the rix mix

It's been a long, gradual slide downhill for me for years. Some temporary struggles upward. But there were key positions - relationships - that needed to be filled to make this work, & never were.

Even my therapist wasn't enough, & I would complain to her about it.

Ten years ago I was handed a new set of circumstances. Basically, they were this: You can't have the screwy life you were trying to have. You're not well enough, mentally stable enough, to continue what you were doing in the way you were doing it. You need a different platform. The one you have doesn't hold you up.

Drugs & booze weren't part of the problem, thank heavens.

So began a series of changes, some of which I resisted. Others I went along with. But I wasn't quick to adapt, or use opportunities & services offered. When I was feeling stable, of course I felt that I reached equilibrium.

I'm fine today, thank you.

You feel good, so it's good time to take care of that other stuff.

But I was shifting between two separate outlooks, & expectations, & one never fully understood or connected with the other.

There were the mental health professionals, testing me & talking with me, & advising me generally. & then there was almost everyone else.

I can't say I wasn't warned about this. I was advised repeatedly that I had to literally educate any key people in my life to the new realities, & that it could be a very difficult task. Many of them would strongly resist, because we had shared histories, good & bad, & in their various ways they would try to make me deny what I was experiencing & what I had to do. The most common would be evading the matter altogether. Why aren't you like you used to be? You seem alright. How come you won't talk on the phone for hours? How come you don't do a weekly radio show anymore? Why aren't you back at the art supply store, you used to talk about new art books all the time. Those were the friends.

From a few others, it was worse. Accusations that I was engaging in some kind of elaborate ruse. Which gives me way too much credit.

Everyone was so sure they knew me. They knew my "history." What else did they need to know? But that was my ruse. Which history they drew from depended upon how they knew me, & how long. By the late 90's, nobody else was really inside my world, experienced it, saw the dimly opaque bubble it had become. I just decorated the bubble & painted various faces on it. A few observant, insightful people sensed it, usually because they themselves had dealt with my kind of mental illness, were familiar with it. They were, in fact, the people who initially talked me into seeking professional help.

I was an outgoing public artist, & I was solitary, reclusive, extremely insecure.

I was compassionate, encouraging to others, & I was coldly indifferent.

I was lazy, unfocused, unreliable, & I was focused, responsible, trustworthy with routines.

I was all those.

Your challenge, my therapist tried to tell me, is not some distant goal to be reached, but is the process of adjusting yourself now to your changed circumstances, from which you cannot turn back. & to meet the challenge I needed " an emotional support structure." Because she was only one piece of that structure. She wasn't family, personal friend, or social worker.

Yes, I could keep much of what I had. Some of those things were good, valuable, useful. . Continue to write, find new outlets. Do a radio show once in a while for fun. If I thought about it, she said, it doesn't have to be that much different, since I had always struggled just to maintain the modest lifestyle I had come to prefer. "In your own way, you've always had a vocation, a career," she said. "So keep having it in the ways it is possible to have it."

What the hell happened? How did I trip up so badly. I've explained avant garde music to 12 year old piano students, & Jersey boardwalks to midwesterners, but I couldn't explain my form of mental illness to anyone, although I have a document of several pages filed somewhere explaining it to me. How would anyone know what to do if I couldn't explain it?

In 2004, after my therapist had to order an "emergency intervention" & I went back into the hospital for two weeks, some of the most serious basic problems were taken in hand & settled. It should have happened a few years earlier.

But another problem was not settled; the lack of "an emotional support structure." My therapist left the clinic before we tackled it, & since I was "maintaining," she was not replaced. When there are seriously dysfunctional households with children at risk, a single client is not a high priority for a clinic with a heavy caseload. At that point, the "emotional support structure" is supposed to take over.

If one can have emotional support only by saying one doesn't really require it, then it isn't emotional support. It isn't even support with conditions.

The conditions of emotional support are usually easy to negotiate: Don't miss your shrink appointments. Don't despair. Pay your rent on time. Return personal phone calls. Eat something. Take walks. Go back to that art class. Write, because you're good at it & makes you feel better when you do.

Not: You're a big fake. You're stupid. You're wasting my taxes. I'm ashamed of you. How does one deal with those conditions? By refusing to accept them & walking away from them, if possible. That's all one can do. Although one loses an actual, important person by doing so, & all the potential understanding. It's not love. Not even close. Not even the beginnings of love. Healing is impossible. I csn't bridge that divide even if I carry with me a box filled with all the requests for forgiveness, & all the regrets & apologies I owe.

Some very unpleasant experiences, failures, angers, resentments, memories, can be smoothed over, can be tucked away. Not everything must be exposed. If I believed that, I'd be writing about all kinds of unpleasant things just because I could. But that kind of personal writing is a stretch for me, always was. By temperament, I'm a middlebrow.

Just never tell me this isn't real, & put me down for it.

So I kept on pulling into myself, a turtle.