The Geographic Cure

The "Four Corners" of the American West exemplifies the idea that we are tied to our native lands by much more than a superficial connection, because any tourist who's been there can tell you that the biggest distinguishing feature to the monument is the same dusty red dirt on all four sides. Where does one state begin and the other end? Without a marker, you might not ever know.

That's not to say that it doesn't mean something to the people who live there. I hiked Harriman Park one summer several times with my dad, and for me, it became a lesson in identifying the landscape: first were the sticker bushes at the beginning of the trail, a small hillside with a dead deer slowly decaying, then a stand of pines above a waterfall, next to a rock quarry. By memorizing it, I was able to find my way in and out of the mountain, day or night. Those woods became home to me.

Most borderlines are like that, too: clearly defined by mountain chains, big lakes, or an entire ocean, just as I know that my eczema is worse in the warmer weather of New York because I'm missing the cold water seafood of Nova Scotia. And no, I can't pop a couple of pills or pile on expensive (and probably toxic) prescription-only lotions, gels, and salves. My body IS the land that I come from, so closely is our health reliant on this connection.

Armed with knowledge and experience, I avoided most of the pitfalls that accompany people who move around frequently. I didn't (and don't) pretend that a different view or country will cure or improve the human condition, as much as I can accurately recognize what a real home is, what "home" means to me, and when it isn't that, unlike many of my friends and peers who feel that changing locales is like going to a fun, new, costume party every single night of the week.

At its worst? An old college classmate of mine who was a typical Middle American cheerleader from Minnesota, then a fashion designer all about clothes and arty trends, and then a burnt-out Californian in her 30s and 40s just looking to "mellow out and chase waves", when she'd once been afraid of swimming alone in the Atlantic Ocean without her native Northeastern friends by her side in the water. Of course, besides the outfit changes lies her serious case of manic-depression that's incurable, which is the real "final frontier" for us, as human beings: the inner-space of our minds, filled as they may be with the broken dreams of what might've been. It's time to come home.

Speed Freaks

3.) Over-stimulate yourself. Caffeine, tobacco, loud noise, driving fast, working without breaks, skipping meals - there are so many ways to keep the body and brain on overdrive and keep the anxiety levels high. 

My mom and her sisters were adept at abusing each other into what they believed were less overt addictions that they thought cleverly hid their compulsions and addictions (strange as they are) like shopping, hoarding, and staging fake scenes to create anxiety they huff like a can of paint. It became a psychotic form of artistry over the more rigorous disciplines behind thinking, doing, and making, which is for suckers like me, who pay their benefits through our day jobs because if we don't, they'll make our lives a living hell that's hard to prove in a court of law without devoting mountains of time and evidence to it, therefore I must have "too much free time" and that means I need to work more (hence their shaky lazy superiority over "working stiffs" like me and the million other people who take care of them), because if you can't abuse people behind closed doors with secret horror shows, who will pay the taxes needed for their disabilities?

Instead of managing children, life, and stress, my mom would pull to a short-stop in the middle of a highway, threatening to crash her car and kill us all if we didn't behave, creating over-dramatic heart palpitations that released the addictive body chemistry she needs to cope, over more obvious (and honest) relaxants like drinking and smoking, which could be pointed out to anyone and are therefore actionable by their feared perpetrators, like, say, someone very bright who caught onto their mental illnesses. Oh, they'll say they're afraid of being dragged away by scary large men wearing white coats, carrying butterfly nets and tranquilizer guns, and then cast without consent into some haunted house horror show, but those stories are now relics from our distant medical past.

Without having any real excuses to hide behind anymore, it's become harder and harder for actual head-cases to strike out against load-bearing "normals" like me, as if chronic abuse and violent derangement are key facets of our human culture that they must protect in order to thrive as a species, when oftentimes it's simply me and my brothers trying to get my mom to stick to her weekly therapy and take her medicine for the billionth time, which she alternately hides and/or lies about to blame on..who else? Me! Children and other family members are amazingly adept excuse-generators for a bevy of life's woes, like hiding sickness and delusional behavior. 

She's always been a very bad driver who uses a host of convenient replies like: 1) she didn't need to drive when she lived in the city so that's why she's "bad" at it, and that was only admitted after she drove into a brick wall with a realtor sitting right next to her while she shopped for her fantasy senior apartment complex with handy car-ports for auto aficionados like herself (preferring instead to joy-ride with my grandfather's car back in the Bronx, without a driver's license), or 2) she didn't learn to drive until her 30s, and that was only because of her friendship with a woman at the local DMV during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania, where she had major diseases like "walking pneumonia" with the spot on her lung even, so she got off easy on her driving test (that's her friend's fault, get it?) which leads to 3) her driving so fucking poorly, she gets into tons of accidents that she covers up whenever she can, because for many years she also drove with two feet, one on the gas and the brake (sometimes at the same time) plus 4) she cares more about her car than her own life and the lives of others at times, which she hides behind cutesy stories about being Mario Andretti the race car driver, or being "like a cabbie, fast but good" which she could never actually do for a living because "she's a woman" (sexism, you see), which is also an excuse for her not performing well and besides that, she was a commuter. "Everyone drives fast during 'rush hour'. That's why it's called that." Oh.

And finally, she liked speeding in cars as an older woman with a more advanced case of MS because it "gave me my life back" with the gift of mobility that's robbed her the use of her dead limbs over using an actual motorized wheelchair, preferring instead to torture us with her snail's pace that's necessary to "retain her ambulatory status" (pronounced "stay-tuss, which is different!"). It's like she's talking to her group at the local church, or the high school, or in attendance at the public library, because she's gone to a bunch of those. First it was for the Divorced Catholics group, then it was the Divorced Catholics group for singles, and then the MS support group (too handicapped for her tastes), but she was finally outmatched in these modern times by all the pros on the high-profile talk show / court t.v / reality programming circuit, with years of solid professional acting chops under their respective belts, so she had to give it up.

Instead of coping, she harassed me one Christmas with a death-defying trip in a really bad blizzard across the Tappan Zee bridge and back from Connecticut. She insisted that she HAD TO see family because "it won't be Christmas if we don't go", forcing me to pack up all of our stuff, packed into "her" car with my Mal in the back. He was forced to sleep in the garage because of all the allergies they supposedly have, even though my brother and his wife now have a dog  that's "allergen free", so I could spend my time being demeaned through their bitchy comments about my humble well-thought gifts, my mom's huffing abuse (because my brother's wife ignores her completely), and checking on my dog throughout the trip because his kids opened the garage door whenever they wanted to, forgetting that my dog was inside, so I could do all this while sleep-deprived, too. Best. Holiday. Ever.

If I dared to mention the conditions she abused us into, she'd bring up her sisters affectations about weather phobias and car driving panic attacks. At least she was better than them, right? Right? No, that's sharing the same genetic disorder in different ways, like the breast cancer bouts you all had. Oh...She might then lapse poetic about flights of fancy over magical lanes of sparkling snow, like she was riding on Santa's sleigh and I should just get over it because it's fun and besides, it's Christmas. There's always a reason behind a reason behind an excuse until finally, in this century, there isn't anymore, because there isn't. It's called real medicine.

http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/thrivenyc.page

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.

Genetics

Pamphlets and prayer, time and money, love and loss, pain and hope.

For years I've thought about oft-touted "stigmatized" diseases, (like alcoholism and drug addiction), as genetic conditions like mental illness, often incurring in the patient at the same time they struggle with substance abuse. It's a phenomenon I've seen up close and personal for most of my life. Mental illness, like cancer, does not discriminate, and so it goes with addictive disorders, which lead me to ask myself, this: if these various conditions and afflictions are so common among humanity, why haven't we properly addressed them?

I know all the usual arguments: "Oh, you don't know how bad it is when I reveal my illness to someone, the prejudice and the bias, blah, blah, blah", words typically spoken by a generic human to me, someone of the most rarest ethnic minority on the planet! I know true marginalization, and watching some random headcase get drunk is certainly not a new or atypical experience for me. Does it sound something like that? Yeah, well folks look at me like I have three heads most days of the week. I'm not exactly "run-of-the-mill" in human.

Most reluctance regarding addictions are due to the person alone, something so well known, it forms the basis of every type of self-help plan, and there are so many of them: AA for alcohol, NA for drugs, sex addiction counseling, Weight Watchers for food junkies, Gamblers Anonymous, it goes on and on and on. Whatever weird "jones" you got, someone else has it, and that's part of it, too. I interacted with some guy online who swore to me that he has a real fetish for frumpy down coats, when he saw a picture of me wearing one in a head-to-toe winter outfit that's common around here, which I then linked back to mental illness and the penchant the disturbed have for unique weirdness, often adopting S&M practices for their shock value. Shockingly, he did not reply and has (surprise, surprise) since stopped following me online.

On any given day. The Dr.Phil show is filled with kooks of varying degrees who have honed their lurid recovery tales over the years, auditioning for a spot on t.v., and finally landing that big audition by appearing on the show with their beleaguered, exhausted families, broke and in tears, in serious need of a vacation and expensive healthcare. Two of the more serious bipolar cases I have met in recent years admitted to their love of hammy bad acting, using their disorders for entertainment value by carefully honing their lies in front of a live (and trapped) studio audience that is the group therapy session.

Instead of feeling the "shame" they so often speak of publicly, it is, in fact, often the exact opposite dynamic in effect: they desperately want our attention, and the more beautiful the human, the more lengths said kook goes to invent a tale of disease and horror. Trust me, I know, though in truth, they never really succeed with me, versed as I am since childhood in the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King. Yeah, nice try, kid. Maybe next time!

In fact, since I've returned home, me and my friends and neighbors openly discuss our habits, tightly linked as a community as we are, because we share a lot of connectors in our shared genetic history. An upstairs neighbor and I talked one warm summer night when I was on the porch trying to catch a breeze about his many years sober, as I revealed my family's struggle with the disease, no tension or static between us; only understanding and empathy. Heck, I knew kids in Rockland County who bottomed out, left home, went abroad for awhile, and then came back from rehab to graduate, all before our junior year in high school.

Same with my mailman, in a chance meeting one morning at my front door: his many years sober, the hearing disability I inherited from my father, and the link between genetics and populations with food allergies, like Asians may have with dairy products and/or flush from alcohol, Native Americans and their inherent toxicity from alcohol due to a lack of the proper enzyme for breaking down our country's mostly European types of fermented drinks, and my stepmothers' serious case of Celiac's disease, born of her upstate Dutch/German family's rural farm diet of meat and potatoes for many, many years, in relative isolation from the rest of the world, including "The City" and it's highly varied cuisine. Uh, yeah you can't break down wheat gluten! That tends to happen over long periods of time and a lack of proper exposure to different types of food groups.

After me and my mailman conquered that huge intellectual hurdle of inherited human diseases in under five minutes flat, (it was a chill, brisk day and he had a full route to attend to), we moved on easily to other topics like his wife's training diet and athleticism, because I also follow a strict diet when I train in MMA. We pondered why such a thing as genetic disorders are still so taboo, leaving off the conversation for some other time. Perhaps today is a good day to end it.

And so it went that a week or two later, I spotted two lost souls "pamphleteering" outside our grocery store. One man had the wide, red-eye stare of a crazy ex-con, and upon closer examination of the brochure, I was right yet again! Turns out his father started the program in desperation of his son's constant incarcerations from drug and alcohol offenses, as is so often the case. Addicts do not belong in jail. It's like sending someone who hoards to a garage sale with $100 burning a hole in her pocket. Bad news will come from it! Same with the rather stern-looking and stiff young man standing next to him, who briefly chatted with me while not moving, breathing, or blinking his eyes once, because he was heavily medicated: their addictions are one just part of a much larger equation, one that includes mental illness and secret family dysfunctions, and that is the real reason why people don't talk openly about their problems: they know we know.

My ex-husband (soon to be annulled in connection to me, because of his inability to have an adult, mature marriage with his amount of disabilities): it isn't just the alcohol or drugs, or his Native American heritage, or his supposed "stupidity" that comes out whenever it is convenient for him to get out of trouble. It's his mental illness that he refuses to treat, because his psychotic behavior is the lone "power" he feels he can wield against healthy people the most, that he is so prejudiced against, much like his refusal to disclose. He feels that this is his one big "win" against me, by refusing to speak the words any person who cares about their health and those of their loved ones would say out loud or in written form: "Hi. My name is David, and I'm an alcoholic." ("Hi, David" , from the group in response. He goes on to speak some more.). "I'm also a drug addict and mentally ill. I suffer from manic depression that I refuse to treat, because I can use it to hurt my friends and family."

That's what all his time-wasting bullshit of a life comes down to, really; that one small disclosure above in bold, as I typed it out above. Those are the words he chooses to keep deep down inside, get sick from, and eventually die from. It's how he wastes his entire life. Instead of withholding these "magic" words from me, words that were supposed to make me afflicted, he stuffs them back down, choking on their toxic power, making himself ever sicker by it. But, not me. Not ever me. Never me. He has been in and out of rehab and jail many times over.

And so, on this day in Januray: Amen to you who are afflicted and seek solace in The Lord. May you find the peace and help that you need as we humans do, who all have afflictions to tend to in this life that is imperfect while on this planet. May you find solace and soothing in the arms of Our Blessed Lord. Amen to you who have the courage to live. Break the cycle of abuse, my friends. Rise above it! I want you to win and be strong, to become like I have, through the constant care, tending, work, and patience that has made me who I am. I await you on the other side with open arms, too.