Where I Can't Go

Some mornings, I am afraid to go back to sleep, after I wake from bad dreams. So it is this morning, and the very best I can do, is let the New Adventurers out of their crate. A jingle bell is rolling behind my bed right now, and soft slithering noises, as they navigate around whatever is under the bed. Dog toys, most likely, although there is my Mom's large punchbowl tray under there as well.

I have rearranged sleeping places for the unicorn meat eating cats, so that they are out of reach, although they won't be for very long. The New Adventurers will go back to Angels of Assisi soon, to be put up for adoption. The apartment will be terribly quiet, but some measure of serenity will return for the adults.

This picture is Minkins, one of the unicorn meat eating cats, in a moment of sanity recently.

It has rained for 5 days now, and last night, it turned cold again. Some few flowers are still on the trees, and the lilac and iris bloom now. The unicorn herds have moved north already, except for a few stragglers here and there, summer unicorns that can bear the Virginia heat and humidity. It really pisses the cats off, that they have missed most of the hunt season for the year.

Here is Ratty, in a super pissed mood. That he is eyeing the dog, is not a good sign.

I had a pedicure yesterday, at Ilema's Esthetique, in Salem. It's always a very spa-like experience there, and I came away with baby soft feet, and a nail polish called, "Let's Go Out for a Drink of Lunch." Really, alcoholics can pick them, can't we?

I also like the color called "Meet Me at the Copier" and there is "Last Night, On Wisteria Lane" which is also in the pink color family, but yesterday, "Let's Go Out for a Drink of Lunch" would only do.

I am now on Youtube, under "Alise Stewart reading at Liminal". Check it out. I didn't remember the time going that quickly, it all seemed like slow motion, but apparently, it was quick.

Today is therapy day, and I will be happy to see my friends. We are not a group that attracts much attention: we wouldn't stick out in a crowd, if we went somewhere as a group. Just average middle-aged women, getting together, and talking about a terrible stigmatized disorder, Borderline Personality. We have all been traumatized, at one point in our lives, and we are careful of one another's feelings. It's a fun group, for the most part, and we work hard at having fun at it...as we try to heal.

I am trying to be careful here: it has been pointed out to me, that what happens in our group is very, very private. That's something I am careful about and aware of, as I write. I will not write about individual members, or my therapist. I will share things like, we have two interns, taking class as we are, and participating in group, who may go on to specialize in treatment for Borderline Personality disorder. Meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous has health professionals attend meetings sometimes, for clinical experience, and I think it is fascinating to be 'studied.' I like to study, the studiers.

These young and personable women are real pioneers in this field, if they do go on to specialize. It is only about 20 years ago that treatment was developed for Borderline. To take the class, as a person with the disorder, can be both liberating and heartbreaking, as any successful treatment can be.

I am curious about my own disorder, to try to tease the silk from the corn, so that I may address my challenges. And there I go, intellectualizing. It is always much harder to face the stigma of having the disorder, than dealing with the disorder itself. To live with Borderline isn't hard...but it is hard on others.

There it is, again. I push it away, to distance myself on the page from my feelings. I hold the topic at arms' length, as being too big of a morsel to bite. I am a writer, but my capacity for self-expression is not limitless.

There are places in my writing, and in my heart and mind, where I cannot go even for you. I push myself every morning, to produce something that will help you to understand how I feel, even why I feel, when feeling isn't regulated for any other group on earth. I want to touch you, and be part of your life. I want to spread understanding about mental health issues. I would like to make life easier for the next person in line for my disorders.

In a room full of people, the ones with mental health issues are easy to spot, most of us just drip poverty. In other societies, we might be shamans, or witchdoctors, or soothsayers. Don't get me wrong. Mental "illness" is stigmatized everywhere, it can be. But in America, we can be cordoned off into a population. Sometimes we are handed just enough to eke out an existence. All of that creativity, and experience, just flushed down the toilet. Lives, circling the drain.

I put it down solely to the influence of the Puritans, and a more benighted population of immigrants has never been. No color in clothing, music was evil, and older women who could no longer bear children were hunted and shunned and put to death. The Arts, and creativity itself, was a sign of the Devil.

Enough. That's what I say when the injustice chokes me.

So I write my small blog, and try to do-unto-others-as-I-would-be-done-by. I try to be a good friend, and a productive citizen, to give something back. Because I am grateful to be a woman born in this day, in this country. With all our problems, and so much that is wrong that I live with, I could be some woman in Somalia, or Cote d'Ivoire, being raped daily, and watching her children grow up with AIDS, and tuberculosis...instead of a woman living in a rape culture, who has been raped, twice.

Here is the core of the injustice I feel today: From the year 2000, to 2005, I worked at a place in Roanoke, called Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project, Inc. We secured funding for water/wastewater projects for the rural poor in Virginia, down to Georgia.

I was physically assaulted by a coworker in 2005. What the agency, Southeast RCAP, decided to do with that is particularly shameful. While I was actively ill, and fully at the mercy of my mental disorders, Southeast RCAP asked me to sign a contract releasing me from my duties. Depending on the 'goodwill' of the then current CEO, Mary C. Terry, and lost in the world of mental illness, with no one to advise or help me, I signed that contract. The firm of Woods, Rogers and Hazelgrove enforces that contract to this day.

It says: that they may tell any future employer that I was fired for failing to show up for work after my assault. Only they don't have to mention the assault. Any damage sustained by me during an assault was 'my own problem.' And no responsibility of theirs.

My appeals to Southeast RCAP and Woods, Rogers, and Hazelgrove for mercy and some fairness in this matter is met with, "She (that is, me) signed the contract, and enforce it we will until the end of time." Or, translated, Tough Shit.

There are always two sides of the story, you may be thinking. But there is truly only that. I tried to interest person after person in my assault: lawyers, the media, the police, the District Attorney's office. No one gives a rat's rear end about my story, from that day to this. In fact, the Roanoke District Attorney's office helped the Agency, by sweeping the whole thing under an ugly rug.

So I live with it, and you do too, make no mistake.

I don't like the conclusions that I come to every morning. And every morning I reluctantly take my anti-Evil pills. I swallow them, and my pride as a hard worker. I lump the letters I get from Woods, Rogers, telling me to stick it where the sun don't shine. I can live with rape, everyone knows that a despicable act. But I cannot live with the rape of my reputation, so easily.

So the bitterness breaks through, and there is my core, and all the attention of my ire and resentment. There sits my hatred of a formerly worthy charity. And the inattention of the world, is too much.