIOUSNESS. THE TRUTH IS YOU. THIS IS A SIMPLE INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE. GET IN TROUBLE. MOVEMENT IS A COLLECTIVE ART THAT RELIES ON PARTICIPANTS. BUILD YOUR OWN DAMN HOUSE. WE WILL HELP. LEAD WITH WHAT YOU KNOW. MAINTAIN GUTS AND HONOR. BE GRACEFUL. LIVE NOW. COMPOSE. SHED THE LIGHT ON HOW THE MIND WORKS. CONSTRUCT YOUR PERCEPTIONS. JOIN US IN OUR DANCE. SONGS WORK.
BY: TROUBLE HERSELF, GIULIETTA CARRELLI
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A surprising and amazing finding is that it seems like Guiletta Carrelli was not the only person who thought Toast was a good idea for digging yourself out of hard times, trying to ground yourself, and get your life back on track. Here’s the story of John Park and his restaurant Toast Kitchen & Bakery.
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Toast turned into a trend. This is before avocado toast came on the scene. It’s almost certainly a catalyst for what was to come. What has been dubbed “hipster toast” and “millennial toast” and so on and so forth.
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Here’s a few quotes that I loved in particular from this 2014 article about Guiletta Carrelli:
At the time of the article, Carrelli was 34.
She grew up in a rough neighborhood of Cleveland in the ’80s and ’90s in a big immigrant family, her father a tailor from Italy, her mother an ex-nun. The family didn’t eat much standard American food. But cinnamon toast, made in a pinch, was the exception. “We never had pie,” Carrelli says. “Our American comfort food was cinnamon toast.”
In public, Carrelli wears a remarkably consistent uniform: a crop top with ripped black jeans and brown leather lace-up boots, with her blond hair wrapped in Jack Sparrowish scarves and headbands. At her waist is a huge silver screaming-eagle belt buckle, and her torso is covered with tattoos of hand tools and designs taken from 18th-century wallpaper patterns. Animated and lucid—her blue eyes bright above a pair of strikingly ruddy cheeks—Carrelli interrupted our long conversation periodically to banter with pretty much every person who visited the shop.
Ever since she was in high school, Carrelli says, she has had something called schizoaffective disorder, a condition that combines symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolarity. People who have it are susceptible to both psychotic episodes and bouts of either mania or depression.
Carrelli tends toward the vivid, manic end of the mood spectrum, she says, but the onset of a psychotic episode can shut her down with little warning for hours, days, or, in the worst instances, months. Even on good days, she struggles to maintain a sense of self; for years her main means of achieving this was to write furiously in notebooks, trying to get the essentials down on paper. When an episode comes on, she describes the experience as a kind of death: Sometimes she gets stuck hallucinating, hearing voices, unable to move or see clearly; other times she has wandered the city aimlessly. “Sometimes I don’t recognize myself,” she says. “I get so much disorganized brain activity, I would get lost for 12 hours.”
Carrelli’s early years with her illness were, she says, a blind struggle. Undiagnosed, she worked her way through college—three different colleges, in different corners of the country—by booking shows for underground bands and doing stints at record stores and coffee shops. But her episodes were a kind of time bomb that occasionally leveled any structure in her life. Roommates always ended up kicking her out. Landlords evicted her. Relationships fell apart. Employers either fired her or quietly stopped scheduling her for shifts. After a while, she began anticipating the pattern and taking steps to pre-empt the inevitable. “I moved when people started catching on,” she says. By the time she hit 30, she had lived in nine different cities.
If your interest is sufficiently peaked, much like mine, you can read the rest of the article here.
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Part of what draws me to this story is the reminder of that age old, cliché, and somewhat tired saying “it takes a village.” The thing is—it’s true.
Anyone with mental health issues knows it’s dangerous to try to white knuckle it on your own—especially for too long without professional support and appropriate interventions.
There are many avenues to find assistance in our time though not nearly enough. And those of us who lack funds, a solid safety net, or good connections, end up suffering for a lack of quality and compassionate mental healthcare.
When thinking about the dream, that some consider very pie in the sky, of Healthcare For All, we need to remember that mental healthcare is just as important as physical healthcare. And, perhaps, most importantly, that preventative care is not only better for the individual but for society at large. Those concerned with paying higher taxes or higher premiums on health insurance often fail to keep in mind that it’s far more expensive to send someone to the hospital or have them turn up at the Emergency Department in a critical state.
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I hope that together we can find a path forward to develop bipartisan support for healthcare and mental healthcare that benefits us all— in spite of zipcode destiny, in spite of being born into life situations that are less than ideal, in spite of the lack of equality for those who our society continues to disenfranchise, disparage, other, castigate, stigmatize, or are otherwise marginalized or scapegoated.
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As an outshot, I highly recommend listening to this recent episode of 1A – The Kids Aren’t Alright: The post-pandemic teen mental health crisis. It’s a stark reminder of the importance of preventative care and a worrisome (if not grim), informative, a sadly not terribly shocking (although the stats are worse than even I would have surmised through a cynical lens) informative discussion about the state of mental health in America and the need to make systemic changes now to provide preventative measures that better aid younger generations to avoid a trend of mental health spiraling downward in our country.
(Ok, here’s where I kinda sorta go in a little bit of a rant… I hope you’ll keep reading.)
Without taking proper preventative measures, there is no question that we have once again set up youth to fail. If you look at the stats, Gen X and Millennials are unlikely to match the wealth of Boomers or The Silent Generation. While current adults struggle and have suffered immensely during the pandemic, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have had their lives completely upended.
It’s tempting to draw comparisons. Say, that the Covid-19 pandemic is Gen Z’s 9/11.
This is problematic and, frankly fallacious logic that comes with attempting to compare one societal, public grief/loss to another.
Every generation has their challenges. The Great Recession of 2008 is looking a little different coming out of a pandemic followed by historic levels of challenging to control inflation. This was partly inevitable after Trump, in tandem with pandemic-related monetary infusions, created an out of control bull market and subsequent bubble. We are now facing the consequences.
Our choices today, about mental health, climate action, gun reform, LGBTQIA+ rights, prioritizing reclaiming women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies, closing the gender wage gap, ensuring social security and Medicaid both remain solvent for future generations, dissolving the billionaire class which should never have become plausible in the first place in order to help close the gap between the extremely wealthy and working poor, fixing America’s infrastructure, understanding the risks associated with rapid AI advancement, prison reform, community policing initiatives, housing is a human right and with the importance of Housing First initiatives to combat homelessness, reforming college education in America and creating other pathways to a living wage that include the opportunity for a well-rounded education… tragically, the list goes on.
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