On listening

In Chapter Eight, I graduate from sixth grade. My uncle Michael takes me fishing with him. I help my mother move into her new house, when I discover some disturbing information about my parents. I live with my father on weekdays and my mother on weekends. I stay home from camp this year and instead participate in day camp in my father’s town.

At day camp, I meet a boy that I am not allowed to date. Our courtship is short lived.

During the school year I attend the local middle school. I have a lot of embarrassment to deal with. I find a new best friend, Rachel. I am bullied again. I bring a different friend, Maria, home with me, but we leave quickly and I am determined not to make that mistake again. I am tempted to tell this girl about what my father does to me.

I spend some time alone in my father’s house after school until he gets home from work. It is during this time one day that I experience my first hallucination, accompanied by a delusion that persists for a very long time.

Back at school, I learn the true age and circumstances of the “boy” I was involved with at day camp.

Also at school, I do not pass the scoliosis screening given by the school nurse. I have a bit of an experience when all the girls at school take square dancing for P.E., while the boys get to take wrestling. Of course, I want to take wrestling. I am made the teacher’s assistant in math class, which bewilders me. I have a crush on a bad boy in my math class. In science, I am mistaken one day by the other students as the teacher. In electricity, I am mistaken as a boy.

At home, my father takes me out to dinner often. He is saddened by the attention I get from men while we are out. My father continues to molest me.

The pressure of school and being molested at home overwhelmed me with stress and I succumbed to my first episode of psychosis. I had my first hallucination coupled with a delusion attached to it.

I guess I would say that it’s important for parents to talk with their kids on a regular basis and see how they are really doing in order to catch any such instances occurring in their homes. If parents really listen with all of themselves to their children, maybe real trouble could be averted.

Mental illness came to me early and was not caught in time to do much good, at first. It was a full two years between my first hallucination and the time when I started counseling. By then my mental health was so bad that it was not long before I was hospitalized for the first time for mental health reasons.

During my hospitalizations, my mental health would improve. Then I was released back into the same stressful environment and I would succumb to my mental illness again. It was a brutal cycle, and one that would lead me to think that suicide was the only way out.

Of course, this was not true. I couldn’t see anything else because of the trap I felt I was in, but suicide was not my only option. There are always other choices and directions our lives can take, but how can we see them?

Sometimes we have to have them shown to us. I remember a nurse in the private mental health unit where I was committed when I was fourteen. She said I just had to make it to eighteen and then my choices were my own. I couldn’t see eighteen. I couldn’t even imagine living that long. This was a linear option being shown to me when I needed a lateral option, a path out to the side of my life instead of straight out in front of me. I survived long enough to be shown that side option several months later, but that nurse was trying. I would have to say that it’s important to keep on trying to offer help and possible solutions to the problem of mental illness. It’s important to keep on keeping on, even when it seems like there is not much success.

I always kind of had this habit of visualizing my life. If I can see myself doing something, then it’s a real possibility for me. I could not see myself living very long. I kept hitting that wall and I was addled from the hits until I could see nothing of my future. It was one big black hole that sucked the circumstances of my life into it. The pain, the frustration, and the loneliness I felt in my life were all being sucked into the giant swirling chasm of blackness.

What I didn’t see is that there was a life where I could feel the sunshine on my face on the other side of that chasm, a life of lightness and peace. When I got the help I really needed at the time that I needed it, I could begin to see that light peeking through the veil that was otherwise obscuring my vision.

That help came not a minute too late for me. It was just in time to do me a world of good.

I wasn’t really listened to at home. I wasn’t really seen. I acted out in ways that I felt I had no control over. This acting out was what eventually led me to the help that I really needed. In the end, I guess I was listened to and seen in the best possible way.