A long and painful road to self acceptance

Date: Friday, August 5, 2016
Subject: S#!^ SHOW

(Disclaimer: The below is disturbing, subjective material. It may upset your sense of convention. If that is the case I urge you to check out that webpage : www.nsahaiku.net for perspective.

The heavy emphasis on the role of the class struggle in the following story is not accidental.

Also, the obscenity is not accidental. )

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, knives were getting twisted, collecting in the corners between shoulder-blades and filling spaces between vertebrae. In the kitchen, the main chef had been used as a tool to keep the other cooks in line and everyone had to watch him work the late shift and open the next day for weeks. Eventually this over-scheduling resulted in the replacement of Ethan's cool, compassionate and efficient approach with the self-satisfied non-work of his redneck replacement; the same manager of the kitchen who had been responsible for Ethan's over-scheduling in the first place.

The redneck had a waitress wife and she was promoted to the lunch shift (a big money shift among the golf-crowd) upon his acceptance of the position of head chef of the kitchen. She made sure everyone else did her chores, took the last tables to walk in, and suffered from her relentless trash talking (oh! a bit of her own medicine, eh?!) when they weren't around. These two were unique in their position of racist intolerance that hadn't been made a clear position held by anyone else I worked with at this location but them. The regime of the kitchen and the front of the house changed, and before long the dishwasher was placed under a test that was impossible to pass. The chef was being negligent and left a pan over a high flame. It became burnt and charred, ruined. Throwing at the dishwasher like before, he stormed around the barricade over which the glass-racks were held and demanded that he clean this pan immediately. The dishwasher tried to explain that it was too hot and, though the pan was completely black and had molted into a crust which was fully unremovable from the pan, the chef used this as his point of advantage, seeing there was no way for the dishwasher to avoid his unrighteous and misdirected anger ( at working in a high volume kitchen for a bunch of blubbering billionaire snobs ), and told him to leave the premises after hollering at him for what seemed like forever and return the next morning at 6:30 am. The dishwasher had to work until after everybody went home. If the night ended for the waitstaff at 3:30 am , you could bet the dishwasher wouldn't be walking out of there until 6. This particular man I know well and admire very much, and his work ethic has outshone all the others. A little supernatural in his determination, I stand in awe of people that don't let the bullshit lies invented by another's arrogance get in their way of doing what they came to do. Then, I try to stand straight and remember what the f*** I am trying to do. Comme ca?
The next day I found out he had gotten to work at 6:30 that morning to be fired in private, because the grounds were so outrageous that had they tried to fire him at the time of the so called infraction, it would have caused an uproar throughout the kitchen because so many people were witness to the lashing out on the little guy that was uncalled for and brutal, unfair and directed to the hardest worker there! To my dismay and despair, thundering sense of loss and shame, he was replaced by a white dishwasher.

I had been there since June, and was told upon being hired that after 6 months I could transfer to another franchise so I planned to wait it out. I didn't make it much longer, however, and in november of 2008 I was laid off for lack of business, never to attend the famous christmas party on a bus in seattle or to transfer to another location. And so my friend and I counted our losses, packed our things, and moved into a friend's basement. At that point we had been evacuated from every safety point we had been afforded up to that point: college was out of the price range as a result of the stock market crash of 2008; the job season was over; my parents were so embedded by their cultural inertia they refused the idea of my friend and I remaining together, and his parents had this bad habit of becoming abusive and controlling beyond the boundaries of reason, and so we were at a moment of blind fate, in our lives. There were the hands of our community there to support us at times, and then there were many times that we were left to fend for ourselves, deprived of a means to sustain our lives, of a means to share community traditions-- we had our technology, our debts and nothing else. But the help of strangers really is what developed the cornerstone on which my life today was built.

The lack of consensus or agreement between the ways of the world I had experienced first-hand waiting that summer, and the sheltered-styrofoam-sterile world of contemporary higher education made me appreciate the authenticity of lived lessons and the understand the inherent deterioration of the truth-value of the lessons taught in classrooms. I made a conscious choice to turn away from the lure of a successful career in self-demoralizing behaviors with the profit margins as the primary priority. Of course, this was just a further defining of an already outlined destiny I was born of : total freedom. The sacrifices I have made to further my dream to actualize a life independent of those destructive behaviors intrinsic to a materialist neo-liberal philosophy may seem to the normal outsider extreme and unworthy of the rewards I have eeked from the life on the other side I claw for every waking minute, but I wouldn't trade my dignity, my truth for the shady and religiously exploitative version I have been coerced over and over again to debunk.

What happened over the next 15 months to me ( between november of 2008 and february of 2010) was a metamorphosis that I was extolling every bit of spiritual, emotional, sexual and psychological energy in my being to resist. By the end of the gluttonous denial of my obvious predicament I had developed a deeper love of red wine than ever before in my life. That wasn't an issue in of itself, it was the lack of social harmony that I experienced on a daily level with every person I interacted with. My views had become too radical to cope with, and as a result I was drifting farther and farther into the outsider zone even within my acquired friend group. I guess I became less inclined to swallow the lines people used to convince themselves their way of living was justifiable. Whatever it was, I became morose and disquieted by the complete imperialist and arrogant way the privileged white carried on, and it ate away at me until I was in a room with my mother and sister one night in February and I could no longer contain my repulsion at the lies they were feeding each-other about the world. Confronted with the obvious contradiction in our personal cosmologies, my mother and sister took it upon themselves to oust my political rebellion as a fit of manic insanity. Initially they accused me of taking hard-drugs. They assumed I stole some pills from my sister's friend's purse. Seriously. Anyway, they thought I was tripping hardcore. After receiving an extended reminder of what people who have honest skepticism of the long term consequences of western civilization and development are faced with in terms of clinical, judicial, and religious persecution, I returned again to the work force, much like Alexander from the Clockwork Orange after receiving his re-socialization therapy.

**photo gif

That first summer on the front lines had brought the consequences of the suppression of the transformative synthesis under the pursuit and domination of commodity culture into full view. The final implications of the position of the wage-laborer today in a lock-step race to annihilation (for the comfort of a few and the perceived convenience of many), were and are still continuing to dawn on me:
1.The lack of regard for the sacred nature of food and water. 2.The lack of respect for the sanctity of authentic expression not expressed under the coercive duress of market dynamics that over time divorces the people from a land that could feed and grow life. 3. The murderous fates those most willing to speak out for the needs of the Earth were & are forced to face. 4.The invention of an industry standard which demanded the poisoning of the crops, groundwater and food supply using insecticides, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and radiation; like a teenager cutting themselves to punish themselves for failing to assimilate. 5.The covering of indigenous culture and history, the outright disrespect to the ancient ruins and sacred sites of the world -- turned into tourist attractions, 6. the excavation of indigenous burial grounds, 7. the razing of old growth forests, 8. the 22 million americans incarcerated by a private prison industry, the highest number of incarcerated citizens per capita in the world, all in the name of cash. The obedience to the monetary demands molded by the greedy self-obbsessed interests of a cruel, brutal imperialistic breed of cash-worshipping cows, herded around by the oblivious, mega-rich, long-toothed, lying politician billionaires who own the media, has drastic impact on the possibility of the existence of social progress, in my view.

The idea of civilization is a social contract to bring a decreased level of instability and confusion to a collected group of individuals. When a "social contract" is used as a premise for the big guys to make the little guys do all the hard bloody work, while simultaneously keeping all of the rewards for himself, the "social contract" is no more than a wolf in sheep's clothing. The wolf unveiled being, a document resembling the Jurassic type of document dispersed from a human slave auction as was a horrific practice in this country for a long time.

The deliberate use of economic positions of advantage to manipulate the behavior of others, as an expression of the insecure powerlessness against the actions of a totalitarian surveillance state advances in stages of extreme disharmony. The frusterations of a bottomless appetite for revenge for all the pain caused in the name of the US began a very long time ago, and continues to bear into the lowest worker on the chain with all its might. From the cleanest cubicle to the dingiest diner dishpit, the lowest common denominator is time and again the target for all of the misdirected angst of humanity against the machinations of our own demise.

Those fat babies napping and lapping their fountains of irony sit in diapers ripe with the rotting material fantasies abandoned for new sources of novel instantaneous gratification that will never satisfy them, live hypnotized by their discomfort. The news projects the rhetoric upon which their lips follow in unison, repeating the mindless words never questioning the narrative of the empty regurgitation of empires of tyranny still left yet untoppled.

It took too long for me to trace the implications of the practice of privatizing prisons. This practice has changed the conversation about the meaning of emancipation today. The dynamics of capitalism applied to commodify human punishment creates a framework so unethical it bears only comparison with the most atrocious of human behavior historically. Laden with the divisions created by an industrial society to keep the poor classes at war with eachother so the rich classes can sit in the box seating and sip champagne; there are so many people in prison it appears the few who possess the means of production (means of producing crime, that is) a very small number of people, determine the physical whereabouts, schedules and lives of the majority of those who claim to live in 'the land of the free'. In the box, billionaires sip their champagne while the trains and planes and automobiles move the prisoners around, day in and day out.

The placement of the motives for maintaining an ethical and just society in the hands of the corporate elite was a sure-fire recipe for the global equivalent of an infant driving the spaceship earth on a sugar crash. The problems faced on the level of the voice of the working class at home and abroad as a result of authority being corrupted by the profit-margin-minded power-grubbing charlatans are environmental, economic and linguistic.

Linguistic problems emerge as a result of the censorship or determination of the semiotic definition of the language by financial interests and complicate the primary objective of communication. A free society uses language to transmit truth. An unfree society censors truth and the language no longer reflects the common ground shared by two poles coming to one place of understanding. Thus, an individual who might attempt to resist the corporate order would be betrayed by their language attempting to convey the distinction between the antagonist of the people and the institutions which puppeteer the people's response. When authority and popular use of the language becomes financially biased to protect certain classes of people less likely to speak out with the mind of a whistle-blower, the applications of concepts such as 'I' and 'Thou' require further inquiry to fully understand the implications of this symbolic shift since Martin Buber's work "I and Thou" first was translated in 1937.

The heavy lifting of these epiphanies came down to the members of my immediate family, who unfortunately failed miserably at the task of quelling my legitimate concerns. The above observation was albeit a thick and dense one, challenging the consensus of the position of assumed identity in today's consumer based society which depends on foreign war profiteering to continue teetering on the brink of extinction. It explicitly presents the contradictions of our current conundrum planetarily, and when they arrived at the conclusions I was attempting to convey to them, they calmly, with the precision of a serial killer, explained to me that this kind of observation was tacitly insane and I was in need of hospitalization.

I was even-toned and clear sighted as I accepted plainly that this was their last defense against the truth-- the clinicalization, diagnosis and disposal of the resistance they recognized me demonstrate against their blindly destructive path to environmental catastrophe. I was driven to the hospital in the back seat, followed their instructions and butter did not melt in my mouth, as I watched my credibility dissolve to the credit of my mother's fine instincts: to trust doctors. They brought me to a room in the back and made me undress. They made me wear a paper itchy gown. I would follow their simple instructions, watching them with half-disbelieving, half-resigned eyes, mobilize a war against the clarity of my intention. Through it all, the social worker sitting by the hospital bed with a face full of makeup like a barbie, the slow mist falling outside, and even one of the red-headed male nurses playing "Eidelweiss" from The Sound of Music to calm me down; through it all I was certain my convictions about the importance of fair and equal exchange were at root what inflamed their sense of fear and self-righteous medically sanctioned indignation, and what prompted their urgent need for an institutionally sanctioned rescue from my contaminated radical conceptions of the world in which we live today. Their outcry for the hand of institutional authority to smack his hand over my mouth was in vain. It did not work, I remained cohesive, strong, and clear as their morale weakened before my eyes. My sister had to leave, perhaps recognizing too late that their punishment was inappropriate and poorly executed.

My mother, who had never so obviously displayed an interest in chemically sedating me as a way to address my resistance to her rule, became impatient with the lack of exciting mania taking place to justify her claims of my mental instability, and she determined to the nurse it was time to medicate. I resisted. I stood up from the hospital bed, and began to walk to the hallway towards the exit. I saw another patient in the ward, a girl with red hair being cross examined and demanding a lawyer, and insisting that what they were doing to her was illegal.

I wished I could attend the trial of the defendants who so thoroughly contorted the medical system to silence politically charged resistance. I tried to push the double doors open a immediately a young police officer was beside me. I hadn't been made aware of the fact that I wasn't allowed to leave. I gently reached out and my finger brushed the metal push-lever of the door. Immediately I was ambushed on all sides by nurses and security guards. I blacked out then. I was injected with a massive dose of Atavan, a sedative and anti-psychotic that was hot and fresh on the pharmaceutical market, and didn't wake up until several days, hours, weeks, years, light-years later. The measurement of time to me has still remained a mystery to this day.

I could only see blackness. And one. blinking. red. dot. My mind was obviously swimming and I felt like I had been dosed with a hallucinogen. The orientation of my visual perspective was on a spinning vertical axis. The blinking dot. The red blinking dot. I saw a blinding rectangle of white light maybe 6 hours later. I was in solitary confinement, the light betrayed to my weakened, deteriorated retinas. I was naked now. No paper itchy dress to cover my vulnerable and exploited body object. The plastic bed I laid on was a blue vinyl piss proof fabric that unpleasantly stuck to my back, my ass, my legs, and my unstockinged freezing feet.

So this rectangle of blinding white light was cut with a silhouette of a head, and as I approached, stumbling over my weakened limbs, I felt a tension I had never known in my temples, as though I had received electric shock therapy, having elaborate audio hallucinations of my sister and my mother trapped in the cells on either side of my own locked solitary confinement cell. Unable to get to them to quell their fears was the initial source of my great uneasiness, which only grew to much larger proportions as I situated myself in the reality which had in fact unfolded. I stumbled, still naked, up to the blinding white rectangle to find a grey haired man with glasses, a clipboard, and rat-like features peering over his spectacles at me with dodgy eyes. There were two lackeys of the female variant standing by with purple latex gloves shrouded in blinding fluorescent light. They twitched like eager dogs awaiting dinner as I tried to make out the conveniently aloof and obviously self-impressed MD's muffled directions through the 3-inch-thick heavy-metal 3-panes-thick-with-metal-netting-inside door. He is telling me to put on the gown and socks he is holding under his clipboard. I nod, wrenching that customer service smile from the swampy depths of sorrowful silent solitary.

They await a response as I look blankly, however defeated, brain-damaged, and lost though I may feel, sorting out my best possible action.

I remember that my father used to say (when I would demand that he stop buying Charmin Toilet Paper because I learned that manufacturer doesn't employ the use of post-consumer waste, therefore, Charmin perpetuates the practice of razing entire old growth forests for one sole use, for an asshole. Virgin tree, not used to make a newspaper or a book or a paper bag and THEN used to be made for a roll of toilet paper, as toilet paper such as seventh generation does by utilizing 80 percent post consumer waste, but they just turn that beautiful old growth tree into some super cushy toilet paper for some body's asshole ONCE, anyway, I used to tell my dad not to buy Charmin, and he would say....) " You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," and I delved into that expression that february morning in 2010, imprisoned, starving, thirsty, dirty, in an undisclosed location, surrounded by strangers. And I tried to mask my sheer fright and despair with nodding and from parched lips, I croaked, "Yes".

Then, the two lackey women attendants filed in after blue florescence flooded the piss-proof room taking me by the arms. A wheelchair was wheeled in and after I covered my extremely skinny body with the gown and footie socks, I sat in the wheelchair and I wondered if I was dead. The disorientation was starkly gloomy. They wheeled me down the hallway, past people I couldn't see because my eyes hadn't adjusted to the light, to the bathroom, where I was left with a shampoo - bob barker's maximum security shampoo, maximum security soap, maximum security lotion, toothpaste, toothbrush, towel, blue shoes like vans with no brand on them. I sat in the white tiled shower letting the water run on me for a long time.

So this is what the pursuit of knowledge finally led to? The path I had taken with the guidance of higher education directed me to an ivory tower which was in fact not permissible by society to enter. The idea of the pursuit of knowledge had in fact been objectified, used as a means to drive the masses farther onward performing the dirty tasks of the elite wealthy classes. Those,I experienced personally, who sincerely challenge the status quo are taken out by sheer force of the humiliation and denial which sits indirect plain view of all who are required by necessity to adhere to a corporate governance as capitalism instates.

Those voices who speak out to address the inconsistencies of the fallacy known as the success of modern day capitalism were immediately silenced by a great force of shame at the truth and a failure to admit and accept that truth which sits in stark opposition to the greater benefit of all -- the status quo would rather have obeyed corporate rule than have addressed the inconsistencies of an imperfect free world.

I witnessed the damaging affects of the platonic forms on structures of wide social influence (schools, hospitals, prisons), and the aesthetic of tight corners I found most damaging to the organic compounds of irregular nature, shape, and size that I recognize a soul does embody (*postmodernism roundness with relativism), without initiating conflict with any other broadly defining self-perpetuating disaster who attributes itself to be a higher order.

This religious cult stole mine and millions of other's voices in an effort to homogenize the idea of truth to manipulate the Earth's purpose for their own uses-- to pursue and dominate the object.

I stayed at that place against my will and watched.

I finished my washing and turned off the shower, getting dressed and braiding my hair -- a warrior defense I remembered. By defeating the idea of image and the complications the west has created with the idea of a woman's self image, by braiding my hair, I was already taking my power back. It was a long road ahead of compliance with the most asinine of demands from the lackeys. I had to be on point with my ability to apprehend an attack. I had failed to do this, and now I was paying the consequences. I hadn't worked it out yet, then, just who I was a warrior for- why so many layers of illusions. I would direct those sincerely curious about the common practice of the medical industry silencing political dissent to investigate the diagnosis of 'sluggish schizophrenia'.

Not knowing how to direct my anger, I followed instructions and talked to the other patients under the custodial control of the staff at the north sound residential treatment facility in Sedro Wooley, WA. Many patients were visibly recovering from great suffering of the soul, and the atmosphere was severely agitated by the authoritative rule under which we were administered drugs and punishment, straight jackets if we resisted, and forced injections of drugs and solitary confinement if we resisted, extended stay in incarceration if we resisted.

The fear that I was physically used or sexually taken advantage of haunts me to this day, because I did not know what happened in the world between the time when I was injected with atavan at the Hospital in Bellingham.

The other patients, in our shared predicament, brought me joy where otherwise none could be found. I wrote an elaborate tale to chronicle the symbolic proportions of the devastating blows to my sense of identity, my sense of reality, my sense of shared common understandings, but no myth was grandiose enough to encapsulate the scale of the betrayal I was experiencing.

Like watching your child be raised in the hands of someone you hate, I came to know that the true fight for freedom has been marginalized, littered and mired with the so-called good intentions of the deluded cross-bearers of a deranged corporate worshipping mass of zombies.

The old and the young alike, looked hopeless as ever sitting together in the common room watching neil young play music for the 2010 winter olympics. Just a bunch of caged up crazies... I thought. And that included me.

I kept fighting, though.

My hysterically deranged mother (she still trusts doctors, to this day) eventually came to parade around how her group of fascists were winning and I, the wild and free, was caged up, while she could gloat her financial and sexual 'liberation' -- she brought her new boyfriend, not my father to the visitation day.

I was so impatient to be free, having lost all track of time in confinement, and not knowing when I would be released, if I would be ever. I didn't ask about my diagnosis until the night before I was finally discharged: they were that overbearing and manipulative, that to suggest that I was 'resisting' their handling of my medical treatment by asking this question was in the category of very unwise things to suggest, and one of the consequences I might experience as a result of suggesting they weren't doing their job right would be the creation of an infraction report. This document could be used to justify the administration of drugs and punishment, straight jackets, solitary confinement and up to and including all the torture one could think of on the spot.

The days passed like the last, and it was hard to watch the older patients so alienated by the corporate class of mental rehabilitation disallowing any physical contact at all between patients. I remember an old woman named Marilyn who I used to talk to, started to cry one day and I reached over to put my arm around her shoulder, and I was immediately reprimanded by a white coated orderly standing near by who informed me that physical contact is strictly forbidden. I didn't bring up the violent physical contact they regularly initiated with unassuming patients who simply didn't feel like complying to the inhuman and vindictively executed medication dosages.

The patients got wheeled to the common room between morning group therapy and lunch, where they would watch the weather, play cards, sit, and stare off in a lithium-induced daze, while I would write. There was an art room where group therapy took place on fridays. When asked if the room could be open for making art at other times, I received an icy stare and the words " I'll ask someone for you ". They didn't say anything else about it. So the next day, I repeated the question. It was several more rounds like this until I decided to refuse food until they opened the art room indefinitely. This seemed to change things up a bit, but only for a day, and then it was back to being closed. I made several paintings there I wish I could get my hands on. They used the art room as a point of leverage to get me to comply to return the demeanor of their plasticity, my weakness was my need to express myself. I did what they asked me, finding my vulnerability a point of commonality with some employees of the residential treatment facility, while it was a point of disgust for the majority of the people working for the facility. I felt very alone, and forgotten by everyone I ever knew. It sucked. Art was all I was living for in the abandoned wings of washington; a decaying and disposed debutante proving to be dysfunctional.

I eventually sated the behavioral fixations of the therapists haunting me to the extent that they allowed me to check out their disc-man and their CD books.

I had spent such a harrowing period of time readjusting to the environment my truly held convictions turned into, the memories I had of music were the most precious of my collected thoughts, helping me through the long, cold nights and wobbly showers, naked and alone, I would start to sing Aretha Franklin or Neko Case and getting big notes opened the part of my chest cavity that felt like a ton of bricks had crushed it. The music of Bob Marley really felt good to listen to. Rediscovering music after captivity is an experience I will never forget.

So when after telling the man who introduced himself to be my caseworker that I would not resist their description of my experience and that would be the better choice not to go to court because that meant I would be leaving the residential treatment facility sooner, it made the experience of No Woman, No Cry, just that much more rewarding. I am still very unclear about what all went down.

Words don't begin to convey the depth of the loss I experienced but the sweet music contained all the textures I had missed so desperately to identify with from behind these eyes and ears. My confidence in the communal-individual identity that supported me was stripped from me in the experience of confinement, solitary isolation from my life, the people in it, and my voice with which to direct my response to the grave injustices taking place, in the name of the preservation of society.

I finally played along well enough to suit the high maintenance personalities administering the discharge requests, but even then, I had to wait two more days because of the inconvenience my pick up created for my sister.

Thing is, there was no family waiting at the gates for my release; they put me in there. The threat to their way of life I introduced by calling out their lies with my life, my clarity, my tone, my vision and my art was enough for them to never see or speak with me the same again. I'm the tainted one, the crazy woman. That's f***ing fascinating. My mother, who had no trouble coming to visit me, driving the 5 hours to Sedro-Wooley, WA to tout her freedoms: travel, sexual 'liberation', money, was unable to come pick me up; and my sister, who lived less than an hour away, took 2 days to make the time to release me.

I mistakenly left the paintings I made during 5 week captivity inside the patient's dwellings. I returned the next day to retrieve them, but I was told they were gone.

As I watched the little cement building grow smaller in the distance, I only hoped someday the impact of this social reformative re-education analysis and diagnosis would in time disappear from my view, as well.

I found out that last night from an orderly with a hair-wrap that they had listed my diagnosis as Skitzo-Effective Disorder.

Those days I spent in Bellingham with my sister I slept on the floor in the living room. I would wake up screaming and crying, still-half-pleading for my life in nightmares I was being robbed of the right to determine my own storage place for ideas.

I went to the waterfalls and drew pictures at sunrise-- still stuck in the schedule of the residential treatment facility. They had handed out sonoma cigarettes and decaffinated coffee at the facility at 6 am, and that next morning, it was all I needed to smoke a cigarette at 6 am and drink some hot joe. There was a java hut at the base of the waterfall, down a very very long staircase.

When I made it back home, I wasn't sure I would ever be able to work with people again-- the level of alienation was so high.

My mom forced me to attend this project intercept program which she designated to be necessary because the program's stated mission was "to keep those who had been hospitalized for their unstable behaviors from becoming hospitalized again," never admitting the underlying message of this entire farce was to keep my generation in line with the corporate global elite, or else to the looney bin! I would go to these group meetings, attended by other young people like me on one side of the table, and on the other side of the table were some mean and deeply entrenched deniers and liars, demanding that we submit to their chemical warfare on our opinions and individuality as if it was some rare form of mad cow disease. Any resistance to the plan they created for how the things were going to go was obvious a sign someone was "emotional" that day, and this would justify the use of up to and including full scale psychological degradation and sedation in order to cover it up.

Over weeks, and with the stealth of a serial killer, I made the case to my doctor and caseworker to stop the use of their Abilify, the medication they prescribed for me to take at the residential treatment facility for Skitzo-Effective Disorder - a diagnosis I received for exposing their intrinsically broken archetypes of community.

My grandma Dana was still alive and she granted me with an immense source of strength to draw from her love.

I quit taking abilify within two months of being released from the residential treatment facility.

I found the listing for a Barista position at a local bookstore sometime in november 2011. I called the number on the screen, and walked down the street a few hours later to meet with a washed up, far away man who owned a dingy diner that served fish tacos and a bookstore with a coffee installation. The crew he was known for employing locally was underage females with a wild streak. I was not underage, but I was female and wild streaks had been known to occur throughout my past. Suffice it to say, I knew from the outset that I was walking into a scenario that would be dripping with unwanted advances, even given my frail condition. The antics of this guy were always ambiguous, He was the kind of guy who played his cards close to his chest. The other boppers who worked for him flirted shamelessly with him, from my perspective it was the kind of flirtation a prostitute initiates with her pimp so he slips her a few bills-- sickening, and backwards on so many levels. I didn't stoop this low, and instead took the approach that hard-work would give me an advantage eventually. If I maintained my integrity, and didn't surrender my clarity for the cheap substitute they sell as honest living, I would someday be able to get away from the soul-sucking pharmaceutical solicitors that claimed to be my friends and family. Well, in this way, I may have been naive.

I was becoming aware that the narratives of misogyny and racism reenforce eachother under the principal of capital value. The misogynistic attitudes that dominate the work-place thread together the narratives of male-supremacy and white-supremecy without batting an eyelash, littering the common places of the world with the diseased ideas of racial prejudice as a matter of course; and violently silencing those who express opposition.

My position at that time spanned two worlds: one of a dingy fish house, where I did the dishes and tried to understand the level of "clean" that I was to maintain. The place was the dirtiest restaurant I have ever seen in my life. The dust and goo that coated every surface was black with time. The sink was greasy, the sponge was beyond gross, and the syrups and chocolate sauce were sticky from years before. I took the orders, made the coffee and chatted it up with the weirdos who walked by. The fish house was nasty beyond all get out, but it wasn't all corporate elite, and he gave me the leeway he extended to the dusty goo that spread throughout the shop. That was nice.

The other position I held for him was at a dusty bookstore, where grumpy old perverts sat around and sucked on peanut butter. I loved the bookstore, and planned to bring joy and organization to the businesses, despite the harrowing attack by the medical-pharmacutical peons who sent my family to destroy my will to live. My will to live in part depends on my ability to relate, and through the chaos and static and bullshit I went through, I was always able to touch bases and relate to a dear friend of mine. Relevantly, the acceptance of my friend by my family was always luke-warm. Imposing the corporate image of the nuclear pasty white family upon my future, they were less than thrilled to accept a non-white Tribal Ancestor into their cult. This distortion between the different groups of my allegiance became louder and unbearable. He was the only one who afforded me the recognition I sought without condition by his ego-maniacal trip.

My friend suffered an attack of convulsions one day while I worked at the bookstore. I was alone in my efforts to address his condition. I took him home to rest it off, remembering all too vividly the non-care provided to me by the "health care system" just months before, but his condition worsened, and his mother insisted that because he wasn't responding to her wholloping smacks that indeed something was wrong and she drove him and I went too, to be there for him. That was a fiasco. Two weeks later he was released. I fought to stay by his side every step of the way, and my sister, my mother, and my father did everything in their power to discourage me. My sister disallowed me from using her Jeep to go see him. The snow started falling.

After all that has come to light in the past 6 years, regarding the tests done on mice who ate GMO foods, showing breast cancer tumors and liver necrosis and seizures, paired with the instances of more friends and cases of unexplained seizures, I believe that there were many factors which led to his condition. I know at least two others who have suffered seizures, and their structures of emotional support are profoundly more solidly built. All to say that I noticed how my family were not concerned with my friend's medical emergency, and I feel this is on the basis of their implicitly racist position. The truth of this circumstance was glaring but I was hurting in so many ways, just trying to bring healing to the one who had shown me mercy when all others abandoned me, that I could not confront it directly at the time, as a matter of conserving energy to bring healing to the wounds of myself and my friend that were unmistakably caused by the same hand of indifference.

The men I had brought into my life before my friend had played the role and winked and thumbs-upped at all the right times, but for me, they were all cardboard. When I found my friend I was already very far off the trail my family had forced me to walk, and I was lost- but his way of fierce knowing and truth brought me guidance at times when no other could create calm. My family refuses to accept him, and I believe it is a deep rooted cultural ignorance that informs their hateful and disdainful approach to the most important person in my life, and their racist separatism began to echo from their initial behaviors towards him throughout the broader community in their intolerance was like a virus they had intended for those who could love all equally, not expecting that they would not be able to contain the repercussions of their hateful and intolerant behaviors towards him, and by extension, towards me, and by extension, towards themselves.

This disapproval of my choice in friend was a catalyst for the declaration of insanity placed upon my head by my mother and sister, and their poorly informed justifications for the unrighteous defamations of character he has had to endure time and time again (by these backwards-ass cross-eyed kooks) who won't even admit that the reason why they lash out is because, he communicates at a different tempo, rate, and meter than them, and they interpret (mistakenly reading their own projections of fear) him to be aggressive, which is really just the explicit assumption of their highly confused and falsely believed god-given sense of right to demand authority over what the definition of "normal" or "regular" communication looks like, which is colorless (white), emotionless (sedated), and objectionless (pacified), according to them. BAH!

Working under this Patriarch, I experienced a reiteration of the imposed consequences the ruling class pushed on me for breaching their racist code of dating which I never experienced until I crossed the tracks of time and walked back into the year 2012. The cold shoulder, the long glances, the gossip, the backstabbing and dramatic inventions of "full grown adults" to eliminate the elephant in the room, which strictly speaking, were the tenets of basic civil rights that are not extended to all, contrary to the well-preserved concept of contemporary, diverse, and free society. The regulars made a big fuss about my friend's existence, which required no provocation for the sense of white entitlement is thick despite the numerous atrocious cultural genocides inflicted by white people in this part of the country. Eventually, they got their way, and he stayed at home. This was not a preferable situation, as he was recovering from a massive neurological trauma and needed attention. We met two street people who themselves were experiencing the press of the police state-- suffering from diabetes and with no where to sleep, my very dear friend had had his medical supplies for diabetes taken twice by the police because he was sleeping in a place they deemed to be city property. The part I still don't understand is why they had to take his medicine away from him on which his life depended, twice!?

These friends came to stay for a while and that experience really changed things for me, because as I had been abandoned by my biological family, I was able to open my heart more and more to my whole human family. Coming to coexist on the basis of a need for harmony became a clearer goal for me, and I really appreciate that part of the job where I could reach out and connect to real people while I was working down there at the bookstore.

Something about me, I have always simply enjoyed the act of shelving books so that was a natural pleasure for me at the position. Aside from the medieval politics, racist attitudes, and the crazy shit that led to my dismissal from that job-- the camaraderie, the coffee and the books I experienced there were formidable. The relationships I made at that job provided for me the strength to transcend the coming onslaught of challenges to I would face.

I enjoyed working the graphic novel section, where I found different interpretations of the traditional linear narrative through the illustrated images of alternative artists' vision.

The dark and estranged narratives that often shroud a woman in a workplace constructed and operated by men are numerous and unrelenting. For me it would come to be a surprise to find the front page of the local newspaper a few years later depicting the face of a regular customer I knew then every day working that job had been caught and convicted of manslaughter and called a serial killer, having murdered a girlfriend before coming into town and two more before that. Just to give you a glimpse of the caliber of company I was working and living with daily at that time. ;)

This has been a painful memory to unleash, however it was something I haven't fully spoken my truth about, and healed the wounds to my voice this experience created for me. I hope for those who have also been hurt by the systems of our creation can develop strength knowing that many people are targeted for their beliefs or wrongly called insane. I have a feeling more people that we care to admit are feeling isolated and hurt by the systems of meaning we have come to accept to define our shared reality. I wish to bring healing to all who need it.