They told me that at the hospital on Mt Auburn Street in Cambridge when I was leaving for PA in 1986.
“Only the good,” they said. And I didn’t know what that meant. There had never been any good.
Daisy the cat was good but that was bad because I wasn’t good enough to take care of her and my mother had just let her out when she wasn’t supposed to and she had gotten pregnant.
Things here in my family as in New Jersey formerly are always mixed up between good and bad so there is nothing, just a steady blase of indifference. I have watched this happening to me over the 7 months I have spent here since getting out of Philhaven, It was starting to happen there and I knew I had to get out. I had NO IDEA my father would do that to me here after DECADES of healing and recovering from the vomit-ridden child I was that I have spent my life trying to heal. I used to say often that I was my own advocate because no one else took an interest. I was being crushed in Florida with the diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder. It sounds like schizophrenia but it isn’t. The therapist always molds you to the diagnosis and the edges and corners were being erased to fit the blank affect of this disorder where in fact I was a warm and dynamic person inside that the therapist missed seeing. It was a helpful diagnosis in that it diffused the battle over the diagnosis of schizophrenia. I have been diagnosed as schizoAFFECTIVE or “bipolar with mixed states” and both of those diagnoses have been called “wastebasket diagnoses,” sort of like “throw-away children.” None of this is very clear which is my point, I lost my point. My clarity. My grasp on reality. The police came once when I called shortly before I left and said , Are you having a hard time interpreting things? and I said YES, and I told him about the schizoid personality diagnosis, that I looked schizophrenic but I wasn’t, and, I know that isnt exactly but what it means but he did understand me that way. I had called because one of Ian’s friends was monkeying around in the pool with a friend after cleaning it and I thought they were playing with me and I was scared. I think that they both left and it was okay.
In other words, it’s all a bunch of baloney. Nowadays they refer to “antipsychotic” medications as “antidepressants.”
Recently I went through a factory reset. I lost the impact of 16 years in Florida to somethings even bigger. Making the whole Tampa Bay area mad at me for a decade and a half was not as big as some of the other malfeasances I have caused or perpetrated. I have spent my whole life turning off or ruining people, places, and things. And hurting people who I didn’t want to. Whom I desperately didn’t want to. And they didn’t even know. They just got mad at me. Hello PAPA!
So, anyway I learned to love that orange light but hear I am picking up on the brilliant white light of the setting sun, I noticed it a month or more ago, as the clear presence of God, and then again a week or so ago, as the end of something the Lord had been doing. I was noticing the white light patterns in the clouds in the meantime and wondering what they meant. It’s just so different here. A semirural Amish underpinning of society here, the rest is grafted on, its terrifying to think of what someone like Jandl is going to do, it’s happening right under our noses. These innocent people, do they know?
So, I see worthy fights here, critical social issues within the general social, climate, issues everywhere. Reasons to stay. I take it seriously that i am a Pennsylvania native, even if only for 6 months. before we left for the West Coast after I was born. It was no accident that Ian was born a stone’s throw away near Buffalo, although in another state it was close to where I was born, also on Lake Erie.
So, a whole lot has cleared up it seems to me, for me, and, I pray, for my son and I am just trying to feel out this night as I attempt to mend fences with Tampa Bay in other words, when I left Cambridge in 1986 to move here it was the most unbelievable horibble, awful leave-taking of my life.
Leaving Seminole in 2012 felt like a breeze but the worst started once I got here and I am only now even beginning to start thinking about living here and I have to make amends here as well as with Tampa for the trouble I have caused. People don’t always know how I really feel because there has never been anyone I can really tell. They knew in Florida because everything I told to my son he told in school!!! That’s probably why it is the longest time I ever stayed anywhere.
Here, I have this blog.
I have a plan to move out of this place to somewhere safer. But I am STILL waiting on my ex to come through with the funds I have been begging for to get settled in a reasonable situation.
Blessings on Seminole, Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay area.
Blessings on my home state, PA.
Un.Bon.Mot 