For people with severe mental illnesses, emotions are a place fraught with a thousand little tensions that don't add up to a whole picture, especially for the seriously bipolar. I watched a receptionist talk (more like interrupt and over-talk) with various employees in a corporate setting for years, and she'd steal facets that she liked from different people by littering her "nonversations" with their borrowed expressions. It was the only memory recall she had; these shards of other people's personas that never added up to a real person for her.
It was doubly odd because she came from a really strong cultural presence in New York, as an Israeli immigrant living in a strongly Jewish part of "Lawnguyland". It wasn't like she was an ethnic minority living on her own. Her parents sent her to a private schul during her formative years, but after puberty, she became sicker and sicker. There was something broken within her that never really worked right, and it was grueling to be around. She'd call herself a "painter", exhibit some drawing skills as an illustrator, then go completely downhill after that first good picture, like all the other areas of her life.
She was also extremely vulnerable to the outside world. I could tell her parents were exhausted by her ongoing illnesses, as the only explanation that made any sense after years of observation. She was too sick to live with, and she had weird tense stand-offs with her roommates at the city apartment she found while commuting from her parent's place on the island. She told me she'd been raped, mugged, drugged, knock-down dragged-out drunk, and that was just during my small time window with her. G-d knows how many horrors awaited for me in her life. I simply didn't want to know them anymore, because like any challenged child, she never got over any of it. Her alleged teenage rape was just as fresh as if it happened to her yesterday.
When I first met her, and she blabbed that she was raped to us at a bar during after-work cocktails—as a bizarre justification for not working at a more "artistic" job—I thought it had happened to her, like, a year ago, and that's why she still lived with her folks. It was like that for every single experience she could dramatize, like gossip or dirt on her fellow co-workers, but never anything deep, real, or significant. She was the most trivially superficial thing I'd ever met, and so repulsive to me intellectually, that I found I couldn't stand her presence sober, like that one crazy bitch at a frat party you only see when you're forced back to the keg line. Ugh...you again, bitch? Sigh...fine, I'll make small talk with you to get a beer.
That's what she was to us—that crazy bitch at the reception desk who would physically block you so she could pelt you with her trash talk. It was fine every once in awhile, but full-on crazy all the time pulls at you real quick, know that I mean? She was a work obstacle we had to constantly get around, like an ill-placed traffic cone in the middle of a narrow city street, clad in a warning color like "safety-cone orange".
She was also very susceptible to the slightest marketing pitch, because she had no genuine sense of self. It was nerve-wracking and jarring to my wholesomeness as a cohesively packaged unit that was beautifully-made through my own hard work, like the books I made for our company. Tight, yo! She'd complain to us that she had no money, then she blow hundreds of dollars every week on these grotesque white-blond dye jobs at a salon, with a full pedicure and manicure and maybe a facial (if she had time), in addition to her oft-repeated tanning salon sessions, supposedly because she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder as a Jew.
In fact, her short list, just as I can remember from that time, was this: PTSD (from the infamous "Unibomber/Central Park rapist"), recovered molestation memories from childhood (sent to me at work in an email in the middle of the day through the company server), manic-depression, bipolar personality identity disorder, ADHD/Adult ADD, dyslexia and other learning impairments like illiteracy, a low IQ, alcoholism, drug addiction (to cocaine and pain pills), bloating and serious water retention (hence the aggressive over-sharing about bodily functions), marked obsessive compulsive addictive hoarding tendencies with significantly ritualistic behaviors, personal boundary issues, a low self-esteem, a hyperactive sex drive that led to a series of increasingly risky behaviors like jogging through the park at 1 a.m. to shed those awful pounds, yo-yo dieting, poor self-image (hence the narcissistic grooming habits), a love/hate food addiction combined with bulimia mixed with occasional sprees of anorexia nervosa, over-spending (she said had to live with her parents because of shopping-related debt, which gave a cool "Sex and the City" vibe to her manic sprees), fixations with people that became stalking and cyberstalking, ambiguous sexual/gender orientation with slight schizoid affective characteristics interspersed with unsuccessful online dating that rarely went beyond the first date (she actually showed me the "you are crazy" text to go along with it), chronic depression with suicidal tendencies, as well as other violently criminal tendencies to go along with her markedly psychotic features.
She was also the most delusional consumer I have ever met. If there was a woman's magazine lying around the reception area for our guests to peruse, she'd blame the images for "forcing her" to buy more shit she didn't need. Huh. Uh, how exactly does that fucking work? If a new tech gadget came out, she HAD TO have it, even though she was almost completely ignorant about computers and technology. Oh, well!
If the bland Midwestern girl made homemade brownies and dared to bring them to the office without first screening it with her manipulatively controlling codependency, we could all look forward to a work day filled with her odd sneaky runs to the kitchen to cut the already-small brownies into these tiny little pieces that she'd furtively jam into her mouth too quickly, licking her fingers and mouth nastily, saying "Mm. Bitch. Mm. Bitch..." over and over again, smacking her lips in a grossly piggish way. Same thing with the office jar of candy.
It had to be placed behind a piece of paper and away from her desk— which was our company's reception desk—because she couldn't handle seeing it, and that was after someone busted her for starving all day long without a proper lunch break (she'd blame the publisher for that), which forced her to cram salad into her mouth at her desk, pouting and giving us evil glares the entire afternoon for being a human who eats. Even though she spent more on herself than anything or anyone else around her, it still hadn't worked. She remained consistently greasy-haired with a dirty cap jammed down onto her matted head (she didn't like her forehead wrinkles), wearing the same torn stained jeans, baggy sweater, and unfashionably clunky shoes.
She remained disgusting, even with her expensive outsourcing of every facet of her life to other people. Her Jewish dentist cousin would give her free teeth-bleaching that she bragged about to an office of better-looking "Ivy Leaguers" who most often just stared at her in disbelief. What to say? She was so fucking crazy that there was no coming back from brain damage that bad, and we knew it. And that was before she went off her psychotropic cocktail of meds, joined a cult, and then recruited for them openly during company hours. In short, Ayelet Rand was the most disturbed person I had ever met in my life. Her sole focus in her life was her, and her confused "feelings" about life that we were forced to help her sort through during our difficult day jobs, because the crazy old Jews who owned the company found her neurosis "charming". How's that for a lawsuit? Hey, it's really not that big of a problem, though. There's a big sample sale going on right down the block! Yeah, right. Bitch. Meet you there later. Much later.
