outsider experience

a fellow writer asked me to write about being an outsider.

Requiem for my Brain 1st draft



I write this from a free place.

I have no traditional history to share.

No regular rights of passage such as first kiss and graduation.

I can express what I have known as an abuse and mental health system survivor.

It is one thing to survive abuse

it is another to survive the system that is supposed to help you but in many cases does harm.

My mental health history can make many people uncomfortable. This stigma creates a wall between me and others. I did not choose to be a mental health consumer. It is something that has happened in my life and I try to manage it. I am aware of it everyday.







At age 14 I attempted suicide.

My reasons were simple at the time, because I was sexually abused throughout my life and

I was having what is now known as a text book reaction.

At the time, I was diagnosed as bipolar and spent 2 weeks on an adult psych ward.

At that young age I felt that I was ruined for the American fairy tale, even one with a twist of subculture.

I felt I had no place within my family and that I had no place in the world.

My Doctor gave me a magic word, bipolar, and a promise that I would be good again, I would feel different about myself.

In that therapeutic process my nymphomania was explored and my over-active imagination.

These are both signs of sexual abuse. Ways of escape to cope with the pain.

But it was 1985.

This is how I manage it currently, putting it in the context of time.

I remember all that talking with him, speculation of esoteric things,

not the concrete grounding I craved.

Are you safe to tell my secret to?

He did not want my secret; he wanted me to fit the word, bipolar,

because that is what he felt comfortable with.

After a year I was sent back to the hospital for medication.

Upon entry I was diagnosed bipolar type2.

I recounted my abuses and I was told those things I either made up or were caused by my inappropriate behavior related to my bipolar disorder. If I take the medication and do as I am told the pain will go away and my parents will love me again.

They also said if I could not heal in 2 years I was looking at a life in the hospital.

Were they just trying to scare me or were they serious?

I don’t know but my parents and I took it serious and we prepared ourselves and life for it.

At the time it did not bother me because the outside world was filled with tormentors and abusers.

It began to bother me when I learned the mental health system is just like the outside world in that way.

There is no escape.

But I was so medicated I could not care.

I got through each day. Walking was difficult and talking was even harder. The doctors kept changing the medication so I did not feel consistent.

Each change meant another way to learn how to maneuver in reality and do the tasks expected of me.



My parent came to visit; they had agreed to experimental psychotropic drugs in my treatment plan. I thought “Pain what pain… thoughts what thoughts… I am here in this chair and I don’t have to give a fuck… and when I am done with chair I will take another pill and dream of off world things… and the next day and the next day and the next”



The other kids in the hospital were resisting, I just settled in.

I took my meds and dulled the pain, because it seemed too much for everyone else to bear,

they just wanted me to be ok and happy and normal as if nothing had happened.

If I just did as they said I would get better and fit in, and I wanted to believe that too.

I wanted to feel real again. I wanted to be a part of things like others did.

But what did that mean to me, I knew what it meant to them; a series of acceptable actions creating behavior and a performance of life, this being achieved through the mix and match of meds.

The blame removed from my parents for not protecting me if my problem was simply chemical; the hospital promised quick results.

But I did not get better.

I just suppressed the healing and became emotionally and functionally stunted.

My young brain undergoing radical shifts and not developing as it should.

So I got transferred to a long term facility and slowly got off the meds.

The problem was I was still in trauma and did fit in to the hospital, mainly because I wanted to stay.

I had no drive to live in the outside world, I was too high functioning for the hospital but could not function in the outside without strong medication or else I start screaming.

The problem with that is no one wanted to hear it.

I did not fit into the proper box at the time.

As times change so does the knowledge base, if they knew then what they know now could I have saved my brain? Would the approach in my treatment been different, less invasive?



My experience of long term was that of an outcast.

Like everywhere else there are cliques.

There are popular kids and the losers.

Everybody else was mad that they were there.

They would bring kids in kicking and screaming.

I was relieved when I walked through those doors.

I BELIEVED IN THE PROMISE OF HEALING AND I WAS VERY MEDICATED.

Finally… quiet. A special room… for me to go and finally break down… and tell the truth about all the fucked up shit in my head because people could not stop putting things into me and telling me I like it.

Sex, Pain and love were all cross wired in my head and I knew it.

I wanted someone to help me.

I took the meds in short term and I existed, feeling the damage to my experience of reality.

I got off the meds in long term and I felt the reality of pain and the loss and I wanted to let it out.



But this was the 80’s and you’ll ruin it for some if you actually try to deal with your issues.

And you may piss off others because you have not seen a true bottom yet.

My pain was earned yet I was taking away a bed from a kid who really deserved a long term mental health facility.

It was made clear that I did not belong there either.

And well my therapist wanted to retire… So I fell through some more cracks, only spent 10 month in hospitals instead of the 2 years to life they told me in the beginning.

I was released and got a new therapist who prescribed new meds.

I had gone from mood stabilizers and anti depressants to anti psychotics all because the actual going through the pain was unacceptable to those around me.

It disturbed their sense of reality.

It was acceptable to disrupt my sense of realty with meds.



A large Public High School is not the place for person experiencing shell shock.

The Navane (anti psychotic) was to help me manage through the day without acting out, being upset by the things I was suppressing.

Dipped in cotton was the poem I wrote for the feeling.

I spent most my days in the health room because I would nod off in class

and this why some faculty and students thought I was a junkie;

add yet another outsider identity.

I learned to move through it.

Move through this other worldly feeling, this detachment that was now my “sane” reality.

And this confused and scared me because I did not feel real at all.

I felt like it was theatre.

I was expected to socialize with my peers.

This did not work out well.

Even though I hung out with subculture kids I was still too weird when medicated to fit in.

Why can’t I relax?

Why can’t I just party and have a good time?



I felt the chasm between me and them.

I could not explain the surreal experience that had become my everyday.

The energy required to think through meds and make sense to others is a quiet triumph.

It was not acceptable to just sit and stare out the window.

I learned that early in my childhood.

I learned to override the chemistry and engage people.

I only lasted 7 weeks before I was readmitted to the adult psych ward.

I spent that summer inside day treatment.

New meds and new therapist and back to school I went.

The safe middle ground of interaction was the arts.

This was the time and place I did not feel bad for feeling alone or for feeling extreme.



Being medicated made art difficult sometimes.

The meds zapped my motivation to create.



What has become of that girl? She became a painter and poet.









To take or not take meds: 22 years of back and forth.
Did I feel anymore connected off meds?

I take meds now.

Not for bipolar but for the side effects of abuse and traumas.

When I was 16 I was scared because I knew I was outside of things. I knew on a gut level that I did not understand myself hormonally, culturally, or spiritually.

So began my quest of self and place.

It has been 22 years of experiments to get my mind right so I can learn how to care for my body chemistry; getting past just dulling pain.

I still feel outside of the shared experience known as society.

But at this point I do not really care.

When I wasn’t on meds I painted and painted and wrote my guts out. I worked, I loved, and I explored the country and met some real good folks and some real bad news folks.



I was also suicidal.

Emotionally reckless and desperate I managed through the 90’s.

No matter how functioning and social I learned how to be I upset people when I tried to face my pain and not suppress it.



So I went off by myself with the intent and drive to figure out what it means to me feel like I belong somewhere.

The struggle was overcoming my under developed sense of self and how to live in the outside world.

I learned how to take meds and create anyway.

Now I paint and write at a more fluid rate.

It has taken many people and many missteps to get me this place.

I tried to take all the roads I went down in stride, but I did get a bit banged up a long the way.

I feel it was worth it and at the same time I am glad I need not go down those roads again. I believe there are new roads.

On these paths fitting in just does not matter.

What matters are questions I am not afraid to ask such as am I sincere?

I know all the ways some people claim I do not fit, but what of all the connection with individuals that I do have?

Do I have to have a group identity to feel inside?

What I found to exasperate my feelings of being an outsider was the over medication and the misdiagnoses.

What truly made me feel like an outsider is the heartbreak when you lose your childhood to the truth of cruelty.

The knowledge that my organic need to heal and feel things was socially unacceptable in the world in which I was born in to and reared in hindered my development.

Medication was supposed to have made me fit socially but it did the opposite.

Art and science as a refuge

To be continued later