REHAB

            As once before in The City, I am again involved in what is otherwise known as ‘Day Treatment’, or psychiatric rehabilitation.  As I’ve suffered from mental health issues on and off throughout my life, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on some of the recurring themes involved in getting professional help.

            The umbrella organization in Orange County, NY is Occupations, and the specific offering for individuals such as myself is PROS, or Personalized Recovery Oriented Services.  I began at the Middletown branch, and have since moved to the much smaller population served at nearby New Windsor; but both have involved an acquaintanceship with staff and peers, resulting in a daunting learning curve.

            This may be a snarky or cynical framing of it, but my observation at times has been that some staff serving at these facilities have been tracked into a career that they reckoned would be easy work for a fat paycheck; in other words, a sophisticated form of babysitting.  The prime motivating reason for my departure from the Postgraduate Center for Mental health in NYC was being assigned to a counselor who seemed utterly passive in delivering services, a kind of psychiatric sponge.  Although a kindly person, I had determined I needed to escape from the sensation of being allowed to indulge in runaway logorrhea.

            Sometimes the result of this kind of professional passivity is a regrettable loss of control, at times unrecoverable.  I’ve seen individuals allowed to continue onward with cross conversation all the while others, struggling to be heard, are discounted or dismissed.  In one group, involving anger management, an Eastern European émigré struggled to express her anxieties, only to be waved away with a diagnosis of ‘acid reflux’ disease.  Driving back to Newburgh after this particularly chaotic workshop, I struggled with how this dismissive atmosphere had been allowed to thrive in what is supposed to be a caring environment.  In the same workshop, a younger woman held forth for a good 20 minutes with a looping complaint of how she would continue to refuse medication until and unless a stomach complaint was diagnosed.  At one point, she averred she’d previously been on meds for something like 26 years.  Later, since she’d been incarcerated, I figured it was more like crystal meth.  In no way had she been on psychotropic drugs for that length of time; too animated, ADD.  But then why had the facilitator just put up with her floor show?

            Then there are the New Age types who bring extensive texts on ‘Metta’ meditation, thoroughly confusing some clients.  A recitation of Buddhist maxims invites the question “Do we have to do this?”  Or the exasperating reliance on pages of boilerplate seemingly exempting the group leader from retrieving clinical information from her own memory bank.  “What,” I found myself thinking, “you can’t hold forth on guilt?”  Give me the group.  I’ve got a lot to say.

           

BERGDORF GOODMAN'S

As I was growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then known as the working class neighborhood of Yorkville, I was subjected to the jumble of rich and poor residing within the width of the island as it existed at that point.  My father, being a German immigrant, came to the country unable to speak English and so put his shoulder to work as a laborer at a variety of jobs ending with the title of Receiving Clerk at the 57^th Street Stouffer’s restaurant.

Often, while I was still in grade school, my mother would bring me downtown and then my father and I would begin our stroll up Fifth Avenue and through Central Park until we got back home to 85^th Street.  We would always stop at FAO Schwartz, the classic kid’s paradise of toys, and spend at least half an hour there while I played.  (Subsequently, at Christmas, I could expect at least one thing I had especially enjoyed.)

But what this is all leading up to, is that on the other side of the Avenue was another store:  Bergdorf Goodman’s.  Every window contained a female manikin with a designer gown, stunning and gorgeous, but also containing a clear message:  this is something you cannot now and will never have.

Much later on in life while living on a sixth story walkup in Greenwich Village, a friend and I, while spending a day together, wound up there.  We accepted the challenge, and fully dressed in lesbian schlep, walked in.  It was a moment Tyler Durden would have savored.  There was nothing as welfare dykes that we could possibly consider purchasing, but I suppose our objective was more along the lines of shocking ourselves into role of guerrilla warriors in even daring to look.  All I remember seriously regarding was a silken scarf of some kind, handling it and turning it over in my hands.  We left without stealing anything, and considering our level of disgust and alienation, I suppose we deserved a subclass medal of some kind.

In reconsidering and reflecting on this as a subject for a blog entry, I came to the realization that there are all kinds of sign posts in our country directing traffic along gender, racial and ethnic and finally, along class lines.  And it’s the strangest thing, whenever I begin a serious reference to my working class roots, it brings up other people’s defenses:  suddenly everyone wants to be working class!  But why?  At the end of the day, being brought up working class means being psychically beaten to a pulp as frequently as is convenient by family, school and society.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, I was inspired by a high school teacher to regard myself as an intellectual.  I took the challenge seriously, but upon arriving in college the other more subterranean agenda took hold, which was to in some way to achieve this goal while being undermined by family dysfunction.  I was far from being a superior student, and it was not until later in life as a returning student that I came into the possession of the skill sets easily inherited by others of more affluent and comfortable backgrounds.  Even today, I am still galled that in having relocated to the Mid Hudson from The City that I thought my way into settlement here was to put my shoulder to the wheel and commit myself to volunteer work in every organization I could identify for myself.  Too, there are people in the arts world who are worker bees, but never achieve the degree of recognition they deserve.  Is all this because some of us have been brought up to believe that this is the only position we can or deserve to occupy in society?

My current circumstances involve living in the City of Newburgh, a crazy quilt pattern of neighborhoods varying in income levels, yet somehow peppered ethnically.  Too, my life has deposited me in the mental health community, a double edged sword of downward mobility but also an oasis of friendship and support.  Today is July 4^th, and the past year has led me to a surprising appreciation of my American citizenship.  As a high schooler, I was something of a hyper patriot, needing something to identify with and hold onto without the benefits of higher education.  Today I realize that we all forge both our identities and agree upon what we have to contribute to the world. 

ELSIE

Growing up on the streets of New York in the ‘50s was not a joke. All kinds of merriment, but also social tragedy came into play. Across the street where I lived in what was then called Manhattan’s Yorkville, was a row of tenements that were later converted into a post office. Some of the inhabitants were Italian, as was pointed out to me by my parents, German and Finnish. Further down the street on my side was a candy store, home to a juke box and, for want of a better description, some West Side Story inhabitants. There was also ‘Fleischman’s’, a small depot for eggs and milk, used by friends of the family, but not by my own. My point in writing this entry, though, is not some of these more picaresque details, but Elsie, a tall, slender older woman living in the tenement next to ours. She would appear, always with a cane, and sometimes with a another woman. They were slightly older than my mother, say in their ‘50s, and seemed ciphers to me. I was always provided with an unspoken message as we would sit on the stoop socializing, to avoid them, and still remember Elsie’s stare. It seemed like there was an unbroachable chasm between us. There was one instance where I remember the two women coming over to us, but they were seldom seen. I began this blog because of a continuing sense of isolation having relocated to New York’s Hudson Valley from The City. Last summer, after having homesteaded in Newburgh’s West End for 12 years, I suddenly came under siege from my neighbors, an unrelenting harassment that ruined my summer. In my astonishment at this, I fought back, ending in some ridiculous scenarios such as walking down my very long driveway nude to fetch my mail. But in the midst of all this hostility, there was the awakening in remembering my childhood, that Elsie and her partner were lesbians. I recently revealed this heartbreak to my psychotherapist, the woman running a bisexual support group at the White Plains Gay community center known as The Loft. It was such a strange experience that it defied any explanation to either my attorney, the city police, my social worker, or either of the two ministers I counseled with. My home had also been entered, and it took quite a while to do the math on what had been taken. At first the damages seemed minor until months later I realized that both my external hard drive and cache of photographs for framing had been stolen. Over the years, as I once attempted an explanation of my adult life, there have been issues following me everywhere I’ve chosen to hang my hat, all surrounding my sexual identity. In fact, this same kind of neighborhood discomfort and hostility is what originally removed me from my humble home in an East Village tenement. At the end of the day, I am always seen as an obstacle requiring removal. Not too long ago, doing some simple paperwork for a resident in Newburgh’s historic district introduced me to some of the terminology involved in City politics, something I’ve never chosen to involve myself in. In struggling against a continuing message of unwelcomeness, it suddenly occurred to me that I was a ‘stakeholder’, that I had bolted myself down in my home, with the determination not to be removed from it. Recently the President declared June to be LGBT Pride month. Let’s celebrate it.

CONSPIRATORIAL RELATIONSHIPS

In my continuing explorations of the local Unitarian Society, I have found the same repository of human dysfunction as elsewhere in my continuing search for community. For half a year, I’ve been struggling with the concept of an LGBT social group, and in turn, struggling with the personalities critical to forming it. A friendship I thought I had secured while hobbling and homebound from crippling orthopedic issues went south on me once I recovered a sense of expansiveness and hope. Suddenly, at what I termed the ‘formative’ or exploratory meeting of ‘Club Sandwich’, there arose all kinds of problematic concerns not only with my competency to both facilitate and publicize, but also some perceived insult, entirely unintentional on my part. Some people will help you die but refuse to help you live. A very long time ago, while living in what used to be an East Village bursting with life and Bohemianism, I thought of an assumed name: Eve Invisible. Over my years of living alone I’d become inured to being overlooked. This is still something I struggle with. Now too, in the Hudson Valley poetry community, it seems okay if you keep a low enough profile, but if you should begin to attract attention, the issue then is one of perception. I’ve encountered countless ‘in’ groups, both in secular life, political and otherwise, as well as in church communities. People seem to feel more comfortable in conspiratorial relationships, and I never seem to fit in. Ironically, I’ve found some of the most painful exclusions in religious communities, where ideals of compassion and acceptance are touted and proclaimed, and then discarded when, for instance, issues of human sexuality arise. But the parade of attempted and failed attempts at establishing the kind of connectedness I seek are numerous: I’ll go back to the mid ‘60s and both the Lower East side anarchist community as well as New York Radical Women, then the lesbian feminist community, then the arts and music explosion in lower Manhattan in the mid ‘70s, then a succession of church communities: Judson Memorial, Park Slope United Methodist, St. George’s Episcopal, Calvary Presbyterian. Not to mention a singles resort I was involved with for 10 years, first as a paying guest and then as work exchange. Oh, and certainly the Omega Institute deserves an honorable, or dishonorable mention. Anyway, this is how the blog got started. I am continuing to fight my way out of the isolation I sunk into subsequent to my geographical relocation out of the City. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

LET'S GO FOR IT

Recently something happened to me that I thought never would: I became a patriot. In the dramatic pre-election tension between America’s two parties, I began reflecting for the first time on what is involved in living in this country. In the sweep of time since the winter of 2010, it became clear to me that I was too far along in years to settle for uncertainty and conflict, but to arrive at an assertion of my identity as bisexual, I had to withstand enormous pressures pushing against me. Freedom in this country is a much mangled word. In the gibberish we hear from the campaign trail, for instance, we are urged to take a stand and free ourselves up from paying insurance premiums into a nationally mandated health plan. Or we are to be ‘free’ of ‘big’ or too big government. Yet these same charlatans are all to eager to interfere with a woman’s constitutional right to regulate her own reproductive destiny. Freedom, in fact, is a word bandied around like a ball in a sports game. Poor freedom. Never mind the millions of war dead resulting from the last global conflagration to fight for our freedom from the ideology of slavery. If there is any freedom guaranteed to us in these United States, it is the freedom to forge our own destinies. Sometimes this is not easy. We can comfort ourselves in our living room easy chairs and cast ballots, only to engage in consequent bellyaching when we do not have things exactly our way. Many do not understand that we live in the stream of history at least up to our ankles, without even experiencing the sensation of the flow of time and change. Having cut my teeth on the turbulence of the sixties, I build on a foundation of agitation for social change. This too is part of our legacy of Americans. 2012 will be a turning point for us. I don’t believe our current two-party system of government can endure, considering the poverty of the Republican viewpoint. An educated woman, I cannot even bring myself to understand what tradition they are attempting to uphold. Our constitutional heritage guarantees us the right to change our governance if it does not serve the people. Let’s go for it. We don’t need to use rifles.

THE 'WE' QUESTION

At a meeting of the Rock Tavern Unitarian Society’s ‘Covenant Group’ the other night, one of the attendees was freely referring to ‘we’. I began asking a question and was promptly stopped since I was doing so out of order. At the end came a section referred to as ‘Wishes and Likes’, and said I would like it if people indicated whether or not they were partnered, especially if they used that controversial pronoun. As this was my first attendance at this group, I’d not coherently pulled my thoughts together, and was promptly descended upon. I’d also declared myself to be an ‘out bisexual woman’, and had also thrown that into the mix. Oh, I was told, I look at women all the time and my husband is OK with that. Oh, we have no problem declaring our sexual orientation. (I staunchly objected to that one.) One individual said she’d been married but was now single. “That helps,” I said. I don’t like the hierarchical structure of heterosexual society, or even partnered society, if that can be referred to. I’ve been single most of my life, have had to do everything for and by myself, including a not insignificant amount of suffering. I don’t like people slinging around the fact that they have the comforts of a relationship. It’s that simple.

THE THRUWAY STORE

What does it mean to get killed in war? Up in my neck of the woods, culture is much different than in The Megalopolis of New York City. Recently, I journeyed over to a local landmark, The Thruway Store, located in Walden, NY. My purpose was to bring over flyers, six of them, announcing the War Healing Circle being facilitated by the Rev. Chris Antal of the Rock Tavern Unitarian Society. Earlier last year, due to disturbances in my neighborhood, I’d gone to its sports department with the intention of purchasing a hand gun, discovering that it was something of a local watering hole, a convergence of hunters, sportsmen, veterans and others involved in the military. My first attendance at one of the Circles was an extraordinary experience. There were 8-10 of us in attendance: veterans, those active in the military but also including three of us from The Society. I was ambushed with tears remembering my antiwar activism of the ‘60s and took my turn speaking to that. An Episcopal priest was present who’d done much work with veterans. She told of a young man scarred by war. He’d relocated his family in order to make them safe from him, feeling his withdrawal and moodiness could only inflict damage. And she said she could sometimes see the firefight being played out in his eyes before they would once again fall numb and his attention would once again turn to a television screen. I myself have been involved in studying war, and WWII in particular, for about seven years. I don’t know why. Many possible reasons have presented themselves: I was a warrior in a previous life/lives (even though I’ve told I’d been a monastic); since I’ve felt so embattled with the world myself, it makes me feel less alone; but perhaps it’s primarily mesmerized by the cruelty of how we butcher one another, the unfortunate primary way we seem to make history. Or perhaps it’s because for as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted it to come to an end. The first time Rev. Antal came over to counsel with me, he was astonished at my admission that I watched the Military Channel, and then even more astonished at my premise that if society in general, and women in particular, would understand firsthand the experience of being in battle, that there would be a radical shift in consciousness, taking us beyond the ease with which we seem to enter into conflict. Instead of sentimentalizing the returning warrior, we need to reflect deeply on the cutting short of life before it has even had an opportunity of flowering into meaning.