Perhaps I feel this way because I work nine to five in a mental health ward that serves inner-city Boston in the Roxbury neighborhood. I have done this for thirteen years.  I work with an extremely deprived lot of people and it can be hard to leave it behind.  Before that I was underemployed for a significant amount of time having just moved into Boston from an out-of-state, State Hospital where I was an inmate for three months.

My wife’s friend is a stay at home, decorative home-schooler who lives off family money and has expensive tastes. I am not proud that this is the way I see her.  She is certainly nice enough. They live in a hippy town out west along the Masshole Turnpike.

At least I can say that my wife does not have to pressure me to do an event like this.  She supports me emotionally and I am genuinely motivated to put on a good show for her. Our relationship is solid.

***

Once parked, we struggle to find the proper side entrance though the clutter of prepubescent girls that are taking over patio and lawn. I note the anxiety, practicing, and perfectionism and wonder what it’s all about, really. I don’t even know what Irish dancing is. I spot a boy or two on the way in. Sure I was lucky to have baseball games and have my parents attend too. But coming face to face with insulated childhood innocence is gearing up to really blow my mind.

We enter the ball room and navigate the crowd scanning for her friend.  We find each other and there are hugs and pleasantries and I wonder if her friend is angry at me.  The last time we paid her a visit in hippy land I lost my cool when her husband ordered the most expensive meal when it had been clear we were paying. But to make matters worse, my wife topped it off by buying her friend some thirty dollar bottle of grape juice. Yes, grape juice. That was just too damn much for me.  I thought of the poverty of the people who I employ after work trying to help them get on their feet after catastrophic mental health break down and I just could not keep my eyes from bulging in their sockets.

My wife managed me well and respected where I was coming from. But somehow I don’t see her friend as being so humble.

My wife’s friend is hosting her parents who are in from out of town.  I have met them before and they are okay.  They’ll talk about their struggles to bring it in and will tolerate their daughter’s expensive tastes with some degree of eye roll. I give them all hugs but my mind is already consumed with the dancing that is going on in this massive marble ball room. They have imported mobile wood floors that are getting good and stomped on in rhythmic patterns.  The get-ups are like nothing I have ever seen before, polyester and doll-baby, yet Irish. I presume they are only worn for these statewide competitions and imagine they are costly.  Many girls are wearing wigs to look more Irish.

The thing that gets me is the privilege involved with spending hours training to put on a show that only Irish lace people would really dig. I go on as we are all seated and my wife is whispering to her friend, thinking about the way people honor such waste in this society and develop these truly idiosyncratic traditions; for what: so that one girl can be better than the next. We are totally surrounded by lace lovers that are stroking their knees, taking pictures, and perpetuating grandiosity.

***

When I work on a mental ward—either as an inmate, a hostage taker, or hopefully, with some skill, a dream maker—it is hard not to see something like rank as being anything but highly hurtful. Although we charge our clientele a high level on their insurance, we stay in an old dilapidated section of the hospital. With hard work the place has gotten better over the years, but there is that yellow stain that runs from the urinal to the drain of the men’s restroom from years of neglect that just won’t go away even when the floor is glossed. Everything is old. The window panes are crusted with soot while the rest of the hospital is renovated. Bubbled widows in the hall that you can’t see in or out of only just got removed two years ago. And though many of us do all that we can, to create a healthy and healing environment, there are still institutional lines that form in front of the decaf coffee among other signs of overcrowding. Just outside the unit is the stench of a trash compactor that the clients who smoke illegally must breathe. And we are located right next to the morgue.

Just witnessing this ballroom reminds me about the importance of ranking up and somehow being deemed talented and worthwhile. My wife points out a dancer that her friend and daughter are appalled at.  Sure she is bow legged and a pinch awkward but she’s getting good exercise and is clearly deserving of love too. I know that if she can’t find love, she will one day get driven into the squalor that I deal with on a daily basis.  And yet it is so important to the lace bastards of the world to worship the best.

In support of our goddaughter, the whole lot of us keep shifting and moving around as a unit.  Eventually, the parents leave and my wife’s friend starts complaining about the fact that her parents snored last night. She can barely stand it.

I look at the competitive display going on right in front of our eyes, each girl trying to take center stage in front of the judges. I lean over and whisper in my wife’s ear, “Why is it that all I can do is hear these girls in my mind saying things like, ‘you bitch,’ and ‘you cunt.” I have distorted my voice a bit when I say the expletives. I probably repeat them a few times.

My wife laughs hysterically and I am a little surprised that I got away with the “c” word.  I mean, it was funny but I really know better than to be using such derogatory language.

As our goddaughter takes a turn, I take notice that the outfit of her troop is simpler than the troops of other girls.  My wife’s friend is madly trying to make her stomp shoes appear a little less old by covering the worn portion with black ink.  All the moves our goddaughter makes look perfect and eloquent but our goddaughter looks a little bit tall and lanky as she does her stuff. And her dress is just a bit wilted made of fuzzy fabric rather that spanking bright polyester.

It is not long after that when I see the one girl that really stands out. She is the only one out there who dances with the grace and ease that tells you she knows she is the best. She is the true doll baby of the ballroom. I hear my wife’s friend comment that the costume she is wearing costs eight hundred dollars.  This girl comes from one of those wealthy districts who can dare to give them the advantage of requiring eight-hundred dollar uniforms for their special girls.  She dances next to a teammate who also has good moves but also bears just a little extra weight in a way that makes her socks look like their pulled up too high.   Yep, the teammate is definitely second rate.

And suddenly we are all scrambling to get to a distant dance floor where our goddaughter has been moved.  The grandparents are back and we join a different crowd of parents that are all collectively clapping for all the dancers.  Somehow all these dancers have advanced and they sure do look better with the community clapping for them. We clap and clap.

I think about all these little egos getting that community boosts and think about how the little girls back in the ghetto block where I stayed back in college had nothing quite like this going for them.  One of them that first hits my memory had a mother who had been developmentally delayed, raised by her maternal grandmother. The way they loved the hell out of us when we gave them attention, told us they had to fight for everything they got with fisticuffs. Maybe they danced well in the double-Dutch but they didn’t experience the ballroom clap.

I think about what it’s like to be a parent and have to drag yourself to all these events.  Yeah, this must be when it gets worthwhile when you get to contribute to your child being clapped at. This is what it’s all about for the parent: contributing to boosting you little girl’s notion of superiority. Though I am clapping to fit it, I feel like we’re all a bunch of assholes.

Just after the clapping stops, I see one mother at a little girl’s throat. How dare the little girl want to go sock-less like her friend! I feel oddly validated. We may all create community for a minute, but it is all dog eat dog in this crowd the minute we have to deal with anything that displeases us. It’s not that I like to see abuse.  It’s just somehow comforting to be reminded that this sense of community is in fact built on façade.

We have to wait around a while for our goddaughter to get her results and I am starting to get that itch. We are just waiting and waiting. I have seen enough to know that our goddaughter will only end up in tears for the most dumb-ass of reasons. I feel that what makes her awesome in my book, the fact that she did not push to get up front and be seen by the judges, is not likely to be respected in this crowd.

I need to get away from here, I think. I can’t learn a damn thing about anything that is going to help the world endure in future generations in a place like this. I am so sharply bias in this manner. The whole days a wash.  I didn’t get any writing done. I really don’t have too much time away from work and this just a royal goddamn pain that isn’t going to help my spirit in any manner whatsoever!

***

And then it dawns on me.  I think of one of the male peers I have worked with back on the crumbling mental ward.

This particular “patient” had been a true twisted character. My colleagues were frustrated with him and talked disparaging of him.  He lost all his board and care placements. He wouldn’t follow rules and sit in groups. The unit felt all but hopeless for him. At one time a competitive swimmer, from wealth and privilege, he went homeless repeatedly. He was incapable of making a friend. And what was worse was that we couldn’t bill for him.  He was utterly useless.

I remember how, myself being the only staff person who could actively demonstrate that he know what “psychosis” feels like, he’d talk to me. He had this terrible chronic pain in his back that made him unable to stand up straight and stay have patience for group.  But then many of my colleague would negate that because on break he would go into the hall and start dancing.  I can’t count the number of times staff made fun of him for his dancing. There was Sid dancing in the hall like a full on lark, making the mental ward just a pinch loonier.

It dawns on me that he was doing Irish dancing. All those fancy moves had looked oddly familiar.

Suddenly I have an ability to understand his behavior on our unit, in the homeless shelters and board and care home that force him into our dilapidated setting.  Finally, I can see the thing that is keeping him going in spite of his pain and in spite of his “psychosis.”

I can see that this lace culture is the one thing that helped him feel valued and that continues to give him hope in all of his squalor. Though I imagine he now feels conflicted about it, I now understand better how disparity in his life make him unable to accept anything else. I think of my own behavior and the way people despised it during incarceration and believe that in time, Sid will overcome all the bullshit and return to health much as I did.  I held onto the privilege of my past to endure minimum wage work, poverty and madness, all at the same time. In spite of all the harassment and humiliation I made people sandwiches so that I could keep afloat and out of the hospital. In like manner, Sid danced in the halls to tolerate being an inmate.

Although I have not seen this man for a year, it is so nice to be reminded that he will be okay. Social integration into the Irish Lace community has helped me decode his existence.  And now I don’t have to look at all this hype with quite the same edge.

***

I always wish I could help some of the other staff I work with not to be so negative and critical toward characters like Sid. I know I need to have more compassion for my fellow staff.  Some are used to being treated to Marriot Hotel-land. They are fighting hard to give their kids that lift and afford these dance competitions. One or two might even feel bitter that they have to come in and work with the dilapidated losers to maintain their career. I wish I could help those on our staff who don’t like what they do see that they work with the greatest people in the world. I wish more of us would be motivated to crack the case of Sid, the Irish Dancer, as I have just done.

People often don’t like to learn the lessons they most need to learn. They don’t feel comfortable when you put them out of their comfort zones. Not everyone integrates gracefully into the squalor or institutionalized poverty. I certainly didn’t initially. But there is hope that as they survive in this wide world we travel through that they will learn the really important of life’s lessons. It is only stigma and oppression that differentiates the people in the Marriot and the people in the inmates in the county hospitals.  I am still the same person I was when whistle blowing landed me in the State hospital and in years of Mad crisis.

As we mount our hybrid SUV and prepare to leave this la la land, I hope and pray that I will continue to learn my lessons so that when I end up back in the institution in old age without a child to take care of me, that I will have learned enough to endure and be humble enough to accept my place in this society. I hope I will find a few staff that actually care about what they are doing and will learn from my experience. I hope that I will enrich their lives the way people like Sid enriches mine.

The post Learning Life’s Lessons In the Least Likely of Places appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

***

This year’s weekend of April 1^st, my wife supports me in insisting that we take a vacation day. She packs up her hybrid SUV with camping materials and when I finish my Friday commute, we hit the interstate headed north. We plan to camp and hike at the Kings Range on the Lost Coast in Humboldt County, but we know even before we sift through the remains of the Bay Area traffic, there’s no way we are going to make it the whole way.

We make it to the city of Ukiah and drive until we find a Safeway. I am about ready to drop as we load our shit into the front of the car and depart to hit the restroom. We pass the panhandlers and the no camping sign and I start to stress about the possibility that the security will force us to move on in the middle of the night.

“Don’t worry about it my boobie,” says my wife.

I look into the eyes of a particular panhandler and hate our privilege. There sure are a significant amount of late night shoppers who are finishing their long weeks. I ponder the meaning of it all over the urinal. After we regroup, we steal into the back of the SUV.

***

We hit our exit in Garberville the next morning before seven am. Throughout the drive, I have processed aspects of my week and history. My wife has been sharing too. I hear about an upcoming trip; house projects she still needs to accomplish; artistic visual displays she might create to soothe anxiety-driven migraines; and many assorted details pertaining to family, her nieces, and her gardening jobs. I most definitely dominate the discourse, but she is supportive and relates to my sense of strife.

As we exit the highway beneath a beaming blue sky we follow signs to Shelter Cove and end up on a country road that is surrounded by lush spring grasses. There is no shoulder and only an occasional gravel pull out. Rundown tweaker properties mix with farm gates with video surveillance. We pass a couple men putting up a thick wooden fence that appears sturdier than the ghost town we just passed a few minutes ago and we ascend the switchbacks of the first of a series of significantly wooded ridges.

By the time we’re driving on the dirt road, we pass a campground and hit an intersection. Then, we leave the flat behind and ascend eroding, mud-gauged switch backs that make my wife progressively uncomfortable to the point where she wants to turn around.

“No, that isn’t a good turnaround,” I suggest, “There isn’t enough room. Keep driving.”

My wife intones her voice, “Now may have passed our only choice. We have got to turn around now!”

At the next switchback we turn around and retrace out steps to the last switchback where we manage to park out of harm’s way. I mimic my wife’s tone in exaggerated falsetto manner. She laughs but quite seriously stands by her decision to park the car.

We make a lunch and boot up and before long we are walking up the steep grade our SUV couldn’t make.

***

When my mind settles into the hike, I ponder the issues that my client’s face.

One of my clients recently shared with me that a corner boy sold her some bunk weed. It was supposed to have the buds in it so that it would be strong so she confronted the seller about the price and quality who turned around and threatened to kill her.

Many of the people I work with have spent half of their lives bouncing from the streets to jail, to the hospital and back. They are used to scraps and neglected facilities. You might think they are used to being threatened. But still a threat is a threat.

At some unlicensed board and care homes they may settle into, it is not uncommon to be bullied. Big clients might be solicited to work as a thug. I have heard that some board and care workers lay claims to their violent pasts to maintain order. Over the years I have heard the most ridiculous sorts of abuses you can imagine.

I have learned my lessons painfully that advising this person to call the police is not an option on this occasion. I now use discernment before contacting the police or APS to investigate abuse. Believing in and respecting the realities of street-life is key to supporting anyone through. I struggle but remind myself being a concerned ear, and reminding her to avoid the d-boy is the best I can do.

At least I respect her belief that she is a religious figure and learn more about how it is true.

Like the psychiatrist, I have come to realize that smoking weed and tobacco may be the only vacation many schizophrenic peoples get. I know many who are afraid to go outside the smoking areas of their homes. I would love to have all my clients accompany us out here, but their work with me does not entitle them to an SUV and a day off. It sure took me a long time to get here, I think.

***

When we get back to the car four hours later, we decide to leave the Lost Coast instead of take a treacherous road down to a favorite hiking zone.

Back on the interstate, we take an exit and find that the road we need to reach the coast has been washed out. Instead, we find a vacant campground where we can use our credit card, set up our tent, cook some dinner, and retire for the day. We settle into a stupid slapstick movie. Somehow Bill Murray’s flat a deadpan face is funny and entertaining as he intermingles in a caper with government spies and corruption. I can never understand how he pulls it off.

***

Traipsing off to sleep I retrace our steps of the day. My mind falls back into hiking down that mountain road when I had remembered studying the whaling industry in fifth grade. I had remembered a private-school-trip to Mystic Seaport during which we had walked through the hull of a restored whaling ship. I had contrasted the packed in crew’s quarters as opposed to the luxury of the captain’s quarters.

I have never done well with the contrast. My whole life I have had this inexplicable hostility for the captain seething through my veins to the rhythm of the old Ranzo-Me-Boys work-ballad. It did not bode well for my relations with my landholding family. I’d thought about how family member after family member tried to quell my stance on the matter and how alienated I have become.

My wife and I met too late in life to have kids. I’d strained financially to stay independent and understand dating regulations. Perhaps I should have just let myself get kissed-rich, but I didn’t understand. When I was in high school my room was converted to a study before I even graduated because I had opted to move out early.

While I work quite well with the crew back on the ward, my work has earned me a 1000 square foot, well-tended captain’s quarters at the end of a commute, not to mention the SUV and vacation day. I am reminded of my own contradictions.

***

The next morning, we travel about five minutes down the interstate and pass a sign that says, “Mendocino Wilderness Area, 42 miles.”

We follow a maze of rivers, some flowing in different directions. It’s another bright blue day and groves of trees and carved hills intersperse themselves just off the road. Low growth fenced-in green pastures dominate. I find myself needing to pull over frequently as raging large trucks seem to travel this route very fast.

Then, I get that familiar sense that I am being tailed. I look in my rear view mirror and sure enough there is a state trooper behind us in a beefy vehicle. I look for a turnout. It takes a while. I can almost sense he is running my plates.

It’s been about seventeen years since I’ve recognized these feelings. For two and a half years they dominated my life.

When a turnout finally arrives, I let the trooper pass and he does so reluctantly at first and then with quite a bit of speed.

I always wonder what is on my dossier that cops pull up.

***

“One time we had a patient come here saying that the FBI was following him,” my psychiatrist at Montana State Hospital had said. “And he was right, they were. He hadn’t done anything bad, but he was a person of interest.”

I had waited two months to finally get a meeting with this old hag who had the power to commit me for an additional nine months. I didn’t trust her enough to ask her if she was referencing me. But I sure though she was. I had a lot of reason to think this. And in the following two years in which I struggled to find work, I endured cop searches and opened mail and many signs that I was being looked at. I was a renegade, blacklisted revolutionary—a vigilante press-alerting pigeon. It’s just that no one believed me. All that attention for little old me, and now, I am afraid to go to even so much as a mainstream protest.

***

We arrive at the town or Quinto, which is a Native American reservation. We pass the tribal police headquarters and find a small outpost store where I pull in.

Sure enough, there are souvenir shirts that say, “Homeland Security since 1492” with a picture of traditionally dressed native peoples. But mostly the store is there for the locals. There are a plethora of cheap toys for the kids, a help-your-self pile of DVDs to rent or buy and about five isles of your basic food necessities. The store is empty accept for us. The owner, a gaunt, wrinkled Caucasian-looking woman, gets off the phone we ask her about hiking trails.

The woman talks to us a while. She explains that the road to Interstate 505 doesn’t open up in this season because of snow in the mountain pass, so we will have to retrace our steps to 101.

“Yes, you have to worry about straying onto private property around here,” she replies. “People end up dead around these parts for the dumbest reasons.”

A few Native American woman enter the store timidly to buy smokes and the woman takes a minute to ring them up.

An angry blonde white woman streams in saying some kind words to the owner. She buys some hotdogs and I follow her outside while my wife waits to complete a modest, respectful purchase we want to make to thank the owner.

I start by trying to make friends with the old skin and bones dog that is working on a hotdog.

“Don’t interrupt him while he’s eating she says.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re right,” I say. “She reminds me a little of my dog who passed away this year.”

“There is nothing sweeter that this old dog the white woman explains, but you can see how timid he is. His owners are tweakers and his life is full of random senseless violence. They don’t even feed him. I just do what I can to help out.”

“I know what you mean,” I say wondering if I sound as genuine as I feel.

My wife and the store owner join us and the blonde woman continues, “In fact, no one would care if you just took that old guy away from here. I was just telling him,” she adds to the store owner, “that we would all be happy because his owners do not take care of him.”

The store owners offers her endorsement of the scheme. We talk for a while.

“Think about what I said,” says the angry white woman about her life and dog.

***

Down the road a patch we stop at the Ranger Station we had been told about. There is a woman ranger in hiking boots who is gardening when we pull in. She looks wildly offended by our presence until my wife emerges from our black SUV and warms her up.

She insists on inviting us in to show us a map of her favorite hiking spot. I stop and pet well-fed friendly dog.

“I’m from Idaho,” she volunteers.

“I’m from New Jersey,” I counter.

“Yes, this time of year you see the cartels come through here,” she explains, but you’ll be safe if you stay on the trail.

“In this county, you can see nature everywhere you look,” she adds, “but you just can’t get out into it.”

I think of the conference I presented at in San Diego earlier in the year. I met a tribe from Oregon in a workshop who told their very disturbing efforts to get clean, recover from prison terms/recidivism, and address the generational trauma of their heritage. I had never heard such powerful and vulnerable stories. Many of them broke down and cried describing their transition away from thug-life. I could not have respected their efforts more. And I work with this recovery stuff on a daily basis.

The Idaho woman gives us the most detailed directions you could imagine. I think, wow, any idiot could follow these directions. She is really heady. She even supports my wife who fears the treacherous off-road we’ll have to take.

We all talk about how relieved we are that the state is decriminalizing cannabis and how it will translate into better economic opportunities and less violence for the tribe.

“I am a mental health counselor who works on the streets of Oakland,” I explain.

“Oh, so your accustomed to all this,” she says. “Yeah, my sister is bipolar. She self-medicates. And you don’t want to be around her unless she is high on cannabis.”

***

It takes us a long time to find the trail head. We take a wrong turn mistakenly follow the map twenty miles into the reservation before I realize what a fool I am. We don’t make the trail head until two o’clock. We scarf some food and get to it as fast as we can to alieve my angst. Really it’s not much different than your typical Sunday when I spend my time writing to process and heal my week and then have to charge to get into the woods before I explode.

We follow a single track trail through a thoroughly burned woodlands for an hour and fifteen minutes until the trail becomes so untended that my back starts to get activated climbing over fallen trees. It’s a miraculous, beautiful experience especially if you like to be reminded of the pending apocalypse.

***

On the way back, I spot a supped up black Jeep standing on a side road just as we are reentering the reservation. I can see a CB radio antennae and note that the vehicle waits for us to drive first. Like I had with the cop car earlier, I get the sense my plates are being ran and in a few minutes the Jeep thunders past our speed limit pace. I tell my wife, “It’s good we aren’t part of a gang. That interaction was a little thug-like.”

***

We return to the interstate and after we pick up gas, we find a popular hamburger stand in the town of Willits that even has a special for veggie burgers. As we sit in small town Americana, I get a call from my Mom.

“I was just reading your book,” my Mom said. “I am at the part where you are in Fresno and you just talked to the detective. I was scared, and I just wanted to give you a call.”

When I published for the first time two years ago, I was desperate for feedback. Usually, I can’t find anybody to read what I write. I have always been too cowardly to publish my work. Now, in spite of marketing efforts, I am still thirsting in the desert when it comes to getting feedback.

“I tried to recapture the perspective I had at the time,” I stammer once again.

“No, I don’t find your work offensive,” my Mom says. “I think you really did a good job putting the reader right there in the moment.”

“Thanks,” I say, “That means so much to me to hear you say that!”

I talk on about how I can manage everything I went through when I am on medication. “In fact I just experienced similar experiences traveling to a Native American reservation. I do every day at work,” I say.

I feel like a bumbling fool on the phone with my Mom. I am talking to her like I have never talked about this with her before. But she is being very strong for me here and it is clearly a moment of healing between us.

After the burger we head west on a road heading for Fort Bragg and the coast. There is a huge elevation gain and many switchbacks filling forest with asphalt. As we descend we enter a coastal pine grove woodland and there are clearly hiking trails surrounding us.

***

Before we stop for the night, I find myself thinking about what the psychiatrist said on my unit some fifteen years ago: about schizophrenics and vacations. I think about how I have fought for years to build up economic empowerment so I could have a wife, an SUV, and a day off. Often it was years on end without a day off to make ends meet. Often it was twelve to sixteen hour days in order to attain credential and licensure. I think how this started out a choice when I was seventeen and became a necessity.

It is extremely devastating to catch a schizophrenic case, lose everything that you own and then to have to escape the street life that suddenly envelops you. I took me two-and-a-half years of hell to get it together enough to get blessed with a good job.

In this day and age the earth is getting scorched beneath us! I am here, preparing to take a mental health day as a schizophrenic. Tomorrow my crew will be at work on the institutional corridor with some of the old bubbled windows still intact. I will wake up in a rundown trailer park. I will find that the public bathroom to be wrecked like the ones I’ve seen in public section 8 housing authorities and Oakland’s single-room occupancy hotels. We will drive into a posh vacation town for an overpriced cup of coffee. Then we will drive from park to park looking for hiking trails. Through miles and miles of farms and wilderness on thinnest of roads, we will find, just like the ranger on the reservation said: that there will be nature everywhere we look, but that we just won’t be able to get out into it. We even drive across a hot springs resort, enter its fence in search of a map, and find a group of shirtless white men on an LSD trip midst couples, gravel, stench and steam. We will end up finding only a small system of hiking trails only in the city of Ukiah that was built by Arnold Schwarzenegger. We will explore the trails and side trails to the point where we find local homeless encampments with the piles of water-logged cardboard beer logos spewed everywhere.

I will forever be struck with seething survivor’s guilt that the good people I work for are not free to enjoy these experiences with me. I will think how they seem to be forever sailing on our society’s ship of fools, deprived, intimidated, humiliated, and straining to make it from smoke to smoke. Meanwhile, society criminalizes every move they make from the inner-city ghettos to the reservations. Every day the law will bear down on them harder leaving them with less and less, lest there be another mass-shooting incident.

Maybe the psychiatrist was right after all! Maybe there is no such thing as a vacation for a schizophrenic. But I am just not sure if he and the rest of mainstream society knows what it really feels like to see the world in this way.

The post Vacation Day for a Schizophrenic appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The fact is, I only learned it bothered him because my best friend who was fifteen years older than me got an invite to the professor’s house for dinner. My friend who had a lifetime of experience using and dealing drugs reported that the professor had called his cute, sleeping hound a beast repeatedly throughout the night and talked about how alcohol was his drug of choice while toasting his guest’s sobriety. However, my friend reported, when it came to me, the professor admitted that he just didn’t know what to say.

“I think I know what that kid’s problem is,” the professor had conceded.

I gave my favorite sociology professor the same look when he announced that my paper was one of the few 100% papers he’d ever given out.

Okay, so I am the sort who spends a lot of time trying to understand my own warped behavior. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I have taken to writing in the first place.

But the primary purpose of this essay is to review the sudden dilemmas of a writer like me who has spent his whole life sitting on his work without sending it out to be published. What does it mean to suddenly be exposed to a social media market when you are just poking your head out hoping to get a following?

Sure, I have a life-sustaining professional guise, but I have no kids, make no friends and tolerate no dinner parties. I have always worked more than full-time to stay out of the mental hospital and off the streets. I write to survive instead of dealing with my domestic responsibilities!

And suddenly I am looking out on a landscape that requires a blog and a brand. There is the implied presumption on the web that you have friends and loved ones who will become fans. Suddenly, I must make friends—lots of them—and sell in a viral manner or there is no point. The expectation is leaving me in quite a state.

Maybe you’ve heard what I have: “most writers are voracious readers!” We writers are supposed to live to write! That’s what many of the publishing outlets want us to do. “Get to know our audience and then write for them,” they imply. Essentially, the whole idea of journalism operates in this way. Outsiders go and learn about the lives of others, write, and so the public who has privilege can make little tyrannical judgments about what is deemed to be different. My question: is when we live to write in this manner and then write to publish, what happens to the reality of the rest of us? How does the masses of stories that I hear at the urban psychiatric ward where I work become so invisible?

In the social media era the practice of journalism that tells people more of what they want to hear is rampant. How can we get to hear about the kinds of facts that really matter to us and make us feel good about ourselves?

I took to writing in high school, not reading. I loved music, not books. I had no rhythm on the guitar, loved the words I was singing, and had to write a lot a lot of papers to graduate. Somehow, I tired of grading on people’s ears and found the art of word expression satisfying.

I particularly started to work on writing once my angry mother who was on the faculty of our private school, outed all my inpatient antics to her faculty friends. News spread like wild fire straight back to my bully peers who my mother then started openly supporting and defending in our family therapy sessions.

Writing became a reason to keep on living. I was at the word processor an awful lot.

When I finally resumed school, living at a friend’s house, my greatest efforts did not even bring me the grades I wanted let alone the awards that I fantasized about. In fact my best essay was turned into the school psychologist and I was formally confronted. I saw it as them threatening to kick me out of school. I still sent the essay out to colleges. It’s true, due to unrecognized dyslexia, teachers always found my spelling mistakes menacing. Perhaps they just presumed I wasn’t putting in the effort. Perhaps with my father as their manager and my mother as their reading specialist, no teacher ever knew what to do with me.

I did graduate cum laude, but I graduated believing the concept of grades was more political than based on merit. Research shows this to be a true presumption, but students aren’t supposed to think like that.

So, in choosing a college to attend, my biggest concern was to send almost all the people I knew the biggest, “fuck you,” I could muster toward their sensibilities. I moved to the ghetto with a woman who was eight years my senior and tried to enjoy life through the domestic abuse. And, so, the fuck-the-awards, creative writer was born.

There I was three-years later at the kind of school that was not the type that drew out future academics or writers. The career development computer program I took recommended a career in law enforcement. I had too many neighborhood friends at the Korean Deli where I worked insulting the vice squad behind their backs to take the consideration very seriously. As per other students, most couldn’t relate to a clearly anorectic male who would go to no parties and drink no beer.

I’d lived in the library where I diligently outlined everything I read so I could pay attention to it.

I logged so many hours, reading just wasn’t something I was going to keep up with for fun. So much for being the voracious reader and writing about writings of others!

Supporting myself through a master’s program did not give me much time to read for pleasure either. I was faking my way through master’s level work on the social work job and remember looking at the full-time students who even had time to read the paper and thinking they were entitled. The locks to my car were broken and because I had no money or time to fix them, I just entered my car through the back and crawled my way up to the driver seat. I didn’t care what the full-time students said when they laughed and tried to insult me.

While I was, by no means the only one who worked my way through at the school I went to, I was the only one who entered my car in this manner. I missed graduation because I never did get the paperwork in on time.

So, when school was out, I was done with books. I returned to a creative poetry habit and kept my internal buzz alive; but couldn’t find anyone else’s work that I appreciated. I did occasionally frequent poetry readings; but couldn’t read my poetry without quivering.

“I think writing is good for you,” said my shrink of seven years when I brought up the issue, “but that’s it! You are always so disappointed when you share your work, I think there is no need for that.”

I often found my obsessive re-writing hard to stop. I wasn’t sure it was worth it when there was no one around to check it out. But I didn’t listen to the shrink.

Eventually, that shrink encouraged my family to permanently dump me in a State Hospital. They had the police do it while I was on my way to Canada to seek asylum. A friend with a nefarious background had threatened me. I had alerted the press and was facing threats at a section eight housing authority. It was a lot of drama and three months of lock up for me. “He’s really not even college material,” she told them, “He’ll be in and out of the hospital his whole life.”

It took some time, moves, and a stint with an arranged job at an Italian delicatessen (where I learned not to whistle-blow,) to get a professional job back. Yes, it worked! I maintain a job in this corrupt country and I know how corrupt it really is.

And then there was a lot of long work days, extra shifts and additional jobs I needed to take as I vied to get my psychotherapy license and pay my way. By the time I got married, I was licensed and had earned enough for a down payment on a house.

It was then, I started to write a memoir. It took me seven years and I devoted weekends and vacations to it. I can admit I read a few memoirs along the way. But, really, writing it was just a joy. And I landed the only book contract I applied for. At last I would be a published author. Then I would bring out all my old writing out of the closet and have myself a little side career.

So fellow writers know are probably laughing about that one. Being an award-winning published author doesn’t mean much these days. It’s hard to feel good about it when almost nobody reads your work. And though I had a contract, it didn’t last. The editors turned out to be erotica-writer-ladies and, I couldn’t stand to have the facts of my experience like my sex abuse changed to fit someone else’s’ racist world view. So, I ended the contact, reclaimed my work, and self-published

So I have been faced with the same questions we all face. Do you join writer’s groups and start sharing your work and getting feedback, so you can swap likes on Facebook to look popular and loved? Do you spend hours playing with social media, so others will read your posts? Do you start making friends with people who went to school at elite universities and have large twitter following so you can access their readers? Is this possible when the very reason you write is because people have always rejected you! Is there really time for any of this when you work and commit to ten hours of writing a week.

So, here I am writing another essay for an audience of people who I don’t even know to be out there for sure on social media.

I’ll keep giving myself assignments to try to get published somewhere besides just my blog. I think an audience of working people exists out there, who might respond to my efforts to relate the things I observe. I spend my time living and that’s what I write about. But I guess I can keep going with my write-to-live attitude on social media till I find people who can relate. Nobody’s stopping me.

The post Write to Live appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".