The American Dietetic Association is heavily corporate funded…yes, these people train YOUR dietician

This was exactly the page I was looking for.  I knew these guys were crooked.  I knew those RD’s (Registered Dieticians) were completely brainwashed.  You can see it in their eyes…the glazed look, the pat answers, sing-song, patronizing voice, talking like they are reading straight out of a textbook.

Here’s the info on the corporate funding, this from Integrity in Science’s website:

http://www.cspinet.org/integrity/nonprofits/american_dietetic_association.html

These “nutrition experts” promote junk food and engineered foods because the ADAendorses these products as healthy.  Why?  Because the organization gets paid lots and lots of money from these “food” giants such as Monsato, king of gene splicing (otherwise known as GMO).

This, my friends, is exactly why YOUR nutritionist is cheering you on when you eat junk food.  This is why YOUR nutritionist is telling you that the ONLY healthy eating is to eat lots and lots of meat, a few glasses of dairy milk a day, and so on.

Never mind that you yourself may be grossed out by meat, or object to eating it for religious or spiritual reasons, or simply by person al conviction.

Never mind that you may have grown up in a family or in a culture that ate meat-free.  This will be completely disregarded by YOUR dietician.  You will most likely be told that eating vegetarian or–horrors!–vegan is actually a form of eating disorder!

What’s next?  Is eating Kosher an eating disorder, too?  Is being really, really scared to have pork in the house something you were taught by your culture, or is it an irrational eating-disorders-based fear?

I recall something in history when the homes of Jews were contaminated with meat that the Jews considered unclean, that is to say, they were completely grossed out and horrified at this RAPE of their homes.  No matter how you feel about the laws of Kashruth, such an act of strewing pork in a Kosher home, in violation of every ounce of conviction that a Jew may have, is disgusting.

The above, the history of the raping of homes of Jews, is part of my history, too.  It is my personal heritage.  I totally “get” why people of many cultures are grossed out, from the bottom of their hearts, by certain foods.

No, I don’t eat Kosher and never have.  It wasn’t what I grew up with in my family.  It was my mother’s choice.  So I’m not scared of pork, but I totally understand why others are.  And no, this isn’t an eating disorder.  This is religion and culture and faith and tradition and memory and family and community.

Hey, Registered Dieticians, how dare you deny us what we believe in our hearts for the sake of an arbitrary, textbook-derived “meal plan”!  Wake up!

This, in a nutshell, is why at eating disorders recovery centers we are forced to eat Lorna Doones, Trail mix that is some national brand of course and full of added sugar and unhealthy oils, Rice Krispie bars, Nutri-grain bars, Oreos, Sun Chips, Lay’s potato chips, Doritos, two other granola bars that are national brands (one chewy, one crunchy, I forget the name), Ritz Bitz, Cheese-Its, Planter’s peanuts complete with oil and salt and probably GMO, and tons of other shit food.  Yes, we were forced to eat this stuff twice a day.  I am not kidding you.

They were teaching us “healthy eating,” you see.

And what were they giving us when we were thirsty?  Chances are, we were denied anything to drink, but if you pressed them, they sure did push the Gatorade…nothing but sugar water and negligible “electrolytes.”   Go to any reliable site on the Internet, or any site about nutrition, and just about anyone will tell you that Gatorade does not replenish electolytes significantly.

Apparently, Pedialyte does, in fact, replace electrolytes.  They shove this up our nostrils.  In 2010, I saw that they were giving me about a quart of pedialyte in my tube.  I asked if we could forgo this nonsense and if I could simply drink it the normal way.

No, they wanted to give it to me in the tube.  That is, they wanted to retain CONTROL.

If I am going to hire, yes, hire, a nutritionist, you’d better believe that I don’t want someone that is brainwashed by big corporations.

There are such revolutionaries out there.  You just have to look for them.  Unfortunately, our Big Business insurance companies won’t pay for people who do not have this RD degree no matter how qualified they are, no matter how much sense they make as opposed to the bullshit crap I was taught at the ED hospital I was at.

Seek out knowledge.  Gain wisdom.  Listen to what your body says.  Act accordingly.   Our bodies have had enough of this hyper-control and brainwashing.  It is YOUR body, not the body of corporate America.  And speak out.

Meditation on Poverty

I just wrote this, and am not sure what to do with it, but here it is.  It came to me in a flash, while lying in my bed, which doubles as a couch.

May 28, Memorial Day, 2012

WHAT POVERTY TEACHES ME: A MEDITATION

Poverty teaches me to make do.

Poverty teaches me that the biggest isn’t the best.  Poverty teaches me that less is more.  Poverty teaches me to think big with my mind.

Poverty teaches me the true meaning of downsizing.  I have learned that it’s easy to get rid of what I don’t want by giving it away.  Poverty teaches me to take pride that I do not need a manicure, pedicure or haircut, nor do I need to adorn my body with jewelry or fancy clothes.  In fact, being poor has taught me that I don’t need new clothes.

Poverty teaches me to laugh and cry when they try to sell me a new TV luxury, such as a satellite dish.  I appreciate the thrill of telling them, “Sorry, no TV.”  When they try to repair a crack in my car’s windshield, I am overjoyed to say, “Sorry, no car.”  Without the car and the TV, I am free.

Poverty teaches me that my little dog is just as needy as I am, and deserves the best.  I cherish this creature. She is sacred.  I need her as much as she needs me.

Poverty teaches me to say, “Yes, thank you,” and also, “No, thank you.”  Mostly, though it teaches me to keep my mouth shut.

Poverty teaches me to accept and love the unwanted, the dented, the scratched, the unbeautiful, and whatever is a little too old, too wrinkled, no longer fashionable, and outdated.

Poverty teaches me to accept and love that which has been cast out by others, that which was used and then tossed aside, and forgotten in the corners of the marketplace.

Poverty teaches me to love the second-hand.  I have learned to hold these things that I have adopted and brought into my household as things dear to my heart, and when I dream, I try to trace their roots.

Poverty teaches me to settle for what others consider second best.  It teaches me to simplify, and embrace what is plain, compact, and practical.

Poverty gives me freedom because material goods give me nothing unless in my mind I am free.

Poverty teaches me to plan ahead, a skill I never had before.  It teaches me to consider priorities and pros and cons, to discern between need and want.

Poverty teaches me to appreciate the government that recognizes that I have a need, but also to question this government, because along with these gifts, I must accept that I will not always be respected.

Because of poverty, I’ve lost friends.  Because of poverty, I’ve gained friends.  God, my inner strength, has always been by my side, even when I have been angry and bitter.

Poverty unleashes my creativity.  How can I get this to last?

In winter, when I struggle in my cold apartment, I love to hear the story of the drop of oil that lasted eight days.  I know that even if I’m poor, though not born in a manger, I can, and will change the world.

Poverty teaches me that there time to think about debt, and a time to set those thoughts aside.  For all my gripes and complaints, the world can truly be a beautiful place, especially now that I have the time, and occasionally, the inclination to sit back and look at it.

I look at the world and I write.  I wring out and extract.  If I am painstaking, what comes out is something money cannot buy.  It is a river of clarity, born of the divine, a glory to behold.

–Julie Greene

Regarding Poverty

First of all, let me say that having to go to food pantries changed the whole way I look at food, survival, and my life as a person with an eating disorder.

I am 54 years old, single and legally disabled.  I am on psychiatric disability.

Last September I spoke with a woman around my age who also suffered from anorexia.  We found that we were surprisingly alike.  She told me she went to food pantries and what the experience was like for her.  She told me how she chose between available foods, and what her reasoning was for these choices.   We had met inside a psychiatric facility and were both being treated for our eating disorders.

When I left the facility, I had a staggering dog boarding bill to pay.   I emptied out my checking account entirely, but this paid for only half the bill.  To date, I still owe a little more to the facility.  Fortunately, I had been a regular there, and of course they love Puzzle, but a bill is a bill is a bill and they have to keep afloat and pay their employees.

So I never really caught up with the bills after that.  For whatever reason, I dipped into my credit card twice for trips to London. The first trip was last November (2011) and I am flying there again in July, 2012.  Both of these trips were to meet with my publisher and other writers around the world with dreams like mine.  I took the plunge because as a writer, I want to change the world, talk about mental illness and eating disorders, and make all our lives better.  Anyway, I’m in the hole.  I might be lucky enough to find someone to have Puzzle in their home while I’m away in July, just keeping my fingers crossed, otherwise I’m further into the hole.

My life is unpredictable because of my eating disorder.  One of my big fears all along has been that I’ll be locked up again, meaning another boarding bill.  This has been a major factor in decisions over the past couple of years whether to go inpatient.  It’s kind of hard to explain to a doctor, “But you can’t section me!  I’ve got a dog home alone!”  Hell, what if I had kids home alone?  It’s quite similar in that we’ve got creatures or people we’re responsible for and can’t just go skipping off to a psych ward to be held for god knows how long.  We have to take into account that getting shipped off to Grandma or to a neighbor or to a children’s shelter situation such as temporary foster care on a moment’s notice is going to seriously wreak havoc on the kids’ lives, let alone give society the message that parents who get locked up, for whatever reason, are unfit.  In the case of Puzzle, I’m fortunate that she is well acquainted with her boarding place, loves it there, and knows what to expect once she gets there.

So again in February, I ended up inpatient, and at the same time, stuff with my family got complicated due to my mother’s waning health.  My brothers have been hostile to me and this situation with them seems endless.  I think it was a few months ago that my brother said he’d done some financial wiggling around, and he offered me some money without specifying an amount.  I hadn’t told him that I needed money, he just offered it out of the blue.  I declined, saying I thought I’d be able to stay on top of the bills and gradually pay them off.  Well, I’m not.  In the month of May I was able to put into my credit card a decent amount, but it got swallowed up by regular expenditures such as phone and Internet.  There’s a cost on there for $40 repeating for six months for an online course I’m not even well enough to participate in, but I have all the materials, so I can do the course in the future.  Still, I’m mad at myself for signing up cuz I sure could use an extra $40 a month.  It’ll only be a few more months, anyway.  Other than that, I pay $10 for a book about once a month on Amazon or whatever if I feel it’s important to have that book and I can’t get it at the library.  If a book is going to help me with my eating, it’s worth it. Anyway, next month I’m not going to be lowering the bills.  They will go up.  My trip in July is paid for…we’ll see about Puzzle’s boarding…but in July Puzzle needs to go to the vet for vaccinations.  It’s endless.

What have I learned?  How to survive like never before.  I cut out everything.  I looked at things as scientifically as I could, trying to eliminate as much as possible.  The obvious stuff was the following:

Membership in the online service E-music got cut immediately.
I stopped going to coffee shops and buying coffee there, ever.
I stopped going to any restaurant or place that sold prepared food.  All prepared food is expensive and you can’t use food stamps to pay for it, let alone tip a food server.  The only disadvantage to this is that if I need to use a bathroom at a restaurant, I can’t without buying their food.  I don’t buy their food, so I have to plan for no restroom while I’m out.

I found myself unable to stop bingeing.  If you have an eating disorder and have been through binge eating, you know how expensive it can be.  Don’t ask me how I did it, but I was able to stop buying first of all anything I had to pay cash for and couldn’t use food stamps.  Dunkin Donuts, for instance, is out of the question, ever.  I ended up cutting out all prepared foods, such as cookies and cakes.  I cut out sugar, because all that sweet stuff was too expensive.  It’s down to bingeing on oatmeal and other quick-cooking grains, pasta, and cans of soup and stuff.  Now and then I buy something like a large tub of generic brand ice cream for maybe $2.50 and wolf that down along with everything else, but not often.  I wish to hell this would stop, but it isn’t.  Not yet.

As to how my eating disorder is otherwise ruining my life, read the rest of my blog.

Anyway, in addition to cutting everything I could, I started going to food pantries.  The many experiences I’ve had at these places have been rather moving for me.  When I’ve come home, I feel like writing about the experience of having gone there, the people I saw, and what went on in my head while I was getting the food.

Everyone goes to a food pantry for a different reason.  You can’t judge and say that this one has more mouths to feed and this one doesn’t, or call a person greedy because they want more than what they’re getting.

Here’s a scenario I invented, that very well could have taken place:

A woman around my age, or maybe older, shows up at the local food pantry and is delighted to find that there is a bag of chopped walnuts sitting there ready for her to take home.  She ends up getting hassled for taking the nuts.  She argues that she needs them for a recipe, but to no avail.  You can live without walnuts, she is told.  You are only allowed one thing from this shelf.  You are taking too much.

She has grandkids.  The grandkids have another grandma.  The other grandma takes the kids to bakeries and ice cream stores.  The other grandma serves luscious fruit salad, tahini and pita bread and salmon and tofu, not macaroni and cheese out of a box.  But our lady hasn’t got the money to take the grandkids anywhere.

It completely sucks cuz the middle generation is very busy telling the kids that one grandma is better than the other because she has more material goods to offer.  The macaroni and cheese that our lady has comes from the supermarket at 88 cents a box, or from a food pantry.  It’s very, very easy to get the kids turned against you.  Our lady feels like shit and her own grandkids call her names, baiting her and telling her that they love the other grandma more.  Yep, kids are cruel, and yep, this happens.

So our lady decides to do something.  She’s lucky enough to get a good brownie mix at the supermarket for 25 cents because the box is dented.  But if she makes these brownies, the middle generation is just going to put her down and tell her they’re from a cheap mix, can’t she do better?  That’s where the nuts come in.  The little special touch that means she’s not going to put up with this shit any longer.

I know what the storybooks say, that a hug means more than brownies with real nuts.  But these are the same storybooks that tell you everyone lives happily ever after.  It doesn’t pan out the way it’s supposed to.  Hardly ever.

To further this scenario, years later our lady ends up severely depressed because she is unwanted, isolated, and neglected.  The middle generation keeps the kids away from her, saying they don’t want the kids poisoned with her negative crap.  She sees them less and less, and when she does, it’s always tough because she’s torn between being honest and being a phony just to keep them from disowning her entirely.  She acts sweet and kind, like everything’s fine, and in doing so, feels like crap.

I guess you could say I’m in the same boat in terms of phoniness.  I am always torn as to whether to act sweet and kind and say I’m doing okay, which is more likely to keep my friends from running away, or tell the truth, risking the end of a relationship.  The storybooks tell you that folks come running to your side when you’re in pain, that everyone loves everyone else, if you’re down and troubled and need a helping hand just call my name and soon I’ll be there is a bunch of bullshit even if Carole King and James Taylor sang and sang and promised that it was true back when I was a kid.  It’s funny how one song can set a standard for what friendship should ideally be.  We used to sing that song with our guitars and long hair and hold hands and stuff and promise we’d write letters.  It turned out that these letters that never got mailed or even written, and to this day, the flowery stationary remains unused.

So I walk around on eggshells with people just to keep them from shutting me out entirely.  Guess it’s better to have a phony relationship than to have no relationship, but I’m not really sure about that.  I could get a TV at a tag sale, watch it for a few hours a day and learn about movie stars and then maybe I’d have something to talk about that my friends could relate to.  I don’t want to spend even five bucks on a TV just to learn how to be boring.  I don’t even want to buy eggs so that I can have eggshells to walk on.  If I have eggshells, I certainly won’t waste them that way, but grind them up to use as a calcium supplement for Puzzle.

Which brings me to the dog food issue.  I never told anyone why I switched Puzzle from dry kibble to real food, or even that I had even done this.  It was part of the whole poverty transformation I went through.  Like I said, I have an eating disorder that will stop at nothing.  I binged on the freaking dog kibble all time.  It was like a knife in my side that I couldn’t take out.  The stuff was gross beyond belief.  I boiled it in a little water, then shoved it into my mouth. Sometimes, I’d add seasoning so it would go down faster.  To stop bingeing at all, I had to get the kibble out of the house.

I figured that canned dog food was grosser than kibble and no way would I eat it, so I switched Puzzle to canned.  The price is staggering for this shit.  Feeding her would cost maybe $90 a month at $3 a can.  I looked for cheaper stuff and found some.

Then, I don’t know what got into me.  I was in the supermarket, totally mesmerized by the presence of the fancy colorful food packages, wandering around like a dazed idiot when I ended up in the dog food aisle and bought three cans of…I really don’t want to admit this…Alpo.  No, I didn’t think I’d go so low as to eat this stuff myself.

It broke my heart.

Three days later it was clear that although Puzzle is the hearty sort, no way could she tolerate Alpo.  Let’s just say her stools told everything.

They tell us folks who have eating disorders that we should learn to stop reading labels.  Huh?  What I learned from reading the label of Alpo Chop House Original Flavor Cooked in Savory Juices changed my life.  I have the can right here.

Water sufficient for processing, meat by-products, chicken, beef, soy flour, brewer’s rice, added color…

Huh?  Added color?  For a dog who supposedly can’t see in color?  Further down the label is says, “Red 3.”

…which explained the red stools, of course.  I told myself no way.  I wanted to wrench my heart out of my chest.  In my mind, I fell to my knees.  I wept, and begged the world for forgiveness.

I guess that was about a month ago.  I’ve fed Puzzle real food ever since.  I got rather obsessed with doggie recipe books and doggie nutrition and getting it just right, but I think we’ve got it down now.   Feeding her is still cheap, because she’s such a tiny dog.  Now and then I spend a whole bunch of time making the tastiest batch of dog food you can imagine.  It is an act of love.  Just another lesson that poverty, and my eating disorder, taught me.

I’m not saying that poverty exists to teach a lesson to the poor.  Poverty teaches everyone.  There is no such thing as deserving to be poor because you were bad, or deserving to be rich because you worked hard.  There is no such thing as “deserved.”

Winning the lottery can ruin a person.  It leads to further gambling, drugs, casinos, drinking, and misery in some cases.  You can give away the money to a good cause, but you’ve still got your feelings to deal with and all the guilt of having received something we’re programmed to believe we don’t deserve, having not worked a forty-hour work week to get it.

Needless to say, I’m grateful for what I learned, and continue to learn.  Yep, I’m in debt, but the numbers on the credit card bill are only numbers.  They don’t cause disease or break bones.  I’ve learned to put these figures out of my head unless I’m doing some budget planning, then I shelve all of the numbers and put the issue to rest.

The other day, some tape recording called me telling me, “Press One to lower your interest rate.”  For the heck of it, I did. A person got on the line, a woman, who asked, “How much debt do you have?”

I said, “I really don’t care to discuss the exact amount over the phone without knowing who you are.  Can you tell me about your program?”

But already, before I even finished this last sentence, there had been a click on the line.  The phone was dead.  Hmm.

When I go to a food pantry, I’ve got my agenda just like everyone else.  No, I’m not trying to be a cool grandma cuz I have no grandkids and no family.  I have an eating disorder.  I’m scared to death of food.  It’s hard enough to get out of the house to begin with, with all the ordeals I go through regarding what to wear, changing clothes over and over because I think I look “fat.” I can recall times that I couldn’t get to the food pantry cuz I was so scared that someone would look at me and think I was a fat pig if I did so much as walk out the door and trudge over to the mailbox down the hall.  But hey, I’d get out sometimes, so long as I was covered in just the right jacket to hide whatever shape my body was at at the time.

It’s called survival.

It gets very scary when I go there, but I now know what to expect.  I pressure myself like you wouldn’t believe to make the right choices.  Scared of this, scared of that, scared to be seen reading a label (though many do), scared to pick something up, then change my mind and be seen putting it back again.  Carefully calculating sizes of containers, and scared to get too much.

For instance, applesauce.  They say you can have a bunch of four-ounce containers (here I remind myself it’s 40 calories if it doesn’t have additives) or one large container.  I get one tiny container and leave it at that.  Why?  I’m scared if I bring home more, I’ll eat it, and I don’t want the calories.

Beans.  Dried, or canned?  Well, duh, dried is the way to go.  I’m scared that as soon as I open a can of canned beans, it’ll all go down the hatch and I won’t be able to stop myself.

Oatmeal.  Sometimes, I give a little to Puzzle.   But it’s fatal to acquire a large container of oatmeal cuz yep, it’ll be gone in a few hours and next thing you know, I’m on a three-day binge.  So when they have those little envelopes and I can get one that’s just plain oats with no sugar, that’s what I get.  One envelope.

One day, I was overjoyed to get a tube of toothpaste.  That shit is expensive.

So I lug this stuff home, knowing that it’s rather obvious where I’ve been.  I see a handful of my neighbors lugging their groceries home from the food pantry, across the street from me walking in the same direction, toward our subsidized housing building.  I try to sneak in the back door and quickly inside if I can sneak through the dining room.  This means no one can be in there.  I mean, surely some former neighbor, these folks that were constantly harping on how thin I’d become only months ago, have a few words to say about my current body state.  The community meals happen in that dining room, and my former neighbors show up for that meal daily.  I work my ass off trying to avoid them, avoid being seen by them, avoid the rude comments.

But last Tuesday, coming home from the food pantry, I found that the dining room was empty.  I cut through, climbed the back stairs, and slipped through a short bit of hall to my front door, unseen.  All the cans and stuff and even meat for Puzzle I laid out on the counter.

I even got herbal tea this time.  Lemon Zinger.  Memories of Celestial Seasonings back in the 70′s.  Pelican Punch.  Roastaroma.  Red Zinger.  Morning Thunder.  Back in the days when they weren’t adding “natural flavoring” to the stuff, when it was all herbs.

I remembered sitting with roommates sipping Lemon Zinger, the latest thing, kinda like Red Zinger, isn’t it?

Yeah, how’s the zing?

Dunno, I’m too stoned.

It’s still a treat.  I rarely drink coffee anymore.  That, too, is just a very special treat.  Less is more, trust me.

When you learn that less is more, a whole world opens up to you.  The biggest car isn’t always the best in the lot. The biggest house doesn’t necessarily have more love in it than the smallest house on the block.  The most expensive education isn’t necessarily the best one for your kid.  And so on.

When you learn that less is more, it can change your life.  It changed mine.

If a food makes you feel yucky, don’t eat it: What’s wrong with traditional eating disorders treatment

Nutritionist at ED hospital:  Julie, you must drink whole milk.  It is part of your meal plan, which, by the way, is exactly the same  as every other patient’s meal plan that ever walked through these doors.

Julie: I don’t like whole milk.  I don’t like the way that it feels in my mouth.  My tummy feels yucky after I drink it, and to me, it doesn’t taste very good.

RD: Your options are whole milk or chocolate milk.  You must drink these.  It’s our “protocol.”  We have a blanket protocol for the entire floor.  This means that even though a “rule ” doesn’t apply to you, you must follow it.

Julie: I tried the chocolate milk and it tastes disgusting. Like plastic or something.

RD: Well, er, we do have soy milk.

Julie: I tried that, too.  The brand you use is disgusting.  It makes me feel horrible after I drink it.  Why should I drink any of these, since they all make me feel yucky?

RD: Your food makes you feel yucky because you are not creditable.  You are sick.  You lack what the established psychiatric community now calls “insight.” We are right and you are wrong. This is always true. We encourage complete compliance. We encourage passivity.  Let us help you and control you.  Let us control all of your bodily functions and watch your every move.  And to prevent unrest, we will monitor your conversations.  See those cameras all over the unit?  See those microphones?  See the staff strategically placed in rooms where conversation between patients thrives? We are doing this in the name of protecting you against this thing we determined is evil, this thing called “triggering.”

Julie: So that’s why you told me to shut up when I mentioned that you can die of these diseases?  Is this why you immediately shut me up when I mentioned the horrors of refeeding edema?  Is this why you shut me up when I told patients that most likely they were being given drugs such as Seroquel not to  help them with anxiety, but to put weight on them?

RD: We don’t want the truth to get leaked out. We don’t believe in informed consent.  All we care about is what you weigh. We are totally obsessed with this number, but we won’t tell you what it is, and we require that we control it and determine what this number is, and that you will never control your body ever again.

Julie:  Hey, I see these starving people here.  Many speak in a manner that is barely audible.  Have you ever wondered why?  We come to you seeking help.  Apparently, your assumption is the helper is the ruler and teacher, and the helpee is stupid, uneducated, incapable, unworthy, inferior, and has bad morals.  Well, let me tell you this: it is this very attitude, an attitude of disrespect, bigotry, and complete totalitarianism that is causing our starvation.  We are hungry for change.  We are hungry for love and acceptance.  We are hungry for common sense, equal rights and equal access to treatment, and full treatment options for all.  It is time to bust loose, tell our stories, and change the world.

The history of my graduate studies at Goddard College: a paper I wrote

I got to feeling nostalgic, so I went through my files and found this paper I did at the end of my graduate studies.  We call this a Process Paper.  These vary considerably between students.  Here’s what I came up with:

Flowers, Books, and the Making of a Dog Sweater:

My Life at Goddard College

 

Another vase of flowers awaited me as I returned to my apartment after the funeral.  I didn’t know their names–I don’t bother learning the names of flowers–let it suffice that, for a change, they meant something to me.  I unlocked my door, set the flowers on my table, and let my aging dog out of her crate.  She peered at me sadly.

I had been brave.  I had survived two wakes on Friday.  Hundreds of people had shown up.  I kept reasonably together at his funeral service.  Yes, I nearly lost it when they put him in the ground and now I’m a damn widow–

I stopped.  I told myself; don’t be so selfish.  Think of the family.  Think of your writing.  At least you’ve got that much.  And you have the dog.

A message on my machine.  I would listen to it later.  I stepped into my kitchen, and peeked into my refrigerator.  Nothing good in there.  In the bathroom, I ran the sink water and splashed cold water on my face.  Oh god I look horrible….

August 19, 2003.  The day my boyfriend, Joe died.  Heart attack.  I had seen him only an hour or so before he collapsed in his elevator.  What would I do?  Joe had been my constant companion, my only companion, for many years.  We had done everything together, from coffee dates to baseball games to romantic dinners, and we’d seen each other through some hard times.  You’d done things to make me mad before, Joe, but why’d you have to die on me?  Why?

I returned to the living room, picked up the phone, then put it back down.  I went through in my mind the things I had to do over the next few days.  I had to go to UMass/Boston to register for my first graduate class: a poetry survey course taught by Lloyd Schwartz.  It would keep me occupied until I was accepted into an MFA program.  I had had my hopes set on eventually attending Goddard’s low-residency program in Vermont.  But now, registering for just one poetry course–going into Boston by subway, and navigating a campus I barely knew–seemed impossible.  If Joe had been alive, what would he have said?  Would he have told me to give up?  No.  But I cannot do this thing.  I am stuck in my tracks without you.

I sat at my table, eyeing the sports memorabilia that Joe and I had collected over the years: bobble-head dolls, mini-baseball bats, cards, and on the wall, a photo of him with my dog, Tiger.  It was one of Joe’s dreams to catch a ball at a baseball game and give it to a child.  He was a ferocious ice cream eater.  We spent an occasional weekend during the summers at his family’s summer home at Humarock, a spit of land between Scituate and Marshfield, Massachusetts, one of the most peaceful places on earth.          One phone message.  I pressed PLAY.  “Julie, this is Paul Selig, director of the MFA in creative writing program at Goddard College.  I’m pleased to let you know that we’ve accepted you into the program, for the spring 2004 residency, which is in January.  The admissions office will send you a letter in the mail in a few days, along with some information….”

I slumped on my couch.  This couldn’t be true.  A dream had become reality, a dream without Joe.  The irony was too much to bear.  I grabbed a Kleenex and sobbed.

 

The winter of 2004 proved to be one of the coldest on record, especially in Vermont, where temperatures reached under 25 below in the mornings.  Being accustomed to Vermont winters–I had lived in Vermont for nine years once–I wasn’t fazed by the weather, but many Southerners at the residency were overwhelmed by the cold, and buildings at Goddard weren’t heated properly, either.  One morning during the eight-day residency we were without power.  Temps in the dorms dropped to the forties.  I ventured to the “help desk” to assist by answering phones.  People in charge considered evacuation of the campus, but fortunately, power returned at 7am.  I jumped from my seat and screamed, “Yes!” with my fist in the air.

Joe was everywhere at the residency.  I wanted so much to call him, to tell him of the beauty of the place, the long, blinding, white walk to the library–I nearly veered off the road and got lost in the woods–and the snow-topped trees.  I wanted to tell him how annoyed I was that the place was not wheelchair accessible, that he would have had trouble navigating the narrow, gravel-covered paths if he were here.  I told him these things in spirit, and was overwhelmed with grief.

I met Kenny, my advisor, who I found was also physically disabled, and I felt an immediate kinship with him.  Advising group was lively, fast-paced, and challenging; the students were bright and on their toes.  Kenny, always with a sense of humor, called me Gail by accident several times.  From then on, I was known in advising group as “Not Gail.”

I wrote up a study plan and reading list, deciding to write about “madness, not what it is, but how it is expressed.”  I was referring to my own disability, mental illness, which for now I kept tucked away, as it had not yet presented itself as a problem.  Books to be annotated included Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor, and twelve more texts.  The plan for creative work was to write short stories and a novella, though what panned out was to become a novel.  I began writing immediately.  Joe, you are right here with me…see how excited I am!

Back home again, I immediately ran into snags with the reading list.  I found One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez painfully tedious, and could not read another page past about one-third of the way through.  I did, however, finish it, and wrote an annotation about Garcia Marquez’s marvelous invention of the “sleeping sickness” in which people forgot absolutely everything.  I confessed to Kenny that I had skimmed portions of The Golden Notebook, and in my annotation clearly stated that I felt that the book was much longer than it needed to be.  Kenny wrote: “I think you mistake length for what is organic and necessary,” to which I replied, “I feel the character centers her life too much on what happens in the bedroom…at her age she should know better….In the “Free Women” section it’s all expository dialogue and could contain more action.”

Finally, though, I found books that I liked, such as Jane Eyre and its complement, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.  Regarding the Rhys, I wrote, “Antoinette is powerless because she is a woman, and has inherited madness from her parents.  It is inevitable and necessary to the narrative that Antoinette should disappear.  She makes sure she has literally and fatally disappeared for good.  Considering this, Antoinette has finally claimed her right.”  I wrote my first short critical paper about two pages of Jane Eyre, dissecting Bronte’s methods of building suspense.

I was so moved by Virginia Woolf’s depiction of the mad Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway that William Styron’s Darkness Visible, a brilliant work in its own right, was somewhat of a disappointment, and this subject I took on in my second short critical paper.  One should “show, don’t tell,” I pointed out–the old adage that isn’t always a steadfast rule.  Here, I brought in The Golden Notebook, stating that Anna Wulf’s lame descriptions of her “anxious tension that [she] could positively smell, like a fog of nervous exhaustion,” noting that here Lessing had said positively nothing.  Yet I wasn’t taking into account the fact that Wulf was an unreliable narrator, that her account of mental turmoil didn’t have to be eloquent, much as Styron’s account was meant to be tamer, more methodical, and more instructional than the wild fancies of Septimus Smith.  I did, in fact, use Styron’s work, and not Woolf’s, for my teaching practicum, when I wanted to show my students examples of descriptions of mental illness.

My creative thesis was moving along at a reasonable pace.  I fashioned my main character, Irma, after my mother, who seems to have some form of ADHD.  The novel takes place at Humarock, where, as it turned out, Irma, then a widow, was time-sharing a cottage on the beach with her daughter, Megan, who has anorexia.  I started the piece in third person, and fluctuated between Irma’s and Megan’s point of view, but then Kenny suggested the switch to first person narration, which I tried and stuck with, though I wasn’t certain it was the best choice.  My creative work was not at all integrated with what I was reading.  This would not begin to happen until my third semester, which was then light years away.  Nonetheless, my writing took off under Kenny’s tutelage; he was very, very quick to point out problems with the building of tension in narrative and the discrepancies in voice and point of view.  Whatever questions he had in his responses, I had to answer in my next process letter, and correspondingly, had to make right in my work.

All along, I knew I wasn’t working up to my potential.  I knew that without Joe’s encouragement, school was a shell I couldn’t crack, a world not my own.  It wasn’t that I was uninterested or bored with school.  I lacked motivation and perseverance, the two qualities that Joe admired me for the most when it came to academia.  I passed the semester, but I didn’t think Kenny was particularly happy with my work.

One struggle I had during the semester was that my puppy, QB took up much of my time.  He was a difficult puppy, and more than once I considered taking him to the behavioral veterinarian recommended by QB’s regular vet.  But I held off.  QB would improve, I reckoned, in time.  Meanwhile, the heartache continued.  I missed my old dog and I missed Joe: what would Joe say about QB?  What would he recommend that I do?

Two days after mailing in my last packet, I was hospitalized in a local psychiatric ward.  Enough was enough–the stress was too much, and my psychiatric disability was getting the better of me.  I came to my second residency with a secret plan to beg Kenny to change my grade for the past semester to an “Unsuccessful Semester.”  Failure.

But Kenny didn’t fail me, and proceeded to write up another difficult reading list for me: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which would count as two annotations, since the book was so long, Grace Paley’s complete stories, stories by Anton Chekhov, Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God, and others.  I found the one teaching text, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, useful during my third semester when I finally wrote my long critical paper, and Kenneth Koch’s I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing to Old People was very helpful when I eventually did my teaching practicum, years later.  And I found the old standard, Huckleberry Finn, to be an eye-opener when it came to inner dialogue, particularly when Huck wrestles with himself as to whether to turn Jim over to the authorities.

At my second residency, I was fortunate to have a wonderful roommate, Jennifer Rumford, who would subsequently become my mentor throughout my schooling.  Although Jennifer was a semester behind me, she graduated before me, and guided me along the long road toward graduation, always supportive, always there for me.

During my second semester, I couldn’t pull together the required long critical paper, nor could I successfully plan a teaching practicum.  Academically, things weren’t looking up for me, and in October, I was hospitalized again.  The grief was too much to bear.  I was able to get an extension on the semester.

I chose to attend the January residency, and was lucky enough to get permission to do so from Paul Selig.  Unfortunately, I developed a bad cold while I was there.  One night, while I was in the throes of a fever, Joe appeared to me in a dream: He was grinning. “You should see this place!” he said.  “The food is great, and they have shows every night!”

I did finish up the semester, in March, by the deadline, but barely.  One packet contained only four annotations and no creative work.  Another packet contained creative work but no annotations. It was all I could muster.  Kenny passed me.  I don’t know why.

I spent the next year in and out of the hospital.  The social worker and nurses there told me that I should give up hopes of ever returning to Goddard, and that I should attend a mental health day program, where I would attend “groups” all day long from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon.  I also enjoyed knitting, so they recommended a knitting club.  These would provide the “structure,” the social worker said, that, according to her, Goddard did not provide for me, “and will give you something to do with your time.”  I argued that though the program at Goddard did not have “classes,” it had provided “structure” and I was certainly busy with it.  I became angry and despondent.  There was one nurse who was on my side, but there was little she could do to change the status quo.  “Just don’t give up hope,” she said.  “I, for one, think you’ll make it back to school.  Something has to give, somehow.”

I left the hospital feeling hopeless that I would ever improve, but something did change, suddenly and significantly.  I was put on a new medication, Topamax, and that changed everything for me.  I was able to write again and concentrate.  I began a blog, and wrote regularly in it.  I wrote furiously, and it became an outlet for creative expression for me.  After the renovations were complete on the local library, I began studying there every day, writing in my blog, and gradually the quality of my writing improved.  At last, I decided to take writing courses at the Boston Center for Adult Education, with writer Toni Amato, and finally, made the decision to return to Goddard at last.  I had rediscovered myself as a writer, no longer writing fiction, but creative nonfiction as I was writing in my blog, and I took my writing very seriously.

It was then that I made the very difficult decision to abandon my first thesis, the novel, and go on with another thesis, a work of creative nonfiction.  The novel was doomed to failure anyway.  Why?  It was because my character, Irma, was based on my mother, first of all–and secondly, it was because Joe was everywhere in my thesis.  The story took place at Humarock, and Irma’s husband was dead, and his absence filled my pages like the grief I felt over losing Joe–and my father.  I was not ready to write about Joe–yet.

My decision to change campuses came to me in a flash.  I knew I needed a “geographical cure.”  I needed a smaller situation, where I would know more people and not get lost in a crowd.  At meals at the Plainfield campus, I had generally eaten alone.  No one had bothered to sit with me.  They all had their own friends and their own little cliques, sadly.   And when I examined who was on the faculty at Port Townsend and saw the name Aimee Liu, I knew I had to make the change.

July, 1981.  I was in the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, perusing the paperbacks, when one caught my eye.  I liked the title: Solitaire.  Didn’t that describe what I was doing with my life, playing against myself, constantly worrying about my weight, my body, restricting my food intake to the point of starvation?  I glanced at my bony hands that shook as I held the book.  “One young woman’s triumph over anorexia nervosa.”  And what was that?  Some kind of cancer?  I opened the book to a random page: “Already I’m as thin as Twiggy.  Kimmy’s mother is so concerned about my weight that she’s offered to send along an extra lunch to school each day for me.  I graciously decline….I will eat nothing for dinner for a month….”  I had to buy this book.  And it was not from some therapist, nurse, or psychiatrist, but from Aimee’s book that I learned that I had anorexia.  So when I saw the name Aimee Liu on the faculty at the Port Townsend campus, I took it as a sign of good fortune: I would switch campuses.  And although I never worked with Aimee directly, I always felt a special connection with her.  I felt as though she was looking out for me the whole time I was there.

I arranged with Paul Selig that I would come to Port Townsend as a G2, and subsequently complete four semesters, including a G5 semester, totaling six.  And with two extra years in the middle (it would be two and a half including another semester I took off) my entire schooling took five and a half years instead of the expected two years, which isn’t bad considering it took me nearly three decades to finish my bachelor’s degree.  I would attend a total of three residencies in Vermont and five residencies in Port Townsend, plus my graduation residency–nine in all.

Something tragic had happened, in the meanwhile, that would color my thinking every day of my life afterward: QB had become aggressive.  After a lengthy ordeal and sessions with the behavioral vet, a Prozac trial, and biting incidents, I had to put him to sleep.  I have thought of QB every day since.

Though I love airplane rides, it is traumatic to fly across the country to a different coast and a different time zone and climate.  Though I came prepared with the right medications, clothing, school supplies, and books, I was still overwhelmed because I was in a new place, Fort Worden, and my mental illness flared up every time I came to the Port Townsend residencies.  I found myself wishing that I could call Joe, and I imagined his gruff voice, reassuring me on my cell phone–but I was on my own now.  Thankfully, I had wonderful roommates, and the general atmosphere around campus was caring and supportive.  I was never completely alone at the residencies–there was always someone to help.  At one residency, I was so doped up on one of my medications that I fell asleep in most of the classes, but thankfully people were understanding and kind, and somehow, I survived it all.

For my first two Port Townsend semesters I studied under the tutelage of Paisley Rekdal, who patiently guided me through the beginning stages of my new nonfiction thesis and some very interesting literature.  It was serendipitous that I would start out with Lauren Slater’s Welcome to My Country, because this book formed the backbone of my study of literature for the four semesters I spent at Port Townsend.  I identified strongly with the narrator, who had been a chronic mental patient and then had become a writer.  Slater writes about her work as patient-turned-psychologist.  Eventually she worked in the same hospital where she herself had been hospitalized.  Later, in my G3 and G4 semesters (fall ’07 and spring-fall ’08) when I did my teaching practicum, I experienced first-hand what it was like to break out of the role of “patient” and become “staff,” as Slater had done.  This book was also the case source for my long critical paper, “Traditional Narrative Structure in the Narrative and Non-Narrative Essay,” that I wrote during my G2 (spring ’07) semester.  I made a vow to myself that after I graduated, I would write to Lauren Slater and thank her for writing this wonderful book, explaining its significance in my studies.

My creative thesis was underway.  I started writing immediately at the residency, a piece about my very first admission to a hospital, a chapter which became the main story of my thesis.  I later called it “A Forgotten Line,” because in the chapter I forgot lines from the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer that, as a Jew, I am not supposed to know, anyway.  Because I was writing my creative thesis about my mental illness, I found Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression a particularly helpful book, because of Solomon’s lucid descriptions of his own and others’ depressions.  I also attempted to write a story about my dog, QB.  It would take three attempts to finally get this chapter right, but not for another year and a half.  I read poetry by Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, essays by John D’Agata, Joan Didion, Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, and Annie Dillard, and Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures: and Other Reports from My Life With Autism.  Susan Griffin’s What Her Body Thought: a Journey into the Shadows had particular influence on me both at the time and later on.  I asked myself how Griffin could take two seemingly unrelated stories and weave them together, integrating them and finally bring both to a single climax at the end of the book.  I wondered if I could possibly do something similar in my own work.  I attempted this in miniature in my essay, “Pro Re Nata.”  Later, I chopped up my thesis as a whole, and kept it that way, combining stories woven together to form a climax toward the end of the book.  I knew I had always wanted to write like Susan Griffin; and there I was, living that dream.

My long critical paper, upon which I finally put the finishing touches in the beginning of the fall ’07 G3 semester, used Welcome to My Country and the essay “In Bed,” from Joan Didion’s The White Album.  I wanted to show that the essay can have a climax, and can build in tension and in fact be built in traditional narrative structure.  I framed my paper using John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.  Perhaps it was with a touch of sadness that I included Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “He and I,” about Ginzburg’s relationship with her beloved husband, which I had studied as an undergraduate at Emerson College while Joe was alive.

The other pieces I wrote that semester other than the beginning of “A Forgotten Line” include “Illness” (a piece I scrapped much later on); “Hunger,” a piece about hunger for love, God, and thinness; “At the Crossroads,” a piece about my attendance at a day treatment program; and “Pro Re Nata,” a piece about my stay at Metropolitan State Hospital and also about coping skills, which I reworked many times.  Hunger has gone through countless overhauls until it arrived at its present condition.  I also wrote a few short pieces about the drug Thorazine, that I did not use in the book.  A portion of “At the Crossroads” was published later in Swamp Magazine.

Around the time of my fourth packet, I my mental illness surfaced for a brief time.  I described the problem as “Evil Beings that lived in my head,” and the word “hospital” popped into my head–and my therapist’s head as well.  But this difficulty passed, and I wrote in my process letter to Paisley:  “It is incredibly difficult to write while my thoughts are totally scrambled.  In a future creative bit, I’ll write some about what that’s like.”

During my G3 semester, I wrote three pieces that were of publishable quality but did not belong in my thesis, Paisley and I decided.  These were “Lenses,” “Consumers,” and “It.”  The latter was about Joe, and was a very private piece.  “Consumers” was later published twice, in Pitkin Review and Breath and Shadow.  Paisley asked me to consider seriously what my thesis was about, and decide what to write based on what was needed, so as to avoid writing unnecessary pieces (though they may be quality works).  I agreed wholeheartedly that this was essential to my work, and that perhaps I should give my creative thesis a title, but I did not title my work until my G5 semester!  I also wrote “Noid,” about paranoia, which I scrapped, because it wasn’t very good, and I wrote “Locker #47,” “Walking the Line,” “Kohlrabi,” and another unsuccessful attempt at the QB story.  Kohlrabi was a two-page experimental story that was successful right away, to my good fortune.  I did not have a complete draft of “Locker #47” until the end of my G4 semester; it is about my high school life.  “Walking the Line” is an experimental piece about my illness later in life.  The piece went through countless revisions and edits even after I finally had a draft at the beginning of my G4 semester.

During my G3 semester I read memoirs by Lauren Slater, St. Augustine, Nick Flynn, and Lawrence Sutin, poetry by C. D. Wright, and short stories by Amy Hempel.  The high point of my reading for the semester was Michael Klein’s memoir Track Conditions, in which he described himself as a reckless man, doing things that could make him a very unlikable character–getting drunk, stealing a car, sleeping around–yet because of Klein’s love for horses and his general appeal as a character, I found myself rooting for him, wanting what he wanted, and even getting mad at him for making stupid mistakes.  My dream was that someday readers would react similarly to my work, and get mad at me, too.

October 2007.  _____Hospital, psychiatric day program, _________, Massachusetts.  I stepped into “group” as “staff,” not as “patient,” for the first time.  I wore a badge that had my name and photo on it and the word “volunteer.”  I was dressed up sort of.  I held my notes in one hand, a pencil in the other.  We sat in the circle.  My co-leader, J—, began, as she would every week: “This is Julie Greene, she is a student at Goddard College, and she is going to be doing a writing group with all of you….”  The students were attentive.  Some wanted to write.  Some did not.  The challenge was to keep them all engaged for the entire 45 minutes, and it wasn’t easy.  Gradually, I became less nervous and learned to be flexible and to trust my instincts while teaching, to be totally prepared yet “go with the flow” and let the class take the lesson to wherever they wanted it to go.  One exciting part of teaching was watching every single pencil scribble on the page during freewrite time.  And of course it was always gratifying to hear people share their works.  What amazed me most, though, was the role-reversal.  I no longer had to knock on the staff office door to enter.  I could hang my coat in their closet.  Heck, I was staff!

In class, I used exercises suggested by my faculty Elena Georgiou and Jane Wohl and Goddard College, and Bill Holinger at Emerson College.  I used quotes from William Styron and Andrew Solomon.  I also used a song, “Lithium,” by Amy Lee and Evanescence, in one of my classes:

Lithium, don’t want to lock me up inside.
Lithium, don’t want to forget how it feels without

Lithium, I want to stay in love with my sorrow.

To illustrate mental illness, in my teaching essay, to those who didn’t understand what it was, I quoted Elyn Saks’ The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, and Vaslav Nijinsky’s Diary.

The next semester (G4, spring ’08) proved to be a rough one, and after the first packet, I chose to drop before the add/drop period was over.  I tried to understand the packet response that my advisor, Beatrix Gates, had written for me, but I was too depressed to decipher anything.  Everything seemed so flat and lifeless.  Still, I remembered the nurse’s words, “Just don’t give up hope.”  It was ironic that shortly after, my doctor put me on the drug, Lithium, and I was so doped up that I only woke up to do my teaching, and slept for the rest of the week.  It wasn’t until months later that I was able to comprehend Bea’s packet response and revise my work.  I came to the next residency and could barely get out of bed each morning, and slept through many of the classes.  I took myself off the drug the following August, against my doctor’s advice, and woke up.

This time, I had another, more productive G4.  I was now working closely with Dvora Zipkin, Goddard’s new disabilities specialist.  Our weekly phone calls proved invaluable to me.  We set up study schedules and modified them as I became more proficient at my work.  From then on, I worked closely with Dvora, and I can truly say that I would not have made it to graduation as smoothly–or at all–without her.

Now, with Bea as my advisor, I revised previous works and wrote some new material as well.  I wrote “Going Back,” “Jungle,” “Connections,” “The Farm,” and “Colors.”  These were short chapters.  I also finished and revised “A Forgotten Line,” “Locker #47,” “Walking the Line,” and “Pro Re Nata.”  At last I was able to write a successful version of the QB story, called simply “QB.”  “Connections” was a piece based on Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary, asking the same question Slater asks: What happens to the creative process when a person recovers from a mental illness?  Then, I read Kenny Fries’ The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory and it blew open my whole creative thesis.

Why?  Kenny tells his stories in order, but they alternate.  The whole book is done in such a way as to leave the reader hanging at the end of every story.  I wanted to do this, too.  I kept in mind Susan Griffin’s What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows, too.  Griffin cleverly intertwines several stories in the book and then brings them together to a terrific climax at the end of the book.  The connection seems far-fetched at first but gradually, the reader catches on, and when the reader realizes the connection, he or she also reaches an epiphany just as the book climaxes.  Fries does this, too, by lining up the most climactic chapters back-to-back (his are divided into short chapters; hers are mostly divided into sections within larger chapters).  I wanted this for my own work.

So I chopped up my thesis, in hard copy, and put it back together, in “braided” fashion, like my hair.  This was painstaking work and involved the use of a notebook, lots of printer ink and paper, a paper punch, and a large table.  Not long after, my chapters were spread out all over the furniture.  Soon, though, I realized I would have to make an outline, and this would simplify the task.  I wrote an excited e-mail to Bea explaining my intentions.  To my surprise, she didn’t write back saying I was nuts.

I came to my last full residency in February 2009 excited–and a little scared–about the coming semester.  As usual, I struggled with the rigorous residency schedule, but frequent contact with Dvora, planning out how I would take care of my basic needs, and which workshops I would attend, kept me on track, and the residency panned out with very few hitches.  I sent off my manuscript–then titled Forgotten Lines: For an Occasion as it Arises, the subtitle coming from the definition of the Latin “pro re nata”–to my advisor, Darrah Cloud, and to Bea, now my second reader, to arrive February 25 instead of the assigned March 16 packet due date, because I had it ready, and was especially excited to get started on revisions!

In the meantime, I crocheted a sweater for Puzzle, my dog, a project I had been working on while on the plane to Seattle.  (I always had a needlework project to keep me occupied on the airplane.)  Then I took a leap, and began a new book–about my six years at Goddard, beginning from the moment I was accepted, and ending at the projected graduation date.  What was most exciting about the project was my plan to use my first creative thesis, the short novel, embedded in the memoir!  This, Joe, would be the book for you.  Excited about the project, I finished seven pages–then Darrah’s feedback arrived March 3.

What Darrah requested was simple: the old adage “show, don’t tell.”  What was summarized had to be fleshed out with scenes, she said.  This had to be done especially in the essay, “Hunger,” but also in some of the narrative chapters as well.  I was summarizing too much.  There were places where I was too vague, and the reader was confused about which hospital was which.

I attacked the manuscript with fervor as I had never had before.  The schedule I had set up with Dvora allowed for two hours’ study in the morning, just over an hour in the early afternoon, and two hours in the later afternoon.  Instead, I found myself working all day, usually over seven hours a day, on the manuscript.  After 17 days, I had added 7,000 words, and I had 144 pages of the revised manuscript.  I wrote to Darrah, and she asked me to send the first 50 pages.  Darrah responded by telling me, among other things, to make one of the villains “meaner.”  I turned to my journals for ideas, and added yet more text to the manuscript.  Finally, on April 17^th, I made the last chapter addition to the manuscript: “Pool,” an experimental chapter, in which the villain forces me underwater, and holds me there.  My first draft was 47,000 words long.  I now had 62,500 words, and was on my way to completion of a third draft.  I sent Darrah about 65 pages in my third packet.  She explained that my entire manuscript was centered around the theme of hunger, and that I should follow this theme.  This was very, very important.

But I had run into a snag.  My mental illness was sneaking up on me.  I had begun to starve myself.  As time went on, I ate less and less.  My concentration, mood, and motivation suffered.  I nearly fainted on several occasions.  The same theme that ran through my thesis was now eating at me.  As I had written in one of my chapters, “My hunger was secret.  My hunger was special.”

Why now?  Did I not want to leave Goddard?  The eating disorder had submerged me many times before, notably in 1981, when it caused me do drop out of school one semester before graduation; I would not let it push me underwater again!

No matter the reason, I had to take action.  What would Aimee say?  What would Joe say, if he were alive?  I recalled the time he wheeled onto the unit at McLean Hospital, when he was visiting me there, with a brown paper bag in his lap.  “I know you can’t stand the hospital food,” he said with a grin, “so I’ve brought subs.  Meatball and tuna.   I want you to eat the meatball right away, while it’s hot.  Don’t argue.”

I made some phone calls, and arranged a meeting at a local eating disorders center, where they made some recommendations.  I worked closely with my therapist and my primary care physician.  Dvora, too, had some excellent advice, explaining that one never truly leaves Goddard.  I asked for support from my friends and my brothers.  I petted Puzzle–a lot.  And I wrote.

And it was through writing–and leafing through some old Goddard papers, that I came across what I had written semesters ago: “In a future creative bit, I’ll write some about what that’s like.”  What did this mean?  Of course I knew what it meant!  Someday, I would get through this, and gain perspective on it, enough to be able to write about it.  It would pass.  Somehow, the starvation would end.

But I was scared.  I was worried that my therapist would hospitalize me.  I made up my mind that I would mail in my thesis on the seventh of May.  I had three days.

I set goals for myself. I worked extensively on “Pool,” which had become a poem. I plunged into my chapter, “Hunger,” and made numerous last-minute changes.  I read a fair portion of the manuscript out loud to myself, and was surprised at how smoothly it read.  At last, I mailed in my thesis, completed–twelve days before the due date.

In 2005 and 2006, when I took time away from Goddard and was hospitalized, doctors and social workers had told me to give up on the idea of ever returning to graduate school, and to attend a mental health day program and join a knitting club.  I have, in part, taken that advice: I have indeed done plenty of knitting.  I knitted many, many sweaters for my little dog, Puzzle.  I knitted these sweaters to pass the time during my trip from Boston to Port Townsend, Washington, to attend the Goddard College residencies.  Today, Puzzle wears these sweaters without a thought, but to me they symbolize not only a journey, but my refusal to give up, my defiance of those people who were supposedly treating me, the very same people who doubted my ability to succeed.  Well, I have succeeded.  My thesis has been accepted.  On July 12, 2009, I will have my degree at last.

When I graduated from Emerson College, my undergraduate school, Joe was right there beside me.  If he were alive, he would be attending my graduation for certain, despite the travel difficulties that his physical disability may cause.  But he will not be at my graduation physically, or the graduation banquet; I am assured, however, that he is enjoying a great meal in Heaven.

Of course, I am very apprehensive about what the future may hold.  But I will continue to revise my creative thesis, now titled This Hunger Is Secret, and work on my new book, which begins with a vase of flowers.  I unlock my door, greet the dog, and pick up my message from Paul Selig, with news that will change my life forever.

 

Julie Greene

May 31, 2009

Guess what

I might as well say this and make it public.

In August 2010 a bunch of women whom I thought were my friends flat out dumped me.

You know who you are.

You said it was for your own protection, that I was driving you insane, causing unrest in the group.

We used to talk about how wonderful it was that we stuck together and supported each other.  A lot of talk about our group being a lifesaver to each one of us, a safe place where we can share and talk.

You repeated over and over to each other about how necessary it was.  How right it was.  You justified what you did and convinced yourselves that what you did was just fine.  Smoothed it over.  Phew!  She’s gone!  Only the best of us are left!

Well, heck, it wasn’t fine at all.

The truth is that you are just like me.   Mine just ended up differently.  You didn’t like that because maybe you saw what you inherently are.

Let’s face it: You folks think about your weight all the time.  Controlling your weight has been central in your lives.  It runs your life.  You are out of control.  You talked about it nonstop.  And you probably still do.  Take a good look at yourselves.  While you’re at it, take a good look at your destructive behaviors around food and weight.  Look at the money you’ve spent on weight-loss schemes, clubs, exercise equipment, special food, crash diets, cleansing diets, lots of pills, therapy, new clothes, new resolutions, even surgery.  I’m sure you’re all still chasing your tails.

Maybe, just maybe, you thought you’d have an easier time losing weight if you got rid of me.  Maybe your toxic friend was keeping you fat.  Clean out the garbage in your life so now you can stick to your diet properly.  Maybe you were so desperate to lose weight that you picked a scapegoat and did an act that if you look at it, was destructive and sick.

And you’re having a hard time forgiving me?  What the hell for?  I think I’m the one that’s having a hard time forgiving you.

I wish it never happened.

Even more about therapy

Okay, say you are really desperate and you’ve tried everything else and by the time you finally end up in one of these people’s offices you are truly at the end of your rope.  I guess a lot of people find themselves in this situation.

Chances are, the therapist will want to know some background information about you.  Some therapists spend an entire session on this information-gathering.  Save a bit of time and get the insurance numbers and data like that done over the phone, so that the time isn’t wasted doing this in the session.  It’s coming out of your pocket, after all.

So right now I see a problem because a desperate person has walked into an office and has spent 50 minutes talking about some dead aunt’s history of heart trouble, while nothing helpful has happened, and the desperate person needs to wait yet another week to…

Cry.  This is what most people tell me they do when they start therapy for the first time. They let it all out.  Finally there is someone to talk to.

Often, this is all a person needs.  Just to let it all out, and move on. Crisis over.  Therapy ended.  Actually, this was what I expected 32 years ago when I walked into my first therapy session.  Guess what?

Maybe this was where all the family history, etc paperwork came in handy.  It gives them a chance to size you up in a legal and practical sense.  I’m sure that when I first filled out these papers, they were filed away and never looked at even by a secretary.  When you go to a doctor’s office, someone who doesn’t already know you, you get three pages at least of papers to fill out.   Does anyone look at theses papers?  Probably not.  But your therapist will dig up the forms real fast when something legal has to be done, so be careful what you write and what you sign.  Think about what it means for your therapist to talk to your other providers and your family members.  You may or may not want this.

When I first started therapy, what did the therapist see?  What did the agency see?

I think these are two separate things, though I am clueless as to how this agency worked back then.  My therapist was rather open-minded and listened well.  I am wondering if the agency saw some kind of contradiction with the fact that I was a Bennington College student and had come to the county clinic instead of going to the school’s student mental health services.  I didn’t fit in with their clientele, according to the stereotype.  I was a Bennington Girl, and therefore rich, and on top of that, Jewish.  I had gone to the clinic stating that I had no income and very little money to live on.  Undoubtedly, they were thinking that if I stuck around, they’d rope my wealthy and unsuspecting parents into the situation.

They tried to do this later on.  I left town and came back and returned to the same therapist.  Then they switched me to another.  This guy was abusive.   I wrote about him before on here.  He was the one who smoked during our sessions non-stop and belittled me.  It was horrible.  He insisted that my family drive three hours to have family therapy with him.  With this guy?  I knew I didn’t feel good about my family, but I wasn’t going to punish them by subjecting them to this guy.  My brother is allergic to smoke besides.  Also, I was embarrassed to admit to my family that I’d fallen for spending even one session with him because he was clearly incompetent.

So, yeah, the papers.  He kicked me out of therapy saying if he couldn’t help me, no one could.  Maybe I didn’t need therapy, he said, but he said if I was not willing to get my family involved, forget it.  I got worse and worse and ended up at the hospital, more desperate than ever, at the end of my rope.  Guess what this agency did?  They called my parents, blew my confidentiality and told them I had shown up at the emergency room, and told them to “come bring her home to mommy and daddy where she belongs.”  I had not given them permission to contact my parents, nor did they tell me they were going to do this.  Actually, I let them know right away that I didn’t want my parents called.  I finally managed to fire these people, pointing out that they had broken the law.  I believe it was the head doctor who had made the actual call, and he was the one whom I confronted.  He admitted fault.  They had gotten my parents’ number off of the form I filled out way back when.   Emergency contact, I guess.

Of course, the hospital didn’t want to give me free care, which was my right, and so they wanted me out of there, but legally, they had to treat me.  I was in pretty bad shape.  This was why they played the parents card.  Bring her to another hospital, not ours.  Some hospital for rich Jewish girls.

And so on.

It’s sad that the health care industry has to size you up in terms of money.  This seems to take precedence over getting actual treatment from them.

Another example of this is when I went to a dentist about a year ago.  I put on the form that I could get my family to help pay what Medicaid didn’t cover.  Huge mistake.  I went in to be examined and they said it would be a kazillion dollars, which I said I didn’t have.  They said, “Go home and ask your mommy.”  This was in 2011 and I was 53 years old.  I was pissed.

I phoned back and said I had no intentions of asking my deaf and elderly mother, whom by the way I did not live with, for money like that.  I said that I meant “within reason,” like under fifty bucks.  These people wanted thousands.  I said I would prefer to have the tooth pulled, which is covered under Medicaid.  Turns out they had assigned me to the non-Medicaid dentist.  Huh?

Be careful what you tell people about family and money because if if they think there is any money lurking around, you will be treated differently and offered a different fee scale and charged differently.

See, this is half the reason I bopped around the mental health system for 32 years.  If I’d told them I was an orphan, they would have had me into that first session, and I would have cried, and I would have done that a bunch of times, and maybe all this would be behind me now and forgotten.

And if all that was forgotten, I wouldn’t be here writing this, would I?  Wow, we are blessed.

 

More about therapy

I have seen people after their upsetting therapy sessions curled in fetal position with their heads buried, completely unresponsive.  I suppose this is called “time out”?  What happens to these curled-up people?  Does the janitor sweep them up at the end of the day?

I have seen people leave therapy sessions saying that the topic of discussion was very upsetting and they can’t stand it anymore and it turns into a huge crisis situation and you can guess where they get shipped off.

Let us not forget all the therapists whose egos are tripled when they discover, upon return from vacation, that half their patients couldn’t cope on their own and hospitalized themselves.  Think how great it must feel for the therapist to be so needed and wanted and loved.

I have had therapists who have enjoyed this power.  When I suggested to these therapists that perhaps having power and control over me, and making claim that they and they alone had the amazing ability to cure me (but if it didn’t work, it was my fault and mine alone) was feeding into their already inflated egos, they invariably flew into a rage.

Those days are over.  I am outta here.

A lot of people stay in therapy because it keeps them unhappy

Just about everyone I’ve talked to who has been helped by therapy has experienced therapy as something with a beginning, middle, and end.  The people I have talked to who expressed the most dramatic change, I’d say, were in therapy for a period of six months to two years, and then stopped.

A lot of people have told me things like, “I can’t live without my therapist.”  Every single person whom I’ve heard say this has ended up in the hospital.

I’ve also heard things like, “My therapist keeps me out of the hospital.”  These people usually end up in the hospital as well.

What I am seeing is that “therapist” is defined differently for people who are labeled “mentally ill.”  The therapist is seen as someone who is life-sustaining.  Many people who do not have the label also see their therapists as life-sustaining.

Insurance will pay for a lot of therapy if the company can be convinced that therapy will be life-sustaining for the patient. So the label comes in handy here.

If the patient is self-pay, the cost of therapy is generally very high.  Very few places go on an affordable sliding scale nowadays.  I have asked therapists about their fees, which run from, say, $90 to $120 or higher per 50-minute session.  “Sliding scale” generally means half price.  We’re still talking one heck of a lot of money.  Still, folks shell out bucks for this if they can be convinced to keep coming back.  Tell them that they have a label and it will be a lot easier to convince them.

There are many possibilities from hereon in.  You can live the label.  Or you can live your life.  You can depend on your therapist to keep you alive.  Or you can choose to keep yourself alive.

If you are considering psychotherapy, here are my suggestions:

If you are in the process of starting up, have a goal in mind.  What do you want to change about yourself?  What other ways have you tried to change yourself?  Why are you seeking this sort of treatment?

Ask the therapist if therapy is the appropriate treatment, or if something else might be a better alternative.  Ask the therapist if he or she feels that his or her type of therapy will be helpful for you.  You don’t have to pay for a session to get these questions answered, and if necessary, get pointed in another direction.

Ask the therapist how he or she can help you meet your goals.  Seek out specifics and also seek out flexibility.

Be upfront and ask the therapist to be upfront with you about “prognosis.”  This is tricky because while no one can predict the future, you need to know what the therapist foresees and what the therapist expects from you.

Beware of therapists who  make promises that sound too good to be true, but at the same time, also beware of therapists who have expectations of you that are far below what you know you can achieve.

Seek out professionals who take you seriously.  Seek out professionals who take time to listen, and listen well.

Ask about Plan B, that is: What if something goes drastically wrong?  Better to ask now than later.

Share your goal very specifically with the therapist.  Ask the therapist what his or her goals are for you.  Is there a conflict?

As treatment proceeds, have points where therapy can be reassessed.  This can be once a month, or shorter, or longer.  Are you improving, staying the same, or getting worse?  Is therapy helping or making you worse?  What else is helping? What else is getting in the way?

If you are already in therapy, consider asking your therapist the questions I outlined above.   Consider redefining your relationship with him or her.

Warning signs:

If the following things happen, get out of therapy with this person as soon as you can:

The therapist abuses you mentally, physically, or psychologically.

The therapist has “boundary issues.”  Sometimes, this can be remedied with a reassessment, but my experience is that these fixes are rarely implemented, or the changes are very short-lived.

If there is a confidentiality problem or disagreement, it may be worth working it out or discussing it.  Often, a confidentiality issue is nothing but miswired communication.  If the consequences of this confidentiality disagreement are severe (if you lost your job, for instance) then you may be wise to stop seeing the therapist.

Same goes for breaking the law.  It depends on which law and what the intent was.  For instance, if the therapist parked illegally to get into the office in time for your appointment, well, think about it.

Drug companies…grrr

I can’t believe it.  I was just over at weather dot com and found out that Cymbalta was approved for lower back pain management.  What next?  They must be getting really desperate to sell their poisons.

If you want are considering taking a powerful antidepressant to manage chronic lower or upper or anywhere anything, read all about what I went through with the last antidepressant I was on.

When I was overweight my back hurt ALL the time.  It really sucked.  I was overweight because of the psych meds I took.

Oh, by the way, I have taken Cymbalta for depression.  It was one of those that did absolutely nothing.  Once, Dr. P gave me a wicked high dose of it and had me on it for a few days to “get me over the hump.”  It worked.  But she said it wasn’t a safe dose to stay on for long.

Wow, I really wish I never started taking these pills.  I am so happy to be getting off of them.  Three more days of Topamax, which I have tapered, and then I am off of it and only taking two remaining psych meds, Trileptal and Lamictal.

I feel decent today, by the way.

The only reason I ever wanted to be on pills was to stop binge eating.  I actually begged to be put on meds for this in the 1980′s when the research was coming out.   The doctors hadn’t read this research (I have the book still, called New Hope for Binge Eaters or something like that) and refused to give me meds, saying this research didn’t exist.  The therapist I had asked me which drug I had read about.  I told her.  She asked me, “How do you spell Imipramine?”  1982 I think.  I do believe that getting on Lithium was certainly a lifesaver for me because it stopped binge eating in for me in 1984, and there were no other treatments for this condition available to me.  I was young and didn’t know much about the world.  I was isolated and lived in a rural area and the doctors knew nothing.  Lithium worked for years until they insisted on adding other drugs and mucking me up.

I am convinced that the non-drug alternatives to these psych meds are the way to go, at least for me and for many people.   Doctors are very quick to push pills.  I think if they are going to be used at all, it should be short term.   The problem is that once you get on them, the doctors, and you, are convinced you “need” them and should stay on them for a long, long time, maybe for the rest of your shortened life.

If anyone asks me, I will most likely keep my mouth shut, though.  If someone takes a psych med and it’s helping them, then it’s not my place to burst their bubble and yap about how nasty these pills are.   They help, but they do other things that really suck, especially after you’ve been taking them for years.  If I am asked, I’ll say something, but really, what you put into your mouth is your business.

Like I said in the hospital, keep your eyes on your own tray, and I’ll keep my eyes on mine.