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Karma Chameleon

Pay back is a bitch. My parents used to tell me this would happen, “just wait until you have children of your own, then you’ll know what we’re going through.” I didn’t believe them. If I had, or if I’d had any real clue as to how difficult I was to raise, I would have had my lady parts discarded as soon as I turned 18.

But I didn’t and so now I am reaping my karma. I am raising a child just like me. It’s a wonder my parents didn’t kill me. Again, my elementary principal, whose name I can’t remember but who must have been a very astute man, told my parents I needed to see a psychiatrist. Apparently he knew I was not right in the head. He’d also had my manic-depressive sister before me and she had struggled in school as well. She struggled with academics. Academics were the only thing I was good at.

I’m not sure how normal my insides were while growing up. How much of the chaos and confusion was due to being a child, an adolescent, a young adult and how much was being bi-polar. I know I felt anchorless. I was desperate for some way to stop my ever-changing and intense emotions. But no one talked about these things then and my parents, out of shame or pride or fear, never did take me to a psychiatrist. Instead they sent me off to a distant relative the summer before I started high school to “babysit.”

I was in a deep, deep depression that summer having coming off two wildly unsuccessful junior high years. Those years were absolute torture. I had no friends, boys made fun of me constantly, we moved from my childhood home to a snotty neighborhood and Tom Stratico shot himself.

Tom Stratico had his locker right below mine –since my name then was Servies – otherwise I would have never known him. He was also in my homeroom but we ran in very different East Whittier Jr. high circles. Tom was tall, the cutest boy in school, captain of the basketball team, dating the cutest girl in school (she later became homecoming queen in High School) and had friends, followers and worshippers. I was in the last category. He deigned to tease me but it was mild teasing and I’ve come to think we had more in common than I ever thought. Certainly it takes some deep psychological problem for a 7^th grade boy to take a shotgun, lie down in his bathtub and shoot half his head off. 

I’d never known that kids could die. I had been lucky and no one I knew had died except my grandfather. It was acceptable to me that my grandfather died. He was old and I never really liked him much. Although he was my mother’s father he was an older version of my own father; critical, perfectionistic, and alcoholic. He may have even been worse but that’s another blog.

When Tom killed himself, the rumors swirled. He had been heartbroken because his girlfriend had dumped him, he was being sent to military school, his parents were getting a divorce, he was dared to do it. But no one really knew. Just as no one knows what goes on inside most people’s inner world. Tom looked good on the outside but he wasn’t. No one takes their life if they are mentally well, it is the instinct of our species to survive, after all. 

I think we were all affected by the tragedy, though I remember my mother talking about how shameful it was that one girl wore a purple dress to his funeral. I remember clearly thinking that was the absolute most evil thing I’d ever heard. What I don’t remember was any counseling. No one talked to us –well, not to me –about how we were feeling, what we were thinking, what were we going to do with this new information. The information that children not only die but take their own lives. My Dad had a gun. I knew where it was. No one talked to me.

I’ve taught at three High Schools in my short teaching career and in each one a teen took their life. Not only were the kids given extensive counseling, we teachers were too. There was a lot of concern about copycat’s and how we as teachers should handle each incident. How we were to model sane behavior to our students. We’ve come a long way and for that I am grateful.

If I had to guess what Tom and I had in common was that we were both bi-polar. I remember his ups clearly and obviously his downs were above the average adolescent angst. What made it even worse, if that is possible, he had spent the day telling everyone he was going to do it. Only one girl and our homeroom teacher believed him enough to contact his parents. Apparently they didn’t believe him. Still, the rest of us wrestled with the guilt that we had done nothing, some had even laughed at him. I’ve never forgotten it, obviously.

Now my son is struggling, really, deeply struggling with his disease. He’s off his meds and spinning out of control. I know bipolars are more likely to commit suicide and he’s talked about it several times. I’ve taken him to hospital emergency rooms, psychiatrists and counselors but in the end I’m not in charge of whether he lives or dies. He’s 22 and it is his decision. He can stay on the meds, but he doesn’t like how they make him feel. Like a lot of creatives he likes the mania. It feels like he gets a lot done then and he is inspired. But then, an abnormal amount of creatives die young. Read . Darkness Visible by William Styron about his lifelong struggle with mental illness. He wrote the brilliant Sophie’s Choice, won the Pulitzer for The Confessions of Nat Turner and then committed himself to a mental hospital for electro-shock. He chronicles, in this slim volume, the heavy weight that mental illness has on writers especially. He speaks the names of all those he lost to the struggle. It is a daunting loss.

 Still, I get it. I really do. Art is the most important thing in my life after him and I have had to learn other ways to become inspired but I sure do miss those manic days sometimes.  My medication makes me a little sluggish and lazy and is a great excuse for my poor housekeeping. I want to clean but my meds say I don’t have to today.

But just like I did after Tom Stratico’s suicide, I keep wondering and searching for things I can do to stop another person’s slide into madness. For that’s what it is. I lived with the madness in my head my whole life. I clung to anything or anyone I thought would stabilize the vertigo. I made bad decisions because I didn’t know of any good ones.

So, I wonder – did my parents suffer watching me? Did they feel helpless and hopeless like I do now? Did they ship me off to relatives because they thought it would do me good or because they couldn’t stand having me around anymore, making them feel inadequate as parents? Have I been horribly unfair to them?

God knows I wasn’t easy. Neither was my sister. God knows it was hard to like me let alone love me, I’m just getting around to it at 60. But if they suffered then they must have loved me because it is only the deep love I have for my child that causes the kind of pain I am feeling.

I called my oldest Al-Anon friend last night. I told her I just needed to talk to someone who loved me and she does. She was honest though, telling me I needed to prepare for my son’s slide into the darkness because it is happening and the only one who can help him – isn’t me.

She also reminded me that he has his own Higher Power and that he is on his own journey. True. All he has to do is ask and his God will come through for him.

Just… what if he doesn’t want to ask?

I Want To Fly Away

I’m doing better than the last time. The last time I was broke, out of work and facing the abyss. The last time I was filled with angsty angst and crawling out of my skin. I had panic anxiety, shivers and shakes and more negative thoughts than a bird watching a cat slowly climb the tree. Neither of us think we’re getting out of this but the stupid bird can at least fly. My wings were clipped a while ago.

Truly, I have forgotten what it feels like to fly. I used to know and my memory of the memory is that it was spectacular. I was watching a YouTube video of Justin Timberlake with Jimmy Fallon doing some stupid rap thing and by the time they finished tears were rolling down my cheeks. ‘Cause here’s the thing, no matter what you think of JT, that boy knows how to fly. He intensely loves to do what he does. The joy radiating off those feet, that face, is palpable. And enviable. I once felt that way. I once, a long time ago, loved my life that much. 

Then I “got real” and started making all these grown-up choices, like getting a real job that paid enough to actually live. My parent’s vision of the world came true. It was either joy or food. Freedom or a roof. Self-love or love for others. No one taught me how to have it all. And now I want it. Desperately. Before I die sort of thing.

There’s a line in the movie Gravity (spoiler alert) where one of the characters muses that everyone will die but she is going to die that day. The amazement on her face at the knowledge that what, for most of us, seems a future event can become reality in an instant. Just one thing that goes awry. One car that leaps a barrier, a cell that mutates inside us, one moment of despair and it’s our time to go.

I’m not sure I’m up to it, ya know. Dying seems like an awfully big event to attend unprepared. What if I’m over-dressed? What if I under-achieved? What if I never really lived my life? I lived A life, sure but did I live MY life? 

And if the answer to that question is no, then when will I? Is it too late? Am I fucking delusional?

I’m bi-polar, we know that, but am I out of mind as well? Do other people feel this way –that their life was never intentional? 

I’ve been doing a lot of studying as I plan to open my life coaching practice. I have named my practice TruePath because that’s what I (hope) I’m finally on and what I want others to find. Who were we meant to be when we showed up? What was to be our special contribution to this life, this community, this planet?

Here’s what I’m thinking – hey, it’s my blog – I do believe we all came here with a passion and perhaps a purpose for that passion. The passion –and the innate skills we arrived with –were supposed to lead us. And some people were led. Like JT. Or Einstein or Oppenheimer. They are rooted in the joy of their particular ability to do a particular thing that gives them a sense of completeness. Of destiny.

Some of you know my sister, right? I always thought she was born too late, into the wrong century, because her skills and her passions are all about home-making. She has the ability to take a shitty little space and make it perfect. She can cook eight courses with her eyes closed. She can –and has –sewn gorgeous dresses, including a friend’s wedding gown that looked straight out of a magazine. For a while she found a place that used these skills. But it was a degrading sort of existence and not very feminist. Her skills were appreciated but they were also “bought”. Where does she fit in today’s world? We can’t all be Martha Stewart. Or JT for that matter. Is it just a sadistic twist of fate to have a passion and no way to use it?

I’d like to hear from you readers –really I would, it would help me out a lot on my journey here. What are your passions? What was/is your destiny? Could you die tomorrow? Today?

Maybe I should just start dancing and singing again. Maybe then my mind would shut the fuck up.

 I believe more will be revealed.

I believe I will blog about it.

‘Cause this feels like destiny to me.

For What It’s Worth

“Something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear…”

With all due respect to Steven Stills, I know exactly what’s happening here. I am unemployed! Arghhh. I took the leap into the abyss. I am free fallin’.  Swinging without a net. What other clichés are there? Oh yeah - I am up shit creek without a paddle.

Who in their right mind, at 60, would quit their job? Just because someone was abusive and bossy?  Thus begins the committee in my head that speaks to me in my father’s voice. Work isn’t supposed to be fun. Who told you you were supposed to be happy? Life is shit and then you die.

But Daddy-o, I try to tell him, I am not in my right mind, never have been, never will be. Oh, yeah, I faked it for a good 40- 50 years but it exhausted me. Exhausted. When is it okay to be myself? When is it okay to say No to crapola? When is it time to say

I am worth MORE!

Taking my 22 year old sophisticatedly cynical son to work this morning I heard my dead father speaking. “Why aren’t you looking for a job?” Aside from the fact that he doesn’t know shit about what I do with my time, I have been looking. Not applying, but looking. No, not true, I did have an interview to be a vet assistant for $9.15 an hour. Uhhh, no. Surely, I am with more than $9.15? $10? $20? What exactly am I worth?

I told him I was waiting for the next right thing.

I know on the “open market” I have very few sought-after skills. I don’t type well. I don’t know how to do any math past Algebra. (Hey, before you judge remember the last time I took a math class was 1967!) I am not “eager, money-driven, competitive with an edge.” This is what they are looking for. I’m telling you it’s like The Hunger Games out here.  Who would you kill for a chance to make mega-commissions selling insurance, gadgets, clothing , cars, yourself?

There is an ad on Craigslist for a “Telephone Entertainer.” Hmmmm, I wonder what that entails? I’ve been told I’m very entertaining on the phone. That was my secret to car deal success, make ‘em laugh. Somehow I’m not sure they would be willing to pay me the big bucks just for making folks laugh. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s a little more … creative than that. Know what I mean, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Still, it is a “stay-at-home” job and I could tell people I’m in show biz.. Maybe I should consider it.

Back to cynical Joe in the car. I told him I was waiting for my Higher Power to show me what’s next. Talk about making someone laugh! He told me religion and spirituality are STUPID! I nodded and didn’t argue. How you going to argue that? Religion is stupid and evil and well, not a good thing for people or the planet. But I know I have a Higher Power, otherwise I’d be dead by now. Or married to that dentist in Ft. Wayne. Someone’s been steering the ship. Well, sometimes. I do tend to take over the pilot seat a little too much. I like to be involved. That’s what I tell myself. But the truth is I am very uncomfortable being still. And it’s not just my ADD, it’s my POSS (piece of shit syndrome.)

When I’m still it’s not the loving embrace of serenity that caresses me, it’s the certainty that doom is imminent and it will all be my fault. I’m not sure what I did wrong (being born with a vagina?) but I know it’s something to do with my epic, intrinsic, undeniable crappiness. I’m just not worth any better. Bottom line. I’m not worth it.

I went to a meeting last week. The topic was solutions but it devolved into a discussion of fear. How to deal with fear. Seems like everyone has a heap and some to spare. We’re scare of other people, poverty, death, bad movies and most of all, the still small voice that tells us we are getting only what we’re worth. And that ain’t much, baby! 

. What struck me about all the fear talk is that we were all sitting in a 12 Step meeting. With the steps plastered everywhere. Don’t we profess –in Step 2 –that we Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.  And then we turn our will and our life over to the CARE of that power.

The CARE, not the derision. Not the sadistic tendencies of lesser gods. And certainly not our well-meaning but broken parents. They didn’t know any better but you know, I sometimes think they should have. Didn’t they see it in our faces? The shame, the fear, the disgust? 

It ultimately doesn’t matter except like Alien they are implanted deep in our bodies. Their words are said in OUR voices now. Their thoughts are my core belief’s; about the world, about other people and especially about my worth.

You may not know this but I was a pretty good actress in High School. I won awards. I did. Oh, I know it’s not the same as winning awards for sports or anything but it wasn’t nothing. A greater God would have spurred me to the next step. My father gave me two incredible pieces of wisdom; 1. Don’t declare a major in college, it will make it easier for you to slip into whatever your husband likes and 2. Become a “gal Friday.” 

I’m not even going to comment on that. I don’t need to, right? The Absolute absurdity is painfully obvious. 

My point –oh, there is one, just wait for it – is that I now have the choice of who I let into my mind. Will it be the old, sabotaging, belittling voice of smallness or the whispers of a Higher Power who CARES for me. Cares enough to say I’m worth more than the wage I am paid. More than the men who have left me. More than the wrinkles on my face. I am worth … well … I’m worth whatever I want. I am worth my heart’s desire.

 I am worth the wait.