Without Prejudice

Much like a confused America wrongly divided itself into two incorrectly opposed factions of "black" and "white", the saying that mental illness (like cancer) doesn't discriminate is dubious and suspect in the extreme. When I heard the verdict for the O.J. Simpson trial live on t.v along with millions of other people, I knew that the corruption of our court system now extended to wealthy African-Americans, too, and if you think that's "equality" in the eyes of the law, then you need to go back to school immediately. In fact, that's what I said for many years after the court case, whenever I was asked about my impression of it: "Well, African-Americans are now just as corrupt as 'rich white men', because they can buy their way to an innocent verdict like they do."

It's like pretending that you are less complicit in a crime because you just stood there while someone else hacked to death a woman in her kitchen for being brave enough to divorce her abuser/attacker. I mean, it's not like you swung the ax yourself, right? Right?! Wrong! And that's exactly where many murder cases wind up while under examination in a courtroom setting; the bystanders who did not stop the crime, or report it, or try to deter it in any way are in some cases just as culpable as the actual murderer for participation in a crime, especially if the attacker is seriously mentally ill. If you knew better and you did nothing about it (hence the cover-up and subsequent silence, post-crime), then you are charged with criminal acts along with the actual murderer. Get it?

This heady climate of celebrity culture has become just another stage for performing, for the criminally insane acting out who use their crimes to gain access to the public's attention. You are O.J. Simpson, regardless of melanin*. Look, I like black-and-white cookies from the deli just as much as any other hardcore New Yorker, but what happens when you can't break it clean in half anymore, because most Americans today are "colored" and mixed ethnically, too? There is no privilege of bias based on "racism" (and there is just one modern human race living today, as far as I know), or skin tone. 

If you are severely mentally ill with violently psychotic tendencies that have been easily observed and often remarked upon in public spaces (like, say, offices and large football fields), then there really isn't anywhere to hide anymore, nor should you continue to do so. Your healthcare claims will be denied, like a car insurer denies coverage to a serial negligent driver, as with a D.U.I. No compliance with our laws = no insurance coverage. Now, if you want to pretend that you need dental coverage but not medical treatment for your personality disorder, then fine. You can pay for it out-of-pocket the next time you wind up in an E.R. for an accident caused by your mental illness. Welcome to "The New America". It's way better than the last version.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin

Positivity Princess

Much like the word "healthy", the word "positive" has taken on an insidiously modern marketing meaning that degrades its usage, as is common for the average English speaker who understands commerce without having enough poetry in the soul to make an actual difference about how we feel. Anyone who takes on serious issues that are complex are derisively referred to as "Negative Nellies", so closely monitored must the "Thought Police" of the world be, in sullen reaction to mature adults. I'm often a favorite target for passive-aggressiveness because I am not typically "wrong" about anything, because it's part of my job to know you, which is also quite often followed by a schoolyard taunt of "Know-It-All" delivered as a sulky potshot given behind my back (in yet another nod to my power as a mother), in a never-ending posture that is the typical defensiveness of passive-aggressors.

I can digest content that's dark, troubling, scary, tough, difficult, or "grim" (as one hapless library clerk noted), because in the land of dissociative disorders, your closed-door horrors are the messes of the world for other, much more gifted people to clean up, much like your child abuse and domestic violence. One crazy design manager superficially characterized my cover designs as "gritty", which is pathetic and pointless to a native New Yorker working among blood-thirsty sharks, in the fiercest urban jungle on the planet. Huh...ya think? Uh, yeah. Life is gritty at times. She didn't last very long because she sucked at her job, which at one time meant styling chapter openers for a typographer to set and print: not exactly a set-yourself-on-fire kind of job, intellectually-speaking.

Noticing that a publisher like me can process those very acts of human horror wrought daily upon society (often directed at the infirm, elderly, and the very young) is the highest compliment you can give a master artist like me, because it means we can handle the subjects that you can't. Turning away from the darkness hidden away in the human soul does nothing to address it properly, let alone help problem-solve it out of existence. It's another reason that I'm consistently surprised when the ignorant uneducated drunk in our neighborhood has an arrogant sense of superiority over, say, someone like me. Only the craziest fuck on the block would try to place oneself above me, because they tap out of life on the regular over, say, walking beyond the corner to carry actual groceries, let alone being smart enough to sort trash properly, as is legally required. Checking out from life and realism means you can't do shit in human, and that's a serious fuck-up to me.

"Negative" has become the playground taunt du jour that refers to anything the mentally ill deem unfit for their lazy contemplation, in a twisted distortion about what a true sense of self means, essential as it is to be successful in this world. How much can you check out of life? You'd be surprised. Don't like your sister-in-laws keen observations about your eating disorder? Call her "mean" and cut her out! She's not fit to be in your bisexual bipolar cheerleader squad anyway (and thank G-d for that)! Don't like your niece noticing your wild hoarding disorder? That's okay. She once smoked a pot cigarette, so she's schizo, too (doesn't work that way, duh). Desperately insecure about your abilities and capabilities? Well, shame people into a dysfunctional tense silence that does nothing but abuse, so that you can feel better about your alcoholism behind closed doors.

I'm sure there's a book or a movie or a program somewhere that addresses what you lack, as a lifelong coward. That's okay. I'll fight your battles and win them all, by your lack of failures. In truth, it's the lack of a well-rounded life that presents itself most glaringly. The chick who can only handle rom-com's? Gay, deeply closeted, insane, and into cat hoarding. It's the art of reading people that I mastered a long time ago, like scoping out the musicians at a recording studio by their lyrics, clothes, and attitudes. I really didn't need to hear their bad Goth audio tracks in progress to know that the lead guy from the band dressed in all black and heavy eyeliner sitting at my art director's desk with devil art had some "issues" to work out (another carefully guarded, softly peddled euphemism for madness that's supposedly "rude" to say out loud in any real, honest way). By allowing the seriously ill to demonize our maturity and range of emotions, we allow them to manipulatively control us, which is not a warrior's way.

And that's what it's really about: their mental problems, not yours. It's a clinically immature way of saying "I know you are but what am I" over and over again until you feel you block out the world that seeps in anyway. It's a desperately deceitful way of guarding against improving through applied learning from an advanced understanding of the world's knowledge, which is real power. If I know (because I read the book) and you don't (because you're knitting the same cat hair sweater over and over again), then I win, and here's the kicker, because I always do. I'm not afraid to shine a light in the hidden corners of the human psyche, the same way the NYPD cleans up your gruesome murder scene involving a two year-old and his teenage mother, or a WWII vet relives the horrors of concentration camps, as they tenderly buried the corpse of a woman holding her child in your gas chambers of the world. Because it's real. That's why.

The Man Who Liked Men

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man

I've worked with just about every type of human currently on planet Earth (twice, thrice, and more than nice), as part of the exclusive media elite of New York, and I studied alongside them, too, as part of the intellectual elite who attend the world's finest schools, rife with the wealth, power, and privileges the children of the richest families so often have. It's given me a wide range of deviant behaviors to observe (and fight) that even the most hard-bitten city detective would have a tough time beating me on, and that's also part of the point: working through the highly competitive and very selective environments that are so difficult to gain access to, they bring on a severe case of "the crazies" for people who are not mentally equipped to work at that level. It causes "freak outs" in the most showily aggressive and publicly hostile ways, which are necessary for us to take action against.

Underneath the cover of work, there's even wild accusations of corporate espionage among employees, ones that quickly followed on the heels of my official apprenticeship, and that's part of it, too: knock out the really gifted folks who threaten anyone in "the game" who can't perform well without using deceit. When I broached the supposedly large gap that existed between the worlds of manufacturing and art, they called me a "spy" on both sides of the fence for being brilliant enough to work technically as well as artistically, which was in direct conflict with company practices at the time, because I was the first classically trained artist to work in both the production and design departments at St. Martin's Press, and the harassment didn't end.

I "sucked" at design because I didn't know computers like the highly experienced graphic designers who couldn't draw expertly like me and my friends who'd studied many art forms could do. When that didn't work, the lead art director laughingly mocked me for not knowing computers like he did as an expert his 30s (I was in my early 20s at the time), by making all of us take some personality test that was rigged for assigning the name "Marie" as that of some stuffy old secretary, because I came into the department as a manager who could perform many job functions, unlike the diva designers who plead ignorance to anything they didn't want to do.

Like any old scam appearing daily at offices for the disordered worldwide, I actually came out ahead of the game through my proficiency and humility to absorb any type of task that was needed for the job at hand, and that was part of the point about my apprenticeship, too: I can do anything better than you, even when I'm robbed of your clear advantages in some sort of fix or "double-cross". When trifling co-workers couldn't hack at me though the work flow, they re-doubled their efforts to con me into social situations disguised as those mandatory horrors known as "the office party", in desperate efforts to get me drunk and spill the beans, which I always did, because more than one wise person told me repeatedly that if you never lie, you have nothing to hide, and that's the truth.

But, that didn't stop 'em from firing hard at me over the years. One of the best cons was a bitchy Eurasian gay girl in disguise, working her typical "art fag" hairdo and expensive designer clothes for all it was worth by sleeping her way through the office staff, girls and boys alike. Oh, I staved her off at arm's length like I know how to do in my sleep, which took 'em awhile to sort out amongst themselves. The industry types in the know rigged a mandatory job requirement for me, making me work oversees with her as their lead production editor (untrained in German, on foreign-language computers with European power sources), because the openly gay woman from the U.S. design team was openly sick, and she constantly threatened discrimination lawsuits that they told me they were afraid of behind closed doors, even though the company had other "out" gay people working there.

It put me in direct line of this editor's abuses overseas in English, which was a new one for me, working as I did alone in a supposedly German-language-only design studio that's a classic isolationist technique for the chronic abuser seeking to attack. It was desperately done, but I knew the deal ahead of time, because it took me six months to find work, a long time for someone as experienced as me, but that's an economic downturn for you. On my first day of work, I saw the gay designer and her manager savage each other in the hallways by violently cursing at each other, after which I immediately called my father to report obvious workplace abuse. He told me I "had to" work there because there were no other jobs out there, and since it took me "so long" to find a job, I had no choice. He told me to "keep my head down, and my mouth shut", which I dutifully transposed onto a small yellow post-it as the anagram "HDMD" in thick black pen, and taped it to my work monitor so as to remember his sage wisdom, which was noticed by the staff around me, though it oddly went unremarked on by the very same employees who seemed to be verbally abusive about any other thing, wherever I went.

In fact, I'm so good at keeping my cool, I became famous for it. Christina, the arty in-over-her-head provincial with the ready strategy of promiscuous office sex, made me her friend by force, which is a common enough technique when the work thing doesn't quite pan out. Her and her friends from Boston put the heavy hand on for inviting me out, so much so that I knew it was a corporate strategy for getting the personal goods on me, so as to use by attacking my psyche through office attacks that would be hard for me to prove, which it was, and which I won at anyway, but that's a story for another day. She tried to set me up one weekend with her guy friend who had trouble dating, and who was also working the online dating scene hard, just like I so happened to be doing at the same time. Huh...what a coincidence.

We had a day at the beach outside of the office that went bad, because my obvious female sex organs in my sexy, black, halter-top bathing suit freaked out their friend, which Christina explained away as the current "skinny fetish" that was all the rage in ads. He even told her she should work out those thighs of hers to sculpt away ugly body fat (she was a size two), because anything over a size four was "fat" (duh, Marie), as she eyeballed me derisively over crepes in some trendy Village hotspot. Oh. Poor me....I wonder if I can cut weight as an athlete? Huh. I did it to blend into their social structure, strict as their group's rules were about appearances back then. It all came apart at their very next party during a holiday Fourth of July weekend, when I innocently inquired about whether their friend liked me or not. Uh, no. They squirmed around me for awhile, until I overheard their skinny blond (and very tan) friend say that he didn't "like anyone over 'a buck seventeen'", in a thinly veiled reference to their group-sanctioned anorexia that has never been my real scene.

The jig was finally up at work when the gay female designer gossiped with us during one of our production meetings (we were all seeing each other socially outside of work by then: I even went to Diana's lesbian-friendly birthday party at a tech-themed bar!), by huffing over this same editor's revelation that the very same guy she tried to set me up with had met a short-haired blond woman online, and that they were dating. It was going really well! Oh, yeah? "So....she's dating men again?!" Diana seemed a bit taken aback by her reveal about her male friend's new girl. "That's funny", she remarked in an offended way, "because the last time I saw her, she was performing as a man in drag shows on the lesbian circuit." 

You could hear a pin drop as the wanna-be, art-fag-with-no-talent from Virginia froze in our little circle of female-only media employees discussing million dollar licensing for a German publishing company on a low-paying teacher's salary. "Haha!" Christina turned bright red, "Oh, really?"  Within months, she'd be back at work overseas (I broke the scam open on that already, because they couldn't prove it was worth the money for me to go there to work), but as an editorial lead (she'd forced out by then the woman who hired me by using all of us to "gang up" on her, though in truth the poor woman was simply incompetent, plus I already knew the group of girls would turn on me, too), Christina felt she had all the power in the world to abuse me until I left for a book publisher, figuring she had won. Whaddya think, New Yorkers? C'mon. Give it to me straight. I think can handle it.

Swap

For years, my mom and her immediate family have been stuck in deeply ingrained patterns of dysfunction that are hard not to notice, though if they are openly observed and remarked upon, they freak out to prevent revelation, which is part of the abusive cycle they remain trapped in. It's heart-breaking to watch sometimes, because like children who want candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I know that their bad choices will only make them sicker through my continued neglect. And just like I know that all those pop-culture movies contributing to deliberately false ideas about real American life that we know aren't true (just like I know that people in India do not break out into Bollywood-type skits every time someone gets engaged, funny as that might in the entertainment world), I know that they argue with me because they fear committal to a state mental institution, like old horror movies filmed in black-and-white.

They don't realize that those abusive types of hospitals are a thing of the past, because they fear healthcare, too, just like my mother's youngest sister hides her irrational phobias over rain and storms, because she knows it's another symptom of her psychoses. It was in this manner that my mother and her family hid the worst of their sicknesses behind socially acceptable hobbies like cleaning and eating and shopping, because they provide easier cover than drinking and smoking, which they mistakenly believe are more open manifestations of mental illness and the stress that produces.

Of course, their weirder addictions simply made our households much more stressful to reveal to anyone outside of our family group (which was part of the point), forcing me and my Gen-X friends into old patterns of drinking and smoking to relieve the inner tension cause by their abusive patterns, which put us right back to where our Depression-Era grandparents lived: at hip, flapper-type bistros full of smoky jazz and fun, which was not at all what my mom and her sisters wanted. They can't smoke, or drink, or have fun easily, because their nervous tensions make them feel nauseous all the time, especially when they don't take their medications. 

My youngest aunt is so "pukesy-poo" (they make up cutesy names to hide the root cause of their anxieties), that as kids, we knew she'd get sick from sitting in a rocking chair that moved slightly (so we'd sneak up behind her to tilt the chair back-and-forth, making her squeal), or from hearing about someone vomiting (so we'd imitate puking sounds with our grandpa), or it might be that she simply she wasn't sipping from a straw the stomach-calming sodas that she's addicted to.

In was in this way that my mom's middle sister became a hardcore food addict, with an addiction so severe that she has to attend weekly group meetings and pay out big bucks to some unhealthy food company that "has to" feed her controlled portion-sizes of chemically-laden food that will surely kill her off someday soon, like my mom's Aspartame-addicted youngest sister. They haven't actually conquered anything in this world. If anything, their silent generation of "Do-Nothings" have created even worse patterns with harder addictions, like hoarding and binge eating, or simulating a "shopper's high" through a covertly athletic "runner's high", making it extremely difficult to diagnose and treat, which is also part of the point.

One year, my infamously large "Moose Dog" accompanied me to my mom's eating-disordered sisters' house in upstate Westchester with me, staying overnight in her basement on Christmas Day Eve, with the understanding that he and I would leave early the next morning for my mom's place in Rockland after staying the night, because I wanted access to her immediate back yard for bathroom runs that are easier when no else is around, like we did whilst in the country. She was fine with that, and so throughout the day, as other family stopped by, I went up-and-down the basement stairs to the rest of the house, periodically checking in on my still-young Malamaute.

At some point during the day, Ted had figured out how to open up sealed plastic containers to gorge himself sight unseen, because on a food run to the garage, my cousin (her son) was looking in the garage and then the basement room for something, while I held Ted's leash and looking on. He stuttered a bit at first while he looked for something his mom had asked for, because where some such holiday food had been stored were the missing Christmas cookies that my aunt and her "fat friends" (the women who join her in her periodic over-eating that's related to their disorders), trade with each other under the cloud cover of a traditional church cookie swap.

You see, Ted masterfully uncapped (without marring them) the tops of each container with Christmas cookies, eating every single one of them, and it was at least three large flat containers that can hold sheet-pan sized cakes. Hilarity ensued, as first my other cousin (her second son), and then my aunt joined us in the mysterious search for her cookie-swap cookies. We all laughed about it, as Ted reposed regally upon on the cool tile floor near the basement door, in a tellingly calm Zen-like fatness, well-satisfied with his holiday endeavors, unruffled as he was because he successfully masterminded this quest for food done on the sly, because winter is coming!! Feed me fat!! FAT!!!

But that's not why my cousins were laughing. They loved Teds' "taking one for the team", because each and every year my cousin's suffer with this gaggle of crazy females and their weird cookie obsession, because even more than that, they bake poorly on purpose to hurt one another with. Addicts don't eat food because it tastes good like we do. No, the point behind their cooking is to make the drug that they need to get high (taste, flavor, and skill aside), and that's exactly why my cousins will always remember one very special dog who ate all the food that sucked, forever putting him in their memory favorably, because your food addiction is no match for my dogs, ladies.  
You're not even as good as one of my animals, woman.

High Anxiety

Compulsive patterns are hard to break. Just ask my mom. Like many women of her generation (pre-Baby Boomer and post-Gen X), she struggled to assimilate herself into a world not of her choosing. Underneath the burdens of her innate challenges, she tried to figure out who she was, without any of the guidance that we have now, thanks to the narcissistic angst of the modern "Special Needs" parent and their Autistic kids. Like them, questions about gender/identity are particularly difficult.

Imagine worrying over the very existence that you and I take for granted everyday, like: who you are attracted to and what do you do about it? They painstakingly work at the core of who they might be with a therapist over some of our most basic human instincts, like a learning-impaired child with dyslexia trying to assemble the puzzle pieces that words represent. Can you imagine that? 

No wonder the disordered reach out wrongly (now numbered as 5 out of 6 people, or 8 out of 10), seeking shelter from the storms that brew inside their heads. Lashing out feels better than trying to understand their garbled perceptions of human speech, because concepts need to be labored over later, when they feel like they can process our communications better, with the guidance of an expert who's researched brain disorders for many years.

It was in this way that I came to accept my mission of breaking through to my own mother's badly broken brain (and becoming an excellent mother way before my actual biologically appropriate time), stuttered and repetitive as it is. When she "argues" with me (and it really isn't arguing to me, because I'm in control while she is not, and she doesn't like that), it's to release the pent-up stress that is the result of her disorders and illnesses.

Even worse for my mom is the trap her education brings to her incorrect assumptions and improper responses, like: how can she have me as a brilliant daughter, when she's the one who studied science? She doesn't understand that genius is genetic and many-abled, because she feels her arrogance must be vigilantly guarded, lest the knowledge from all of her over-wrought degrees (that all of us supported her in having), evaporate in an instant, like her mental faculties do during her sickest times.

In compensation for her low points, she learned to cover up her chronically anti-social behavior (like many people suffering with serious brain disorders do, to avoid detection as a life strategy), by re-orientating them around more conventionally disorientating events, like flying in an airplane, which is a common enough phobia that passes as a legitimate non-mental illness she can play to the hilt by letting her anxieties out under that appropriate cloud cover. She channels nervousness and anxietty brought on by ordinary events (that would surely reveal the depths of her diseases) into everyday compulsions that appear harmless on the surface, like washing dishes or folding laundry.

The problem with that is that she never learned to express her incorrect trains of thought accurately (which don't hold up under careful scrutiny well), because those conversations would reveal her serious compulsive-obsessivenesss that she inappropriately feels she can manage because she studied botany in school over sixty years ago. It doesn't make any sense, and a closer examination of her reasoning process reveals to a studied scholar (like me) exactly why doing laundry is not the same as genuine grief, which she will do anything to avoid, because emotional pain feels likee the psychic pain that is her life.

In avoidance of feeling feelings that are crucial to our health (like how a good night's sleep eludes her during the manic stress that occurs around heightened emotional times like holiday seasons, some of the worst emotional stress our mentally ill family members have), many people like her hoard and over-attach emotions to objects that have no real significance, then work a complex scheme to cover it up, like causing a hysterical fight over blinds that were raised slightly askew. For example, when my grandmother died, I mourned her thoroughly. I felt sadness, a deep sense of loss, and also a joy at having known her. I would not be me without her. Such was the gift that a life like hers brings, so that a big void is necessarily left in her wake. 

I don't dislike feeling very strong emotions, because I know I can process them correctly over time with an appropriate thought process, but the most disordered among us sometimes can't even get out of bed in the morning (my mom gets that typical manic-depressive "surge" of energy at night, because she also has Circadian Rhythm Disorder, sometimes puttering around until 4:30 a.m.), let alone contemplate concepts like life and death. They break life down into superficial, bite-sized bits that become extremely unproductive over time, especially in isolation, causing the abuse that they feel they need to keep their "creature comforts" in place that are signs of severe emotional distress.

Case in point, my mom has a big healthcare appointment coming up, which is a symptom of her holiday stress. Doctor appointments are often used to block out emotions she can't handle, so she tap-dances around her mental illnesses by using more socially acceptable illnesses as cover-ups. Like a lot of chronically sick people, she is disturbed by old-fashioned ideas about mental institutions that no longer exist, but she doesn't know that. Her brain just tells her to avoid detection at all costs, even if it leads to the death of a loved one, which she will regret later on after her fugue state has passed. My mom has had to retract her false claims of "elder abuse" thrown at me during her life stress (under threat of legal prosecution by family who has also been falsely accused by her), because she couldn't handle my hard move from Brooklyn that was tied to her basement area as my storage unit, and the use of her car for me to painfully move all my stuff by myself over the course of three days.

After I told her on the last day that I was too tired to do the psychotherapy she needed to "see" my stuff in her basement (which would have been too grueling for me to supervise, because her delusions make her MS symptoms worse, and I was already physically exhausted), so I simply told her: "I have nothing left to give", which is her worst nightmare. She called the cops for me not being her nursemaid during my hardest time. That's it. In fact, the policemen who responded to her panicky call have picked her up off the floor before, through her Life Alert system, one that took years for us to enforce properly with her, and then she failed a basic recognition test. "Nope, never seen you before", as he reminded her that he was there for her when she broke her shoulder in seven places, because he picked her up off the floor and called for an ambulance.

He then administered the same test with me, and I responded correctly that he and I had never met before at my mother's house, which was true. It was already over with at that point, even as my mom told him I was "nuts" because she is mad, something authority figures often hear: the classically immature "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I" speech given in lieu of a more carefully reasoned rationale. The jig was up and he and I knew it, as we exchanged pointed glances she missed during her diva crisis about me not emotionally catering to her during my real life event, which is part of a destructive family pattern firmly in place. He warned her then that she had no legal right to lock me out because I had already established residency, which she promptly forgot as soon as they walked away, by trying to slam the door in my face again.

I then called the two officers now present back to her rapidly closing front door, as they warned her once again (repetition is commonplace for Special Needs people) that she has no legal right to change the locks on me, because delusional paranoid states are some of the most challenging times of communication with the sick who walk, talk, work, and live among us. She might not actually have any memories attached to my stress, because as soon as she is calmed, soothed, and stroked like a puppy, she forgets about other people, even the ones she gave birth to, which she naturally doesn't remember well, because "they" gave her ether during her labors, as she lay unconscious from heavy sedation. "Yeah, one minute I'm in labor, and the next thing I had a baby!", she likes to tell me. And how...exactly? "I don't know! I was 'out' like a light!", which is unlike any birthing experience I've ever seen or heard of.

That's the crux of it in a nutshell: stress and panic reorient her chemically addicted brain to use other people as her drug to get high off of, as serious a sickness as any strung-out heroin junkie. Right now, she's busy nursing the high from her next doctor's appointment, which happens next week, resulting in typical conversations like "I can't think of anything right now! I 'have to' (and it's always HAVE TO) focus on my mouth pain and 'getting through' (like some soldier in combat) my appointment next week. Once that's over, I can 'focus' again"!, which is pure bullshit. She doesn't ever snap to "after" her moments, but the deferred payment program helps her to successfully avoid stressful times, like birthdays and Christmases, especially if she falsely pads her schedule to be artificially busy, as clever a deceit as any con by a really good cat burglar.

She's totally full of shit about being present and available for you somewhere off in the distant future when she feels better (because I fix what's wrong while she's on the nod), and that's just the way addicts like it: they can get high off of you during their blackout times, even when she remembers days, weeks, and months later that she just abused the one woman around her who's healthy enough to keep her alive, and that's me. Then, in the middle of the night when no one's around to see her or help her, she cries herself to sleep, because she remembers that she almost killed me through abuse and neglect. 

And that's the worse part of it all: that a smart woman who can make me a perfect grilled cheese is alone by herself every night, remembering in one big flood of emotions that the genuine love she feels for me was replaced by an extremely violent hate that is psychosis. That's what I cannot abide by any longer, and neither should you. We want more for you. We want you to get better. We. Want. More. I want a real mother. I want the woman who worked at the Botanical Gardens, who taught me all about the native trees, plants, and flowers we love that we can also point out and name together in Latin or French, as well as English. That's who I want back. You can keep the abusive, obsessive-compulsive addict this Christmas.