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Chuck's Story
It ain't easy being mentally ill!
I know it looks like a lot of fun. Wandering around in Oz or Wonderland,
cavorting with your imaginary companions. Learning life lessons from a giant
invisible rabbit. Eating people's livers with some fava beans and a nice
Chianti.
True, some of us do get lucky that way. For the most part, though, it's a
stone bummer. More than once, I have found myself wishing that my grasp on
reality would shatter completely, dumping me forever into some twilight world
where I was too crazy to suffer any more. Despite my best efforts, it never got
off the drawing board. I was sick, but not sick enough. I could not make myself
well, and I could not make myself too insane to care. So I changed tactics.
Remember how Hamlet playacted at madness so nobody would take him seriously
enough to put the skids to his plans for his Uncle Claudius? I spent a number of
years doing the exact opposite. To the best of my ability, I pretended to be
well, hoping to fool everyone around me, especially myself. I kept at it for a
long time.
Mental illness has a number of bonus features, which set it apart from
other health problems. The same is true of addiction. When you have both at
once, you are a member of a very elite group indeed. If suffering builds
character, we are some of the finest characters you're ever likely to run
across. Of course, no mental illness that I can think of is in and of itself
fatal. Not in an organic sense. Suicide, on the other hand, generally is.
Addiction is more risky because of the twin terrors of withdrawal and overdose.
While there probably is a genetic component, addiction is a behavior-based
malady. You have to go out somewhere to find the stuff and then
introduce it into your system. A person could be "cured" by some
simple method, like being bound in a straitjacket and locked in a closet for the
remainder of his or her life.
Okay, now cue the violins, because here comes a sob story. A true sob
story.
A lot of my sobbing got started on account of an SOB who by some accident
of nature or poor judgement on my mother's part ended up being my father. They
say not to speak ill of the dead, but if I followed that I could never speak of
him at all. He was very ill. Illness defined his existence. He was sickness
personified. If it hadn't been for his bad qualities, he'd have had no qualities
at all. He was mentally ill, severely so, I have no doubt of that. It began to
manifest itself in a major way after my mother died. He was paranoid, childish,
self-centered, self-pitying, mean spirited and stupid. All of these, I have to
add, have played their parts in my own life. I have them too. And I know I got
them from him, either genetically or as a consequence of his abuse. And then of
course there is monkey-see-monkey-do. I cannot recall him hitting me. (I need to
add here that there are a great many things about my life that I don't recall,
many of them relatively recent. I never lucked up and had a complete psychotic
break, but I guess repressed memory and trauma-induced amnesia are a decent
consolation prize. Better than nothing.) I wish he had hit me. I wish he had
beaten me with a baseball bat. Anything, ANYTHING
but what he actually did. Which was letting me watch him fall apart.
For a kid, that is beyond scary.
 As
a child, I had virtually nothing in the way of adult guidance and nurturing
after my mother died. My father was worse than useless. My ethical education
came mostly from comic books. I could have done worse I guess. Superman, Batman
and Spider-Man were far better role models than my father. It could be that I
owe to them the fact that I am not now a homicidal maniac. But every benefit you
get in this world comes with a price. As I gained my morality, I lost most of
whatever connection I had with reality. I lived in my own head, and everything I
took in came from books and movies. I just didn't want to live here in the real
world. I was tired of it. Things quite naturally got worse after my father died.
I had held out a small hope that his removal from the world would make
everything right again. I still think it was an improvement, but not by much.
So, thus orphaned, I had to leave my home in Ohio to go live with my mother's
people in Alabama. I have neither the time nor the inclination to start digging
in that pile right now, so let me enlist your imagination in a brief exercise.
Think back to the worst day you ever had in your life. Now picture yourself
experiencing it every single day of your life for six or seven years. Your
humble narrator had fallen out of the frying pan and into the fire. But it was a
slow fire. A war of attrition rather than my father's frequent guerilla raids.
My aunt and uncle in Alabama were good people, but they had no business trying
to raise a child. My aunt in particular was seriously mentally ill herself. Of
course, back then I never thought in those terms, and neither did anybody else.
That's why I never got therapy when I was a traumatized child. It just didn't
occur to anyone in my family. They were bone stupid, most of them, and it
showed. The two or three that weren't were borderline psychotic. Maybe not even
borderline. I should strive to give credit where credit is due. Some of them
were true champions of dysfunction. They would have been legendary if neuroses
were a professional sport. Damn shame, that. I could probably set a few records
myself.
Let us view a bare outline of the rake's progress,
from Feb. 2001 until today. I started in my own apartment. I had lived there for
two years. It was a nice place. Before long, I lost that. I had intended to
enter a weird church-run rehab program of some kind, but I couldn't bring myself
to do it. In Jan. 2002, having already been given an eviction notice, I left my
apartment, left all of my belongings behind, sold a bunch of my precious old
comic books, and set out. I went to Gadsden, Alabama. Friends there. I stayed
with them, made a nuisance of myself, sank deeper and deeper into pain and
hopelessness, lacked the money to stay as drunk as I wanted to. I had nothing. I
was nothing. I was miserable. A second DUI came in 2002. Court ordered a stint
at a Salvation Army "rehab" program. Three of the worst months of my
life. I can't even begin to tell you. After that ordeal, back in Gadsden with my
friends. I met a woman and moved in with her. I became intolerable, she asked me
to leave, I got drunk and crazy and had to be dragged out. Another brief
hospital stay, followed my committal (commitment?) to the state hospital in
Montgomery, and if I thought I knew misery, I was about to enter a whole new
league. And keep in mind, I felt utterly alone through all this, as I certainly
was. That adds the spice to this stew of despond. One month in that mausoleum, then to a group home for people who were much
worse off than me. Not sure why the doc sent me there of all places. But we had
no Transition House there, so you took what you could get, and if it did nothing
whatsoever to advance your recovery that was too bad. After about a year in this
group home setting, I came to OK to take up with my friends, the ones I had
"visited" in Gadsden. I felt no sense of belonging to anything, or
anything belonging to me. I wasn't a man. Barely a human being. I felt low. I
felt sick and pathetic. I wanted it to end. Living in strange, depressing
places, wasting my life, year after year. I have to admit now that the only
reason I approached Transition House was because I hated the halfway house
I wound up in when I left inpatient treatment. Halfway house is a good
name for it because I was still halfway nuts when I got there, and every facet
of the place seemed designed to help me go the rest of the way. To stay where I
was would have led to another disaster. I know this. I was headed in that
direction. The whole thing was just too bleak. I could not handle that place. At
the time when I most desperately needed a home and a family I was living in an
environment with all the charm and warmth and welcome of a bus station men's
room. I was alone. I was scared. I was very, very depressed. And why not? You
would have been, too. I have no living relatives. None. And precious little of
anything else at that point. No job. No wife. No money. Certainly no
self-respect, and no real hope for the future. I was a wreck, I was submerged in
self-pity, and somewhere deep in my mind I was trying to put together my exit
strategy. From the world, I mean. Why not? My father did it. I saw him do it. It
wasn't complicated. Point and click, so to speak. From a clinical standpoint, I
had all the qualifications. I was nothing BUT red flags. About all I was lacking
was the gun. That and a certain level of courage or cowardice, whichever one of
those you need to take the plunge. And I was working on that.
The halfway house had this policy. You had to go out every day and stay
gone from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon looking for a job. With no
car, no ID, no friends in town, no money... I was on disability, so I could pay
my way, but that didn't matter. Nothing wrong with a little shot of the old work
ethic. I worked all my life up until I got sick. And I will work again, very
soon. I'm not lazy. I'm not a bum. I am in fact a very sensitive little bugger,
and the atmosphere at the house was dreadful. I was still sick. Terribly so. I
could not tolerate that pressure just then. And then, in the midst of this
desert, an oasis manifested itself. I had heard they didn't run it like a
combination boot camp and cheap hot-sheet motel. The accommodations were
actually pleasant. The staff seemed genuinely interested in me. My sole purpose
in approaching them was to upgrade my standard of living a bit, and to be
allowed to sleep until 9 if I wanted to. But what I found was so much more.
I do have to walk a fine line between acknowledging and understanding the
problems that led to my distress, and making excuses for myself. In the past, I
have usually swung back and forth from one extreme to the other. Either it was
everybody else's fault and I was a poor victim, or I was a rotten bastard who
was responsible for all the ills of the world. Neither one of these gets you
anywhere near solving the problem. The truth is actually smack in the middle
somewhere. I had some rotten breaks when I was too young to do anything about
them, and I was further hampered with two illnesses. Well, more than that
actually because I have three psychiatric disorders. On the other hand, I have
always had the most wonderful friends and I also had many, many opportunities to
straighten myself out, which for one spurious reason or another I always passed
up. Some of it was fear. Some of it was laziness. Some of it was, frankly, a
desire to sponge off people. But some of it was very severe major depression,
some of it was post-traumatic stress, some of it may have been manic depression
(we have not yet determined if I actually have that one or not), and probably 11
or 12 percent was me being a jackass. Well, okay, 20 percent. Okay, dammit,
fifty. But that's my final offer. I've got to save something to plea-bargain
with when I get to the Pearly Gates. Be
that as it may, if I ever start losing faith in my higher power or fairy
godmother or the Force or whatever it is, I need only look back at the day my
path crossed that of Transition House.
The staff here makes a point of reminding us that whatever success we enjoy is
the product of our own efforts. And of course they're right. But they work
equally hard to provide us with a place in which to do it. That's all many of us
ever needed. If I had been obliged to spend the past year in some kind of an
institution or whatever, I am very certain my sense of alienation would have hit
critical mass. But once I had been stripped of my distractions and my anxiety,
paranoia and depression sunk to manageable levels, I did in fact start thinking
in terms of genuine rehabilitation. I dedicated myself to working as best I
could toward that goal. And, by God, it is working! I have made huge strides.
Believe me, I have never, ever been this open in my life. All that secrecy was a
terminal condition. And it really wasn't easy. Once or twice I just had to put
my hands over my eyes and jump. I have said things that a lifetime of secrecy
had sealed so tight that I just KNEW I could never say them and I hoped I could
just kinda work around them. But they showed me different. They nurtured me and
helped me to heal. The fact that I was not required to tromp through the streets
of Norman until I found a job flipping burgers gave me the free time I needed to
recover, and it also allowed me to attend conferences, meet people, share ideas,
learn as much as I could about co-occurring disorders and just generally prep
myself for a career of my own in the mental health field. A year ago, I had no
direction whatsoever. But they helped me find myself. And they have been so
encouraging and so supportive of my ambitions. They have done everything in
their power to help me. And this has truly changed the course of my life. And
not just my life. Please allow me to set aside false modesty for a moment and
tell you that I am extremely smart, amazingly capable, talented to a fault,
determined to do what is right and almost unbelievably good-looking. I firmly
believe that I will make a valuable addition to the mental health community. In
addition to my innate magnificence, I have some fantastic role models to draw on
for inspiration in my my own endeavors. And if I can touch the lives of others
the way the staff at Transition House has touched mine, I will consider myself a
complete success. I want to be a ripple on their pond, and spread far and wide
the things they have given me.
So you see, the lives that are touched and enhanced by TH go far beyond
the "official" tally of residents, outreach clients and former program
members (all of whom, I might add, are encouraged to keep in touch and avail
themselves of the groups and activities offered here at no cost whatsoever). Add
that to the incalculable inspiration that flows from the butterfly effect and
what you have is something extraordinary.
If I had had a Transition House 20 years ago, who
knows what I might have done? TH is thus far still unique in my experience. If
there are any other programs like this one, I've never heard of them. That is a
shame. I would love to see Transition House become a template for programs all
over the country. The world. The galaxy. And I plan to maintain contact and help
whenever I can. Because of what the staff has worked so hard to build here, I
have options that I never would have dreamed of. Were I a fabulously wealthy
man, I would build and finance them all over the world and staff them with
clones of Bonnie, Jeanene, Katie, Elizabeth and Ilene.
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