Beauty for Ashes Part 3

Black Balloon

Baby's black balloon makes her fly
I almost fell into that hole in your life
And you're not thinking about tomorrow
'Cause you were the same as me
But on your knees

…Comin' down the world turned over
And angels fall without you there
And I'll go on to bring you home
All because I'm
All because I'm
And I'll become
What you became to me

(Black Balloon, Goo Goo Dolls)

I would love to give an exact date for when I became mentally ill just to give clarity to a life that often seems smeared with all its volatility and colorful experiences.  My life sometimes reminds me of Christmas sugar cookies.  My mom would give me a bowl of red, green, yellow, and blue frosting for my cookies.  I would have a container with sprinkles that were tiny little cylinders of white, pink, and green.  She would give me bottles of colored sugar, one green, and one of red.  The final ingredient would be a container of tiny red-hots.  I would invariably mix all the colors together and crowd every topping onto the same cookie.  The end result would be a cookie covered in gray-brown frosting, and a menagerie of sugar accents.  My life has been much like one of my cookies, every color and texture thrown onto one surface to make an overdone gray-brown mess, personifying the nature of bipolar disorder.

            Bipolar did not really make a sudden assault. I think it was a gradual infiltration that was helped by environmental stresses over time.  I believe my personality made clearing a path to the takeover of my mind that generally happens with mental illness, much easier.  I am a person who feels responsible not only for myself but for others as well.  I tend to take on more than my share of worries in life, and I am, or at least tend to be, unwilling to compromise my ideals.  I am a perfectionist but I would not say I have a Type A personality.  I demand a lot from myself and am often very hard on myself when I fail.  I am not as hard on others as I am on myself, though I believe I used to be when I was younger.  I am also a visionary, and being so exacts its own toll on a life just as it gives rewards.

            In his book, Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman describes a visionary leader as, “articulating where a group is going, but not how it will get there” (Goleman, 2002, p. 57).  Visionaries see the big picture.  Visionaries have the emotional intelligence (EI) to inspire others—to encourage them to catch the vision as we so often hear.  Another EI  characteristic of the visionary is that they are genuine.  They truly believe in their vision, and others sense that genuineness in them.  But the most valuable characteristic to a visionary is empathy (Goleman, 2002).   Empathy has the ability to link people.  Having someone identify with your situation is the quickest way for them to become your ally.  Understanding is what draws us together in that open loop of emotional communication Goleman references, and it is a powerful way for a leader to respond to the needs of his/her followers.

            Goleman relays negative aspects of being a visionary, but I prefer to deviate from his thoughts on the matter and share my own.  I know what the pitfalls of being a visionary have been in my life.  My ability to see the big picture offers great help to my friends when they are in need of consolation and problem solving.  However, for me, it is often too much for me to look at the whole view and highly stressful, especially when the best way to combat mental illness is to take it a tiny little piece at a time.  One needs to live in the present, for it is all we are guaranteed, but one also needs to see the bigger view or inspiration and progress will be lost.  How to marry the two?  I am still working to find that balance. 

When I was younger I didn’t understand who I was or that I was being stalked by a mental illness.  I just knew that life was bloody, and I seemed to be continually caught on the front lines.  I did not know I was a visionary type person or what that even meant.  I just knew I did not fit in my world, and I was continually looking toward a horizon I never seemed to get to no matter how fast I ran.  One thing I did understand at an early age was that people could not be judged by what they look like on the outside.  I was not compassionate, and empathy was not something I developed until I was older and had overcome the bonfire of anger that was raging through me.  Even so, I somehow attracted people to me who were broken, from bad homes, and needing someone to be loyal to them.  I was stunted emotionally, but I knew what honesty and loyalty were, and they were two commodities lacking in the world I lived in.  I think that is one reason my friends tended to be from rough homes, were oddities in our school society, and generally had substance abuse issues.  Had my parents known what my friends did and what their lives were like, they would probably never have let me leave the house. 

            My senior year of high school held four major events.  The first was obvious:  I was graduating.  The second was that my jazz band was invited to play in Philadelphia at the National Jazz Festival.  It was a huge deal, and we were so excited.  My rhythm section had been playing together since eighth grade.  We had won multiple awards because we were so rhythmically tight.  The trip would be the culmination of much work and tenacity.  However, the trip was almost squelched by the third major event.  We were moving.  Wyoming’s economy bottomed out and my parents were having a hard time making ends meet.  They decided to move three months before my graduation.  My band teacher personally requested that my parent’s let me stay to finish with the band trip.  I did not want to leave until after graduation.  I remember it was a bit of a question for a while, but some people from our church who lived in Riverton offered me a room so I could stay.  I was thrilled to be able to go on my trip and graduate with my class.  Even so, it was pretty difficult for me to be away from my family. 

The people I lived with didn’t trust me because I was a teenager.  They were good people.   They just did not trust teenagers.  I was working at a local restaurant and was struggling with the long hours they had me putting in.  I had finished all my credits the first half of the year, so I was simply marking time until graduation.  I missed a lot of school because I would work late and would then be too tired to go to school.  The people I stayed with had a hard time with this.  I was always honest with them, telling them exactly where I had been and making sure to call them so they would not worry, but they still did not trust me.  I think my mom finally intervened and told them I had never lied, and never would.  It just was not part of my nature.  I do not know what else they talked about but things got better.  I did not feel so pulled between them—school and work. 

            The final major event that happened my senior year was that I fell in love.  Hard.  I had had several boyfriends.  I even had a best friend who was a guy. We were always together, so guys were not a novelty to me.  I think that what happened to me my freshman year sort of eliminated any romantic notions I had about men.  And while I was wary of them and tended not to trust them, I found them to be really fun to hang out with.  I did not have to worry about the petty games girls tend to play. I could shoot straight from the hip and was understood and respected.  I had guy friends who treated me like a little sister, which meant that I was to call them when they were late for school, so they could peel themselves off the floor of whatever toilet they had passed out by, and drag their sorry asses to school.  I watched at parties to make sure those who should not be drinking too much were not, and I often castigated those who were doing too many drugs.  I guess I was much like the dorm mom or maybe just the hall monitor.  Needless to say, I provided a valuable thing for these guys, loyalty and safety, and when you are doing drugs and underage drinking, that is a very important thing. 

            Now there should be no misunderstanding here.  I did not enable these guys to practice their vices.  I spent a lot of time trying to get them away from what they were doing.  But when a person has gone down the road of self-sabotage, they cannot be talked out of what they are doing.  I just loved them in my stunted kind of way.  And I tried to make sure they were not destroying their futures as they were grappling to find themselves in their present.

            So my senior year, I met Aaron.  I must admit I have always had a penchant for bad boys. And he was a bad boy.  I met him at the restaurant where I worked.  He was the new cook, and I knew the first time I saw him that he was trouble. I was a good girl.  I did not tease guys or lead them on—at least not intentionally.  No matter how I seemed on the outside, I still wanted one thing, and that was to have a good marriage like my parents.  The only difference for me was that I also wanted to find some wild child and make him over into Prince Charming, like one would take a wild horse and turn him into the horse and buggy type.  Stupid.

            With Aaron I was ushered, full tilt down a dark hole into the world of drugs.  The title of this chapter is what that year of my life was like.  I was in a black balloon. Aaron had told me up front that he smoked pot, but he did not tell me that the house he lived in was a drug house.  There were three floors with three different apartments, and everyone did drugs. Aaron had been in jail for selling drugs before the age of 18, which was quite a rap sheet.  I was not foolish enough to be impressed by what he had done or was doing.  But I also knew that we are often victims of life, and sometimes the poor decisions we make are a direct result of that.  So I made it clear he was not to be high when with me, and we went from there, though I was mostly too naïve to know whether he adhered to that stipulation or not.

            I got to know the people who lived in the house with Aaron.  At first they were wary of me, considering me a little “goody goody”, but as time went on they accepted me.  I discovered that Aaron had made it clear no one in the house was to ever offer me drugs, but even if he had not, I would not have been tempted.  I had seen the ramifications of drugs in some of my friends at school.  I was not naïve enough to think they were any kind of an answer.  The couple that lived on the main floor of the house was trying to escape the grief over the loss of their two-year old little girl who died of leukemia.  Cocaine was their drug of choice but they were not opposed to immersing themselves in alcohol and pot as well.  I felt truly sorry for them, and I did not judge them, for young as I was, I realized they were up against something I could not begin to understand. 

            Aaron had a couple of roommates. They were guys who liked to party and live hard.  I often heard through the town grapevine of things they had done or trouble they had gotten into, but they were always very good to me and protective of me.  The other couple that lived in the basement liked hard-core drugs like heroine and acid.  I suspect they also did crank, the strongest type of amphetamine there is, more commonly known as meth.  The young woman did not like me because she liked being the center of attention, and when I was around, that did not happen as much.  She would often hit on Aaron just to try to get a reaction out of me, but I assumed that her perception was distorted due to the drugs and did not take it personally. 

The other couple who ran in that particular drug circle but did not live in the house were married and 

older than the rest of the people I knew.  I figured the average age to be early to mid twenties but Tim 

and Kerry were in their thirties.  Tim liked his pot, even grew it in their house.  Kerry just loved Tim 

and was much like me in the sense that she was with an addict but not one herself.  I once asked her 

how she handled it, and she told me it made her sad but that she loved Tim and wanted to be there 

whether he rose or fell.

 Many would argue with me that pot is not addictive, but then my question would be, “What do you 

call addiction?”   I suppose I could give the general explanation that pot is a doorway, and maybe so, 

but if you are a person who tends to make most repeated processes habitual, then addiction is easily 

accomplished.  So I guess my theory is that any substance, if taken enough, becomes a habit.  If it 

alters the mind and body from one state to another, the body becomes dependent on that substance to 

take it there over and over.  That is an addiction, body, mind, or both.  That is just my theory based

on about half a decade of watching drug use.  The pool was never large, but it was diverse, and I 

formed my ideas based on the way the drugs destroyed those I cared about.

      I remember Aaron going to a lumber mill every day for a month, asking over and over for a job.  

He badgered them until they gave him a job.  Then less than two weeks after he had started, he just

quit going to work.  Too much pot can kill the human drive.  I wondered if he was mixing in other 

drubs where he could, but he was mainly a fan of pot, and it was pot that kept him from moving 

forward with his life.  I helped where I could.  I never gave him money, just groceries, for I knew 

where the money would go.  I encouraged him as best I could. I tried to build him up and show him 

he was somebody, and then I finally realized I needed to let him go to become whatever he would

ultimately choose to become.  So I broke up with him.  There is much more to the story as is so often 

the case, but what matters most is what I am sharing on these pages. 

    One day I got a call after several months of not hearing from Aaron.  He asked me to come over

and help him pack.  He had finally decided he needed help and his stepmother and dad were going to

drive from Douglas, Wyoming to pick him up and take him to rehabilitation.  I agreed to go help him.  

I helped him pack up his stuff, which was not much, and then we talked.  He told me he was sorry

for what he had done to me, that I was the person he loved most, and yet I was the one he drove

furthest away.  He said many things that night, most of which I cannot remember. What I do 

remember is that somehow I had made a difference in his life, and that knowledge awes me still.

     I waited with him until his parents got there, and then he was gone.  It seemed that fast.  I saw

him one more time right before he went into rehabilitation, and that was it.  The effect having him gone

had on me was one of delayed shock.  Even when we had broken up, he was still in my life, still there

somehow. This person I had put all my energies and focus into was suddenly not there.  I was lost.  

It is corny to say he was my first true love, but it is the truth, he was my first and greatest, and there

are multiple reasons why it is important to share this in my story. For one thing, I learned about

compassion.  Life is not neatly wrapped up in boxes with labels.  There are really beautiful people who

 are caught up in the pain of life who do things that are not good.  That does not mean they are not

worth knowing, and it does not make them not worth loving.  I learned this from Aaron and those I

met because of him. I also felt very accepted and safe with these people.  There were broken places

in me that I did not even acknowledge; yet they called out to the brokenness in those I was with, and 

I felt like I belonged.  I also feel that this relationship was very substantial in my young life.  I became

 so much more dimensional during that half a year with Aaron.  I knew that we would not be able to

have a fairy tale life.  I began to understand that when you love someone who is a rebel, you cannot

make them to change, and often their choices interfere with their love for you.  Even though Aaron

was getting straightened out he would not be able to come back to me.  He would need to move

forward, and even though I was the one person in his life who was a good influence on him at the

time, I was also a reminder of all his failures and all that he must leave behind in order to move

forward and leave addiction behind.  He knew I had known him during his failures and he was unable

to look at me and believe I would not hold that against him in the future.  All this I knew and

understood with the insight of a woman much older than the 17 year old girl I was.

      I know now that a ramification of sexual molestation is to block off reaction to life events.  I react

to shocking events much like a person who has been punched in the stomach.  There is a point right

after the punch is delivered when the air has been pushed from the body, and it is not grasping for

more, it is simply frozen for a moment, trying to determine what has happened and what to do about

it.  The time elapsed is probably less that a second, but this feeling I speak of is where I’ve spent most

 of my emotional life.  I experience shock, and as it numbs me I straighten up from the hit and

continue on with my life, not stopping to begin emotional inhalation and exhalation once again.  This is

what I did with Aaron. The problem with not dealing with devastation or grief of any kind is that it

 must go somewhere.  For me, it became an ominous series of clouds that hovered over my horizon

waiting for just a bit more pressure that would usher in the dark storm of depression that would cover

my skies for the second time in my life.

            My family had moved to another state, as I mentioned before.  I went to college leaving behind all I knew, reminders of my life before, as well as my grandma who was getting older, and whom I missed dreadfully.  I was unable to grieve my missing Aaron as well as all the other losses, and on top of that, I was a freshman in college jazz band where most of the players were seniors.  I had beat out the other two bass players, one of which was a senior, and that did not bode well.  They gave me hell, and I was just not up to fighting with anyone.  I made it through half a year at the college, and then decided, regardless of the scholarship, I was over the whole experience. 

            I went home, feeling lost and fractious.  I felt like a flat line on a heart monitor.  Life was limp, and I was an unwilling participant.  My family moved while I was in college from Idaho to Montana, which was better for all of us.  I think my parents finally felt they could begin to gain some headway financially, and my siblings seemed to settle in better in school.  For me, it really did not matter.  I worked at K-Mart for a bit, but then decided I was not going to mark time.  I made a wise decision to go to beauty school. I found solace in envisioning three dimensionally on a head of hair.  I have always been good with my hands and inherited my dad’s artistic ability to look at something and see what it could look like as a finished product.  I discovered great contentment in the joy I could give to others, helping them like themselves better by changing their look.  There was satisfaction not only in creating but also in knowing a young housewife who felt dumpy and ugly had left my chair feeling beautiful, her husband practically drooling as he followed her out the door, not because of my work, but because he was once again seeing confidence and sensuality in the wife he loved. 

            I had no idea I could be a part of something so grand, and it changed me, slowly pulling me out of myself and back to a purpose.  I realized there was a connection between personal suffering and caring about others.  The anger inside was ever churning like furious waters, and I was often lost in judgment of others rather than understanding, but I knew I was on a journey to somewhere.  I felt it.  I knew that my life had a particular purpose.  I just didn’t know what it was yet.

            I finished at the top of my class in beauty school.  I was 20.  Before I even received my cosmetology license, I was on my way to another adventure.  I had no way of knowing where the road I was on would lead.  I was just glad to be headed somewhere.  My grandma always said, “It’s always exciting to think what might be around the next bend.” 

But I felt I was running from something, and I could feel it breathing down my neck.  My life seemed to me to be a series of disappointments rounded out by brutal life lessons, and I felt hunted and haunted; hunted by something I could not define that later would show itself as the mental illness that had been crouching inside me like a big slimy frog for most of my life, and haunted by loss and the realization that life is not always what you make it.  Sometimes it just is, and that knowledge made me cynical and unwilling to dream.  I turned toward my new adventure, hoping to find something beautiful about my life, something worth living for and dreaming about.