See Who We Are

X had a song in the 1990s titled “See Who We Are.”

I’m a mental health activist because I couldn’t accept “business as usual” and the poor treatment of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

At first I wanted to be known as a schizophrenia expert and now I prefer the term mental health activist.

It’s because I’ve become wary of the assumptions masquerading as facts that are parroted by so-called experts.

Like that of an “internationally recognized expert” on mental health who regurgitated that no one with schizophrenia could recover. She didn’t go beyond that to give techniques that would help people recover. She didn’t give any ideas she had about how to change the broken-down mental health system. She simply kept stating over and over the same bleak information on schizophrenia recovery that gives no one hope.

I make the case for not stereotyping others. For not assuming things about other people based on how they look, or what kind of diagnosis or other “thing” they have. I challenge that expert to buy one of the homeless people with schizophrenia a hot chocolate on a cold winter day. Instead of writing a news article stating the obvious and not offering a solution for helping individuals with untreated mental illness that go homeless.

To truly see how another person is inside where it counts is a gift each of us should hone. Remember: no human being is a statistic. Take time to see and observe others. Break bread with people who are different from you.

Difference is beautiful. That in the end is why I titled my memoir Left of the Dial: to encourage people to celebrate their difference. To narrate the story arc of the life of a quirky, creative young girl.

Let’s face it: a lot of us have a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Yet rather than deny this or get spooked by it, we owe it to ourselves to accept the diagnosis. It’s a part of our lives. Yet with good medication, therapy as needed, a fitness routine, and a support team, it is no longer a big part of our lives: it’s just something we have, no more than that.

I titled my memoir Left of the Dial because I wrote about music, fashion, books, and friendships. I wanted my book to be about a happy life lived in harmony even with ongoing hardship.

I implore everyone reading this blog who is an outsider, who does not have a mental illness:

See who we are.

There’s a human being experiencing this pain. We’re not nameless faceless shells. Our illness is not the sum total of who we are. We have real lives. We have hopes and dreams and needs and fears and feelings just like everyone does.

See who we are.

Harmony / Evensong

Left of the Dial is the title of my memoir because I champion living a life in balance with the needle on the left of the dial of the VU meter. So that everything’s balanced. No loud noisy thoughts in a bar room brawl with your feelings. No severe symptoms veering into the red on the right.

The goal is to have harmony in your head, in your body and mind and spirit.

Harmony: that’s the word that’s the ticket to having an easier time of it in our lives.

Living a life left of the dial signals you live in harmony with your values first of all, no one else’s. So if you’re a mainstream girl in a body-pierced world, that’s your way of living your life left of the dial. If everyone’s sporting tattoos, you’re the rebel if you have none.

You don’t have to worry about other people not liking you for who you are. You just have to like yourself, and be okay with your choices. You find stability and security in a home of your own and that home can be in your own skin.

Here’s to every one of us who is starting out in life on our own. Here’s hoping that when each of us nears 50 (as I am) we can view our lives in a cheer-view mirror instead of a negative rear-view mirror.

I firmly believe that right where you are is where you need to be at this moment in time. And if it’s less than ideal, take action every day to change your life for the better.

As well I champion not being afraid to do your own thing: to stand up and decide what’s right for you to do at this time in your life. I fought a brave fight to be taken seriously in my goal of living independently and obtaining a full-time job in the early 1990s when it was unheard of for a person with SZ to do this.

I will tell readers now and I will tell readers always:

Dare. Take the risk that things will be better on the other side.

Risk doing the thing that scares you. Do the thing you think you cannot do.

Pay attention to the voice that tells you “I must try no matter how hard it is.”

Find your own happy house in your head and in your neighborhood.

A Million Thank You’s

The book is taking off.

I want to send out a million thank you’s to the readers who wrote reviews for Left of the Dial on my Amazon page.

I’m going to try to be involved with the International Women’s Writing Guild’s author book fair at their Meet the Editors and Agents Big Apple event in New York City in April. There, I might be able to sell copies of the book in person.

On Tuesday I will publish here another memoir excerpt.

I wrote my memoir because I wanted to get out the message that individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia can live full and robust lives just like people who don’t have an MI.

Too often, the media is a cacophony of war stories, hell stories under the umbrella of “misery memoirs.” It was in my estimation time for the tide to turn. I wanted to publish a positive account of what happens when psychiatry gets it right.

The Lizard Lounge

The memoir excerpt below takes place just before my first pdoc lowered the dose of Stelazine to 2 mg.

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Another moody winter arrived. Margot introduced me to her new boyfriend, Lizard, a strange Pisces. He was a perfectly cast grunge character who played bass in Cargo, a rock band that performed at SRO, a club on Bay Street.

I spent the weekends with her at his place because I had nothing better to do and nowhere else to go. We ordered in Mexican food—quesadillas and nachos—because we were too lazy to go to the store and get the provisions. He had enough beer in the fridge to outlast the next century.

In Lizard’s pad, everything new was old before it’s time: the slipcovers, the shabby worn arms of the overstuffed easy chairs, the going-down-behind-the-mystery surface of real life into the still waters of a placebo high.

They sat on the couch in front of the wall, and I sat on the chair under the window. Four milk crates topped with a mirror formed the coffee table. The living room had a disposable feeling.

Lizard liked to get high on weed, listening to Pink Floyd albums and spouting amber philosophies.

“Is that your favorite color?” he asked, pointing his Corona toward my purple shirt.

“Not exactly. I’m a red person.”

“It’s just a shirt,” I said, though I took care when I bought it. A shirt was never just a shirt to me: it reflected who I was—the face I presented to others. I felt that if I dressed in sharp fashion, people would think I was interesting and admire me.

“What face are you behind the face you show?” Lizard challenged.

“Excuse me?”

“You have a startling effect.” He stared at me.

He looked like a disheveled freak that you’d find riding a late-night bus. I ignored him and flipped absentmindedly through the pages of Mirabella, a women’s magazine.

“Let her be,” Margot said.

He finished the joint and placed another album on the turntable. She went to change into her kimono.

When the music was over, she said, “Later for you guys; I’m going to bed.”

At two in the morning, he crawled around looking, having forgotten where he stashed the Thai stick, and in the half-light of the kitchen, he was just another stoned Jesus working his jones like salvation.

“I kept it here, I know I did,” he muttered.

When he found the private reserve, it was rather skimpy. He was a daily pot smoker, and wouldn’t have enough left for tomorrow.

“That bum CR sold me out again.”

I continued to read the magazine as if he wasn’t there.

“Let’s knock on his door and make him pony up.”

Those stained clothes, the scruffy jeans; I didn’t know what Margot saw in him.

She walked in as if she wasn’t aware she came out of the bedroom.

“What are you saying? What are you saying?”

She continued: “It’s two in the morning and we’re not going to walk the street at this hour.”

Lizard: “Shit, what am I going to do?”

Margot: “You should have thought of that earlier.”

He waved his hands in the air. “Go find me a beer.”

My God, how did she stay in the relationship? The next thing I knew, she popped open a Heineken and poured it on his shirt. “Cool off.”

“Sick chick.”

“You know you like it that way.” She laughed. “Come to bed, darling.”

That was my cue to take solace in the spare bedroom. I was a night owl again. Too cold, I lay awake looking out the window to the backyard. It was three, four, and then five in the morning. You haven’t lived until you’ve made it to 3:00 a.m. eternal—when the sky is the silver-gray of a knife blade, and you feel that you’re the only one awake on earth.
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Left of the Dial Amazon Page. It’s also available via special order at bookstores.

Memoir Excerpts Will Return

Tomorrow I will post a memoir excerpt from Left of the Dial. I was unable to write a blog entry today so stay tuned for tomorrow’s post.

VU Meter

I’ve been thinking about my VU meter analogy and the significance of living your life left of the dial: with your feelings and thoughts in balance and everything on an even keel.

A person shouldn’t have to spend days and days and even weeks and weeks depressed or otherwise symptomatic.

Yet one think (er-thing) I’ll talk about here this winter is knowing when to rest and when to get active.

Sometimes we all need to rest for a day here and there. I’m fond of living in a city where there are four seasons: I have the chance to acclimate my body to nature and the changing weather.

I’m the biggest foe of climate change and the rising sea levels and the erosion of marshland and other economically damaging man-made phenomena.

I advocate for getting in tune with the seasons, with the natural world, with living by a park or by greenery if you’re able.

I’m all for whatever effective techniques a person can use to lower the distortion on the VU meter. I champion the natural world that is fast disappearing as money-grubbing agribusinesses and food conglomerates put profits above people.

Illness is not a natural state of being. And all sorts of illnesses are on the rise because companies are in the business of selling fake food.

Ironically, as our natural resources get ravaged, I think too our personal resources become limited.

As cold as it gets in New York City in the winter now I make the case for hibernating when it’s necessary.

I maintain though that lowering the volume on the VU meter can help us live our lives in balance.

The interconnected nature of all these elements I’m talking about is no accident.

I’d love to hear your comments on this.

Mille Grazie

Mille Grazie.

A thousand thanks to everyone who has bought a copy of my book.

My goal in March is to do in-person book talks in the New York City area. Stay tuned on my speaking engagements page to find out the dates and times and locations.

I’m in contact with my Uncle who served in Iwo Jima in World War II. He commented that in my book I “reminded all of us of our humanity.”

My Uncle enlisted. No draft existed. He risked his life to do what he believed was right: serve our great country in a time of war.

I think of my Uncle now. I wrote to him that we did not suffer in vain: he and I lived to tell our stories to benefit others. I told him I’m willing to risk the stigma.

The cost of untreated mental illness in America is estimated to be upwards of $100 Billion. The loss of human capital is greater.

Sometimes the cost of telling your story is a price you must be willing to pay because of the benefit to others.

My Uncle sends me essays he wrote about his involvement in the war. He was a Marine. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

Mary Oliver is often quoted from her famous poem:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

What do you plan to do? If you have a story, tell it. If you have a cake to make, bake it.

I plan to go to my grave advancing the agenda that getting the right treatment right away results in a better outcome.

Our lives are wild and precious.

We are each of us here for a purpose in this lifetime.

“Tell me, what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Rocker Chic Blues

I’m going to continue with another memoir excerpt.
This is a scene from an early session with my first therapist. She was Italian, as I am.
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The days seemed longer, even though they were short. My one happiness was the jewelry design workshop I signed up for on Monday nights at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. I was creating a copper necklace and earrings. The hot metal felt good in my palm as I sanded the edges. The earrings were cutout triangles with dangling wires. The pendant was a downturned cutout triangle screwed to a flat, stippled back.

In the studio, I lost all sense of time. A young girl who attended FIT talked with me about her goal of designing a jewelry line for Tiffany’s. “Would it be like Paloma Picasso’s?” I remembered this designer’s signature kiss earrings from the advertisements in the fashion magazines. “I want to work with diamonds,” she intimated. We were the first to arrive in the studio and the last to leave.

The night before, I felt tiny particles of dust in my eye, and I was afraid it was the copper, so I called the emergency room, and the triage nurse told me that as long as I could still see, it was okay. I was afraid to go to sleep but woke up fine this morning.

Now I sat in Flora’s room across from her in the black chair. I rubbed my eyes reflexively.

“Is your eye okay?” She was concerned.

“Oh I was working in the studio; it must be the copper dust.” “The copper dust? A studio?”

“I haven’t been doing much. So I joined a jewelry-making class,” I said this as if it was just something I did.

“Good. Why didn’t you tell me?”

My voice came out in a trickle. “It’s all I can do.” The tears started coming down.

“This is a big thing. Don’t discount it. You’ve just gotten out of a hospital, and you’re doing things. That’s great.” She extended a boutique box of tissues.

“Oh it’s not much of anything. What can I do? I have to do something.”

“Are you socializing?”

“I have a friend, Carny, from school. I’m afraid she won’t want to be my friend once she finds out I got sick.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Oh, she’s just great. We met at the radio station. We’d go out at night drinking in Clove Lake Park or drive to Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, and listen to punk bands.”

Oh, those nights at the park: swinging low on the swings and talking about when we were young. She’d gone to the after-hours club Danceteria with fake ID, and I had stayed home with my ear to the radio. Yet I could match her song for song when it came to what we were doing at that time in our lives. The first song I heard when I tuned in to WSIA was the Heaven 17 song “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang.” She first drove on the highway listening to the Avengers’ “We Are the One” on the cassette deck.

It was sweet relief from boredom, and I was flattered that she would want anything to do with me. I was besotted with the tales of her sexual escapades—the savage love conquests on the foreplay couch in her apartment. She had a lot of boyfriends before her long-term guy Willy, and I had no one. I wondered what it would take to get the courage to be able to love someone and leave, or be left. I was afraid a guy would use me, and I’d feel cheap.

Carny was a happy drunk and fueled by alcohol; I was chatty and outgoing. We revealed our deepest desires: she wanted to marry Willy, and I wanted to become a journalist. We vowed to meet on the park swings ten years from that date and catch up with each other. I knew it would never happen yet secretly hoped it would.

Silent as I remembered this, Flora brought me back into real life by asking, “What are you thinking?”

“All a person needs is two friends, pizza, and a really great sound system.”

“I suspect you can count on one hand the number of good friends you have,” she colluded.

The friendship between Carny and me was an unlikely pairing. We didn’t celebrate each other’s birthdays. We had little in common except the music. Her feelings were often mercurial. My mood was as black as my boots lately. She was like a chair that goes with a table; we just happened to fall into each other’s lives.

Flora’s comment stung, though most likely she was talking about everyone, not just me. Who was I if not a rocker girl? Who would I be without Carny? I wanted to be Chris, whoever she was, and right now I felt like I was a long way away from meeting my true self.

The tears flowed as I reckoned with the idea that I would lose all this. I was embarrassed to use up all the tissues, so I reached for one last tissue to dry my face. I drowned in tears as the session neared the end.

“Carny was the only person who understood my dream.”

“What did you dream of?”

“I want to go to grad school for a degree in journalism.”

“Okay, that’s a good long-range goal, but what are you doing now during the day?”

I told her I was doing nothing except reading books I checked out of the library. She said that it would be a good idea if I joined a day program called Rise, where people with psychiatric conditions met five days a week for therapy and support.

“You could meet new people—be around people who are in the same life boat.”

It sounded like a plan. She tore off a sticky note from on her desk and wrote down the name and phone number of the director to schedule an intake.

“Think of it as a job interview, to sell her on getting you in. I’ll see you next week.”

“Okay.” I searched in my bag for the sixty bucks and forked it over.

“By the way, what are you creating in the studio?”

“A pendant and a pair of earrings.”

“You’re okay, kid. Keep up the good work.”

“Thanks.” I exited the room.

Driving home, I stopped at the drugstore to look for some lipstick. I swirled up the tubes until I found the perfect shade. It was Certainly Red.

Left of the Dial Amazon Page

Left of the Dial News

You can special order Left of the Dial from Barnes & Noble and local bookstores as well as buying it online.

Public libraries will be able to buy copies so you’ll be able to check it out of the library too.

Towards March I will do book signings in the New York City area.

Shortly I will create a GoodReads author account so stay tuned for this also.

Write Where You Are

I recommend plotting in chronological order the key events of your life.

Take the event that resonates with you the most and start writing about that time in your life.

The goal is to have 50 pages of writing. I recommend joining a writing workshop that is comprised of supportive, knowledgeable, and educated individuals from diverse walks of life.

The first memoir workshop I joined in 2001 was for Italian American writers. The next workshop I joined had four women and was at first lead by a published fiction writer and playwright. Then we met on our own at each others’ houses.

I was not afraid to tell my story to unknown strangers in 2001 and then again with the women. At some point, you’ll have to get feedback for your writing. You can’t rely solely on your own eye or ear.

There is no formula for writing memoir. I told my story in chronological order and tightly edited it to include only certain scenes that followed one into the other in a cohesive, linear narrative.

You can’t bridle up what you have to say when you first start. It might take two, three, or more rounds of editing to polish and perfect your story.

So write where you are. Keeping going. Listen to other people’s feedback with an open mind.
You want to publish only the best possible version of your story. Regardless of whether you get an editor to buy your book, or you decide to self-publish, you have to bring out a great, engaging story.

I will talk more in the coming blog entries about how to see your life with new eyes to uplift your narrative. Or as one woman in the first workshop told another woman, “Be Irish” even though she wasn’t from Ireland. You have to fully become the character whose life you’re crafting.

Sometimes this will be unsettling. You’ll have to go to the root of the narrative and pull up the weeds so that the gorgeous flowers show through. What you write might be about something sad, about a horror, yet there should always be something elegant and beautiful about it. (That’s what I think.)