Crazy Girl

Crazy Girl (A Memoir)

“Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Angela Monet

CHAPTER ONE

When suicide is not an option, you can either shove the food down your throat or shove the plate aside and never touch it again. Put on those black velvet shoes; take that walk down the sidewalk as three blocks becomes five blocks becomes fifteen.
Let the scene move you like you’re in a trance. This strange archaic painting. Fall with the leaves rustling in the light. Flick the birds off as they flutter through the air; you're kissing the window with haste. People continue their normal lives, growing up with their pretentious savior, and then they leave home to never look back again. No one knows you; no one ever tried to get to know the strange one in the corner. You know, the shy one who didn't speak up loud enough for anyone to hear. Now she's screaming. Now her ears are on fire. She tells herself; take your pills because death is not an option.


Repeat that mantra to yourself as the skies turn grayer and your skin itches with anxiety and rage. What is it that you feel anymore? With your head down, not wanting to meet anyone's gaze, you walk on. Not that they were looking anyways. Not really.

You continue with a sort of awkward strife. The sun seems to burn lifelessly as you shield your eyes from the glare. You're an alien on planet earth. You're a punished Goddess. You are anything but a human. And you wonder if only those cinematic dreams were true.

Why do people die? Why will there be nothing left over after all this confusion? What will be left of you when you leave. Nothing? Will no one remember you? You aren't that well known, that memory worthy. Most people pay you no mind as they continue on. Pretend she isn't there, they tell themselves.

Yes because once before you sank into that freezing pool of ice, there was something. It was like there was something to believe in. We all had believed in something, but then we lost our minds. Everyone had to be somewhere beneath the surface. Everyone had to bare their knives and shred at our last hopes of a peaceful world. We wouldn’t let ourselves be defenseless to love. We could not be defenseless, we needed to hurt.

Let's pretend there was a written record of every joy, every transgression that individual encountered. Let's pretend these records exist within our hearts. If I had kept a record of all my doubts and confusions, my errors and failures, this would be it. It was overall a rough ride through hell and all places. This is my attempt to capture the story of a metamorphosis. How the crazy little girl grew up to become everything she’d never believed she would.

The story begins in the present. I, the writer, begin to paint a vivid fairy tale of my child-life. I sit here upon this turquoise couch in the living-room while I listen, watching as the dog scratches at her flees and then plops down onto the huge doggie bed. I am listening to 'How I Feel' By Wax Tailor. Yes, it is ironic, as I am trying to pinpoint exactly how I do feel. How do you feel? I feel like a vacuum full of meaningless spots.

Therapists are all about feelings. They love to get into the nitty gritty of emotional torment. Well, it's pretty comical. I should know how I feel, and still have trouble describing it. I feel like a cloud whirling in a cotton candy brain, a star shining piercing light that hums within the chambers of a broken head. Who knows?

I imagine the reader asking. What is your story? What do you have to say to me? I reply then, that I just want to be heard by anyone. I want people to know my life exists somewhere in this wide open space of golden opportunities.

Then I hear the tsk tsk as you whisper through the voice. You poor thing. I wish I could somehow scribble down these colors, make a picture book of my whole story and then never erase it, never let it dissolve. I wish I could just hold the pencil in my hand and scribble a whole universe onto these walls. As we feel along the passages in the ever present ‘now’, I am thinking about a place long before. Let me bring you into a place far away from now.

It was all nothing but a red within the darkness. I’d grown accustomed to being rocked me back and forth in a rocking chair, and then I happened. My hands were tiny as I reached out to grab my father's finger. I remember him smiling at me, overcome with such a joy. We had made a pact when my little hand curled around his finger; you won't let me down, I cried.

I remember it so clearly, being a little ball curled in my father's arms and being carried through the rain up the stairs of a building. I remember smells and colors. Then I remember the faces, and comments. "She has such gorgeous blue eyes!”

I was nearly six months old when I began talking in full sentences. I talked a lot, I guess. I remember sitting at the table and pretending to be like them. I remember it as if those memories never left me, really. I was so home and yet so far away from the rest of the world. I wanted to stay young forever. Maybe I had already been here, and I just couldn’t wait to experience innocence.

My parents were both twenty-one when they got married. Mom was pregnant shortly there-after. When my mom had been ready to give birth to me, my dad had to rush her to the hospital. It was very icy and snowy that year. He had to break the door open just to get in the driver's side. All the way to the hospital he had to hold onto the door to keep it from flying open.

We used to go lots of places after we moved to Pittsburgh; and for me there was always something to do. I remember my dad would take me on walks through the park.

When I was four years old I used to sit on the stairway of the castle apartment and admire the stained glass window with a crack in it. I felt a pity for the crack in the window, and yet it let the light stream into the stairwell like in a fantasy world.

We had neighbors who yelled a lot. I didn't like them using the word "shut up" which wasn't allowed in the house. "Shut up" was a bad word according to my parents.

I was also four years old when my younger brother was born. I remember the day clearly. I was at the apartment with my aunt as she was babysitting me. We got a call from my dad who told us to come there fast. I have an image of when we first reached the birthing place where mom was. My dad opened up the door and had a look of both surprise and urgency. He told us to hurry up and come in.

Inside of the hospital everyone was beaming, and I named a cabbage patch kid after my brother.

When I was seven, I was an ambitious girl who wanted to be a singer and a dancer. I was always looking for an adventure. I often times acted like a tom-boy: watching power rangers and playing with toy cars. I loved going on hikes in the woods and climbing hills. I made up names for places, and in the section of Pittsburgh we lived in had buildings that were over two-hundred years old. There was even a castle-like building; I would go up onto the roof and over-look the world from above.

I was always off in my own separate world. I had an over-active imagination and liked to write stories. I was the mother of two dollies, Samantha and Kelly. Kelly was a Christmas present. She was one of those new born dolls that could eat and wore a diaper. I took to her as if she were the real thing. I practically believed she was alive.

I never liked kindergarten that much. My teacher had poufy blond hair that stuck out on either side. She was always taking off points and scolding me for being late. There's not much I have to say about Kindergarten other than it’s sort of a blur for me.

In the first grade I took part in the school plays at my Catholic school down the hill from my house. I made some friends but I had always seemed to pick out the ones who were weird. For some reason, this pitted me against everyone else. When I had started to become friends with the "Weird kids" everyone else just figured I was weird too.

My teacher was a nun. She was stricter with me because I was a "slowpoke". Sometimes I was so slow going down the stairs that all the other kids would rush by me calling me a slowpoke.

I remember when my dad first walked me to my school in the beginning of first grade. I would run down the long steep hill which led to our house until I got to the stop sign, swing around it three times to gain balance, and then I’d take a left on 13th street towards my catholic school. Sometimes I’d leave him behind and feel bad.

Nearing the end of second grade was when things started to fall apart. My mom was sleeping hours on end. I would come into her room wanting to cheer her up and to do something like we once did. We used to do so many things; she was the one who taught me to write and to imagine so much. We had big art projects, anything I could think of we created.

My dad would always take me to museums and libraries. He even brought me presents when he got home from work at U.S. Steel as a computer programmer. Back then he had to take a bus because we only had one car. My parents had married "young" as they say. They didn't have a formal wedding in a church. My parents had a court wedding.

I thought constantly. I was somewhat mature for being in the second grade, considering that I had thought I would be so mature just to realize I was still so young. I tried to explain my thoughts to my friends but they weren't that enthusiastic. I walked to school every morning from my house. It wasn't a very long walk but I loved walking.

I was excited that I was going to go to the third grade at Catholic School, but at the time my parents weren't getting along too well. They fought a lot about bills, spending money, and I always tried to stop them by putting myself in the middle of it. This usually made them get mad at me. This turned into a never-ending cycle for me, they got mad, I tried to get them to stop fighting, and then they would start saying bad things to me. It was always that they were "having a discussion" and not an argument.

I used to run around my neighborhood, it was like a separate world from the city. Our house was two hundred years old, made mostly of stone. It was a nice house with a basement. I was a little afraid of the basement when we first moved in.

I had made friends with many adults in the neighborhood as well. I would always go over to Jody's house to play darts. I beat her at darts and she said I had a really good eye. I think my talent scared her, as she was the one who taught me.

I don't know what caused my mom's depression. It might have been influenced by a number of factors, she had gained weight after the pregnancy and her feet always hurt from a muscle condition that runs on her side of the family. They were fighting all the time and her feet really hurt.

But mom just wasn't the same. She wouldn't wake up even after I shook her repeatedly. She didn't want to play or talk or anything. I talked to God and I talked to trees. I also had imaginary friends which I had named.

I had a friend in the neighborhood and our parents didn't get along. His mother thought I was a bad influence on him and told my mother that she didn't want us playing together anymore after I had convinced him to run away with me when our parents came to get us. When he described some morbid things about her and she overheard, she thought I had somehow told him to say those things.

Mom saw a doctor who prescribed her Phentermine which would help her weight alongside of Prozac for depression. I remember seeing the bottle of pills and thinking of it as wrong, that she shouldn't take them. I saw them as the evil things that were ruining her life.

Things started getting scary. Mom was very emotional and not making any sense. She would tell me stories about things that had supposedly happened to her in her childhood. Scary things. She would be venting all of these suppressed memories that I thought were real. She didn't know that they weren't. Jim, who she was supposed to marry, was banished from the family by her parents and she was meant to find Jim. He was her true love. She knew things, she was psychic. She told me bad people wanted to prevent her from revealing some future event.

I also have a memory of a story, but my memory is confused about it. One day her father had made her a cherry pie to bring to school and she had forgotten to take it with her. In one instance I remember she said he got mad at her about it. And at another instance he had come all the way to school just to bring her the cherry pie. I think she told me the story twice with different endings.

She had a special box were she had all her special items. She told me that when she was little she had set out a whole selection of pictures down and then suddenly the pictures started flying around the room. "What did your mom say?" I asked "Well she screamed...they didn't believe me...they didn't believe it was magic."

Magic was everywhere, it was my childhood, and now it had become something else to me. Something evil, twisted, it was as if I had become lost to the child I had been. I remember one day she had a bowl full of stones and lit a candle over them.

I walked up to her, and she may have told me to hold my pebble close. She asked me what I saw. I didn’t see anything at first, and then I saw a long dark tunnel with no ending. It scared me. I told her about it, she asked if there was a light at the end. I told her there was a torch so you could walk through it. I never saw a torch or a light. Just a ominous dark tunnel.

Later that night I was in my room and once again I gazed at the crystal ball. I saw a yellow troll laughing and dancing with horns. It scared me. I never saw anything again other than when I looked into mirrors and saw my skin change shape.

My parents were fighting about everything and dad didn't know she was sick...he didn't know it was because of all the pills that she wasn't making any sense.

I prayed for them not to get a divorce. I was sitting in the living room as she stood in the doorway and suddenly announced, "I'm going out."

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm going to fight bad guys."

The funny thing is that I remember dad had been saying it was ok. That she was doing just that, going to fight bad guys. Who were these bad guys?

She ended up at a bus station or so I was told then, the story has changed now. Then she was taken to a mental hospital and stayed there for what seemed like forever. We moved into my grandma's house on my dad's side. I always asked about her, "When is mom coming back? Where is she?" Dad said that she was at a hospital because she wasn’t well. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. So I would ask and ask. It seemed endless, like she was being hurt. He said she was away and that she was sick and needed to get better. "Your mom is sick." He would tell me. “But she’ll be coming home. I just don’t know when.”

"But when will she come home?" I would ask.

"When she’s ready," Dad would say reassuringly.

Finally, in around a month we got to visit mom where she was in the hospital. I never knew why she was there or what happened until I turned seventeen. She used to sing to us before bed. My little brother was her teddy-bear and I was her sunshine. She had written a letter to me and handed it to me when I visited along with an angel penny. She told me on the letter how much she loved me.

At the end of the letter she quoted the song, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine" she was bright and happy and there were wheelchairs. She was sitting in a yellow seat. She was beaming to see us. Then finally, we took her home. But I don't know what happened when she was there, all I know is that she doesn’t talk about it anymore. She told me it felt like electroshock, but I don’t know what happened and the hospital is no longer around.

When years later my dad told me that she had tried to commit suicide, I was in shock. No one had ever once told me the reason she had been hospitalized. He actually thought he had told me when I was young, but he wouldn't have.

He said it so casually that it scared me and hurt me at the same time. I thought she had just lost it because of the Prozac and Diet Pills. The doctor had over prescribed her on Prozac and that's what pushed her over the edge. My mom has said that as well, and then my dad said she was OD’ing on purpose. But I just couldn’t see my mom as someone who at the time would OD on Prozac.

Afterwards, after she had been taken to the hospital, my parents hardly saw each other. My mom got her own apartment in Pittsburgh and my dad moved back to stay at his mom's house. Mom and I would spend every Monday watching a certain TV-show and I made a good friend, Barbara, who lived below in the apartment. Her parents were divorced too, she told me, and she didn't like having to go back and forth. My mom seemed truly happy then but I think she was alone inside.

I had to go back and forth from houses for awhile. I went to third grade at my Grandma’s and hated the school, hated the teachers, and everyone hated me. I got pushed around sometimes but mostly I was picked on by the teachers who dumped my desks and made me write things during recess. The classes seemed to be too hard for me. I had no interest in cells or punctuation and grammar.

I had more fun staying at my cousin's house. We became very close at that age and still are close friends now. We spent a lot of time exploring forests, parks, making up stories. I was still imaginative but also had gained some weight. I began eating more and people called me fat. That Christmas of ‘97 we celebrated at mom's house. We had a small Christmas tree but it was a really special Christmas.

The following summer I stayed with my mom and my brother and I had to go to a YMCA camp while mom worked full time at Goodwill helping with people who had disabilities. That had been her passion, helping people. One person she helped especially was called Joan, a woman who was blind and had trouble talking. She spent a lot of time taking care of her, talking to her, having her at our house.

At the YMCA camp I was bullied a lot. I was called every name you can think of and blamed as if my being white made me a racist. I was punished for repeating things that others said that I didn't know were racist. The majority of the people at the camp were black. There were five white people and the rest of the camp was made up of black kids.

There was this one boy, who was aggressive with me, wouldn't let me sit at his table, always picked on me. I was afraid of him and dreaded going to camp.

The fourth grade was spent in Pittsburgh with my mom at another Catholic school, Immaculate Conception. I joined the choir and did ok in my studies. I still wasn't very good at making friends though. I made some friends, but a lot of the popular girls didn't like me.

Near the middle of the fourth grade my dad came to my mom's apartment asking her to please get back together with him and he wanted us to be a family again. I had prayed a lot to God for them to get back together. I guess my prayers had been answered.

CHAPTER TWO

It was a normal day with a crisp blue sky. Well, normal for everyone else. Not for me. I got out of the car and shut it behind me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just followed them. I didn't think there was a legitimate reason to be there. Thoughts were not really racing through my head, but as my parents led me down the sidewalk I began to feel a gnawing worry.

I thought maybe they would arrest me for my freak out. Yet, it had to be a joke; I knew they could not arrest me for this. I had committed no crime. I also knew that this would not be what you under normal circumstances even call an episode of crazy.

I thought I had completely recovered. I had overcome this debilitating disease. I also had a lot of things going on inside me that I couldn't just shove aside. It was the accumulated snowball of everything I had been through and when all that got tossed aside, the wreckage of my very being became the object of another practical joke.

"This is what crazy looks like!" I smiled and I laughed. "This is crazy!" "Look! Look! Is this what you wanted to see? Am I crazy now?" I was angry. I took her little piece of china and threw it onto the floor and it smashed into a million tiny pieces.

I guess I was. It was a family heirloom of my mom’s from her Aunt Ruth.

I had decided that I didn't need therapy about a year before my episode. Sometimes I wonder if I was just too beaten down and tired out to combat my own demons. When being patronized and pushed into a corner, you aren't really given a choice what to think. When your parents tell you if you don’t smile and behave, that they’ll lock you up, it isn’t exactly pleasant. Of course, I had a record: Fifteen and boarding school, a record of transgressions.

My psychiatrist had told me that I was lucky to have such a nice family. The psychiatrist said that since I thought I was better and I wanted off the meds it was my choice, so she closed the book and out I went. But that freedom didn't last very long.

I entered the hospital lobby, awaiting treatment, meds, the stretcher where I would be strapped onto, unconsciously, to end up someplace else. Who would care what rights might be taken away from me while in there? In that place or was it a place at all?

I wasn't suicidal, I wasn't angry, no it was worse...I was starving for something…maybe understanding. But what would it matter? I knew I was ok.

In the lobby, I sat there and waited. The silence felt surreal and uncanny to me. It was too quiet for comfort. People were mesmerized by the television set protruding overhead from the wall. I sat next to my mom, who wasn’t really saying anything…caught up in her own inner world possibly. It was so disturbing, because it was like not one person noticed me. I felt like I was in a parallel dimension.

“You might be in worse places than a hospital if you didn't have parents like us...out on the street...or in jail!" No, I wasn’t safe anywhere.

"Get in," Dad said then, "I'm taking you to the hospital. If you don't walk yourself I'm going to have to drag you."

I think he was more upset about the antique cup than anything else. The shattered pieces weren’t a pretty site. Even if it was a mistake, girls aren’t allowed to make mistakes and break a family heirloom.

I used the bathroom in the ER. I felt normal, I felt OK. I walked up to the doors and tried to leave. I pleaded with them, practically begging to go home. “I’m ok, see? I’m not sick.” I said. But no one listened. Maybe they were blind.

Of course, then about five security guards came and stood in front of the exit doors then led me through the rooms in the Emergency Doors to where I wouldn't be seen. In the waiting room, they made me sit on this couch staring up into the vents for six hours that seemed to last an eternity.

Where was I going to end up?

My thoughts kept spinning, spinning and disappearing into these ideas of what I was going to be put through in one of those mental wards. Even though I felt terrified...I began to stare up at the vents, intuitively. It felt as though a secret source had told me to look up into the vents. Would this become some sort of coping mechanism for me?

I don’t think it helped.

"You're going to the hospital" He had said. I hid in the pine trees for an hour until I saw his car pulling up. Yeah, I thought, I am fine, I thought…God. I am perfectly fine for the first time and right now here they are ready to take me away

So here I am sitting in the emergency room next to mom waiting for nothing. Staring straight ahead into the nothing. There was a sign on the wall with instructions on the different stages of washing your hands and it seemed ridiculous to me. Would that be irrational? None of it seemed like paranoia. It just all felt incredulous and wrong. The whole thing was making me feel nervously ill.

I tried to remain calm. Why me? Why here? What the hell did I do and why can’t I just get out of here...that's when the fears started to accumulate. Anxiety after anxiety was passing through my mind of what was going to be done to me at the hospital. I had not had a positive experience in the time I had been in the hospital in the past.

In fact, it was a source of my post traumatic stress disorder. But now, even my parents were acting as if it was a punishment.

So I shifted my focus from the sign on the wall about washing hands to the doors of the Emergency Room. As they opened and closed, I thought about mom when she was in jail for protesting School of the Americas, about those doors. The kind of doors you can't open from the insides.

Those doors were prison doors, prison doors for the sick. What kind of doors would they have at this place? People kept rushing in and out in and out of those doors, and no one knew me, no one saw me. No, I was so invisible to all the doctors and security guards and medics and nurses and my parents and my friends at home who didn't really even know me.

It was a deafening sort of feeling. It was completely deafening. I was helpless. At seventeen there was no way they were going to acknowledge my intelligence. At seventeen I was going to be reduced to the level of a thirteen year old. But everyone there was so dull and quiet, and everyone there was crazy because everyone there was walking past and no one even saw.

Well, in times like these when you find yourself in a state of utter isolation and desperation...you may think it's over. It will leave you for a minute, while in due time the memory does come rushing back in. The memory will play out before your eyes, you don't need to see but you will see it in dazzling white colors. It's a beautiful movie; it's the movie of your life. You’re a crazy girl to them now.

Can't they see that I am not crazy! I'm not out of control, no violent maniacal behaviors, no screaming, and no goofy conversations with myself or am I seeing green aliens? What the heck is the matter with me?

I didn't do anything that was wrong! I'm not a drug addict, I don't do anything wrong at all. I'm practically perfect. I'm just sitting here and I am waiting and waiting for what?

I just want to go home, or even just out of this building. But they’re not going to let me leave the building. I'm seventeen, for Christ's sakes you can't just keep me here. Yeah, I may be crazy but that doesn't mean I'm clinically insane! Why the hell are they putting me through all this?

I wanted to get better, like I was, ok so maybe I don’t know what that means anymore. But this is a punishment. I am being punished for being sick. And because I'm not acknowledging that I am sick I am being punished...that's all it ever felt like to me.

Now I’m starting to panic. Thanks for the help, doctor. But I just go back to staring at the poster on the wall. Step 2. Rinse with Warm Water.

So, that's how they'll do it. That’s how it'll happen to me. I see most of the people in the waiting room are watching Martha Stuart's Cooking Show on the television set.

Suddenly my eyes avert to the TV and become transfixed there. I begin imagining what happens in that place. What's going to happen to me?

It begins to become perfectly clear to me. I know what's going to happen now.

I will come back out through these same two revolving doors a completely new person. I will be perfectly organized and utterly brainwashed to love Martha Stuart.

I can see it now...I begin to have these little skits in my head. I am being brainwashed before a television screen, the screen is blank, my ears are ringing, I can't comprehend anything but what they tell me.

I am responsive to their treatment. So I watch the television screen and Martha Stuart is there and as the rest of the world just washes away, all that's left. Yes, that's what they will do...they will force me to watch Martha Stuart over and over again.

Even in my head it was sarcasm. I was utterly helpless and no one acknowledged me. Me. Who was I to them anyways?

They didn’t even bother to sedate me. Well I was so passive. Why be non-compliant when you don’t have a choice either way? Fuck maturity. Let’s just throw her inside an asylum and hope she changes her mind. Or we’ll change it for her!

I had been waiting for six hours just to figure out if I was going to be put in hell or limbo. So I walked into the ambulance, sat down and told the person next to me all about it. I told her all about the abuse I had been experiencing, the bruise my father gave me when I said I felt like he was being sexist. She said she would see what she could do.

When we got to the hospital, I looked up at the big brick building and could only feel my stomach churning. Then I didn’t feel anything but panic crawling through my veins. This place looked like a prison, for sure. I felt so much of that nothing growing inside of me.

They took me in through the entrance into the hospital. This is where they are going to do strange experiments with my head. I don't want to go inside. I can see blue curtains hiding people...people that have been taken hostage like me, but more likely the unluckier ones.

Who knows, maybe I'll make it out alive.

So They make me get onto a stretcher because it is still their policy; and then they wheel me up the elevator and I just give an odd smirk to everyone.

I feel ridiculous and the whole experience is so patronizing. Then I am admitted and led in through the doors. I start to feel better, although still kind of disassociated from all this stress.

Maybe they will try to help me? There are no strange scientists hiding behind these blue curtains or metal bars. But all I want is to be left alone. A sense of calm settles down over me and I feel like I am safe once again. I am to meet with an older woman with blondish hair who fills out paperwork and a questionnaire.

"So, do you have any history of drug usage?"

"No.

The list goes on and on and I guess according to their list of transgression, I’m a Saint.

I'm taken down to the "cafeteria" by two orderlies. One of them gets me a juice box while the other watches over my shoulder. I am waiting to see a doctor for a physical. It’s so quiet and peaceful in there; at length the orderlies come and take me to my bedroom. I crawl into bed, trying to sleep. But they wake me up again.

They gave me an IQ test, which the doctor proudly remarked I had passed with above average scores.

A younger man pulls out a stethoscope and measures my heartbeat. Then, finally, I flop down to let my body relax into the hard bed. As I lay in my tiny bed, I stare up at the vents in the ceiling.

It would a lonely night.

Once again I'm staring into the ceiling, but now I'm completely in the dark, scared, and completely alone with my mind. I begin to think I can hear people outside whispering about me...

"Oh, she is a Schizophrenic."

"Do you know what they do with people like them?"

"Execution..."

"This is so wrong...so terrible."

"Well I tried to argue with them."

"I tried to tell them that she seemed fine to me..."

“She’s a schizophrenic.”

Yes, and I can still see them digging outside my window. That must be where they bury all the dead bodies. That must be what they do with crazy people like us, with people like me. I wish I could wake up from this nightmare.