I DON'T HAVE ANY INTERNET ACCESS ON SUNDAYS.
THERE IS NO CODE INTENDED FOR ANYTHING ON THIS PAGE.
MY ATTEMPTS TO GET RID OF CODE IN MY OWN WRITING HAVEN'T BEEN WELL-RECEIVED, AND IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR THIS PAGE IN PARTICULAR THAT MY STATEMENT THAT THERE IS NO CODE HERE IS TAKEN SERIOUSLY.
MAYBE I'M NOT DOING A GOOD JOB WITH GETTING RID OF CODE IN EVERYTHING I DO, BUT THAT'S BECAUSE GETTING RID OF IT ISN'T AN EASY THING TO DO WHILE YOU BOTH REALLY WANT TO BE RID OF IT AND WANT TO HAVE SOME SENSITIVITY TO HOW OTHER PEOPLE WILL RESPOND TO WHAT YOU DO.
THERE IS NO CODE INTENDED FOR ANYTHING ON THIS PAGE.
April 25, 2011
It’s not inconsistent for me to be able to say what’s good about my family along with what’s bad about it. The other day I talked about the good, and today I need to talk more about what’s bad.
--When my parents went, without my knowledge, to talk to the medical director of the community mental health center for Chittenden County on October 20, 2010, I think it’s very likely that if my father told her that he didn’t want to become my legal guardian, he was lying. I read in the medical director’s report (she’s also a psychiatrist) that my father had said he’d refused to consider applying for guardianship of me.
For one of my parents to become my guardian was probably something that she suggested to my parents after they told her that I believed that I was getting coded messages from the television. If readers will recall from my last discussion of my parents going to talk to the psychiatrist, my parents knew about my blog although I hadn’t told them about it; I had never discussed any of it with them. There was one thing after another that they knew to be true that they presented to her as if they were psychotic symptoms that I was experiencing.
Even though I didn’t know that they had gone to talk to her until November 21, 2010, one of the first things that I did when I got to the Vermont State Hospital was write a letter to the judge asking him please to prevent either of my parents from becoming my guardian. The judge responded by appointing me a guardian ad litem. The guardian ad litem will cease to be my guardian when the case is settled.
The appointment of the guardian ad litem blocked anyone else from gaining any legal power over me. I hadn’t heard of a guardian ad litem before; I thought it was a good solution, a good response from the judge.
Copyright L. Kochman April 25, 2011 @ 10:03 a.m./added some text @ 10:50 a.m.
@ 12:19 p.m.
In my opinion, what’s been happening for the past couple of decades in psychology and psychiatry is that the issues already present in families have been given an official excuse by the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has been allowed to diagnose and medicate everyone who will agree to it or who can be pressured into it. I know that nobody in my family ever meant to become bad; after a few years of having been a psychiatric survivor, my despair at the loss of my “good” identity made me vulnerable to the nihilism that is always attractive at some point to most teenagers and people in their twenties. At times, I became someone who would have horrified me if I’d been a child or teenager and could have seen into my own future. I don’t think that I was still that person when I got back to my parents’ house and was staying with them during the summer of 2001. I also know that I hadn’t been that person the entire time that I’d been away from their house for the year before that, when I’d lived in a shelter and then gotten my own apartment for a while.
Unfortunately, people who have psychiatric histories are guiltlessly and relentlessly abused by society in general, and my parents’ own unkind tendencies flowered with the permission that the stigma on me gave them. Even when I wanted to make it up to them for how I’d been to them at previous times, they didn’t care.
For most of the summer of 2001, I didn’t have much clothing. I had had enough clothes when I’d gotten a room in an apartment with some other people in a mid-size city after spending several months in a homeless shelter there. By the summer of 2001, I had long since lost my job and the apartment that went with it because I couldn’t keep it together when my parents told me that they were going to use private investigators to watch what I did whenever they felt like it, for the rest of my life.
I fell apart after that. I couldn’t think about anything except that I’d have no privacy from my parents, and that it seemed that they wanted to remove all possibility of normality and happiness from my life.
I had already spent the better part of a year in the shelter. I called my parents with enough regularity that they couldn’t accuse me of being out of touch. I went home a few times, and every so often my parents would send me some money; $50 or so. But I worked; I did day labor and then when I got the apartment with help from a program offered by a day shelter, I got a regular job. My parents weren’t paying for anything I did, and hadn’t been since before I left their house and my home state and went to the shelter.
I tried to call them when I first moved into the apartment, and they took something that I meant as a joke badly. I tried to talk to them more and they were so difficult, mean and demanding that I hung up on them without giving them my new address or phone number. I felt so much better after I’d hung up the phone, and I felt so much better as the days passed and I didn’t speak to them or respond to their e-mails, that I figured maybe having little to nothing to do with my parents was the secret to a happy life that I’d been missing up until then.
After a couple of weeks passed during which I didn’t speak to my parents and they didn’t know my address or phone number, a staff person at the day shelter that had helped me get the apartment took me aside. She said that a private investigator had shown up at the day shelter, looking for me. She said that the P.I. had told her that my father had told him that I had “emotional issues.” She gave me the card that he’d given her. She also told me to be careful; it was good advice that I wish I’d known how to follow.
I was upset and I called my parents. They laughed at me. My father was very condescending to me and told me “I knew you’d be angry.” In the background I could hear my mother yelling and laughing, too.
They didn’t say anything such as “Thank you for calling us; we didn’t want to upset you but we were really worried about you because we didn’t know where you were.” They didn’t say anything such as “We’re so glad that you’re ok; please don’t leave us having no idea where you are again.” They didn’t say anything such as “Our hiring a private investigator was a one-time occurrence that we did because we didn’t know where you were and we wanted to know that the apartment you moved into was ok.”
No, they were laughing. They also made it clear that the private investigator was going to be a fixture in my life for as long as they felt like having him there.
Motivation had kept me going through what I found to be the surmountable difficulties of the excellent shelter system that was in that city at that time. However, once I felt that my life was never going to be my own no matter what I did, I felt as if my parents had put a skewer through my future.
I gave up; first I lost my job, then the apartment. I stayed at some shelters just to have a place to sleep, but most of the time I wandered around during the day, wondering what I could do to make my parents leave me alone. I tried to talk to a judge; he said there was nothing I could do. I tried to talk to the police; they said there was nothing I could do.
Now, at 36, I know that there is something I can do; if they do it again, I can get a civil restraining order. But I was 27 then, and I didn’t think there was any remedy for what my parents planned to do.
For lack of a plan and lack of hope, I ended up back at my parents’ house a few months after I’d first gotten the apartment. My parents were meaner to me than they ever had been before. My father told me “You’re not especially welcome here;” this after they’d claimed that their plan to use private investigators to follow me around for the rest of their lives was out of love and concern.
My parents told me that I couldn’t use either of their cars; they said I’d stolen the car the year before when I’d taken it without asking to drive to the city where I’d lived since.
I had taken the car in the middle of the night and driven it to the house of some relatives in that city. I parked the car in the driveway and then offered no objection at all when my relative called my parents to tell them that I was at her house and that the car was there. My parents had their car back as soon as they came to get it. I had only taken it out of desperation to leave their house, where all we had done for a long time was fight.
Once I was back at their house, in the summer of 2001, my parents also accused me of having given my clothes away while I was staying at their house, before I left and stayed in the shelter. I don’t know if they didn’t remember or if they didn’t care that almost all of the clothes to which they were referring had all been between 4 and 6 sizes too big for me. They were clothes that I had worn in college when the psychiatric medication that I’d been taking had put 30 to 60 extra pounds on me that I couldn’t lose no matter what I did. The medication was something that I was pressured into taking by my parents and by the therapists and psychiatrists who made money off the fact that my parents were willing to be told that I was chronically mentally ill and would need medication for the rest of my life.
I had worked while staying at the shelter and for a while when I had my own place, so I had been able to buy clothes then. I had also gotten clothes from the shelters and day programs for the homeless. Most of that clothing didn’t make it back with me to my parents’ house. I asked my parents to help me get some clothes. They said “You can wear your mother’s old clothes until you get a job and can buy your own.”
One thing that my parents said after that summer was that one of the reasons that they didn’t want me to use their cars was that they didn’t think I was in good enough mental shape to drive. Yet, apparently, during the summer of 2001, they expected me to both get a job while wearing clothes that my mother didn’t want and to create an entirely new wardrobe for myself.
My mother has always been at least an inch shorter than I am. Even if her idea of “old clothes” weren’t clothes that she bought before 1982, many of which don't fit me, her feet are at least a size smaller than mine.
It’s true that I wasn’t in the best mental shape at that time. I still hadn’t recovered from the fact that my parents had told me that I could expect a future of being watched by people whom they hired, and my father reiterated his statement about that issue once I was back at their house. I understood from this, whether he meant it that way or not, that the only way not to be stalked by my parents was never to leave the state in which they lived. Maybe they didn’t mean it that way; maybe they meant I couldn’t even leave their house if I ever wanted any privacy at all.
I might have tried more diligently to find something to wear in my mother’s closet and to go to work, without use of a car, if I had felt I had anything to live for. I don’t know what I would have done about having no shoes, though; how many places will hire you if you don’t have any shoes?
It’s not as if my mother actually wanted me to wear ANY of her clothes, old or not. She didn’t welcome me into her room and say “pick out what you can find.” I think what they said about my being able to wear her old clothes was more about their refusal to help me get anything new, even from a thrift store, than a desire to help me in any way.
There were several weeks during that summer when I didn’t change clothes; I changed towels. I would take a shower and then spend the next 24 hours in a towel.
I just tried to stay out of the way; when my father got home from work, I’d go to my room and get into bed and stay away from the rest of the house until my father went to work in the morning.
I had one pair of underwear. When I got my period, I put washcloths in the underwear and washed the washcloths and the underwear every day.
I don’t remember if it was before or after the weeks when I was wearing towels that I did have some clothes on. I think it was a skirt and a shirt that I had found in my mother’s closet; still no shoes. I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my parents’ house, next to the garden. A guy walking his dog came by; he stopped and asked me out.
He could have been a lot worse. Once he had a chance to talk to me, he saw right away that I wasn’t doing very well. He could have tried to make me have sex with him, but he never did. At one point, he drove me to the mall, told me to stay in the car in the parking lot, went into the shoe store and emerged from the shoe store with a pair of women’s walking sneakers which he made me take.
It was a long summer, and the fall wasn’t much better.
I’ve just read most of this over, and there’s something I want to say.
By the time of the events I’m describing here, it had been almost 9 years since my first hospitalization. When I finished reading what I’d written just now, an image of my mother appeared in my mind. I think I was 18, and desperate to leave something, anything, of what I’d felt since being in the hospital behind. I sat on the floor of my room and cut off most of my hair.
My mother walked in and was surprised; she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was cutting off my hair. She said “Why?” I told her not to worry. She turned around and left my room without another word.
A few minutes later I went out into the kitchen and she had her head down on her arm on the banister of the staircase. She was sobbing. She looked up as I came in and said “I’m sorry,” the best she could through her tears.
Copyright L. Kochman April 25, 2011/some editing April 26, 2011 @ 8:38 a.m.
THERE IS NO CODE INTENDED FOR ANYTHING ON THIS PAGE.
MY ATTEMPTS TO GET RID OF CODE IN MY OWN WRITING HAVEN'T BEEN WELL-RECEIVED, AND IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR THIS PAGE IN PARTICULAR THAT MY STATEMENT THAT THERE IS NO CODE HERE IS TAKEN SERIOUSLY.
MAYBE I'M NOT DOING A GOOD JOB WITH GETTING RID OF CODE IN EVERYTHING I DO, BUT THAT'S BECAUSE GETTING RID OF IT ISN'T AN EASY THING TO DO WHILE YOU BOTH REALLY WANT TO BE RID OF IT AND WANT TO HAVE SOME SENSITIVITY TO HOW OTHER PEOPLE WILL RESPOND TO WHAT YOU DO.
THERE IS NO CODE INTENDED FOR ANYTHING ON THIS PAGE.
April 25, 2011
It’s not inconsistent for me to be able to say what’s good about my family along with what’s bad about it. The other day I talked about the good, and today I need to talk more about what’s bad.
--When my parents went, without my knowledge, to talk to the medical director of the community mental health center for Chittenden County on October 20, 2010, I think it’s very likely that if my father told her that he didn’t want to become my legal guardian, he was lying. I read in the medical director’s report (she’s also a psychiatrist) that my father had said he’d refused to consider applying for guardianship of me.
For one of my parents to become my guardian was probably something that she suggested to my parents after they told her that I believed that I was getting coded messages from the television. If readers will recall from my last discussion of my parents going to talk to the psychiatrist, my parents knew about my blog although I hadn’t told them about it; I had never discussed any of it with them. There was one thing after another that they knew to be true that they presented to her as if they were psychotic symptoms that I was experiencing.
Even though I didn’t know that they had gone to talk to her until November 21, 2010, one of the first things that I did when I got to the Vermont State Hospital was write a letter to the judge asking him please to prevent either of my parents from becoming my guardian. The judge responded by appointing me a guardian ad litem. The guardian ad litem will cease to be my guardian when the case is settled.
The appointment of the guardian ad litem blocked anyone else from gaining any legal power over me. I hadn’t heard of a guardian ad litem before; I thought it was a good solution, a good response from the judge.
Copyright L. Kochman April 25, 2011 @ 10:03 a.m./added some text @ 10:50 a.m.
@ 12:19 p.m.
In my opinion, what’s been happening for the past couple of decades in psychology and psychiatry is that the issues already present in families have been given an official excuse by the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has been allowed to diagnose and medicate everyone who will agree to it or who can be pressured into it. I know that nobody in my family ever meant to become bad; after a few years of having been a psychiatric survivor, my despair at the loss of my “good” identity made me vulnerable to the nihilism that is always attractive at some point to most teenagers and people in their twenties. At times, I became someone who would have horrified me if I’d been a child or teenager and could have seen into my own future. I don’t think that I was still that person when I got back to my parents’ house and was staying with them during the summer of 2001. I also know that I hadn’t been that person the entire time that I’d been away from their house for the year before that, when I’d lived in a shelter and then gotten my own apartment for a while.
Unfortunately, people who have psychiatric histories are guiltlessly and relentlessly abused by society in general, and my parents’ own unkind tendencies flowered with the permission that the stigma on me gave them. Even when I wanted to make it up to them for how I’d been to them at previous times, they didn’t care.
For most of the summer of 2001, I didn’t have much clothing. I had had enough clothes when I’d gotten a room in an apartment with some other people in a mid-size city after spending several months in a homeless shelter there. By the summer of 2001, I had long since lost my job and the apartment that went with it because I couldn’t keep it together when my parents told me that they were going to use private investigators to watch what I did whenever they felt like it, for the rest of my life.
I fell apart after that. I couldn’t think about anything except that I’d have no privacy from my parents, and that it seemed that they wanted to remove all possibility of normality and happiness from my life.
I had already spent the better part of a year in the shelter. I called my parents with enough regularity that they couldn’t accuse me of being out of touch. I went home a few times, and every so often my parents would send me some money; $50 or so. But I worked; I did day labor and then when I got the apartment with help from a program offered by a day shelter, I got a regular job. My parents weren’t paying for anything I did, and hadn’t been since before I left their house and my home state and went to the shelter.
I tried to call them when I first moved into the apartment, and they took something that I meant as a joke badly. I tried to talk to them more and they were so difficult, mean and demanding that I hung up on them without giving them my new address or phone number. I felt so much better after I’d hung up the phone, and I felt so much better as the days passed and I didn’t speak to them or respond to their e-mails, that I figured maybe having little to nothing to do with my parents was the secret to a happy life that I’d been missing up until then.
After a couple of weeks passed during which I didn’t speak to my parents and they didn’t know my address or phone number, a staff person at the day shelter that had helped me get the apartment took me aside. She said that a private investigator had shown up at the day shelter, looking for me. She said that the P.I. had told her that my father had told him that I had “emotional issues.” She gave me the card that he’d given her. She also told me to be careful; it was good advice that I wish I’d known how to follow.
I was upset and I called my parents. They laughed at me. My father was very condescending to me and told me “I knew you’d be angry.” In the background I could hear my mother yelling and laughing, too.
They didn’t say anything such as “Thank you for calling us; we didn’t want to upset you but we were really worried about you because we didn’t know where you were.” They didn’t say anything such as “We’re so glad that you’re ok; please don’t leave us having no idea where you are again.” They didn’t say anything such as “Our hiring a private investigator was a one-time occurrence that we did because we didn’t know where you were and we wanted to know that the apartment you moved into was ok.”
No, they were laughing. They also made it clear that the private investigator was going to be a fixture in my life for as long as they felt like having him there.
Motivation had kept me going through what I found to be the surmountable difficulties of the excellent shelter system that was in that city at that time. However, once I felt that my life was never going to be my own no matter what I did, I felt as if my parents had put a skewer through my future.
I gave up; first I lost my job, then the apartment. I stayed at some shelters just to have a place to sleep, but most of the time I wandered around during the day, wondering what I could do to make my parents leave me alone. I tried to talk to a judge; he said there was nothing I could do. I tried to talk to the police; they said there was nothing I could do.
Now, at 36, I know that there is something I can do; if they do it again, I can get a civil restraining order. But I was 27 then, and I didn’t think there was any remedy for what my parents planned to do.
For lack of a plan and lack of hope, I ended up back at my parents’ house a few months after I’d first gotten the apartment. My parents were meaner to me than they ever had been before. My father told me “You’re not especially welcome here;” this after they’d claimed that their plan to use private investigators to follow me around for the rest of their lives was out of love and concern.
My parents told me that I couldn’t use either of their cars; they said I’d stolen the car the year before when I’d taken it without asking to drive to the city where I’d lived since.
I had taken the car in the middle of the night and driven it to the house of some relatives in that city. I parked the car in the driveway and then offered no objection at all when my relative called my parents to tell them that I was at her house and that the car was there. My parents had their car back as soon as they came to get it. I had only taken it out of desperation to leave their house, where all we had done for a long time was fight.
Once I was back at their house, in the summer of 2001, my parents also accused me of having given my clothes away while I was staying at their house, before I left and stayed in the shelter. I don’t know if they didn’t remember or if they didn’t care that almost all of the clothes to which they were referring had all been between 4 and 6 sizes too big for me. They were clothes that I had worn in college when the psychiatric medication that I’d been taking had put 30 to 60 extra pounds on me that I couldn’t lose no matter what I did. The medication was something that I was pressured into taking by my parents and by the therapists and psychiatrists who made money off the fact that my parents were willing to be told that I was chronically mentally ill and would need medication for the rest of my life.
I had worked while staying at the shelter and for a while when I had my own place, so I had been able to buy clothes then. I had also gotten clothes from the shelters and day programs for the homeless. Most of that clothing didn’t make it back with me to my parents’ house. I asked my parents to help me get some clothes. They said “You can wear your mother’s old clothes until you get a job and can buy your own.”
One thing that my parents said after that summer was that one of the reasons that they didn’t want me to use their cars was that they didn’t think I was in good enough mental shape to drive. Yet, apparently, during the summer of 2001, they expected me to both get a job while wearing clothes that my mother didn’t want and to create an entirely new wardrobe for myself.
My mother has always been at least an inch shorter than I am. Even if her idea of “old clothes” weren’t clothes that she bought before 1982, many of which don't fit me, her feet are at least a size smaller than mine.
It’s true that I wasn’t in the best mental shape at that time. I still hadn’t recovered from the fact that my parents had told me that I could expect a future of being watched by people whom they hired, and my father reiterated his statement about that issue once I was back at their house. I understood from this, whether he meant it that way or not, that the only way not to be stalked by my parents was never to leave the state in which they lived. Maybe they didn’t mean it that way; maybe they meant I couldn’t even leave their house if I ever wanted any privacy at all.
I might have tried more diligently to find something to wear in my mother’s closet and to go to work, without use of a car, if I had felt I had anything to live for. I don’t know what I would have done about having no shoes, though; how many places will hire you if you don’t have any shoes?
It’s not as if my mother actually wanted me to wear ANY of her clothes, old or not. She didn’t welcome me into her room and say “pick out what you can find.” I think what they said about my being able to wear her old clothes was more about their refusal to help me get anything new, even from a thrift store, than a desire to help me in any way.
There were several weeks during that summer when I didn’t change clothes; I changed towels. I would take a shower and then spend the next 24 hours in a towel.
I just tried to stay out of the way; when my father got home from work, I’d go to my room and get into bed and stay away from the rest of the house until my father went to work in the morning.
I had one pair of underwear. When I got my period, I put washcloths in the underwear and washed the washcloths and the underwear every day.
I don’t remember if it was before or after the weeks when I was wearing towels that I did have some clothes on. I think it was a skirt and a shirt that I had found in my mother’s closet; still no shoes. I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my parents’ house, next to the garden. A guy walking his dog came by; he stopped and asked me out.
He could have been a lot worse. Once he had a chance to talk to me, he saw right away that I wasn’t doing very well. He could have tried to make me have sex with him, but he never did. At one point, he drove me to the mall, told me to stay in the car in the parking lot, went into the shoe store and emerged from the shoe store with a pair of women’s walking sneakers which he made me take.
It was a long summer, and the fall wasn’t much better.
I’ve just read most of this over, and there’s something I want to say.
By the time of the events I’m describing here, it had been almost 9 years since my first hospitalization. When I finished reading what I’d written just now, an image of my mother appeared in my mind. I think I was 18, and desperate to leave something, anything, of what I’d felt since being in the hospital behind. I sat on the floor of my room and cut off most of my hair.
My mother walked in and was surprised; she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was cutting off my hair. She said “Why?” I told her not to worry. She turned around and left my room without another word.
A few minutes later I went out into the kitchen and she had her head down on her arm on the banister of the staircase. She was sobbing. She looked up as I came in and said “I’m sorry,” the best she could through her tears.
Copyright L. Kochman April 25, 2011/some editing April 26, 2011 @ 8:38 a.m.