you know, the ones they sell at pet stores to take home in a bag to feed to your boa. They seem to have no life or emotion.
I used to take my kid to the pet store sometimes just to look (we couldn’t keep a pet and it turned out to be a real shame when we did). After seeing them feed the snake I never went back.
My three excellent therapists in Florida (two were LCSW’s, one was a Ph.D. clinical neuropsychologist)(all three were men much older than me) helped me a lot but somehow I kept ending up on psych wards anyway and getting into all kinds of trouble and wound up leaving Florida on bad terms. I am trying to fix that, although I do not plan to return.
Florida can be a brutal place (it’s the heat); my husband is a brutal man; his father fought in ground combat in World War II. He stayed; I had to go. Florida is right for him; nowhere is really right for me. Nowhere. He cried when I had to tell him I was really going to leave. He had seen the lovely American society scene and was accepted, people were kind. I felt awful. But I just couldn’t handle it any more, I was getting ill. Very ill. And he was saying he thought Ian didn’t have long to live. I so wanted to make it all right for all three of us but God blew us apart. No man could put us asunder (and no man did; God did.)
Pennsylvania can be brutal in a different way. Downtown Easton nearly took my life. I’ve been running ever since trying to figure out what the fff**** is wrong for me here, everywhere I go it’s something.
I am grateful to God right now for giving me the ability to think. I did not have this before I went to Florida. Not American-style. There was a decision I had to make about signing something and it was important and I had no idea how to make up my mind about it but I had to and I did and it was a good decision.
There was a person I mentioned in one of my recent posts that I feared for because someone else in the same situation said that I had ruined his reputation and I didn’t really even know what that meant but I knew that it was bad. I had never had to worry about mine because I was s silly little numbskull and nobody ever minded about me. I just wanted to write. I liked putting words together in a compelling way. I had trouble with it. I wanted help with it. I DID NOT NEED TO BE ON THAT MAGAZINE, or rather, I desperately wanted to be on that magazine in a small way, it was just what I was looking for and it was a little vague what was happening there to me and in general. I DID NOT WANT TO BE THE EDITOR (“President.”) It didn’t just ruin me it DESTROYED ME.
Why didn’t anybody do anything? I was having a meltdown in public. For two long semesters. The doctor I had at the state hospital in PA (after my parents moved here) several years later, had the first streak of insight into this situation. She said that I was bad at handling situations. One of the 3 therapists in Florida also had something to offer. I had had no training for the position. I had only been a board member on the magazine for about a month before I was asked to run for President. Or was I? Now I don’t see things like this because I see that I often misinterpret people and maybe, as I said in another post recently, the offer of the Presidency was just a joke.
Anyway the upshot was that my life was ruined. But it was pointed out to me that another person SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN ME (of course) was also ruined. The person who said this didn’t understand that I was also a person who was ruined. I was the butt of the blame. People thought I WANTED what I became. NOBODY HAD MY BACK. Well, one person did, the person who asked for my endorsement as the next President early on in a bad moment and I gladly gave it to him and I rested in contentment on that. I was sure he would make a good one and it would all be over and I could go home and put my life back together and …who knows…? But what a political monstrosity the elections turned into. I was trying to organize them because that was how it was handled when they got me elected. And others were doing the same thing.
I was given to understand by a certain person that the Advocate was going under and he would be “glad to warch it going under under me.” So I had been on a mission to “SAVE THE ADVOCATE.” At the end, the head of the Board of Trustees asked “Why are you doing all this?” (all the fixing up the building, etcetera) and I didn’t really have an answer for him. I just so dearly loved the place and the magazine. It was a go to from two roommates who hated me. But then it wasn’t a go to any more because I was told it was going down. And if I wanted the Advocate that was the deal, I had to take charge of it. There is something f’d up in that that I can’t put into words, I put it Eliot, the Acting Senior Tutor whose office I ended up in, that I had been “given an offer I couldn’t refuse.” I don’t know whether that correctly characterizes it or not. I was dealing with people who were out of my league. Still, I did not appreciate being treated without common courtesy.
That’s where I myself turned into a common little white feeding mouse and shamed myself and all the people who had always depended me in the worst way. It was horrible. Back home, I was having trouble talking, I was seeing in black and white, I had the most hideous pungent sweat. And my mother SO STUPIDLY called me “ARROGANT”
WHO KNOWS WHY? But that triggered a trajectory that I never got over.
But I keep getting away from the person I hurt so badly by getting him mixed up with my carefully orchestrated election. I asked him to do certain things and he did. I asked him to run for president when I had already endorsed someone else. I just didn’t see what I was doing. The other person whom I had already endorsed didn’t know what was going on either. I just didn’t think that anyone else was going to run and my effort to save the Advocate was going to fail and I would have to go home and kill myself. I didn’t know that that was what I was thinking but it was. It had to be a good election, a redemption.
If only I could have TOLD someone. I was all alone.
So, I picked someone else to help me. I was just messing around. I don’t know why he gave me so much respect. He had taken a semester off, or a year, and he wasn’t familiar with the shenanigans surrounding MY election. Now, please keep in mind that this is the year 1982, fall semester. This has been percolating for the most unbelievably long time. It was obliquely referenced in a 60 Minutes show in the summer of 2018 when I had just gotten out of a personal boarding home. Since then I have been trying to pull things back together and stay out of the hospital.
So, as I have said, someone told me that I had destroyed the person I had told to run for President. By publishing an article that he wrote that was inappropriate and I didn’t know it. I just didn’t know where it was coming from and it sounded so brilliant. And nobody checked it and it went into the magazine along with a lot of other stuff that was less than well.
The upshot was that my father would NOT let me withdraw from the semester. I had done next to no work. I spent a lot of time writing one long “short” story. If only I had been an Option 3 (Option C?) I don’t remember–the Creative writing Option– I would have been fine. It would have been my thesis. I got one A, a D which became a Pass and an Absent. So I took a leave of absence then, when I was at home, I got a letter requiring me to withdraw for one semester without a work requirement.
So, this was a nasty mess a year in the making, for me, a lifetime in the making and all I can say is that it is SAD for me the way things went. And all I can do for the other person who was truly hurt was that in some way I kept him in my prayers and I will follow the Lord’s guidance in that regard. That was the other thing that came out of it for me, an abiding faith. As for everyone else involved and the magazine itself, I think, after 40 years, it is appropriate to relinquish my care and concern there to the Lord also, and let him show me how He wants to orchestrate it in my life and set it free in others.
Lord Jesus Come!
Un.Bon.Mot 