I dunno

There’s a girl at the hospital, my patient.  Her last name is Li, like her fathers, but I found out today that in China the last name goes in front.  In Indonesia there is no last name.  When I found this out after about a month of living there it struck how people could be so different and so the same. Something as foundational as the order of your names doesn’t have to stay the same to be human.  I remember when I first knew I could spell my last name because my mother asked me at the Russian video store.  It was that important.

 

That means potentially other things could go to.  Getting rid of things is something I have been considering since I first found out that there was sales tax, after agonizing over where I should spend my allowance on this plastic puzzle of a horse.  I was 5.  I was on a boat trip with my grandparents.  My grandfather owned a really big motor boat.  It had two bedrooms inside.  My grandmother used to make scrambled eggs in the morning, one of the only things my grandmother ever cooked for me.  When on land she would take me out to lunch, or when she was too weak to go out for lunch, we would order in her favorite Chinese food.  Chinese food, for me, is one of those foundational things, even if I have traded the Americanized takeout I got as a child in the suburbs to authentic Chinese food from China towns in cities I live in, or visit. The puzzle was something I wasn’t sure was worth the money, even though obviously it was neat.  It was the plastic kind where you just shift the pieces around in the square, you know, the pieces slide back and forth.  But I was a penny pincher, so when I found out that there was sales tax after all of that deciding, I cried.  I’ve been very bad at paying my taxes ever since and no longer count my change.

 

Hue Li, or Li Hue, depending on who you are asking, immigrated to the US 6 years ago.  She is 18 now and she experiences the usual problems that some 18 year olds face.  Like, Why should I be in school if I don’t have to be?  Or, why do people need money?  Why can’t life be simple, we will just live in the forest and eat apples off of trees.  My supervisor named this bizarre thought content, which I realized after he pointed it out was probably right.  I told Hue that part of the problem is that apples don’t grow in winter and the other problem is that though one a day will keep the doctor away, that obviously hasn’t worked for her.

 

My grandma is someone I have to do without now that she is dead.  I was her favorite.  She called me the sad one.  She called everyone her favorite.  But I imagined I really was her favorite because she and I had similar temperments.  I don’t remember what we used to talk about at all.  What would I talk about with a  grandma now?  I don’t know, but I would probably remember.  I took my favorite item of hers and hung it on my wall.  A tapestry, batik, that looks like it came from Indonesia.  Probably it didn’t, but I liked it before I knew it was batik, or that there was such a thing as Indonesia.  I literally always liked it.  For a while I was upset over the idea that because I was in Indonesia when she died all my cousins, all females and older, unfortunately, had divied up the goods without even thinking of me.  I never did well in those power struggles, even when I am around.  But now that I have this one thing, one thing no one else wanted, I feel a little better.

 

The nurses spelled Hue’s name wrong on her chart.  They spelled it Heu.  This made my supervisor annoyed enough to mention it too me with a hint of self-righteousness over the cultural insensitivity.  I had a hard time relating because that sort of thing doesn’t bother me, though I am certainly self-righteous over the things that do.  I did try to learn to pronounce her name right, but mostly in the name of intimacy and not right or wrong.

 

When I first came into the room Hue told me that her grandmother was dead in the bed next to hers, so naturally I lifted up the covers to see who might be there.  The sheets were stained with blood.  I was shocked!  I am so sorry! I said.  They must not have cleaned this up before you came in here!  Then I noticed that there was blood on her sheets too and started to put two and two together.  Do you have your period? I asked.  She said, I dunno.

 

When her father came to visit, for a family session, the kind where we are supposed to discover and resolve issues contributing to mental illness in the home, this girl went mum.  She looked infuriated.  The father spoke only Cantonese so I set up a language line and put a translator on speaker phone.  The father would ask the girl, how are you doing?  And she said, I dunno.  Or do you have a boyfriend?  And she said, I dunno.  Or why did you decide to drop out of school, we must find out!  Which I thought was inappropriate for that particular moment.  I thought the boyfriend question was inappropriate too, but he explained to me that a boyfriend might explain why Hue was acting this way.  I wanted to ask how he figured, but I didn’t because I was trying to be culturally sensitive.

 

When I told my supervisor this story he asked if maybe the father is lacking the ability to empathize.  I said, no, I don’t think so, I think he’s just Chinese.  Yet, there was obviously more going on too  For example, the father confirms the girls report that the mother attempted to kill herself 3 times. The translator explained to me after the girl had left the session because she refused to speak in it, that maybe she did this because she would not discuss her problems in front of her father.  The translator had seen this before.  The patient was more likely to speak to her mother, if at all.  But parents are authority figures, so actually she was more likely to speak to me.

 

This was true.  After the session she asked me, Don’t you think there is something wrong with him?  He keeps everything inside.  He is cold inside.  He is not curious about me.  I wanted to explain to her that this might be some sort of cultural misunderstanding.  The only reason she stated being in the hospital is that a stranger called the police after seeing Hue walk with her mother, who had scars on her wrists.  I told her that I thought this was a misunderstanding, too.

 

Ironically, during a conference on French/American psychoanalysis a similar issue came up.  A French man presented the Chinese psyche in powerpoint and its conflict with modernity, which tries to reconcile a man bound by nature to the individual man of reason.  A glaringly culturally insensitive American man asked, do the Chinese have a capacity for empathy?  The French man wanted to know why one would ask such a question, to which the man replied, here, in America, we have a little thing called self-psychology, started by a man named Kohut.  He had a handout about it and everything.  An agenda, I guess.  The French man brainstormed…  compassion has been a concept in Chinese since ancient times, so yes, this is like Chinese empathy.

 

But I suspect he is wrong.  I don’t think that compassion and empathy are at all the same.  Empathy can only happen after you project your own self-exploration onto others, so there needs to be self-exploration in the first place.  Compassion is like sympathy minus the pity party.  It is about what happens, not about what one feels.  I imagine that Chinese children grow up with no empathy, only compassion and that they are just fine.  They may not have insight into the inner workings of their own psyche’s, but they are probably not very neurotic.  The same with this girl.  She had no interest in the why or wherefore of how she felt.  When she hallucinated her dead grandmother in the bed next to her own, that was just a dream.  The questions of life could be simpler for her, because she is Chinese.

 

When Chinese people get neurotic they don’t look little like the characters on Seinfeld, who are like my people.  Rather they get neurasthenia, which is a nervous disorder.  You feel it in your body and your bones.  I had it once.  It made me very tired, but not funny, like the people on Seinfeld.  This is why I imagine that I am from the part of Eastern Europe that is part Asian.

 

Today Hue asked me, do you think its more important in a marriage to show what is on the inside or to keep the outside composed?  I told her I wasn’t sure since I had never been married.  Oh, she said, that is why you are sad.  I took a bit of offense to that, because I was taking things personally that day.  I asked her what she thought and she said, I dunno.

 

In China she could have been married already and a housewife.  Why should she go to college?  In 8^th grade she got all F’s because she didn’t speak English and since then she decided to get all A’s, but as she put it, getting all A’s and the good life are not compatible, so she picks the good life.  I just worry that for her this means being American and the good life are incompatible and whether or not her parents understand her, she is going to need to learn how to reconcile the two before she stops hallucinating.  At least, this is my theory.

 

Yet, what do I know? She didn’t seemed not to be bothered by her hallucinations/dreams, so why should I?  She says she wants to be a teacher when she is 30 and between 18 and 30, that’s a long time.  My age, 28, less so.

Totalitarianism

[The whole in me, in everyone, there is a hole.  Love can’t fill it. True love is about not filling it.  You are the hole in me, the hole that is the Holocaust in all your friend’s lives, that means, you make yourself the right shape and deny your ability to fill it.  Somehow, you manage to do it universally.]

 

We had this conversation to ourselves during the dream time compilation of the lectures from the day on psychoanalysis and its reference to the French/American divide, which is, I gather, that the French are more shapely, far less content abstract, or content concrete, because they care mostly about form in both its universal and contextualizing senses.  That is much like the both of us.  They also wear better makeup and have nicer hair, which is like me.  People there spoke to me in French.  You told me that if I didn’t want to be there I should leave.  Actually, you said, I could always leave and I asked you if that was your unconscious articulating that wish in the form of advice.

 

His lecture begs the question though, how do you deal with the historical burden of of civilization’s appropriation of death on the treatment of the individual during psychoanalysis?  Is it that you help them to see that they have already attempted to appropriate death into themselves?  To me this seems like the entire foundation of the need for the thing in the first place.  Otherwise might we not still believe in universalities, like religions and the like and not have ever come to be so complex as to take death as our own burden?  If you read Hannah Arendt you will find that psychoanalysis and totalitarianism are contemporaries and they both have everything to do with the Jewish question.  You’re Jewish.  So am I.  Maybe that has something to do with it too.  You are kind of like the opposite of the Nazis.  You’re the shape of the violence you won’t perpetrate.

 

We are caught in a trap, boy, it is cyclical and solipsistic.  What are you writing your poetry about lately?  Yesterday at lunch I told your friend that we hadn’t been friends for at least 5 months.  This was after you told him not to use you as a point of reference and I told you, stop making yourself a point of reference and forbaying other people to use you.  This has something to do with it.  By it, I meant totalitarianism. It means you can say and do anything.

 

But here I am, still talking about you, still trying to fill the thing that can’t be filled, to answer questions with no answer, your correction of, on which is based our love.  You almost drove me mad sir and you think you are going to make people more sane but you drive people mad, which is why they stop being friends with you, or that is just me and for them its just that they don’t get anything out of it, because they are not in love with you, like me.  I’m not saying you can’t use this approach to make people sane.

 

During lunch all of our intimacy was expressed in ironic commentary against the other, no, my ironic commentary, your just telling me when I was wrong, like usual, which you have yet to realize is the event that triggers the thing that makes this all oppositional and if you really wanted to know me you might have the courtesy to stop with the triggering event which you would be able to identify if you only had the ability to hear everything I am saying to you all the time.

 

Like I said, lets go to the Medici for lunch.  And you said, I hate the Medici, we could get into our car and go to The Nile and I said No, I don’t want to go there.  Because every time I go there I order the same things and it reminds me of you and all the times we have gone there for the past 10 years and ordered the same things.  When we told your new friend that we had known each other for 10 years he thought we were older than him, like 32, which was ironic because when I am with you I feel like I am 19, which was ten years ago.

 

You ordered a sandwich and ate it in under 5 minutes flat and took claim to the other half of our omelettes which I proceeded to eat the rest of, on principle.   I convinced your friend to order the same omelette as I do there, the omelette Lorraine, which is delicious and also particularly apropo both because of the French people we had been listening to and because it’s a dish that always reminds me of people other than you.  When your friend commented on the speed of your consumption I wanted to point out that you have been eating that fast for the last ten years, but I know this mothering tendency of mine, its rude and you never correct me.  That’s not one of the things you correct me about.

 

He told us about going insane in Sweden and being hospitalized for a month in a facility that had gardens, but no psychotherapy.  I asked, which would you prefer, if you had to choose between one of the other?  Then I asked him if he was bipolar or just manic, because I was curious and you corrected me:  I can never ask someone, “Are you bipolar?” I have to say “Do you have bipolar?”  And then I corrected you and said that having something implies that there is something to be had.

 

And I’d rather attribute the condition to someone’s character and then you said it is more correct to ask someone if they have had a depressive episode and I said that I don’t like to get caught up in scruples having to do with grammar and you said you would ask someone if they were neurotic because most everyone is neurotic and I said that people take offense to that and you said but its more right and I said that other people won’t not take offense just because it is more right.

 

The sin of being too sure of myself obviously takes a reactionary form for me.  You are always accusing me of that, of being too reactionary.  When our oversureness enters into relationship with one another we fight and I become the correction to all your flaws.  And you are like the dad I never had.  The one who would have paused his lecture to tell my mother to stop fighting with me.  But like with him, I am still correcting you into something that’s not always assuming that I will think like you, because that’s my appropriation of my own death, making sure that no one tells me what to do. I won’t tell them they are wrong, either, unless they are telling other people they are wrong, like you. So we are in stalemate and inasmuch as we are the perfect corrections for one another, we are also in love.

 

[Two totalitarian nations can only be islands, otherwise, the borders get confused, they have to make compromises, to allow other people’s frameworks to draw different holes that can’t be filled, to make the space for domination conspicuous and incomplete.]

wheniwasyrbabymama

Three years ago there was a city that we lived in and in my mind we lived on the cobble stoned streets looking out towards the statue of liberty and eating key lime pie.  That’s what we should have been doing. But instead you lived in your father’s old office turned your studio on the upper east side in the same building where you grew up.  The way the doorman looked at me always made me uncomfortable.  I couldn’t tell if it was because I was young, or not as well dressed as the other people in the building, or if he knew I was going to visit you, but he seemed to take what I did very personally.  So did I.  His attention made me feel suspect, which stood in relief to how I felt when I was in your apartment, which was something closer to not like anyone at all.

 

To get to your apartment I took the elevator to the 11^th floor.  Sometimes I’d find myself next to a woman the age and ethnicity of my mother, Jewish like my mother, really, but silent, less friendly and richer than my mother.  I would inevitably get a look that I took to indicated – not suspicion of my character, exactly- but the opinion that there would be something else she would do if she were me.  Walking into that building made me feel iterant and uncanny, like the home I was in was undeniably some place I shouldn’t be.

 

Once I got into your apartment everything changed.  There was just us and your wall of windows.  I would look up to the tops of skyscapers and down to the busy street with the pizza place on the corner and the Chinese food restaurant.  Pizza and Chinese food have the power to revive my cannyness.  And you wouldn’t question me about anything, a situation I found to be very different than my home.

 

Though both your mother and mine hired Carribean ladies to help them raise their children, in most other respects they were very different.  For one, you came from old money, paleo-conservative wasps and I came from upwardly mobile Long Island jewry.   Maybe this is why I so appreciated how you demonstrated a certain respect for the inner life, really an entire lack of curiousity about it, which the doorman and the old Jewish ladies in the elevator couldn’t help but expose even in the short time we spent together.  This points to a fact rarely recognized due to a prejudice towards recognizing people by skin color, as opposed to by history, or by the size of their nose.  The upper east side is very diverse, actually, a practical Utopia of Jewish and protestant diversity.  Like most integrated neighborhoods, one could attribute this possibility to the observation that money and diversity, at least in this day and age which is apparently post race and gender in the name of being all about the benjamins, go hand and hand.

 

The point is, I’d sleep on your couch weekly.  I’d sleep on the green corduroy couch which you brought there from your apartment in Chicago and which you had originally brought from the apartment you grew up in 4 floors underneath this one.  This is another thing about wasps, there’s a limit to the quantity of items they want new.  Now when I imagine the couch I want for my apartment, the one I just moved into, where all the furniture is inherited from whatever was already around, I imagine something corduroy – something substantial enough to make my living room stop reflecting sound.

 

I never would have slept over if we lived in another city, a city like Chicago.  But in NY your house on the upper west side was an hour away from my house in Brooklyn by subway and I never wanted to take it after a certain number of joints after a certain time of night.  It was the kind of inertia problem that was only a problem if you happen to live in a place that requires a certain kind of je ne sais get up and go.  That’s why we should have lived together where there were cobble stones, where we could have walked out and looked at the statue of liberty, where our ancestors had came in.  If that were the case maybe I would have stayed.  But it’s better here, anyways.  I don’t have to confront my heritage here.  Here I sit on my sun porch looking across the yard at the ivy changing color on the factory my friends live in where I never sleep over because my apartment is just across the yard and I can think of you nostalgically, like my home.  That’s easier.

 

Your sister has been sending me your short stories.  If you knew you’d think I had betrayed you.  I had.  I am.  I’m cheating on you with your sister.  Her stories are beautiful.  Full of admittances, but not allowances.

 

So I slept on your couch once a week.  For whatever reason, you rarely slept on mine.  Maybe it was less predictable there.  I also always called you, always asked you out to lunch.  I was the man in this relationship, I guess.  So it makes sense that when you fucked the man I had fucked the week before, my best friend, next to you, when you fucked him and he left you and me, which he was always liable to do, you still let me sleep over, as opposed to him, who lived in my neighborhood and wouldn’t even invite me to the bar.

 

When you fucked him and became impregnated with his child you decided to keep it.  You always thought you would, which was easier for you since your parents are pro-life, which has always seemed to me less like a religious belief and more like a pro-not-making-overly-determinate-decisions-about-life perspective.  I also had the tendency to go with the flow, but for me that position was sort of against the grain.  So was being overly responsible to people who don’t owe you anything.  But when you decided to keep it, you needed help in a way that a man would never give.  So I became your babymama, your de facto man, a cuckholded woman, because I decided I would keep you.  Once you gave me earrings as a thank you present and they broke a few weeks later.  They were pretty though.  You’ve always had good taste in things.

 

When you got pregnant, I called you on the phone right after you had taken the test.  I had a nice bedroom then.  There were hundreds of roaches in the kitchen and homeless man on the steps and a crack head across the hall and a boy who was trying really hard to sell me pot and fuck me, also across the hall, but the bedroom was nice.  I think my roommate resented me for it though.  I called you on the phone eating my favorite Carribbean food on the fireescape, the black metal kind they have in Brooklyn, watching the sun go down.  It was pretty there.  I called you and you told me that you were pregnant and you were crying.  I immediately looked up planned parenthoods and the amount of time under which you can still take the morning after pill, which had recently become the month after pill.  I had no idea you would think about keeping it.  I didn’t know you as well then.  Later you wrote about this incident in your book.  I think you were a little mad about it.  But listen, I never promised to provide the kind of help you wanted, or even the kind of help that you need.  I never promised anything, except to be there when your baby was born.

 

When you first told me that you decided to keep the baby it was in your apartment, your sister was over.  You sister and you got along better then.  I expressed my doubts.  I asked you if you were sure, if you had thought it all through, if you realized what you were doing.  I thought I was doing my job, sort of like my mother thinks she is doing hers.  My mother used to dress me in embroidered sweaters and when I reached puberty and my hair started to change she had it cut into a bob and I blew it dry every morning.  Kids used to tell me they couldn’t see the teacher because my hair was blocking their way.  A lot of effort for nothing, is what that was.  Your sister told me not to rain on your parade.

 

When I told my mother you were keeping the baby she was shocked.  When I told her you had a trust fund and your parents said they would help, she posed the question “You don’t think we would do that for you, do you?”  I didn’t, I wouldn’t.

 

When you got pregnant you and I worked together, in the city, investigating police misconduct.  I got the tip from you.  My supervisor was really excited when she interviewed me, I guess, because I had good ideas and could pull off a fairly decent roll play.  She had no idea that my ability to think abstractly existed in opposite proportion to my ability to follow direction.   She also didn’t know that I don’t work very well in teams. You on the other hand, have always been good at the things you do.  That’s why it was so important to you that everything went smoothly, even though your bastard’s child conception made the bastard who was the father bail.  Maybe that made it more important.  So you worried for weeks about how to tell your workmates.  It would be a little strange.  You weren’t married.  You looked ageless.  But it went fine.  The one girl who didn’t say anything wore an engagement ring on her finger.  Before the ring, we thought we’d be friends.  I didn’t make any friends there and neither, really, did you.  Do you see why I needed you then?

 

 

I also had no idea you had been fucking my friend for months.  I went around telling people that you had only fucked twice and omigod you got pregnant.  Who could blame you for that?  When you corrected me it was because I told you that I had been telling people this story and you felt betrayed.  You felt betrayed and I felt deceived.  What was private for you wasn’t private for me.  It made me feel better to tell that story.  You took that away from me.  You fucked my best friend and had his baby and now the baby is three and he and I aren’t friends because he thinks you ruined your life and I can’t stomach it.  Telling the truth has always been my job.

 

I guess I did it though, because you took care of me too, for those years, maybe I needed you to take care of me.  Or maybe I needed someone to kick me out of my stupor.  Either way, you did what I asked, even though I had to ask for it, so I did what you asked.  It was an exchange, the kind of exchange that no one else owed me or really has owed me since.  In the mornings we would wake up and read your paper which you had delivered to your door and drink coffee and then we would take a walk and in the park and we wouldn’t go to the MET, even though you lived just a few blocks from it, because you didn’t like museums and I didn’t go alone.  That was never in the deal.  I don’t remember what else we did.  I don’t remember much, in general.

 

But as you got more pregnant that got taken from me anyways.  It forced me to grow up, too.  You got mad at me for typing on the computer in the kitchen after you went to bed.  You got black out shades and a sound machine so you could sleep.  This was the opposite of what I needed.  I needed light to wake up and silence to fall asleep and the comfort of someone doing something that was just to pass the time.  You had become entirely objective oriented.  So it got uncomfortable for me.  I stopped sleeping over.

 

I went to the bookstore and bought books about natural pregnancy and brought you to experts, like my roommates mother who delivered babies in Africa and my cousin who was bringing up two kids in the city and sometimes I arranged little dinners and brought around your good-for-nothing childhood friends.  That wasn’t your phrasing.  You just complained and wished they’d be better.  You were suspicious of me too, though, even though I always tried to be as unsuspicious as possible.

 

Eventually, the baby’s father started coming around and we would go to your apartment to practice natural birth techniques and he would start massaging you and I would leave.  I didn’t care anymore, by then, who it was massaging who.  You would still let him fuck you and then complain that he was mean to you in the morning and you would cry in front of him and I wasn’t there, thankfully.  I made plans to go to Indonesia, even though before I did it I sat on my couch for 6 hours, in a new apartment, sans roaches and crack heads and thinking about all the ways I could die there.

 

All that work went to naught and you were worried I’d give the doctors a hard time.  On the day the baby was born they started the pregnancy at 6AM with a shot of petosin and by 8:30 I was pushing on the back of your head with all of my strength and watching its blue bloody head emerge from your vagina and I was probably the only one around with enough wherewithal to remember that.  Your mom waited downstairs, in the lobby.  It was after about a twenty minute update that I came back to the room to find you getting injected in the spine and crying.  That’s how fast you dilated, 20 minutes.  Later you said it felt like getting shot in the stomach repeatedly.

 

The father sat in a chair with his heads in his hands.  Right after the baby was born he decided to take a walk and told me I’d make a good nurse and the nurses there told him he was a man who knew his limits and at that moment I knew my nursing days were over. Ironically, you became a nurse just a few years later, because you needed a good profession with good hours and benefits to support your baby and even though you could have gotten a PhD and become an academic and spent your life thinking about all the things you though about anyways, you wanted to do something of use.  I wanted that too.  I became a social worker.  Someone whose job it is to guide people through their problems.  The main difference between what you do and what I do is that I think that verbalization will lead to change.

 

A girl in my group at the psychiatric hospital I work in told the saddest story the other day.  The prompt was to tell a story about something you wanted feedback on, having to do with your hospitalization.  She told a story about how she had once almost married a man whose baby she had become pregnant with but then she lost the baby and lost the man.  Then her mother cheated on her father with him.  The girl said she had thought about it very hard, but she couldn’t figure out how to let it go.  “How could a mother do that to her daughter?” she asked.  The group went mum.  After the group she asked me what I would do, as if I had been withholding this information from her, as if I had some answer to this question that I just hadn’t told her yet.  I had just gotten yelled at by another patient who thought I had slighted her because she talked too much and I didn’t know how she felt because I had a family and I had friends and I could never know how she felt, so she was punishing me, I guess.  I told that woman I was sorry and I told the girl that she shouldn’t wait around for the answer, because she might never know.

Behavioral Health 9/16

My mother says that she visiting an insane asylum where Van Gogh stayed in France and now it’s a haven for the mentally ill and disabled where they are “living as happily and relaxed as possible in acceptance of their condition and treated with peace, kindness and patience.”  I don’t know if I believe her.

Paula:

P. breaths heavily through her nose which is very small.  Her face is flat.  She looks like a pug. She breathes heavily through her nose and I ask her if she OK.  This is just what I do when I don’t want to talk about stuff, she says.

As she wanders down the hallway the doctor calls her over.  Miss, miss, miss ______.  Can I speak with you please?  Me?  She says.  Me?  She is barely audible.  I look the other way.

As she walks down the long corridor the lights flash like they did last night when she couldn’t sleep.  She goes back to bed, on her plastic mattress.  I can sleep here, she says.  I can sleep anywhere.  If only it weren’t for that light.

So many if onlys.  If only you didn’t live in America you would be eating pastries in France, with goats and even if you were more like a goat than a human, or a pug or whatever, even if you read more like the trees, that would be OK.  They take their past seriously there.

I am moving!  I am moving out of this hospital.  I am no martyr and if I were, I wouldn’t be able to do my work here anyways.  If I were, maybe my back wouldn’t be breaking.  I have injuries in my back that are just from observation.

It is getting cold.  I forget where I have put my pants and sweaters and things.  In the hospital it is always opposite the temperature of what it is outside.  Too cold in the summer; too hot in the winter.  Nabila says that in 2 Central, where the geriatrics are, she holds her breath as she walks down the hallways so she doesn’t breath in any of the particles.  Wait, no, I said that.  She said the thing about the particles.  I said to an MHA this morning that I really wanted some coffee and he remarked that there is some coffee right here.  No!  Not decafe coffee!  I said.  This is what it must be like in hell, coffee everywhere but all decafe.  He agreed.  Later someone pointed out that I could just bring my own coffee.

The nurse I came in with, “Fuck This Place!”  he said.  I would have been leaving months ago if I didn’t have to wait for a new job.  I would like to lead a group on this topic.  “Fuck This Place!”  I would have been leaving months ago if……

Andre, he asked if he could shine my shoes yesterday in group.  Are you serious? I asked.  I pushed him a little.  They call this flirting with the patients.  I think Andre is cute.  He’s a fucking control freak and he never says what he means and he is always staring inappropriately and in real life this would bother me, but here I can let him be my type.

Sometimes the patients on the mentally retarded unit, where my office is, the second worst smelling unit, get to go outside.  Good for them.

“I remember when we used to be able to smoke here.”  You could go outside?  NO!  We used to be able to smoke right here! She says.  During smoking time, they even gave us cigarettes.  “You been here a long time ago” says the smart MHA, with the glasses, who thinks he gets to judge my groups because I’m a woman.  We are both too righteous.  Anyways, I was surprised, because she doesn’t look that old.  I like her piercing.  It in her upper cheek by her eye.  How do they get it there?

Marcus is ignoring me now.  He is acting weird, in fact.  He is looking at me from across the cafeteria and when I catch his eye BY ACCIDENT and smile (because that’s just sort of automatic nervous reaction) he looks vaguely disturbed.  And I notice that his eyes are always kind of red, like he hasn’t gotten enough sleep.  He looks a little unhealthy, despite being so ripped.

Marcus, couldn’t you at least give me a conversation in exchange for all of these expectations?  At least somebody should.

Grieve

There is a man across the yard, I’ve never met him,

Well, I have met him, but I don’t know him.

He is strange.

He prefers to be alone

Most of the time

He is like me

I know because he has taught me to want to be alone

Being alone here resembles being together

Context is enough.

Congeniality.

My dad was a pussy.  He let my mom start huge fights with me at the dinner table and a few months ago when I asked him, he said that my mother used to say I was manipulative.  It was late.  I was on my second glass of wine, which he didn’t want me to get anyways because I had coerced him into taking me out to fancy dinner at the place I had last coerced my mom into (I am a slow learner when it comes to avoiding bad vibes) and I said “ITS NEVER THE CHILDS FAULT!  ITS NEVER THE CHILDS FAULT!”  I learned that in social work school and then I felt bad for poisoning the waters, just like I used to feel bad back then.  Things never change.  He took it without a word.  Things never change.  What I had to say still didn’t influence that much.

I also learned, but this time by observation, that people are manipulative for reasons other than genetic ones.  Besides, I don’t remember being manipulative.  I remember telling it like it is.  I remember avoiding that bitch who threw the iron at me down the stairs.  I remember exploding with anger…  but not being manipulative.  And I’m not manipulative now, nor was I ever really, so that part of the story doesn’t ring true.  My dad said that as if he, independently, would not have been able to judge whether or not I was manipulative himself.  Was he not there?

Anyways, 10 years later, I am entirely scathed but very good at dealing with it.  Once, when I was on my way to Mexico for a semester abroad, I called my mother a liar and she jumped out on the highway.  Then, when we got to the airport, she jumped out of the car and headed for a plane to nowhere.  I never saw my dad cry before and I seem to have blocked the rest of the event out, like even the plane ride, I don’t remember it, AT ALL.  But I got there and had a great time and broke up with my abusive boyfriend.  So that was that.  But anyways, who does that?  When I brought it up with my mother sometime in the middle between then and now, for some, I don’t know, closure?  Reconciliation?  Validation of the fact that she had fucked me repeatedly, she did not remember.  Not only did she not remember, she claimed not to understand what I was saying.  Was I speaking pig latin or something.  IAMTALKINGABOUTSOMETHINGTHATHAPPENEDANDWEWEREBOTHTHEREINFACTTHOSEOTHERPEOPLEINOURFAMILYWERETHERETOO!THEY’REWITNESSES.ICANPROVEIT.  She left me crying that night on the curb in front of my apartment.  The one she wouldn’t visit for 6 months because it was in the ghetto and that too was apparently doing something to her.  She said that she wouldn’t change; that she was an old dog who couldn’t learn new tricks.  I believed her and adjusted myself accordingly.

She could divorce my father and get a new man and new friends and have lots of sex though.  Those tricks she had the energy for.  She got happier, which made her easier to get along with.  And I changed.  First I changed into someone who was morbidly depressed and couldn’t concentrate on anything and didn’t know why, but could only blame herself.  Who slept with her friend who she didn’t like who made her feel stupid for not living up to his expectations and never helped her out because in his opinion people should help themselves.  And in her’s too.  Asking other people for help didn’t seem to work so she would help herself and make absolutely as few demands on others as possible (but that didn’t work either).

He always said that friends were not for comfort.  Ok.  What ARE they for then?  If you can’t help people, then what are YOU doing!?  Other people seem to understand these distinctions far better than I do.  I understand this distinction.  After I fought with my friend so many times and eventually unjustly accused him of raping me, he proposed that we engage in a congenial working relationship.  Thats kind of like the decision to only help yourself, I think, which requires ignoring all slights…  But eventually, since we worked in the same place, we did have a congenial working relationship.  It didn’t solve the problem of it feeling like rape.

Exception

Exceptions:

 

Ideas aren’t sexy.  I wish I had learned that a long time ago.  Other things I wish I had learned a long time ago include:  incompleteness; that sometimes, or rather usually, it’s the other person acting weird; and to accept disappointments.

 

When people call me a good soul I correct them.  I say that I am just bored.  The truth is probably even more reprehensible than that.  But suffice it to say, I don’t think of myself as a good soul.  I have some other ideas, but when I try to explain them it’s not sexy.

 

I’ve been trying to figure out what you mean when you say we don’t help people.  Isn’t the truth something more like, we help people, but only inadvertently?  Or that working with crazy people is just another way of working on myself?  We don’t help people, but we are serviceable to them.  I told him that I can’t work in an office, because I fall asleep.  He told me I was smoking too much weed.  What?  Me?  (How’d he know.  I just met him on a plane.  I’m wearing makeup!).  He told me his job is forwarding capitalism, but he pointed out that capitalism makes the world go round, right?  Right.

 

Would it have helped him feel worse or better if I had explained that this was all my job was doing, too?  That is: helping air compress into bottles and helping people behave well are both about fitting diffuse things into obtuse shapes.  This is the point where I explain that I find people far more interesting than air, but that I do missing solving problems with objective answers.  And that the air in the hospital is stale and smells like death and it’s enough to drive a girl crazy.

 

I like to call the place I work a mental hospital and the people I work with crazy people.  I think its romantic.  It’s a fact that the things I have thus far chosen to do with my life are making me bizarre.  When academics say that I do things, that’s there way of calling me a good person, but they don’t believe in good, just like you don’t believe in helping.  But the truth is, their ideas aren’t sexy and they’re just jealous.

 

There’s a lot of sex in the hospital, though nobody’s having it.  Sex mixed with peeing on the floor.  This one patient looks me up and down while sucking on his thumb.

 

You are the only person who would find this funny, but you and I, we were all about ideas weren’t we?  And it wasn’t sexy?  Or we were trying too hard to be characters from one of the French New Wave films you showed me and it was just too big a contrast from the dirty business of who we actually are, social workers.  Now you are somewhere on the east coast doing home interventions, not helping anyone.  It sucks, doesn’t it.  If only I could have recognized your incompleteness, that you were the one acting weird and if I could have accepted small disappointments.  What I was attracted to about you, though, was that you are so wary of making things overblown, too wary of me, though.  For me, I wish you had made an exception.

 

 

Inheritance

I told you that I am always sad to leave, but that is only half the truth, because I am also always sad to come.

 

Does it make it better that I told you I only came in for the beach?  Perhaps thats how we started off on the wrong foot.

 

We sat at the kitchen table, the candles lit, the hurricane had arrived just before me and shut off all the lights.  We were talking about your sister, until your sister came home.  Then you pronounced that you were going upstairs, leaving me to do the exact thing we had been talking about, which was talking to your sister instead of to you.  You are not interested in the question of why things bother you.  Later you said that we didn’t have to go to bed, you just didn’t want to talk about your sister’s apartment, again, because you had already been talking about it.  But you had just realized that you were wrong and it’s my theory that actually, you were embarrassed.  They have a term for that, when you express the opposite sentiment from how you feel, but I forget what it is.

 

The topic of battles between sisters of similar ages has been coming up lately.  Mine and I have called something of a truce, or at least I have, or at least she has.  Well anyways, it’s the only explanation I have come up with for the silence.  Knowing why this has happened doesn’t seem to help.  All I know is, it’s not our fault, really.  It’s just inherited – so we do the opposite thing from how we feel, to balance the thing out.  Neither of us can stand to fight.  So I won’t fight with you, either.  I’ll just talk to your sister less.

An Argument for Schizophrenia, or, Women Only Like Me When I Do There Housework

A psychiatric doctor once said, “I would have liked to treat Marilyn Monroe,” but there are so many answers for that it doesn’t seem likely.  In downtown Chicago there is a building sized statue of her in her classic move, standing over a street vent with her skirt blowing up, except this time she is standing over a fountain.  Apparently, it’s a traveling art exhibit, which has found its way onto the miracle mile.  A business woman interviewed in a NY Times article complains that when she looks out of her 5^th story office window Marilyn is blocking her view across the street.  She says it’s strange to have your site stopped at Marilyn’s ass.

 

When writing my notes at the psychiatric hospital if I make a mistake I have to cross out the line and write “error” and my initials.  I also learned that the carrot points into the sentence, not out.  This doesn’t seem obvious to me.  Aren’t you looking for a word that was left out?  I don’t like admitting my own mistakes.  I have this theory that the problem with the people here is that other people have been trying to force them to admit theirs.

 

The problem with Marilyn is that she killed herself and no one wants to think it’s her fault.  It’s like that Godard film, or all of them, “I am evil sometimes but no one cares because I am so gorgeous,” or something.  It works the same way with the statue.  It’s not Marilyn’s fault that her ass is exposed, it’s our fault, for making a 3 story statue of Marilyn’s bottom.  If this was the artist’s intention its kind of a nasty trick, if you ask me.  First you think that the statue is scandalous and then you realize that it is.  The times article took a picture of it with two children gazing up at Marilyn’s bottom from underneath.  When I think about criticizing the psychiatric hospital I work for I don’t want it to be like this.  It’s not fair to the people who haven’t killed themselves yet.

 

Besides, it’s not in style, killing yourself.  What is in style is women with short hair wearing transparent button down shirts.  They look kind of masculine, but also kind of French, since you can see their undersized perky breasts.  I was on that look two years ago, minus the breasts, since mine are anything but perky, but now that it’s in the NY Times magazine it looks like I am no longer going to be able to flirt with the line between looking sexy and looking like a man.  So I’m growing my hair long and wearing makeup and tight shirts.  I’m still French, just the old fashioned kind.

 

The fact is, for me at least, that only way to get around not being quick is to be classic.  The only way to become more feminine is to spend time with more men.  Platitudes.  Women will always resent you for not doing enough work.  They’ll barrade you for being absent minded.  They’ll tell you your breasts look saggy in your bathing suit.  They’ll never read your blog.  Men will lend you books and talk to you about things, or if they are talking to each other about things they won’t think its strange if you just listen.  They’ll make fun of you for what you talk about with other women, though, and they still won’t hang your cabinets.  It’s a cruel world.

 

It’s no surprise, then, that gender bending is the modern day solution to mental illness.  Marilyn Monroe was just in a fix she couldn’t get out of.  Being miserable didn’t make people not like her.  Now people get into different sorts of fixes, like that nobody respects you because you are miserable.  Ugliness, on the other hand, has never made people respect you.  People in the hospital are very ugly, by definition.  So it’s obvious now that the best thing for Marilyn to do would have been to masquerade as a man, a handsome man.  What if the statue had been, instead of exposing the exploitative powers of a scandalous picture, Marilyn dressed as Charlie Chapin?  It’s so perfectly French and Freudian.  How much happier we all would have been?  Schizophrenic, maybe, but happier.

 

 

Mental Health Associates

Marcus is an MHA.  M is for miraculous or manly, H is for handsome, A for associate or asshole.  We both work at a psychiatric hospital, but our jobs are different.  I like his better.  There are various units in the hospital all divided by age.  He sits on them and monitors behavior, sometimes keeping logs of the patients’ movements once in the rounds the book.  He has to do this every 15 minutes, to make sure they haven’t disappeared, or aren’t up to some mischief.  That is not the part of the job that sounds fun.

Usually Marcus sits on the boy’s unit, which I imagine is because he is very muscular and boys would find that intimidating, perhaps admirable.  You can see it very clearly through his shirt, though I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out.  I, on the other hand, work with the adults, who find me intimidating because I am pretty.  Adolescents scare me because they don’t find me intimidating at all.  I have always been wiser than adults, but a little slower with my own kind.  Now that I am adult, though, I’m not sure.

Marcus’s job is not mostly to monitor; it’s to control.  My job is to monitor, to report, sometimes to counsel and not mostly to be therapeutic, though my title is therapist.  When I meet with patients they always have this reaction like, of surprise.  You want to meet, with me?  Why?  I had this one patient who always asked if I had something for him to sign.  On the last day in the hospital he asked me if I was his social worker, as if he had never seen me before.

Their skepticism is contagious.  I tell them that I want to meet, “to talk,” because I have yet to develop a more accurate explanation, but I’m pretty sure I’m not very convincing.  According to the treatment plans I write I am helping them to identify triggers, to develop coping mechanisms and to determine if medication compliance is resulting in increased reality testing.  I suspect I’m not very good at any of these things.  I’ve always been bad at agenda setting.

There’s a hierarchy at the hospital, but it might differ depending on who you are.  By pay, the MHAs are the lowest, then the therapists, then the nurses and then the doctors.  But before I knew this I thought the therapists were higher than the nurses, because it is a psychiatric hospital, after all.  This was also before I realized that the difference between psychiatry and therapy is that the one emphasizes discipline and the other love and that you can’t mix the two, because their objectives will cancel each other out.  They complement each other though, kind of like your mother and father, the difference being actually that the one requires expertise and the other you are supposed to do just for the pleasure of it, apparently, or therapists would get paid more.  Oh, and, the mother is the one who knows what’s going on, but the father always gets to tell the mother what to do.  I, myself, do not get paid.  In fact, I pay, because I am an intern and need to do this to graduate from school, which puts me in a strange relationship to the hierarchy.  The patients can’t tell the difference though.

I met Marcus, my associate, on my first day in the hospital.  I had been sitting on one of the units, the one where I am told they put “manic” people, unless they are “sexually acting out” manic people, in which case there are various other places for them to stay.  In truth the sexually acting out women are allowed to stay, but the men usually have to go.  I was just there to “observe” to “learn” to be a fly on the wall.  In fact, I had to be a fly on the wall, lest I do something that required filling out paperwork.  My first day I was worried that I would be too snobby and/or pretty to make friends with the MHA’s, that they could sniff it on me, or something.  This is how wrong I am about how people react to snobbiness and prettiness.   All you really need to do is say Hi.

In fact, the place where I work is not a psychiatric hospital.  It’s a behavioral health hospital.  Behavioral health, since it is short term, revolves around self-awareness.  One has to be aware enough of his/herself to behave according to the rules or society.  So the main purpose of the hospital is really to facilitate socialization.  One could see how I might be bad at this, for the same reason that it’s easy for me to relate to crazy people, even though, most of the time, I’m not one.  On the top of my group notes, under the category of goals, I always put self-awareness, because I know that is the right answer.  The patients know it too.  When they are self-aware enough to pretend to be sane they get to go.

Javier, the older, Hispanic MHA (skinny, irritable, focused, coherent), made sure to introduce himself in a way that let me know I should have introduced myself.  So I apologized profusely.  I wanted to say, I’m sorry, its not that I am snobby and pretty, it’s just that I’m disorganized and petrified.  I think my tone may have made that clear.  He introduced the first group for the day.  “Today is June 27^th, the weather is 90F and sunny.”  He wrote it on the board.  You might think this is patronizing, but for people with nothing to schedule and no access to the outside world, it is just, in fact, a courtesy.  Or perhaps it is patronizing since this information is really irrelevant here and the fact that it’s hot and sunny in Chicago, just a tease.  Or perhaps it is meant to be both.  In this hospital courtesy and condescension are sometimes the same thing.

Marcus, on the other hand, was sitting in a corner playing spades with the patients.  They were having some argument about the rules.  “Well that’s not how they play it where I come from.”  He remained neutral.  He invited me over.  This is how on my first day at work I learned to play spades.

I immediately liked Marcus for his mild manners and because Heather declared that he was the only staff she could trust.  Often, I find, you can trust a crazy person’s judgment of character better than most.  Heather, herself, had become famous in the hospital.  When in orientation you could hear someone screaming from the 2^nd floor, we were informed that this was Heather.  When staff popped their head in to say “Hi,” they would say something funny like, “Oh, I have just been fired by Heather,” or “Oh, Heather just gave me a raise.”  So when I finally met Heather (impulsive, psychotic, focused, agitated, labile) and she welcomed me to the hospital and told me that I better respect her because if I don’t she’ll fire me, I was honored.  But when she asked me if she could take my seat next to Marcus I said No.  I forgot to mention that patients are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Honestly though, I see why Heather was famous, because I haven’t found a patient quite as lively since.  They could use her to advertise the place, “Where crazy people come for a crazy time.”  Her feelings quickly turned against Marcus, whom she accused of sexually harassing her the next day, proving once again the old adage, that being nice to crazy people doesn’t pay.  Sane people are, however, just as simple, as evidenced by the fact that after this day both Marcus and Javier developed crushes on me.  Discipline, mixed with a little condescension, always leads to love.  Love is in fact the only thing that kills desire and this is why love is the social worker’s job.  Nobody wants it.

This cycle, discipline, condescension, love, does not lead to increased reality testing.  In fact, people in the psychiatric hospital who refuse to take their meds often get worse.  It’s not good for the staff either.  Marcus, for example, also seemed to suffer, sometimes ignoring me and other times asking me out.  Perhaps he thought that this would provoke my desire, but for me it doesn’t work like that.  Maybe this is why I’m a social worker, because I am emotionally incapable of playing a roll in the cycle.  That’s why I don’t date much.  It, however, took my cointern Daryl to point out that Marcus has control issues.  I still don’t quite get it, but in some vague way it makes sense.  He also pointed out that Marcus doesn’t seem like my type.  “A ripped black man with you?” he exclaimed.  “Well, who seems more like my type in this hospital?” I countered.  I was jealous that every woman in the hospital seemed like Daryl’s type and no man, or woman, seemed like mine.

During this conversation Marcus walked by my table twice.  He sat behind me, with his back turned, not saying a word, apparently absorbed in the work of monitoring the boys while they ate.  I asked Daryl if he thought this was strange and he said it was probably because I was sitting with a dude, which to me seemed even stranger.  In these sorts of circumstances I always want to break the awkwardness.  My inclination was to turn around and make some sort of conversation, to put Marcus at ease, but I guess this is my own form of condescension and besides my approach, which was to smile, have lively conversation and ignore the situation worked, because later Marcus left a message on my phone.

The problem with me is that I can see some things, like depressed mood, confusion, anxiety, vulnerability, pride, but not others.  I don’t know what those other things are, but I get the feelings they are supposed to be the things that I respond to if what I am looking for is behavioral health.  I’m still not sure what to do with Marcus, if I should ask him on a date, or respond when he asks me on one, or if he’ll keep on asking if I ignore him.  It seems like I am supposed to be the one doling out the discipline and he the condescension.  I am pretty sure that for him I feel a certain amount of love, but as far as behavioral health goes, it’s not worth it if it makes me crazy.