After Midnight

Despite occasional harsh prejudices to the contrary, I remain an unpopular "day person" awake in the dawn of your socially acceptable manic-depression. In my small town of Pearl River, only two businesses operate 24/7, 365 days/year: the convenient store on the corner doing a brisk business in chemically-laden tobacco, booze, energy drinks, junk food, and lotto tickets, or the chain drugstore right across the street with its handy drive-up window. 

It speaks to our priorities about what we feel is most important to us in our lives, and it's the commercialized convenience of excess, which makes my natural body-clock jarring to the pale shakiness of a typical "night owl". Nor does it stop at a simple day/night dichotomy either, observed through the touchy tenderness about "alternative" circadian rhythms. It was in this vein that I suffered through each and every New Year's Eve with my mom growing up, who gets a "jolt of energy" (her words) between 10-11 p.m., moving around her carefully controlled, highly monitored "home environment" (her words again) to wash dishes and do laundry, then check her emails until 12 p.m.-1:30 a.m., unless of course I want to watch the UFC fights in her apartment airing "late" that end around her usual bedtime of 2:00 a.m. Then, my entire life and schedule is immediately suspect and abused.

It didn't matter how much my mom and her freaky friends or family "made fun" of me for sleeping at night, even if it was New Year's Eve. When you wake up between 6-7 a.m. in the morning, you go to sleep in the evening whether you want to or not, and that's healthy, except if you're paranoid and bipolar. Then, it's the complete opposite. Most of the seriously disordered people I know crave sugar, caffeine, or cocaine to get that rush when the depressive side of their illness kicks in, making them miss active late nights over a feeble, disabling, daytime lethargy. Of course, I can stay up for an event if I plan for it, but if I don't have to, I don't. It's simple: no dinner date or late-nite party to attend, I'm asleep. And I'll probably be working the next day. 

So, to all you lone wolves regularly sleeping with the sun like I do, know that you're not alone in your healthy sleep habits this New Year's Eve. And no, Jane, there's nothing wrong with getting a full 8-9 hours of sleep, despite peer pressure or what you've been told about "peak performance hours" for "maximum productivity". They're marketing buzzwords for anxiety and mania, anyway. Have a good night's sleep, and I'll see you all in 2017, fans of daytime. G-d bless. 

Shock to the System

Lately I've been seeing a building rhetoric grow in popular media outlets that suggest electroshock therapy as a cruel and inhumane practice, even though it isn't designed to be so. If you ever met a violently-shaking schizophrenic or a severely distressed bipolar individual who's completely disassociated from reality (and has been so for days, manically cycling through a series of brain traumas that cannot correct themselves on their own), it's easy to point fingers around the medical community that treats the sickest kinds of people living among us.

It's illogical to assume that currents targeted to specific areas of the brain (that are already shutting down) would be overly harmful, since a severely dysfunctional brain is significantly handicapped to begin with. We run on electricity! All lifeforms on earth are held sway under the same natural principles of Applied physics, and our bodies (with brains) are no different. Would you ask a heart patient to remove his or her life-saving pacemaker just to suit your irrational fears about electrical currents and the mechanical devices made to heal them?

It seems cruel when I phrase it that way, right? And it is. We should be open to any healing practice that has years of solid science backing it. I know mental illness is scary. We've all been victimized by chronic abuse, most often at the hands of the seriously disordered, and isn't that reason enough to keep these kinds of helpful methods around? Any empirical scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence) would read the same data that I did, to come back to the same place. If it works, it works. Who are we to question someone else's healing? Let. It. Be.

Forget what you've seen in those old movies (based on better books) about cuckoo birds, insane nurses, and wrongfully-imprisoned Indians who seem harmless until they're violently tripped off. When was the last time you stepped over a homeless individual on the streets, yo? Like, yesterday, New Yorker?! We're confronted with illness every day. It ain't just hype when you confront damage like that, is it? It's real. People need understanding; not fear and ignorance. You need to heal. It's time.

Know the facts, first: 
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
- http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/electroconvulsive-therapy/basics/definition/prc-20014161
- http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/electroconvulsive-therapy
- http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/ect
- https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies

Open Door

Oneonta versus Providence: a story told in manned, locked doors.

When I lived in rural upstate New York for school, in a old shared house that was dilapidated way back in the late 80s, the front door was always open. I took off my keys to give to a housemate for duplication in town and never got them back, or maybe I simply misplaced them one evening down at the "Black Oak Tavern", where my boyfriend worked the door. Because I was so young (and looked it), it was the only bar in town for me, which suited me fine. It greatly reduced the number of situations that needed handling with drunk kids, and everyone on campus knew I dated him.

He was proud to be a "strongman" when it suited him, often getting his way by being the biggest, strongest guy in the room; charms that wore off soon after the buzz from college faded. Violence is great for bar brawls; he'd worn an arm cast proudly back then to show that he could fight, but out in the real world (a place where there are tons of ex-football playing star quarterbacks from high school who are 6' tall), it doesn't really solve much. It didn't escape my attention on His Holiness' recent visit that he, too, had manned a door during his youth, as it is a common enough job for the working class man. My college beau did it during the summer, too, as a hatted doorman for rich people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It suited his chatty nervy personality, but tons of talking has never done much for me that I couldn't learn more efficiently elsewhere.

But, he didn't do his work for the vocation of it; he wanted money (and lots of it), with hints of violence to go with the suggestion that he could throw you out anytime he wanted to. He and I sorted through that early on in our relationship, because we had to. I grew up in a violent household that did not grow more peaceful with alcohol, because fighting and drinking go hand-in-hand. We got into one night after one too many, and he told me firmly that he did not believe in touching women, so I couldn't touch him, even if it was a small quick shove on the shoulder. I immediately agreed. We set ground rules that night for our relationship in our dorms empty staircase (me, at all of 17, and he was just 18), in a way that still eludes the old neighborhood drunks here in town, poorly navigating life every single day on their own; without medication, appropriate health care, or stints in rehab.

It seems so strange to us now, perhaps because we have moved so far from the family as a holy role model, but there was a time when I could walk into a house I shared with my college buddies without ever carrying a house key for that entire year at school, because the front door was always unlocked. Oh, we all had locks on our individual bedroom doors (mostly for privacy with our boyfriends, or for studying and sleeping), but we never once locked the door after that initial key exchange, because we had nothing to be afraid about it. 

We'd occasionally find a drunk friend or two passed out on the large couches in the back living room after a party (all old houses had a front parlor that opened up into the main living room back then), but it stands out in stark contrast to the poor drunks around me now, with all the pain and hurt they cause daily, simply because they won't admit they need help, choosing instead to abuse the normal, happy, healthy people around them, for diseases they inherited from their own family.

Think about it this way: when was the last time you felt safe enough to keep your front door unlocked at night? When was the last time you didn't check all the windows in your home to make sure they were sealed tight? Who was to blame for your discomfort? I'll bet you know exactly who is unsafe around you (write a list of names), and so you have to ask yourself this: why do you protect them? And what from? The knowledge that they hurt? As easy as it seems to enable the problem people around us in the moment, it is always a poor tree that bears rotten fruit. If you know someone who is alcoholic and psychotic, the very best thing you can do for them is get them help today...no matter how violently they respond to your righteousness. Get help.

http://www.informationrockland.com/MatchList.aspx?c;;0;;N;0;0;POPULATION%20GROUPS;People%20with%20Disabilities;424;Psychiatric%20Mobile%20Response%20Teams 

Thanks

I was 19 years old the first time I made an entire Thanksgiving dinner by myself. I came home from college to a note on the kitchen table from my mom. She left town quickly, going on vacation to Florida with her then-boyfriend, our widowed next door neighbor that we, her kids, loathed for many good reasons, and his wild teenage daughter. Great. Now what? My middle brother was distraught when he came home from his upstate New York school. He's someone who enjoys comforts, rituals, stability, and routines. What about Thanksgiving? 
He asked me, tears in his eyes from shock, growing more emotional. Are we not going to have a holiday now?! He's a lovely, sensitive boy, and he was struggling with being away at school, while I thrived under my own domain, because I'd already had an enormous amount of life experience and responsibilities for such a young girl. I felt terrible. Well, I said to him, let me call Grandma and Grandpa, and see what they think. My grandparents lived within ten minutes of us, and they often served as surrogate parents in the absences of my mother and father. My father had left the area years ago for points out west, establishing a business and another family, so he was almost completely out of reach of us, in that time before cell phones, computers, emails, and the Internet. 

When I reached my grandparents on the phone, they were taken aback. My mother had left town without telling them either, typical for someone with her issues. It was a cowardly thing to do, but not unlike her to leave such a huge parental burden on my shoulders. My grandparents weren't much help, either. At that point they stopped hosting big dinners with a lot of cooking because they were elderly (like they had warned us they would do for many years, as part of their retirement), and they no longer had the energy for such large family affairs. I took a deep breath. OK, I said to them over the phone, I'll do it. I'll make Thanksgiving dinner. After all, I reasoned to myself, I'd made gravy with my grandmother on Thanksgiving before as a little girl, and she'd be with me in my mother's kitchen to give me moral support. Vegetables were easy, they would bring dessert, so I just had to manage the bird and the side dishes on my own.

And so I did it. I went to the store and bought everything I knew I'd need. I smoothed the nice white linen table cloth over the dining room table, took out the good china from the wooden sideboard, polished the fine silver like I'd done countless times in my youth, and washed the crystal glasses that I took out of the glass case where the special occasion tableware was kept. I woke up early the next day, put on one of my mother's aprons, got the heavy stuffed turkey in the oven, sewing the bird shut just like I'd seen it done before, saving the giblets in the sink like my grandfather taught me to do for soup and gravy, and I then made an entire dinner by myself. My grandparents drove over to the house, and I was there to greet them at the front door to usher in the holiday with them. I took their coats and hung them up in the hall closet, just like my parents used to do with guests. I remember feeling grown up, helpful, competent, and very much in command of the day's events. We went into the kitchen. We opened some wine, and my brother and grandfather drank beer. I put all the food on the table as they sat down. When the last dish hit the table, I breathed a sigh of relief, pulling my chair up to the table, placing the linen napkin on my lap. My grandfather said "Grace" at the head of the table. Afterwards, I raised my glass in toast to my grandmother, grandfather, and brother, smiling widely at each of them as we clinked glasses. 

I thought about that time again last weekend at the grocery store, having dragged myself there from my sick bed because I didn't have any food to eat. The cashier was deep in conversation with the lady in line before me about typical holiday family drama stuff, of a kind so common to this area and particular to this culture, that when she was done with her groceries, I stepped seamlessly into the conversation, picking right up where my neighbor left off. The clerk couldn't understand why her sister wouldn't host, but OK, why not have it at her house? What about her mother's house? She has plenty of room! We laughed exasperatedly over our predicaments, as I told her my teenage tale of woe. She chuckled ruefully about it, saying tiredly to me, as we bagged my groceries: "All I want to do is put up my feet, have a beer, and order pizza." Oh, yeah, that sounds good. I sighed as I shouldered the heavy bag for my walk back. "Me, too", I said, and then I hoped we would both get our holiday wishes this year. It looks like I will, because this little mommy desperately needs her rest, if only for one day. Thanks.