City of Reading

I am here to make peace.

I was a menace here 35 years ago.

I was a person without faith.

A rebellious teenager, an alcohol drinker and cigarette smoker, later promiscuous.

At Wernersville State Hospital I was like a bull in a china shop. They said I ruined that place. This scared me to death.

Then, I moved to my parents’ house at the edge of Berks County. I stopped drinking so much. I wasn’t having sex with anybody. But I was using Reading like a psych award. ”Practicing” having friends. I had never lived in a community in a normal way before.

That lasted for about 2 years. Then I met my husband and left town. I felt like I was about to die or go back to Wernersville.

I am here to make peace. This is a place I never visited after returning to the area from Florida in 2012. I was afraid. One person from Wernersville contacted me when I first got here and I drove from Easton to see him. It didn’t really go well. Then, I was in a partial program at the Reading Hospital briefly, after the Lamictal overdose, but I got thrown out.

I got baptised at St. Mary’s, Kutztown, in 2018, and things have been going better for me since then. I haven’t been suicudal any more. It is just no longer part of my thinking. My brother’s dramatic suicide in Maui in 2018, followed by my mother’s death in 2020, drove me over the edge in a different way. I have been in and out of the hospital since then, and the ER in Allentown started sending me here to Reading. It has not gone well for me. I just didn’t know this place any more.

But I know that some of my old friends at Wernersville are still there.

I don’t know if David is but if he is I want to give him Excalibur to heal it about the book–the Ring Cycle of course.

I don’t know how to make it up to Reading for how I spoiled it here in the 80’s, but I do want to say that I am not here to harm anybody. I have changed so much since then. I want to offer my good will.