Eleanor is back in town. I told Ray I was tired and needed to go home. I fell asleep before I could really say hi. I think we're going to spend some time at the house or just out of the city. I don't know.
We're in my apartment. I've spent the day sort of rummaging around through boxes. Things that came with me, the very few things that came with me. Most of it followed me in boxes, sent by Po or Dani. Most of them I never opened.
I found one that had my old journals, ones I kept a long time ago when I was in school. They stopped about the time I started dating Brad. But I can't even blame him, because they had started to stop before then, before the wedding. Skimming through my old entries I can see how unhappy I was with Chace. Worse than unhappy, fake happy. Pretend happy. I'd rather be apathetic.
There was one entry I found from before I graduated, when I was doing my summer internship at a little hospital in Connecticut.
July 12, 2001
Some days I forget that this is a psychiatric unit. I've been here since May and the majority of the patients we get are here for detox. Sometimes detox and depression or anxiety or bipolar, but always with the detox issues. Okay, just usually. We've had a couple depressed/suicidal patients, a couple bipolars off their meds... but no one who you would say is "crazy". No one you'd look at and think "Okay, this is what insanity looks like." I should have know better than to expect it. This is real life, not Hollywood, people don't actually look like.
And then I met Joe. Obviously that's not his name, HIPPA and all that. Joe is crazy. 100% certifiably crazy. He's Schizoaffective, bipolar type with prominent psychotic features, current episode manic, polysubstance abuser, with a whole slew of Axis II junk. Oh and a TBI. That sure as hell doesn't help. He's been in and out of treatment his whole life.
He looks the part. He looks crazy. He's fat, dirty, smelly, loud, has no front teeth and scary. He stares at you intensely with too-wide eyes and a blunted affect. He is the type of person who if you saw him walking down the street, you'd turn around and walk the other way. He stands too close when he talks to you and he says all sorts of crazy things about the government and his old employer who he worked for in the 80s and doesn't even exist anymore (but he'll talk about it like he is).
The other patients shy away from him. They are afraid of him. He makes them nervous. They don't like how he smells. "He's a bad person and he doesn't belong here." Okay miss "I-shoot-up-15-bags-of-heroin-a-day". Okay mr "I-spent-my-kid's-college-fund-on-booze". Judge away, you bunch of hypocrits with your rotting out teeth and your clothes that smells like you washed it in chewing tobacco. You who sits on the outside of the circle and puts no effort into their own treatment. You're going to relapse. You're clueless. You think you can go home and handle six beers a night. Well some day it's going to handle you.
For nearly ten years that man lead a fairly successful life. This is after his TBI, after having lived his life with an illness that has left him uncertain of reality, after having done his share of drugs, after a stint in Osbourndale and another in Whiting because they realized, "hey, this guy isn't all right in the head". After all of that he managed to reform. He managed to survive in a society that is biased against anyone different, who once persecuted people like him as being possessed by demons. He to this day believes the medications he's taking is going to kill him because it's poison, but every day he takes them.
Is he a good person? ...Is that really for us to decide? Would he have ever done those things (bar fights, threatening) if it weren't for his disease? This is a person who if you tell him to jump off a bridge he will. All it took was the girl he likes at the group home to tell him to give her his SSDI check and he did. And she spent it on crack, some of which she told him to smoke and he did. He told him this bawling his eyes out. "I knew it was wrong!" He told me. "But I love her! I love and she said to do it so I did."
He gets it more than you idiots ever will. Every day he swears until he's blue in the face that he won't ever touch drugs again. He'll tell you all about how he ruined his life. He takes responsibility for it. He knew it was wrong. He shows nothing but remorse for that. He thinks he should go to Hell for it, for having hurt the people he cares about, for being "a burden on society". He wants to work. To give back. He goes to a nursing home as often as he can to read and talk to the elderly because "they've done so much for us, for somebody and when I'm old I hope someone has the decency to come and talk to me. They need it." He budgets out every dime of his check so that he can not only get what he needs, but enough so that he can make dinner for his friends, so that he can buy cigarettes for people who can't afford them, coffee for someone in line.
He might be a big loud scary smelly oaf, but he has one of the kindest souls I've ever seen. I wish he'd had the resources back then, back in the beginning of his life he does now, because I think that Joe could have, should have, been a different person. I regret that so few people have the patience to see him for the person he truly is despite his illness, despite his social awkwardness. I wish him all the best.
Occasionally I still get updates from the OT who supervised me back then. He's still here. He'll update me on this one who's back and that one who's back. Patients who will forever be locked into a cycle or periods of relative stability and crisis. Since I left the hospital, since I stopped doing that, I started to just delete them without looking inside. It makes my heart hurt too much. Ray wanted to make sure that I didn't resent him for me leaving work.
I left because I could no longer help the Joes of the world. You cannot help others when you cannot help yourself. I was done with lying to myself, with saying I was okay and that I could handle it. I couldn't. Could I now? Maybe. I'm stronger today than I was then. But I'm not going to go back. I'm not going to turn back and go back into the past. I have my future set ahead of me and I think I did the right thing.
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