My Recovery: The In-Between Days

On September 25, 1987 I had a breakdown. The next morning my mother drove me to the ER.  I was admitted to the inpatient unit a day later and given Stelazine, the drug that worked—if imperfectly—until April 2007 when Dr. Altman instituted the cross-titer to the Geodon.

This blog entry is about the in-between days from 1987 to 1991 when I lived at home and then in a residence, working my way up from the halfway house to supported living in a housing project. Arlington Terrace was a haven for drug deals, and crack vials littered the hallways. The apartments were infested with roaches. 

There was no heat in the winter. There was no hope of a better life for the ex-patients, who had been in the mental health system for four, five, six years or longer. As I slowly recovered, I realized I didn't want that to be my fate: collecting a disability check for the rest of my life, at the mercy of the government for food, shelter and healthcare.

The story of how I got here from there begins when I got out of the hospital and returned to living with my parents for the first year of my recovery.  That lost year I spent in the "wood shed" was a form of solitary courage to feel the hurt physically and express the emotional pain in therapy—one-on-one with a therapist, and at the day program with a counselor and the others who had also just gotten out of the hospital.

It was all I could do: to get in my Mustang at eight in the morning, turn on the FM radio, and drive across town to Rise. Indeed, I lacked the motivation to take showers or wash and comb my hair, and to dress neatly. In an art therapy session there, I remember drawing a picture of Tide detergent because I had the goal of doing my own laundry. Before I got sick, Mom was the one to do this.

The first year of my recovery I spent sleeping ten hours a night. My greatest goal in life—to be a writer—was put on hold. For that one sad year I couldn't pick up a pen to write.  My father bought me a computer so I could do my writing, and all I could manage to type was one short poem, "Bounced Back Blues."

Then something happened. 

After a year at Rise, I moved into the halfway house, in September 1988.  I'd brought sheets of loose leaf in a binder and began writing down my feelings, and observations about what was going on in my life.  Though I threw out that seminal journal years ago, the words come back to me now. On lonely nights in my bedroom, listening to scratchy records on my stereo, I would write, over and over, "When life throws you a curve, hit it out of the ball park."

At that time, Rise was meant to be short-term, so when I lived at Lake House, I started a new day program that I attended until fall 1989 when I began training as a word processor. The coordinator I met with weekly at the halfway house felt I could do more than just check in with him, I could read from my journal entries and begin to articulate my goals and hopes for the future.