All posts in category Teenage runaway

49 Shades of Mommie Dearest

My mother is not quite as fearsome as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, but she can give her a good run for her money.

She’s a classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Me, Me, Me, Me.  In fact, my private name for her is MeMe.  She’s always a step ahead.  If I lose one pound, she loses two.  If my disabled father is not moving fast enough to suit her, she’ll take off at her swinging clip and leave him to fall face down on the sidewalk.  Things like that.

My childhood was one big nightmare on toe shoes, tiptoeing around on eggshells, never knowing what I would inadvertently do to set her off into a screaming rage.  I spent a lot of time outside.

I never knew which of my possessions was up for disappearance next.  Or my pets, for instance: which would be given away, which would “just die,” which would “run away.”  The only ones that stayed were the ones she and my father considered their own.

As most of my bloggie friends know, I ran away at age 16.  My mother went to a psychiatrist (the only time in her life) who told her it wasn’t her fault: I was just a rebellious teenager who should be left to learn my own lessons.  I did: homelessness, hunger, rape, prostitution.  Good lessons.

For some reason I was not killed, and eventually pulled my way up and out, and even more eventually became a doctor.  That made Mom happy, because it reflected well on her.  See, I turned out well after all.  It wasn’t her fault.  But I never returned to the parental “home,” which was not my home.

Then things got pretty bad when I had a breakdown and lost my practice and everything I had, and ended up totally disabled and bankrupt.  No help from Mom there; in fact, she persisted in telling her friends that my practice was going great!

I moved to the other side of the country, and that felt better, to be on a different coast and less in the weltering chill of her force field.  And then I moved to the other side of the world, which was even better.

On a mission trip, I fell in love with Israel: in particular, Jerusalem.  As soon as I set my foot on the broiling hot stone paved streets, I knew I had found home.  A year after the trip, I went back to study in a Jewish women’s seminary for a month, which turned into three months.  I shed buckets of tears praying at the Western Wall for God to please bring me home.  It came to pass, in March of 2007, that I moved to Israel to stay.  I was Home.

It wasn’t easy.  I moved eight times in the first fifteen months, for every reason you can think of, and some you would never imagine (bracket fungus growing out of the kitchen walls after a flood soaked the plaster).  I felt like the Wandering Jew, and in my own country at that!  How ironic.  But never, even through those hardships and others, did the feeling of joy at being home ever leave me.  For one who has never had a home, the delirious joy of having found Home is hard to describe.

My parents are old, and I am the only child.  I had planned on making trips to see them every four months or so, to keep a finger on the pulse.  And I did.  After two years, my father started a downhill slide, and I increased the frequency to every three months.  As you can imagine, at an average of $1200 per trip plus car rental (they live in the boonies, and I would never be without a car: an escape route from my mother), it was a serious drain on my savings.

My father had a small stroke, and some other things started to go wrong with him, so the visits increased to every other month.  Finally, he started falling, and after two emergency trips back precipitated by head injuries, I decided that the time had come to move back across the world and be on site for what I thought were going to be my father’s last days.

His last days turned into weeks, months, and years: two and a half of them.  He’s certainly not the man he used to be, and considerably disabled, but he seems to have stabilized, thank G-d.

I am living in what is basically a barn: his former pottery studio, which I have restored from a rotting shell to a tight shelter.  That is a story in and of itself.  It’s close enough so that if I’m needed I can be there in two minutes, yet far enough away that I have privacy to do whatever I want to do.  It’s tolerable.

But I long for Jerusalem.  When I first came here I would find myself uncontrollably sobbing for hours.  I long for Jerusalem herself.  I miss my many friends, dear friends like I have never had before; and I miss my family of choice, my holy brothers and sisters, with whom I have bonds unlike any I have ever experienced in my previous life.

I miss just wandering the streets, watching the swirling admixture of Jews of all varieties with their distinctive ways of dress, and the plethora of priests, nuns, monks, striding out of their monasteries and convents in the Old City, countless varieties with their own dramatic habits: nuns so covered up in black that they would give any Muslim woman a run for her money, unless she was wearing a niqab; Muslims, the women in every degree of covering–the one I get a kick out of is the college girls with tight colorful hijabs that make their heads look like periscopes,  and skin-tight jeans and high heels; or the head-to-toe chador lady walking arm-in-arm with her mulletted husband in a muscle shirt and cut-off jean shorts.  All swirling around in the streets together, gabbing in the countless cafes, shopping, going to school–doing what everyone does.  And me, me! there among them, one of them.  Home, home at last!

Mom’s been on Zoloft for a month now.  She found herself crying all the time, so when both of them got bronchitis and I took them to the doctor she took the opportunity to tell the doctor about that, and got some Zoloft.  She really is feeling better, you can tell, although she insists on only taking half the prescribed amount.  That’s her.  She eats half an English muffin, half a sandwich, half a tab of Zoloft.  Oh well; what matters is that she actually copped to feeling bad and did something about it, and realizes she is feeling better.  Let’s pray she doesn’t quit just because she feels better.

So today, seeing that she is in a good mood, I decided to break some news: I am establishing a schedule for visiting my home, because I am miserable without it.  I will return every fall for the High Holidays and the month that precedes them, which is a month for study and preparation;  and I will return in the spring for Purim, which is thought of in the States as the Jewish Halloween because everybody gets dressed up, but in fact it is a holiday steeped in deep mysticism.

She shrugged.  ”You do whatever you need to do.  I’ll get along somehow.”  What did I expect?  But the little child in me wanted approval.

“I miss my home,” I said, by way of what I hoped would be explanation.

“This is your home!  Your home is right here!”  Her little eyes snapped.

“No, Mom, this is not my home.  This is your home.  You fell in love with this place, and you chose to live here.  I have never lived here.  I moved out of your house when I was sixteen…”

“I know,” she interrupted coldly.

“And just like you fell in love with this place, I fell in love with Jerusalem, and I am very sad when I am away.  And you know that I have a mental illness, and I have to take care of myself.  And all of my support system is in Jerusalem, all of my friends, my religious life, everything.  You don’t want me to end up in the hospital again, do you?  Because of isolation and no support?”

“What, being away from Jerusalem will put you in the hospital?”  Snort.

“What I would like you to do is to start looking into home care options that will give you respite and help while I’m away, so that you don’t get sick yourself.” Long conversation about that, leading to dead ends but it was a start, anyway.

I gave up.  Changed the subject.  Will not speak of it again.  Will just buy the tickets, get on the plane, and be there.  And eventually I will be able to pack up and go back, G-d willing, back to the crazy peaceful whirl of war zone in the Middle East, the only place in the world where I feel safe.

11 Comments
by Soul Survivor on May 7, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in bipolar illness, child abuse, Disability, family, Mental Illness, prostitution, Rape, Teenage runaway
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Posted by Soul Survivor on May 7, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/05/07/49-shades-of-mommie-dearest/

My Mental Magic Shield

I just had a revelation.  I’ve always told everybody something I learned in my NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner course in 1997-98, which is, All Illness Has A Purpose.  All illness has a message that your body is trying to teach you.  Even when it’s a horrible illness, like God forbid cancer, or Lou Gherig’s disease (did I spell that right?), or you name it.  The reason for the disease is to give you the opportunity to grow the spiritual organs that you are missing.

Hard one to swallow, eh?  Yeah, for me too.  I’m always grateful that I don’t have anything worse than what I have, although in suicidal moments (or days, weeks, months, or years) it seems as if I really could not feel worse no matter what was being done to me.

But tonight, as I was alternately reading stuff on children of narcissistic mothers (I have one: a narcissistic mother who is the daughter of a narcissistic mother–what a joy) and a 1981 textbook on runaways, what causes them and what to do with them (I was a runaway in 1970-71), I got a revelation.  What do my psychiatric diagnoses do for me?  They shield me.  They stand between me and the world.

This is a double edged sword.  Because my Bipolar Disorder and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (which I do not think of as a disorder, but an advantage) put me one level of separation away from the world, I feel isolated a lot.  I used to feel lonely, but now I feel more comfortable when I’m alone, which is 99.5% of the time.  On the positive side, my “disorders” protect me from a lot of the slings and arrows I would otherwise be subject to, if I was out in the world and participating in it.

Twice that I can remember, some other human being was trying to coerce me into doing their will, and I said “Don’t do that, you’re hurting me, you know I’m mentally ill,” and they stopped.  So that was a positive way to use my illness as a defense.  On the other hand, it would have been much healthier to say “stop doing that because it’s a shit thing to do and I won’t put up with it.”  Now THAT would be a healthy way of defending one’s self.  But since I wasn’t up to it because I actually WAS feeling ill, using my illness as a shield was a good strategy, I think.

On the other hand, I don’t wish to cultivate this defense mechanism, because I think it could become a habit: “oh, poor me, I’m mentally ill, don’t stress me out.”  When actually, what I should be saying is “Hey, don’t fuck with me, you’re taking advantage of me, you’re trying to abuse me, you’re seriously pushing my buttons.”  But that has always been a problem for me, because of the way I was raised.

When I was a child, “back-talk” was rewarded with “back-hand” across the mouth, prolonged tirades including belittlement, insults, curses, and other forms of crushing.  The Silent Treatment usually followed.  Banishment to one’s room was routine; but as soon as I got old enough to grok the situation, I stayed in my room voluntarily, or stayed outside, even if it was cold or raining, rather than be in the nasty indoor weather.

So I learned to say as little as possible, if confronted by negativity or abuse.  I always laugh when I read accounts of rape trials where they look for signs of struggle on the girl’s part.  Oh yeah, great if they find his skin under her fingernails; but let’s be realistic: when some dude who is twice your size says, “don’t make any noise and you won’t get hurt,” you’re probably going to keep as quiet as possible and let it get over with so he will go away and leave you to your quiet private hell.  I know that one very well.  Way too well.

I have to say I think I was more of a rape-magnet because of my abusive upbringing.  When your mother tells you you’re nothing, you’re shit, etc., etc., etc., after a while your subconscious incorporates that into its reality, and it becomes part of your personality, that you are somehow substandard protoplasm, and rapists get that on their radar from miles away.  It’s like, shit, if there was some asshole wanting to rape somebody in the general vicinity, all he had to do was turn around and, pow, there I was, telepathy or something.

That was before I figured out that I was crazy and therefore had a good reason for people not to fuck with me.  I have permission now to get really, really angry.  I can unload on people if I get that pushed.  But it freaks me out, because I am a pacifist.  I unloaded on a particularly toxic asshole last year.  It was the first time in my life I have ever done that.  No, it was the second time.  The first time was when my ex-husband “forgot” to come home from work one night.

So I’d much rather use my magic shield: I’m mentally ill, don’t fuck with me.  I don’t know how healthy that is, but it’s better than heaving a vase at their head.

13 Comments
by Soul Survivor on April 28, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Autistic Spectrum, bipolar illness, child abuse, family, Mental Illness, Rape, Teenage runaway
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Posted by Soul Survivor on April 28, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/04/28/my-mental-magic-shield/

My Mother and Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish

Some non-Jewish people know what Kaddish is.  Some Jewish people also know what Kaddish is.  I would guess that more Jewish people don’t than do, because of the secularization of the Jewish people due to the Holocaust and subsequent rush to blend in with whatever dominant culture we found ourselves washed ashore in, those who escaped the ovens.

Kaddish, for those who don’t know, is a Jewish prayer that is an integral part of observant Jewish life.  It is best known as the “prayer for the dead,” although death is never mentioned in the prayer itself.  It is, in fact, a joyous song of praise, enumerating the awesome powers and grace of the Almighty.  It is indeed said at Jewish funerals and at each of the three daily communal prayers, on behalf of the departed, for eleven months.  But it is also said many times during each prayer service, as a marker that divides the different segments of the service.  There are wonderful mystical reasons for this, having to do with elevating the congregation up through the layers of world upon world that lead to complete unification with God.  Most religious Jews don’t know these things, but say the prayers by rote.   Much knowledge has been lost in the years of our physical and spiritual exile.

My parents are among the first-generation children of immigrant parents from Russia and Poland who escaped the Holocaust as children, and had no religious background whatsoever.  Correction: my father’s father was the child of a Hassidic rabbi from Prussia, and his mother was the daughter of a rabbi in the Ukraine.  Both were sent out of their respective countries as children, experiencing exploitation and multitudinous horrors on their way to New York City, where they met and became members of the Communist Party, rejecting their religion out of bitterness; so my father was brought up without religion, to endure antisemitism on a strictly genetic/racial basis.

My mother was raised in a mildly religious environment, but it never really rubbed off on her.  She came away with a few legends and fears, but quickly learned how to cook pork ounce she was out of her culturally kosher home, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

My mother likes to throw things out.  She threw out her rudimentary Judaism once she was free of the parental home.  She likes to keep a tidy house, so she throws out anything that seems out of place.  She has thrown me out many times.  I have kept coming back, out of a childish wish that she would all of a sudden become the Good Fairy Mother, but that has not happened yet and as she is 86 and I am nearing 60, I don’t think it is likely to happen.

My mother has two sides: childlike, and childish.  Her childlike side is quite charming.  She is filled with wonder at a pair of redbirds on a bush, deer in the yard, a squirrel sitting on a railing eating corn she has put out for it.  She adores her cat with something approaching sexual love.

On the other hand, when tired or vexed she will burst into childish tantrums, cursing and belittling, mocking, slamming doors and kicking the dog.  And throwing things out.

The other day she was in a childish mood, a mild one, and concentrating on throwing things out.  She can’t throw me out at the moment, because she needs my help with my invalid father, but she can throw his things out, and that’s what she was up to.  I happened along just as Allen Ginsberg’s volume of poetry Kaddish was hitting the dust bin.

“Why are you throwing that out?” I asked.  I noted that their once voluminous library seemed to have shrunken, and wondered how many old friends of my youth had gone the way that Kaddish seemed destined.

“Kaddish,” she shuddered, twisting her face in horror.  I got it.  Kaddish, the “prayer for the dead.”  Death is lingering around our house now.  In a way it is a marvel: every new day a gift, if my father is still living.  Nevertheless it is a spectre hovering, palpable to all.  I understand: Kaddish is an unwelcome resident here.  I fished it out of the waste basket and dusted it off.

“I’ve never read this,” I remarked.

“Take it,” she said. “Get it out of this house.”

I did.  I took it to The Studio, my father’s old studio where I now reside.  And began to read.  On the first page, Ginsberg is mourning his mother’s death, pacing his living room and saying Kaddish aloud, alone, which is something one is never supposed to do because the prayer is so powerful it could be damaging without the power of ten people to say it.  But there he is, the power of his grief holding him safe in his living room, crying out loud the poem of God’s greatness to the Universe.

His mother died of insanity.  It struck her like a brick to the head when Ginsberg was a young child, and he spent his childhood accompanying her on trains and buses from one institution to another, until she finally ended up in Bellevue, the end of the line, and when countless shock treatments failed, the lobotomy.  She quickly grew old, and died at the age of 60.  My age.

He never gave up on his mother, and he never stopped loving her.  His family spiralled into collective dysfunction around her.  But it seemed to me that somehow he was able to extract, and treasure, the remnants of the delightful, dignified woman his mother once was, and carry that in his heart always.  It made me smile and cry.

I have never been able to feel that way about my mother.  Perhaps it has something to do with the stories she likes to tell about how I was such an idiot as a baby to climb out of my crib and fall onto a radiator, necessitating a trip to the emergency room; or another time, when, at seven months of age I disrupted dinner by climbing into a cupboard and getting hold of a bottle of Tabasco Sauce, which I somehow got all over me, burning my skin and prompting another visit to the emergency room.

These things, and more, might explain why I recoil at her touch, and why I break into a cold sweat at the sound of her voice.

Reading Ginsberg caused me to go inside and feel what I would feel when at last my mother dies (which is not likely to be for a very long time, given the longevity of her branch of the family, who often live to be 100 or more).

What did I feel then, when I went inside?

Relief, yes.  And grief: for the mother I never had.

9 Comments
by Soul Survivor on March 30, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in family, Mental Illness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, symptoms, Teenage runaway, triggers
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Posted by Soul Survivor on March 30, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/03/30/my-mother-and-allen-ginsbergs-kaddish/

Noga The Wonderdog: my anchor to reality

Noga the Wonder Dog

Meet Noga.  She’s my Psychiatric Service Dog.  What service does she provide for me?   She keeps me grounded in reality.

You see, many years ago I was raped.  Not once, but many times.  And that has provided me with a whopping case of PTSD:  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The way I coped with being a homeless street kid who got raped a lot was to dissociate.  To leave my body behind, while horrible things were being done to it, and go floating away to Somewhere Else.  It became a habit with my brain, to dissociate from anything threatening; and at last my brain started doing it all on its own, in response to triggers that I may not even be aware of.

And even now, forty years later, I often find that I have been “gone” for hours at a time.  I often have no idea what happened to trigger the episode.  But Noga can tell when I have dissociated, and she jumps up on my legs and “bops” me with her feet, and if necessary, pulls at my pants leg to bring me back to the here-and-now.

And then there are the nightmares.  In my last post I showed you a picture of all the pills I have to take in order to get through the night.  But even with all those drugs, some nights (like last night, for example) I will dream, or hallucinate, or both, that someone has climbed through the window and is standing over me.  B.N. (Before Noga), I could spend hours in a half-dream, half-waking state of paralysis, waiting for the intruder to make his move.  But Noga is a fierce 13 pound watch dog, and she bites!  Now if I have a nightmare I can reach over and if Noga is sleeping beside my left shoulder as she always does, I know there is nothing to fear and I can safely go back to sleep.  Here is Noga keeping the bed warm:

Noga refuses to get out of bed on a rainy morning!

Whose bed do you think this is, anyway?

There are other things she does for me, besides being my Service Dog.  She keeps my right elbow at the proper height for typing by curling up under it, for instance.  That plaid thing is my elbow.

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Plus, she’s just my cute little buddy.

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Noga hates getting her hair wet.

Photos courtesy of my Samsung Galaxy SIII phone.

 

21 Comments
by Soul Survivor on March 19, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Disability, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, psychiatric service dog, Rape, symptoms, Teenage runaway, triggers
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Posted by Soul Survivor on March 19, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/03/19/noga-the-wonderdog-my-anchor-to-reality/

DPchallenge: 2 AM Photo

Sleep is always a challenge for me.  To achieve it, I take five (5) medications: Seroquel, clonazepam, lorazepam, zolpidem, and lithium.  Yes, I know there are six pills in the picture.  That is because of the two Seroquel.  For those who are new to my blog, I take all these poisons due to PTSD incurred courtesy of childhood abuse and a stint on the streets as a teenage runaway, complete with serial rapes.  You can read all about it here.

Nighttime Knockout Pills

Nighttime Knockout Pills

And as if all those pills weren’t enough, I use about half an ounce of some kind of liquor as an adjuvant (enhancer).  My favorite is Ouzo, as it leaves a lovely trace of anise on my palate, as my knockout pills waft me to sleep.  Thats one of the reasons I don’t practice medicine anymore: you just can’t field nighttime medical emergencies while hammered on six kinds of meds (I regard the Ouzo as one of them).

Adjuvant

Adjuvant

If something manages to wake me at night, an earthquake for instance, or the part of the ceiling directly above my bed falling down, or a painfully full bladder (thank God I do wake up for that), I stumble through whatever is necessary to remove myself from the annoyance.  I imagine I would look, to an innocent observer, rather like a hapless zombie that has feasted upon too many alcoholics, or perhaps upon me: too full of sedatives to even try to escape.

So imagine my annoyance when my Galaxy SIII, only slightly smaller than an iPad, rumbled to life at 2 AM, buzzing and tinkling its bell tone indicating an incoming text.

I must have been in the light part of my sleep cycle (otherwise it could have hit me in the head and I wouldn’t have turned a hair), because I awoke with a start that sent Noga, my Lhasa Apso, scurrying to the foot of the bed, as I sat bolt upright as if on springs.

Noga refuses to get out of bed on a rainy morning!

Noga the Lhasa Apso 

My first thought was it must be some mother who had fed her baby strawberry jello, and now its diaper was shockingly red.  Then I remembered: I am no longer in practice as a pediatrician, due to my mental illness and its Machiavellian treatments.  Then a more chilling thought occurred to me: what if something had happened to some family member, God forbid?  But that would entail a phone call from the appropriate authorities, not a text.

At last I wrenched myself far enough away from drugged stupor to actually look at the phone.  MMS, it said.  I touched the “view” button.

Oh fer cryin’ out loud.  This had to be from Floyd, my pervy neighbor.  Who else would send me a photo of his large and rampant, uh, you know….in the middle of the fricking night?  He must have been pickled.  Deleted the goddam thing and lay back down.

Then I sat up again.  I was thirsty.  All these drugs make my mouth dry.  I felt around for my bottle of Gerolsteiner that I usually keep by the bed.  I love Gerolsteiner:  it has lots of minerals in it, good for your body.  And it tastes good, too.  Shit, it wasn’t anywhere around.  I got out of bed and stumped into the dark kitchen.  Ah, there was the bottle: right next to the sink.  Why the hell did I leave it there?  Must have got distracted while brushing my teeth.  Ah well.  Here it was, anyway.

Gerolsteiner, yum

Gerolsteiner, yum!

 

I unscrewed the cap and took a deep chug.

Jeezus Christ and all his disciples, what the hell was this!?  Oh fuck, it was the Ouzo!  What was is doing next to the sink?? What am I gonna do now?  I musta just ingested a cup of it.  And on top of all these meds….should I make myself throw up?  That’s what I would tell someone else.  I hate to throw up.  I’ll do anything to avoid it.

Well shit, if I’m gonna die I may as well go back to bed.  But now I really need the Gerolsteiner, to quell the burning in my stomach.  I found a new bottle on the shelf and drank as much of it as I could, hoping to dilute the Ouzo enough so I wouldn’t die immediately of drug interactions.  Maybe gently in my sleep, to be found some days later when I didn’t answer my phone.  Morbid thoughts.  Damn phone.

I stumbled toward the bed, holding onto the furniture to keep from falling down.

Damn.  Now my bladder was grumbling and required immediate attention.  I looked outside.  Raining cats and dogs.  No effing way I was going to make my way to the outhouse in this storm, especially in my present compromised condition.  For you newbies, just to let you know, my plumbing situation is non-standard.  ’Nuff said.

2012-10-25 09.13.51

I got out the pee jar, which I keep under the bed for such emergencies.  (No picture of the pee jar, sorry.  Too personal.)

Squatting over the pee jar, I let the excess water drain out with relief.  Shit, shit, and more shit!  Apparently I had not remembered to empty the pee jar since its last use, and now there was pee all over the floor.  Time to get the mop.  (No picture of this either.)

After cleaning up as much of the mess as I could in my present condition, I fell into bed and drifted into a semi-comatose state resembling sleep.  But not for long.  ”Brrrr, bling!” went my phone.  I picked the damn thing up and threw it across the room.  It smashed into the closet door.  Good thing I bought the insurance.


http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/writing-challenge-nighttime-photo/

17 Comments
by Soul Survivor on March 18, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in bipolar illness, blogging, Disability, humor, medical practice, medications, Mental Illness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, psychiatric service dog, Rape, symptoms, Teenage runaway, Uncategorized
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Posted by Soul Survivor on March 18, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/03/18/dpchallenge-2-am-photo/

It’s Not Easy Being Brilliant

Last night I had the strangest dream.  I was walking down alleys in some foreign country–it might have been Morocco, judging from what I saw in store windows.  I have never been to Morocco, but I went to the Moroccan restaurant in Disney World and had some fantastic food.  And a store that I frequent in Jerusalem, Rika’s, carries Moroccan stuff, everything from clothing to solid brass mortar and pestle sets, which I regret not getting when I moved to the States.  Never mind, I’ll get one when I move back :-)

Anyway.  Back to the dream.  I was consumed by anxiety because I was supposed to meet with someone at a restaurant somewhere around there, and I couldn’t find it and my cell phone had turned into a wristwatch, courtesy of Dick Tracy I’m sure.  So I had no way to locate the place, or to tell the people I was going to meet with that I would be late.

In my growing state of panic, I turned out of the narrow lanes and found myself in a cityscape not unlike the South Side of Chicago, which is where I did my undergraduate work.  Dreams, right?  I decided to just let my intuition guide me, since I had no other guidance, and found myself in an underground mall full of fast food joints and cheap clothing stores.  I wandered through the passages in the mall until I found the restaurant: a shiny, upscale place full of chrome and stainless steel, very unlike the people I was going to meet.

And those people were:  my ex-husband, his wife, and my ex’s sister’s husband.  I joined them and apologized for being late, but they were very understanding.  We got right to the reason for the meeting, which was:  my ex was having a breakdown because of the guilt he suddenly felt for how he believed he had treated our son when our son was little.  I was shocked, because although they didn’t have a lot of contact for a few years, I didn’t think he had done anything more than most parents do in the way of mistakes, and he had already been forgiven for those.  But there he was, crying and begging me for forgiveness.  I didn’t know how to feel.  Ah, dreams.

In a few days we will celebrate our son’s 28th birthday.  In the Hebrew system of numerology, 28 is the number for “strength.”  I bless our son to have lots of strength, for now and for many, many healthy years to come.

He was not an easy child to raise.  The brilliant ones never are.  He always wanted more, and better, and faster; but at the same time he would get overloaded and have classic melt-downs, needing to be bear-hugged until he calmed down enough to go to his room and totally wreck it.  And he wasn’t so good with children his age.  In kindergarten he absolutely refused to participate.  I went to the child psychologist he had been seeing since age three, and together with the teachers we worked out a behavioral contract: for each five minutes that he cooperated and participated in class, he got to do whatever he wanted for fifteen minutes.  At first that was reading to himself in a loft they had in the room (he had taught himself to read when he was three).  Then he discovered the laminating machine in the office, and fell in love.  All of his out-of-class time was spent laminating things for the teachers and staff.  I joked that they should have paid him.

First grade was a wash-out.  It was a lovely Quaker school, and each morning the children had a meeting to cooperatively decide what they would learn today.  No dice: my son staunchly refused to participate, and stationed himself in a corner like a wooden Indian.  But somehow managed to get perfect grades on the tests.  Countless phone calls from the sweet young teacher later, I said to him, why don’t you just give him a job?  How about giving him a tape recorder and making him the class documentarian?  It worked.  He followed the class everywhere with his tape recorder.  That was his role.

Second grade was better because the new school had a pull-out Gifted Student program, and not only did he get one-on-one instruction, but he had peers with whom he could interact, that were on his wavelength.  They did stuff outside of school together too, like observing our goats having babies and speculating about how the babies got in there.  Then they observed our stallion in action, and that answered that question.

But then there was the constant bullying, because my son was weird.  Time after time he’d come home crying with a new bruise he’d acquired on the playground or the bus.  Countless phone calls to and meetings with the school principal bore no fruit, as they insisted that the incidents had to be witnessed by an adult, and of course the bullies were smarter than that.

So one day when we were at wit’s end, I said to him, look, the next time someone hits you, you hit ‘em back!  And indeed the next day some kid whacked him upside the head while standing in line to get off the school bus, and my son turned around and decked the little bastard.  Oh, didn’t that precipitate an uproar!  The kid’s parents called the principal and threatened to call the police (on a seven-year-old?), and my son was suspended for two days.  But the bullying stopped.  That time, anyway.

After a few years of relative peace, we moved to another state, and there the bullying started anew, and my son stopped doing school.  He went, yes, but once again he stopped participating.   There was a dominant religion there, and the boys used to follow my son around yelling “You’re Jewish and you’re going to hell!”  One day my son turned around and said, “Fine, at least you won’t be there.”  Suspended again, two days.

Things progressed from bad to worse.  He was in seventh grade; I took him for educational testing and he turned out to be working at college sophomore level in reading, and college freshman level in math.  No wonder he wasn’t interested in seventh grade.

But he began to have behavioral issues similar to what he had had as a three year old: tantrums, but now with a simmering anger that frightened me, as he was literally twice my size.  His alternating angry outbursts and silent gloominess had me worried about depression.  We have a long family tradition of depression, and he certainly had both situational and genetic reasons to be depressed.

So I took him to a psychiatrist.  He would not say a word.  The psychiatrist recommended a psychologist, but the same thing happened:  arms crossed, staring at floor.  After five iterations of this, I gave up.  But then I found the suicidal note that “just happened” to slip out of his notebook.  Terrified, I got him into the car by means of screaming threats of calling the ambulance, and drove him to the emergency room, where I showed the note to the doctor and they sent for the psychiatrist on call, who read the letter and asked him if he felt suicidal now.  He shook his head.  Question repeated, response repeated.  Recommend follow-up with regular doctor in the morning.

Please, I pleaded, please just admit him for a 24 hour observation.  This note is really serious.  (As a pediatrician myself, I was trained that there are two kinds of suicide threats:  serious, and more serious.  And this one was more serious, because it specified a plan.)  They sent him home.

Then, it seemed moments later now, the Columbine school shooting happened.  Panic shot through every school in the country.  Some went on lockdown, some installed metal detectors.  Many started conducting regular routine locker searches.  Our school was one of those.

When they searched my son’s locker, they found it stuffed with papers.  Most of them were his homework papers that he never turned in: all done perfectly.  Some of the papers were more concerning: images of guns and missiles and ominous, dark poems about death and mayhem.  They called me in, showed me all the stuff, and threw him out.

It was at this point that I sent him to a wilderness therapy program, one that he couldn’t get out of until he started seriously dealing with his “shit.”  That is a whole ‘nother story, but it was the first of many outpatient and residential treatment programs.  He got into drugs, much more seriously than I had any idea of, as he told me later.  At the age of sixteen he had failed many programs and torn up the family, and his step-mother–I had sent him to live with his father because I couldn’t handle him anymore and thought that being with his dad might help–threw him out.  He went to live with a bunch of gangsters and sold drugs until they thew him out, and then he crashed where he could and ate cold pizza out of the dumpsters.  Somehow we got him into an adolescent psychiatric hospital, and they drugged him into a stupor, and there he lay on couches listlessly watching TV, until some kid started bullying him and he picked the kid up and threw him into a refrigerator, and they threw him out.  So he went to live in a homeless shelter, back to dealing drugs.

Then, serendipitously, he got busted for a small amount of pot.  I called the judge–I worked with the courts in that county a lot and knew all the judges–and begged him to remand my son to long-term residential therapy.  I knew that if I didn’t do something before he turned 18 that he would be lost, in jail, or dead.  The judge did me that favor, and I found a wonderful therapeutic boarding school that helped him find his way out of the hole he had fallen into and discover his wonderful talents.  He also got started on the right antidepressants, and thrived.

And now, bli ayin hara (a Jewish prayer against the Evil Eye, just ignore it), he is working on his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry, doing things with the insides of cells that no one else has done before.  I am so proud of him!  He has taken charge of his mental health issues, working with a therapist and doing DBT.  He consciously cultivates hobbies that round out his life so that he’s not spending all his time in the lab, which he knows he would do if he didn’t do something on purpose to change it.

Looking back on this post, it’s amazing to see how many paragraphs of difficulty and heartbreak it took, to get to this last paragraph of triumph over desperation and despair.  And what I’ve told you is just the tip of the iceberg.  And he still has to work constantly to keep himself on an even keel, and living a healthy life.  But he’s doing it, thank God.  It isn’t easy being brilliant.

 

 

4 Comments
by Soul Survivor on March 5, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Autistic Spectrum, family, medications, Mental Illness, Recovery, relationship, stigma, symptoms, Teenage runaway, tests, treatments
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Posted by Soul Survivor on March 5, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/03/05/its-not-easy-being-brilliant/

Is Prostitution Ever Voluntary?

Yes, I know this is a blog about being bipolar.  And you know what?  I think the topics of bipolar-ism and prostitution go hand in hand.

And why is that?  It is because pimps hone in on the vulnerable, the lonely, the ones who are looking for love and not finding it, the ones with poor self esteem, the depressed, the confused.  And because the mentally ill often become homeless, jobless, drug-addicted, and desperate.

It’s still January, and January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month.  I’ve been reading a lot and learning a lot about the dynamics of sex trafficking and prostitution.  Among the things I’ve learned are that:

  • Depending on the study, the average age for entry into prostitution is 11 to 13 years old.
  • The vast majority of prostituted youth (and adults) come from abusive homes.
  • Girls (and sometimes boys) are often “groomed” by “loverboys” who give them jewelry, clothes, and mostly, attention, and when they are “ready” they are abducted and forced into a life of slavery.
  • This goes on in virtually every country.
  • Girls who try to refuse to cooperate are beaten and raped into submission
  • Girls are “domestically trafficked,” which means they are moved from city to city within a country: like from Columbus, OH to Detroit, MI, for instance
  • Girls as young as 12 and 13 get arrested, thrown into jail, and charged with prostitution, while pimps and johns go scot free

Can you imagine being taken away and raped over and over, many times a day, for years, until you either “disappear” or get spit out on the street because you are too old to appeal to the child rapists any longer?  It just totally tears me apart.

And then there is the child pornography.  Need I say more?

But prostitution is “the oldest profession.”  Isn’t it?  Women (and men) CHOOSE to sell their bodies because

  • They like sex
  • They like money
  • They like sex AND money
  • It’s easy money
  • It’s an exciting, glamourous lifestyle
  • It’s empowering to women to be able to do whatever they want with their bodies

Not really.  If you want to know how glamourous and empowering the prostitution lifestyle is, look at the rates of drug abuse.  Prostituted women are either given drugs by their pimps to keep them cooperative, or else the women themselves develop drug habits to escape from the hell of being used as sperm receptacles.  Those with serious drug habits often do get into a vicious cycle of having to get money to buy drugs, and the quickest and easiest way to do that is to turn a trick.

I have known a lot of prostitutes, and not one of them has done it because she enjoyed the sex.  Sex for the prostituted is for one thing: money. And most of the time most of the money doesn’t go to her, it goes to the pimp or madam who rents her out.  Prostitutes learn how to dissociate when a john is on top of them.  The problem is, the dissociation doesn’t always work: that’s where the drugs come in.

Now we come to runaways.  As some of you already know, I was a teenage runaway.  I ran away from an abusive home after being drugged, abducted, and brutally raped by a man who had been admiring me at work.  So I ended up on the street.  I wasn’t there because I wanted to be; I was there because I thought I was going to find peace and love.  What I found was that if I needed food, shelter, a shower, drugs, anything really, the only way to get it was to sleep with some guy.  If I didn’t have a place to crash (meaning a guy to sleep with), I slept outside or walked the streets all night.

That was back in the early 1970′s.  Things have changed now, for the worse.  Runaways now are caught and funneled into the sex trafficking business by pimps who work the streets looking for them.  It is very easy to spot a runaway.  Your hair is uncombed, your clothes are a mess from sleeping under some bush in the park, you are probably carrying a backpack, maybe a sleeping bag if you thought that far ahead.  You look homeless, because you are.

So some handsome, well groomed guy offers to buy you a meal, and you are hungry.  Then he offers you a place to crash, and you are tired of sleeping in doorways or in the park, and have probably been raped a couple of times by now so you are ready to come indoors.  Then you discover that you can’t get out.  And then the nightmare really begins.  That’s the way it is now.

As for the glamourous call-girl life, I’ve known a couple of women who’ve done that.  I thought about it myself sometimes, when I was young and beautiful and needed money to make it through college.  Yeah, I have some friends who got through school by “turning tricks,” as it was called back then.  I have never seen such damaged people in my life, apart from the ones who were kidnapped into it.  My friends who were “voluntarily” prostituting themselves found their self-esteem eroded trick by trick, and to bolster themselves up they had to turn another trick, and another….”the life” becomes an addiction.

We were all hooked on cocaine.  My cocaine habit was small change compared with theirs.  I did coke because it actually treated my depression (I didn’t realize that till years later); they did coke because they couldn’t stand their lives.  I got my coke by sleeping with dealers; they got their coke by turning tricks to make the money to buy more coke.  I guess I was a prostitute too, huh?  I just didn’t do it for cash, because I was scared to.  I did it for “stuff,” whatever was needed at the time.  Yeah, I heard myself being called a “coke whore,” but I chose not to listen until one morning I woke up next to yet another man I had never seen before, and I quit. Cold turkey quit.  I was one of the lucky ones.

To get back to the original question: Is Prostitution Ever Voluntary?  My answer is: it can look that way, when it’s an adult woman who makes what she thinks is an informed, purposeful choice, because she thinks she can make money quickly and easily that way.  But once in “the life,” a woman becomes trapped, either by her pimp or her drug habit or the crushing of her soul that is prostitution. Then it’s not voluntary: it’s slavery.

 

2 Comments
by Soul Survivor on January 29, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Autistic Spectrum, bipolar illness, blogging, Disability, Mental Illness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, prostitution, Rape, Teenage runaway, triggers, Uncategorized
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Posted by Soul Survivor on January 29, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/01/29/is-prostitution-ever-voluntary/

In the Booth with Ruth – Stella Marr, Sex Trafficking Survivor, Anti-Sex Trafficking Activist and Advocate, Executive Director and Founding Member of Sex Trafficking Survivors United (Survivors Connect)

Seemingly tireless campaigner for abolition of human trafficking Ruth Jacobs presents another in her eye-opening series of interviews with survivors of sex trafficking.  Stella Marr, who was trafficked in New York City for ten years, talks about her work.  The link to her personal blog, ManhattanCallGirl, is at the bottom of the interview linked below.  I had the honor of speaking with Stella a couple of days ago.  She is a powerful and compassionate woman, dedicated to effecting change in the system that currently criminalizes trafficked women, while allowing the men who buy them to either get off free or get a slap on the hand.  Please read Stella’s compelling interview, and while you’re at it, take a look through the many other interviews that Ruth has compiled during January, which is Human Trafficking Awareness Month.

via In the Booth with Ruth – Stella Marr, Sex Trafficking Survivor, Anti-Sex Trafficking Activist and Advocate, Executive Director and Founding Member of Sex Trafficking Survivors United (Survivors Connect).

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by Soul Survivor on January 29, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, prostitution, Rape, Recovery, Teenage runaway
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Posted by Soul Survivor on January 29, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/01/29/in-the-booth-with-ruth-stella-marr-sex-trafficking-survivor-anti-sex-trafficking-activist-and-advocate-executive-director-and-founding-member-of-sex-trafficking-survivors-united-survivors-connec/

Blog For Mental Health 2013!

I am proud and humbled to have been pledged by Ruby Tuesday of A Canvas of the Minds as a Mental Health Blogger for 2013.  It’s not an award, but a commitment to keep on blogging with the aim of erasing stigma and creating community among those of us who live with mental illness.  Our Mental Health Blogger community is a place where people living with mental illness as well as their families and loved ones can come together in mutual acceptance and support.  It’s awesome!  So here’s the pledge:

I pledge my commitment to the Blog For Mental Health 2013 Project.  I will blog about mental health topics not only for myself, but for others.  By displaying this badge, I show my pride, dedication, and acceptance for mental health.  I use this to promote mental health education in the struggle to erase stigma.

Here is where I’m supposed to write a short summary of my own journey with mental illness.  Where to begin?  I’ve had issues all of my life with PTSD and dissociation.  Likewise, I cannot remember a time when I was not depressed.  I ran away from home, permanently, when I was 16 and only by the grace of G-d did not die or end up trafficked to Mexico, although there were some close calls.  I didn’t know I had a mental illness till I was in college and desperate to make money.  There was an ad in the student newspaper: take drugs and get paid!  No, really, it was a study that the Psychiatry part of the medical school was doing.  So I went and applied, and had to take a whole day’s worth of psychological testing before they would give me the drugs.  Some guy called me the next day and said, “You have to go to Student Mental Health right now!  Your testing shows you are Severely Depressed.”  Humph.  I didn’t feel any different than I always felt, but if I had to go to Student Mental Health in order to get my drugs, that’s the way it was.  I went.  There was a nice lady behind the desk in a cozy room.  She smiled beneficently and asked, “Why are you depressed?”  ”I’m not depressed,” I said. “Then why are you here?” she asked.  ”The Psych Drug Study made me come,” I said.  She shuffled through my slim chart and said, “Your testing shows you are severely depressed.”  She looked up at me with that saintly smile and said, “You get good grades.  You have a good job.  You’re good looking.  So why are you depressed?”  I stood up, thanked the lady, and walked out.

The next time I got an inkling that I might be depressed came when I was in medical school, married, with a baby who never slept.  I adored him, and many years later I still adore him, but the fact is, he never slept through the night until he was five.  So at that time I think he was maybe ten months old, and I had not slept since he was born.  I was in the middle of my Cardiology clinical rotation.  Everyone had gone to lunch, but as usual I had no appetite and was uninterested in hanging out with people, so I was sitting in a study carrel reading EKGs.  My Cardiology attending came over and said, “Aren’t you going to go get some lunch?”  And I said, “No thanks, I’m not hungry,” avoiding eye contact by studying the EKG.  ”Look at me,” he said, and I did, mechanically.  ”You’re depressed,” he said.  ”I want you to go home and get some help.  You need to see a psychiatrist.  Please call me tomorrow and tell me what you have done about this.”  And head hanging, I went home.  My ex-husband came home and said, “What are you doing home so early?” since I usually stayed late studying.  ”I’m depressed,” I said.  He turned on his heel and walked out.  ”Let me know when you’re better,” he said on his way out the door.  I called somebody at the medical school whom I trusted, and told him the situation.  Five minutes later I got a call from a psychiatrist, who gently demanded that my (ex) husband accompany me to an appointment on the following day.  He did.  The shrink explained to him that I was physically incapable of doing what I was doing, taking care of our son all night and being a medical student all day (and sometimes all night too).  He explained how to give the baby a bottle.

He also gave me my first psych drug, imipramine, which not only knocked me completely out, but gave me a horrible itchy rash from head to toe.  Then he gave me antihistamines for the rash.  I dimly remember lying on the cool hardwood floor wishing I was dead but having no control over my body and therefore being unable to act on it, which was good.  After I got over that, he gave me some other drug, which allowed me to make it through med school in one piece.

Then I got to my residency in Pediatrics, where the standard work week was 120 hours.  More sleep deprivation.  And still with the non-sleeping child, who, bless his heart, sleeps like a baby now that he’s in his 20′s.  And then there was the husband who needed attention too.  So I went to a shrink and got Wellbutrin, which is very good for some people, but me it tipped over into hypomania.  Only nobody in the medical world in which I lived seemed to know about Depression and Mania and those kinds of nervous system brain sorts of things.  They only knew about Show Up For Work And Keep Your Mouth Shut.  I had this private joke: if one of us residents died, they wouldn’t give us time off to go to our own funeral.

As it happened, three of us residents DID die, and another one got taken out of service for accidentally giving someone the wrong medicine, which caused their death; so instead of every third night call, we had every other night, and sometimes “every every” night, which meant we didn’t get to go home much.  I really don’t know how the program directors thought that flesh and blood human beings could tolerate that for three years and not kill themselves or die in car accidents falling asleep on the way home, both of which things did happen in our little corner of Hell.

Anyway.  Fast forward from the late 1980′s-early 1990′s when all this shit was going down, to Y2K.  That’s right, the nearly infamous Year 2000.  Well, it WAS infamous for me, because a whole conflagration of disasters hit me that knocked my pins right out from under me and I ended up in the hospital.  And I became disabled, just like I am now.  The only good thing was that some shrink finally noticed that I’m bipolar, and put me on Lithium.  But by then my medical practice was in ruins, my family life in tatters, my finances non-existent, and worst of all, I had lost my identity.

I’ve wandered around some more since then, and although I’ve just been declared permanently and totally disabled by a Federal Social Security judge (and that feels pretty rough), I’m writing more than I ever have.  I’m blogging, and have become part of this wonderful community that is centered around A Canvas of The Minds.  I’m FINALLY writing my book, having used NaNoWriMo for the past two years to give me the kick-start I’ve needed to get two of the volumes well into progress.  I’m slowly redefining myself, and even though I still have attacks of  ”the mentals,” I’m bumping along, and that’s OK.

Oh all right, that was not short.  I am Incapable Of Writing Anything Short.

Now comes the part where I am supposed to pledge five other Mental Health Bloggers.  OMG.  How am I supposed to choose????  I’ll just start, and when I get to five I’ll stop.  Maybe.

PAZ, of Melancholically Manic Mouse

Lunch, of Lunch Sketch

Nicolas, of Puncture Repair Kit

bpshielsy at The Pipolar Place

survivor55 at Bipolar and Breastless

I hereby pledge to remember to let all of the above know I’ve pledged them.

Lastly:  I am supposed to remember not to forget to link back to Canvas, so here it is.  I think I’ve linked back to Canvas about six times in this post, but I’m feeling kind of wacky today so if I’ve messed up in some of this stuff I hope everyone will forgive me.  And feel free to let me know!

Love to everybody and sending good juju for staying healthy this winter, and looking forward to another wonderful year of Mental Health blogging together!

Soul Survivor

8 Comments
by Soul Survivor on January 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Autistic Spectrum, bipolar illness, blogging, Disability, family, humor, medical practice, medical school, medications, Mental Illness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Recovery, relationship, symptoms, Teenage runaway, tests, treatments, triggers, Uncategorized
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Soul Survivor on January 27, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/01/27/blog-for-mental-health-2013/

In the Booth with Ruth - Dina Leah

Reblogged from Dina Leah: story of a teenage runaway:

Interview with Ruth Jacobs...you can see I was scared to open up...

Dina Leah, a survivor of child abuse and rape, ran away from home at age 16 only to find herself homeless on the streets. The only way to get shelter, food, and other necessities was to have sex with strange men. This led to more rapes, and a vicious cycle of drug abuse, survivor sex, and homelessness. She is currently writing a novelized memoir, using a pseudonym out of fear of her abusors. Ruth Jacobs, tireless advocate for change and abolition of prostitution, interviews Dina here about Dina's life as a writer. In a second interview on Ruth's website, Dina talks about her life as a runaway and how it has affected her, both as an activist for street kids and in her own personal life.
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by Soul Survivor on January 23, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in bipolar illness, Disability, family, Mental Illness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Rape, Teenage runaway, Uncategorized
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Posted by Soul Survivor on January 23, 2013

http://bipolarforlife.me/2013/01/23/1256/

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