I have recently been remembering sad times from my early years of mental illness. I did great when I first became mentally ill, and was able to finish college. But then, when I got home, I had to go work in a bookstore and was on the wrong psychiatric medicine. It was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I stayed at the bookstore for twelve years, and during the last two years, for some reason, people started being mean to me and humiliating me with all the embarrassing material that I already had been abused by for years. I think about it all the time and people are probably tired of me always trying to think and talk about it and try to find some kind of mastery over the experience.
I actually did achieve some happiness after all by writing poetry, being blessed with awesome friends, and doing things like making cookies and volunteering. So I am okay, but I think that looking back, it is kind of interesting to see the bookends of torture that were part of my bookstore life. It was about two years on either side, and my experience during the first part was essentially a condition of something like a captivity PTSD, and the condition from my last years is more like a combat PTSD. I of course don’t mean to compare the experience itself with what people go through as crime victims and soldiers, but I think that it is very interesting to see the nature of the conditions. For the first problems, I was essentially trapped and drugged. There is no way to describe how bad the medicine hurt me and how much people were okay with that for various reasons. And what is left to do but try to escape in some way. That is the correct goal during captivity. And then, with the last part, when people start tearing me to shreds and threatening a life and literary contribution that I worked on for years after losing everything, the nature of the destruction is kind of a shredding and tearing of my life and self. The symptoms are very different and aren’t as much about escape, but the results from facing everything and managing emotions and mental life that were torn up on purpose.
I don’t really need to try to label it necessarily, but I do like labels and naming things, and have always appreciated my mental health diagnosis as an explanation for a whole life that doesn’t match a lot of the world. I think to look back now with some sense of recovery but also a sense of loss, it is kind of interesting to interpret the extra disorders that got added to my illness, and see a very clear pattern that can’t be denied. In some ways, for a while, it did seem deniable and even absurd. I still can see it as being comical to end up with trauma like that from working in a bookstore. But obviously there was more to it than that. There was bad medicine, depression itself, the threat of mania and psychosis, family problems, four hundred thousand customers who I had no control over, a concentration of the most destructive media problems in history, and then the oddest component of all, which is bad people deliberately making it worse for some reason. Soon I will try to move on from these recent blog topics, but it has been on my mind a lot lately, partially because of legal intimidation and health problems. In the end, I have to note the interesting absurdity and find some happiness because of what a never-ending comedy resource it is likely to be for several thousand or million years.
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