Tag Archives: recovery

Why my rapist gotta google me?

Spectral phantasmagoria of my peripheral vision 1981: journal drawing, winter 1981

Spectral phantasmagori of my peripheral vision: journal drawing, winter 1981

I’ve always had a problem with the phrase “my rapist”.

My "Angry Unicorn" tag, journal drawing winter 1981

My “Angry Unicorn” tag, journal drawing winter 1981

It attaches so much ownership and blame to what is actually an event that happened TO me, without my consent. It’s so much clearer to say “the man who raped me”.

Except I was groomed as a child to become a perfect assault victim, and my teenage alcoholism created a perfect storm of vulnerability, and so multiple men raped me.

Which means it’s not clear at all, to say “The man who raped me.” I can’t even say, “The man who raped me when I was fourteen”, and have it be clear.

So, one of the men who raped me when I was fourteen. The first one. Left a comment on my blog. Yesterday.

With a beloved friend and student, Charlottenburg Fall 2016

With a beloved friend and student, Charlottenburg Fall 2016

Rusty iron in my mouth, cupping my coffee cup for warmth, safe in Berlin, safe and loved, so loved, so strong, and still it sent an electric charge of nauseous danger through me.

He reaches out every few years, contacts me on social media, says he’s glad I’m doing well. That I wasn’t doing so well the last time he saw me. But never, “I’m so sorry”. Just say it. Trust me, it won’t solve the problem. You will still carry guilt and grief and horror at your actions.

But there is a tiny scrap of peace in knowing you have done due diligence at last.

I know how it is not to be able to say it. It took me thirty years to say it in one instance, to clearly and openly admit my guilt at the harm I did. And they say making amends lets you forgive yourself, but maybe sometimes it only lets you open your heart to the depth of the wrong you did or the loss you endure. And you just have to live with the depth of that wrong, just breathe it in and say “I am so sorry”. To the universe, to the family, to the spirit of that blue-eyed boy or girl.

It makes me furious that he always mentions how I wasn’t doing so well the last time he saw me.

Opening my 80s and 90s journals box to write this piece, 2017.

Opening my 80s and 90s journals box to write this piece, Berlin 2017.

Well sure I was a mess, I was a fifteen-year-old alcoholic and drug addict whose live-in boyfriend had just tried to kill himself in front of her and been locked up at Bellevue! I am an addict, a person with multiple disabling diseases of the mind and body, and me being that doesn’t make me a lesser person, or excuse the harm you did.

My alcoholism did not make me complicit in the violations that occurred to me.

Yes, no thanks to you I’ve been clean and sober for 28 years! No thanks to you I’ve sought treatment for my depression and OCD and DSPS and PTSD and spent 28 years trying to become a better person!

I dated my rapist.

Journals from the 80s and early 90s.

Journals from the 80s and early 90s.

That is, I continued to see, and had sex once or twice with, Evan, the first man who raped me when I was fourteen. For several months, until on an early Summer day in 1981, I replaced him with a gentle lover, Teo.

I was so incredibly happy that winter of ’81, when I first met Evan. The happiest I had ever been.

On January 8, 1981, my fourteenth birthday, I woke up with a clear decision in my mind.

I would try one more thing before I killed myself: becoming a drug addict.

It seemed totally reasonable; I could not endure my feelings and the pain I was in, but drugs offered a way to manage those feelings until I had more resources.

I was somehow sure that if I made it to adulthood, got away from my father, I would be able to get tools to be happy.

With GIlly and other cherished friends, Abington Square Fall 1981

With GIlly and other cherished friends, Abington Square Fall 1981

So I walked into Tony’s coffeeshop next to Stuyvesant High School, and asked where the kids with the drugs were. I found Gilly, and she took me to my people.

I had Found the Others, at only fourteen. Decades later, living in the Bay Area, I met a lot of people who hadn’t Found their People til college, or ’til they moved to San Francisco. As a New Yorker I was incredibly lucky, and it surely saved my life. My people were the last group of Stuyvesant Freaks, who hung out in the east half of Stuyvesant Park, doing drugs and listening to the Dead.

I immediately began taking all the chemicals of every kind I could find, as well as drinking. But my people didn’t drink much; they were Deadheads, and psychonauts, and hippies. So my first serious forays into drug use involved a lot of psychedelics and pot. I was stoned all the time. I smoked pot all day, and I took speed and acid with it.

My new best friend Jenny, who like all my new friends was a junior or senior, was so disappointed that I was still a virgin.

She had lost her virginity at 14, and wanted to be able to talk girl talk about sex with me. Falling in love with her, day by day, it became even more urgent to me to get rid of my hymen. I loved Jenny, I wanted to be lovers with her, but she was straight, and I couldn’t even tell her.

I had been seriously wanting to take a lover for almost a year, since before when I saw “Little Darlings” the previous summer. Boys fascinated me, mesmerized me, roused a terrible angry hunger in me, and as the Spring came on it intensified.  In early March the warmer nights began and our tribe started its routine of going to Central Park after dark.

We roamed the park in a mob, only afraid of the Guardian Angels.

The park, shunned at night by everyone but criminals in 1981, was our huge playground. One night, high on acid and jug wine, I broke my ankle falling from the Frisbee Hill rocks. My friend Billy carried me to the huge Upper West Side apartment of one of the sweetest and kindest of the Music and Art kids, an adjunct tribe to our Stuyvesant Freaks.

In the morning I woke up and realized my ankle was broken; my mom took me to the hospital where it was reassembled with a pin.

And I had a cast and crutches. Plus a vague sense that smoking pot was turning weird for me.

Inside journal cover, Winter 1981.

Inside journal cover, Winter 1981.

But I was still deliriously happy, because my friends were amazing. I had briefly run away the previous month, and my divorced parents had agreed my mom would take me away from my father, to a place of our own. She had found a place, on leafy Abington Square in the West Village. We would move in together in May.

A week after the surgery, now pretty mobile on my crutches, I was back at the Music and Art guy’s place for a party. I had promised Billy I wouldn’t drink this time, so my friend John suggested a nice bowl. I smoked with him in one of the rooms of tie-dyed laughing singing teenagers, the huge flat’s endless rooms filled with our people, our beautiful brilliant gifted people. (You never knew where the parents were.)

But the high went wrong, it filled me with terrible paranoia, and suddenly I felt wildly unsafe and terrified.

So John let me drink a bit of wine, to take the edge off. My friends were three and four years older than me, there was no-one my age around, and they were experienced users. I started drinking. Billy, a gentle drug-dealer who genuinely cared about me, yelled at me. I went into the bedroom of the host guy (it grieves me I no longer remember his name, maybe David or something) where I had spent the previous Saturday night struggling to get up and dance while Billy held me and explained that my ankle was hurt. The host’s room was crowded with our people, and small; the kids always got the maid’s rooms in these flats.

I was sitting on the floor, looking across at a boy I knew playing guitar.

His name was Teo, and he would become my first boyfriend. He was wearing a white embroidered cambric shirt from India, open at the chest, and he was playing “Blackbird”; his long dark curls tumbled over his shoulders. I was drinking whatever bottle was passed to me. I was so happy and so full of love for the world I’d stumbled into. I blacked out.

I came out of the blackout kissing someone. I pushed him away to find out who it was.

Age 14 or 15, on Abington Square

Age 14 or 15, on Abington Square

It was Evan, a senior who I had bought acid from once or twice. Blue Dolphins, maybe. He was a graffiti writer, and tall and slim and beautiful, with brown eyes and long golden-brown hair in a ponytail. He looked like a hippy version of Shaun Cassidy.

I found him quite acceptable as a kissing partner; he was on my mental list of guys I found hot, “candidates”. He was eighteen, a little old, but that was ok. We were sitting in the window, and it was dark; the room was empty and silent. A lot of time had passed, obviously.

I kissed him some more, and we decided to go to my place. In the lobby we were kissing, me on my crutches, him holding me up I suppose, and he pulled away and said, “Look what you’ve done to me, you goddam little nymphomaniac!”.

I had a vague idea he was a vegetarian or Buddhist or something, and I thought possibly he had committed to celibacy for some spiritual reason.

So I thought perhaps what he meant was that i was seducing him into unwanted carnal feelings. I did not fucking care. It was April, it was Spring, young people had boiling sap for blood and missing out on desire was obvious foolishness.

We caught a cab the long way down the West Side to Chelsea and walked through the dark apartment, past my father’s bedroom and through the living room where my brother slept. We went into my tiny bedroom and got on my single bed, and started making out again. At some point there were less clothes, and I was backed up against the wall at the head of the bed. My head was angled against the wall, I was propped up on my pillow, and suddenly his naked hips and his erect dick were in my face.

He shoved his cock in my mouth, and I bit him. Pretty hard, I think.

I was offended as hell. I was raised by hippies, and the 1950s idea that women should provide oral or manual release service to men to avoid having further intimacy was tacky as hell to me. I wasn’t there to get him off; I was there because I liked boys and I wanted to do sex with boys. He pulled away yelping in pain, rocked back on his heels, and said, “Alright, I’m gonna fuck you then, you bitch.”

I looked him in the eye in my dim bedroom, and I said, “See if I care”. And he pulled me down onto the bed and did it.

It hurt quite a lot. I blacked out again at some point, and of course I was very intoxicated, so luckily I missed some of it.

All my life ever since I have drawn strength from that moment, the moment when my brave-hearted fourteen-year-old self met ugliness with brio and courage. I have always been proud that I stood up to him in a spirit of sarcasm and New Yorker sass.

And I have always grieved that I didn’t wait just two months longer, til the sunny summer day when Teo and I made love in my new West Village bedroom together. But I might not have had the courage to boldly seduce Teo – which I certainly did- if I hadn’t had the confidence of being devirginized. And Teo was a bit of a geek, he would never have made a pass. So it goes.

In the morning Evan was odd and awkward; only now do I realize he might have been a bit of an Aspie. He demonstrated his most impressive physical skill, the lighting of a match from a book with his toes. Probably to light my cigarette; I smoked Marlboro 100s in the gold pack back then.

He got dressed and picked up my white Princess phone and wrote down the number written on the metal place. “That’s not my number”, I said. It was the number of a very bad boy I had loved in 8th grade.

He asked me for my actual number and I gave it to him. I walked him out, past my brother and my father, and locked the door. There was blood on my sheets, not too much, and I was still pretty drunk.

I did not want to discuss the matter with my father, though he gave me an inquiring leer.

The first time a boy had spent the night with me was on March 16. That boy, Gerardo, had not had the resolve or perhaps the ability to wait, and it had ended in his messy ejaculation, though I would certainly have had sex with him. After I walked him out my father had wanted to know if I was finally having sex, and did i need birth control; I had been able to evade him and say no, which at least was a good thing.

I could not wait to get to school and tell Jenny. I had beaten her by a couple months; she was almost fifteen when she lost it.

When my mom drove me to school I told her I needed birth control, and she made an appointment for me with Dr. Wolff on the Upper East Side. The camaraderie with Jenny was glorious; we sat on 15th st. in the Spring sun giggling together.

Evan sorta stuck around for the next couple weeks, in a weird,  embarrassing and embarrassed way. He would come out of school and sit with me at lunch ( I had long since stopped actually going into the school building, and went straight to the park with my friends each day.) He would sit near me but not really pay attention to me, and Billy would kiss me hello but Evan never did.

I felt like he was ashamed of me, which made me furious. Then he invited me to dinner.

Spring 1981 journal back cover Rachel Ketchum - EditedI was still on crutches, so we took a taxi. I wrote about the evening in my journal (seen below) for my beloved English professor Roger Baronat, who adored my writing and treated it with great respect while never cutting me slack for skipping class, finals and homework.

I have transcribed it here. You can see I was not in any way a normal fourteen-year-old. And also that the Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson I was reading were bad influences on my early writing style.

Well. Evan said he wanted to cook dinner for me, so after school (after his– eighth – school) ( I didn’t go) it was a beautiful sunny day and we stayed, in the park, for a bit – so many people! – mmm – then found a cab (takes a while – going downtown? – they yell over their yellow doors – ) and directed it to Brooklyn. Wide-eyed, enchanted and happy I looked over the bridge – ships! ships! Look, look, see the masts? see the dock? See the sailboats? Oh! Look! This is Brooklyn? How come? Suburbs? My god, you live in the suburbs?

‘Don’t look now’ (where?) ‘but my dad’s right behind us’, said Evan, and I turned with my chin on his shoulder to peer out the back window of the checkercab. Green car. Hee. hee. heeheeheehee…’Don’t wave.’ ‘No?’…Looks like my dad…– beard-brained, ponderous, charming and soulless — trees and crowded houses, quiet streets, wonderful Victorian turrets and formica ranches – driveways and cars and bikes — oh Evan, the air smells good! – the country!! Taxi-cab driver don’t know where he’s going so we walked a sleepy lawny block, down a path — a patio, no less, fancy me going in through a screen door after fourteen years of bolts and locks? Kitchen a tribute to TV commercials and floor wax America over, but Evan’s room is just like every teenage dope fiends’ and cluttered, postered and unmade. Jimi Hendrix Experience poster on the ceiling above his bed – now I couldn’t cope with black orpheus medusa snakes above my head every night, but that’s me. I won’t go near a lay-up either.

Anyhow – we went and sat outside, sun going down, by the garden, huddled close for warmth, and then went back inside so Evan could cook. Well I did the best I could to help, and now and then his dad harassed us, and his mom came home, as sweet and soft-smiling as you could possibly imagine, soft brown pageboy hair falling over her cheeks, tall and still graceful though in a weary way; laid her head on Evan’s shoulder, for a moment aglow with creator’s awe at this tall lovely creature who was yes, her son and was now cooking dinner —

She was a little bit drunk from champagne at her office, (to celebrate an account or somewhat) and as she fixed her scotch-and-water and sat back she told us how they’d had a beastie, a chameleon, named Camile, at the party. I never quite understood why but it was enough that it had been there, crawling among the vino-damp cocktail napkins on the desks pressed into bar service, and that she’d taken pleasure in its glowy, gentle eyes and soft tummy, iridescent tail and little feet.

May 8, 1981 journal page

May 8, 1981 journal page

Since the journal was for Mr. Baronat, who knew that I was a drug user and graffiti criminal but had perfectly good boundaries about sexuality with his students, I did not mention the sex.

After dinner we went into Evan’s bedroom and he had sex with me again. I told him I had an appointment soon to get birth control, but he didn’t care one way or the other. I looked up at the Jimi Hendrix poster as he pushed into me. “Lie there and think about pizza”, Jenny said, about sex that wasn’t fun.

It hurt again, and I rocked my hips, trying to get comfortable; he hissed, “Up and down, not side to side!” I was mortified; not a good start to my career as a femme fatale. Later his dad drove me home to Manhattan. For one night it seemed like maybe he was going to be my boyfriend. But things went back to the weird not-quite-hanging out at school.

And my mom and I moved in together, to our own place, where I had a nice bedroom and a double bed and was safe from my father.

Evan came over one last time after I had my cast off and my diaphragm (Dr. Wolff, who had delivered me, said I was too young for the pill, too young for tubal ligation and he was terrified of IUDs).

We had sex in my grown-up bed, actually naked, and he actually went down on me and acted like a lover. But it was not thrilling.

There was no intimacy, it was just awkward, and I was really pissed about every single way he was an asshole.

I knew he wasn’t what I wanted, and a week later I was with Teo. And with a half dozen other boys and men by October.

A quote from Gilly, written in my Fall 1981 journal.

A quote from Gilly, written in my Fall 1981 journal.

Me age 15, with Paul, winter 1982

Me age 15, with Paul, winter 1982

Evan stopped by six months later, after my live-in boyfriend Paul had slashed his throat with a razor and been hauled off to the Psych ward, after I’d embarked on a course of self-prescribed compassionate leave involving bottles and bottles of Valium obtained with forged prescriptions. Evan yelled at me about not going to school, about my drug use, and gave me a beautiful airbrushed piece of art with my name graffiti-style.

He seemed to be trying to tell me he was sorry without ever saying the words, in the 80s.

In the later half of the 80s I learned he was dating a very vulnerable and fragile sixteen-year-old friend of mine, doing Dead tour selling t-shirts with her. Figures, I said to myself.

In 2008 or so he tracked me down on Facebook. Said he was glad I was doing ok, since I wasn’t in such good shape the last time he saw me. In a sober spirit of full accountability for my own sexual predation, my decades of rage at men and the time I might have had sex with a boy below the New York age of consent at 20, I did not judge him. But I could be pissed that that was the tack he’d choose to take, and I blocked his ass.

And then yesterday, checking my comment queue for the Planned Parenthood donation raffle, I saw his comment.

“Hi Rachael, your blog is incredible, and very powerful. Glad to see you are doing well.

Evan”

He left it on this post! About making amends! Where i state quite clearly that:

“The people I knew and who knew me, well, that’s up to them, and they haven’t made much progress to date.”

Jesus! Just say you’re sorry! The statute of limitations has expired!

I did horrible things in the 80s. I cheated like crazy on my sweetest boyfriends. I hit them. I froze them out emotionally when they just wanted to love me. I seduced boy virgins endlessly, thirteen in all, avenging my trauma by giving them the consent and attention and gentleness and passion I didn’t get, a night they would never forget. And then breaking up with them.

In the 80s, if you wanted to be a sexual adventurer, you paid a high price. The ratio of sexual trauma to adventure was very high, a friend my age once told one of our young women friends. Dark magic was all we had. Our desire was dangerous as hell to us.

We swung the cannons of our young bodies, firing broadsides. I suffered great harm, and I did terrible harm. Let there be healing for all who can heal.

Me and Daria at KaDeWe, November 2016

Me and Daria at KaDeWe, November 2016. She said today,

“As for the guy, take it as they neither can live free from what they’ve done. They are evil in this story although they caused this evil not just to you but to themselves, if it’s still haunting them.”

 

Longterm remission and recovery from severe depression IS FUCKING POSSIBLE.

This November marks my four-year anniversary of complete remission from severe, long-term Major Depressive Disorder.

Photo by Julia Wolf 2015, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Photo by Julia Wolf 2015, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

glucklich in berlin Suzanne Forbes 2016Despite the US election, despite my fear for my loved ones and my horror and grief at injustice and cruelty, I am deeply happy.

It’s not just that we moved to Berlin and have a better life. I felt better for several years before we left.

I entered remission in November 2012, thanks to my partner who got me on new health insurance, my mom who found me doctors when I didn’t have the strength, and a doctor who changed my meds fearlessly.

I can’t even understand how happy I am these days.

meandmaria-by-sabine-sept-6-2016I’ve been happy much of the time, and deeply content, and gleeful, and terrified, and traumatized, and overwhelmed with grief, and sick with fear, and bursting, bursting with love, the last four years. I’ve spent many, many hours in the pure flow zone of creative work. I’ve been exhausted, A LOT.

What I haven’t been, for a single day, is depressed. If you have depression, you know the difference.

I haven’t had a single day when I wanted to kill myself.

Miss Cat DVine by Suzanne Forbes July 2016Not a single day when I thought obsessively about killing myself. Not a single day when killing myself seemed like gravity, like something I was fighting every day not to be pulled into.

I haven’t had a Plan for four years. I actually almost don’t remember what it felt like to want to drink Drano or to check the windows of the car for leaks. In the last four years, there has been only one moment when I looked at the headlights of the oncoming train and felt a dizzying pull. It was two or three seconds, during the most frightening part of our move, when things seemed hopeless and like we’d have to go back to the US.

If you have long-term suicidal depression, you probably can’t imagine this.

I lived in the Bay Area for eighteen years. By the time we left, there wasn’t a single street I hadn’t driven down wanting to kill myself. I had calculated the speed I’d need to go off every embankment, through every safety rail. Every tall building and dark water had called to me. But the last two years and four months we lived there, I was indifferent to them. I had no business with them.

I tried to kill myself for the first time when I was thirteen.

photo John Garetti 1977

Paramedics had to come for my drug overdoses twice before I was twenty-one. Near the end of my years in the Bay, in January of 2012, I was very briefly 5150’d in the ER at the Kaiser Hospital for suicidal impulse. (They were super nice and they put warm blankets around you. Definitely go there if you’re in Oakland and want to harm yourself!)

I’ve been seeing therapists since I was EIGHT YEARS OLD. I have moderate OCD, Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder, PTSD and a bunch of other stuff. Oh and I’m a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict sober 27 years.Suzanne Forbes Rachel Ketchum NYC SVA id 1988

 

I’ve been in in-patient treatment for chemical dependency, spent four months in a halfway house, been through the Kaiser Family program co-dependency outpatient program, been through the Kaiser outpatient program for depression, spent five years each with two therapists doing PTSD work and dozens of visits with other therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors.

Most significant of all, I have spent decades in recovery communities and support groups of all kinds, which have been the biggest resource I have to grow and change.

I HATE being mentally ill.

goat by Suzanne Forbes 2007

Goats for no reason.

I never wanted to be sick and I have fought all the diseases of the mind I suffer from fucking tooth and nail all my life. I know you have too, if you have them. I know you’re not lazy, not weak and not sorry for yourself. You are incredibly brave.

You are courageous beyond words and stronger than you should ever have had to be.

You are a superhero, in the secret identity of a person who has had to spend thousands of days on the couch with a blanket. I know you don’t want to be on the couch. I know you hate it. I believe you when you say you want to be better and that you have tried everything.

I beg you, get someone to help you try one more thing.

Pony rides by Suzanne Forbes Dec 20 2015

Ponies from last December.

I would never tell you to “fight harder”. I know you’ve been fighting as hard as you possibly can your entire life. What I beg you to do is to beg someone who cares about you to help you with your life and death struggle. I didn’t have the strength, when my crisis hit its peak in summer 2012, to find new doctors.

I was exhausted by the cycle at Kaiser, where they couldn’t offer me one-on-one therapy and wouldn’t take me off the Wellbutrin/Celexa cocktail because I “wasn’t stable enough to risk it”. I was on new insurance, in the summer of 2012, thanks to the company my bf worked for including domestic partners. But I couldn’t go through the nightmare rounds of trying to find a therapist, trying to find a psychiatrist who was taking new patients, navigating the phone trees.

My mom did the phone calls for me, and it saved my life.

ugly-hippie-sandalI went to a new psychiatrist, who I did not like at all. But he was daring (or close to retirement and just didn’t care); he stopped the Wellbutrin/Celexa cold turkey and switched me to Cymbalta. Which at the time was under patent and cost like $200 bucks a month. Lucky me, I had insurance.

He said it might take longer to kick in than I thought possible. He made me wait, showing up at his office dull-eyed or weeping quietly even though I felt totally creeped out by his old feet in their ugly sandals.

Sometimes he said, wait one more day, then call me if it’s not better. I sustained my sanity during this period by reading the excellent psychiatric medicine website CrazyMeds, where they can help you “Find the Options That Suck Less”. (Sadly, the forums are not currently active as the site owner is very sick and lacks spoons to move the site to a newer host.) Reading about other people’s dogged persistence in finding medicine for their depression helped me hang in. I read about other people who Cymbalta had worked for after longer than they wanted to wait. My mom found me a therapist, and I went back to weekly therapy. For the fourth time? The fifth? Who fucking knows. I hate therapy.

One day the meds kicked in. It was as simple as that.

esdip Berlin summer illustration students Aug 20 2016 Suzanne Forbes

Drawing on the bus with my students, summer 2016.

I was following the oft-described “Most Effective Treatment for Depression”, combining medication and talk therapy. My therapist was warm but tough, and we did a fair amount of cognitive work.

I have no more information than that. I do know that nowadays I feel like I have a scaffolding of cognitive training that keeps me from destructive thought patterns, but I could never have stopped those patterns long enough to develop new scaffolding without the meds. I’ve been on Cymbalta, same dose, for four years. I”m fine, truly and utterly fine. And being fine is WONDERFUL. I make art, teach drawing, care for my husband and our cats.

Don’t think recovering addicts who take anti-depressants are really sober? Come at me!

photo-of-rachel-ketchum-1986-by-possibly-david-seligI forget to take my meds constantly and always have. I have to put them in a 14-day pill dispenser and keep it on my worktable in front of me. I don’t know about you, but I never forgot to take my drug of choice. And I was a pill-freak, I totally fetishized and obsessed about pills. Here’s a picture of me on some downer pills in 1986*. You can see the difference between me then and me now, right?

The meds are totally neutral to my addictive brain, I’ve never wanted to take more of them or abuse them.

I have never been free of depression symptoms for this long in my entire life. Predictably, once my brain got better, my body fell apart. I had to have surgery for fibroids, I had terrible problems with anemia (even now, even though I’m on the cusp of menopause now), I’ve been through crazy perimenopause symptoms. I hate being hot, and I have had three years of hot flashes.

bead embroidered corset by Suzanne Forbes 2013I got calcium crystals in my ear and developed Benign Positional Disorder, an illness of the inner ear that makes you feel like you have the drunk spins. I had to go on disability from work! I had to have physical therapy for vertigo at the Vertigo Clinic in Oakland! Who even heard of such a thing? Isn’t that fucking ridiculous?

And the whole time, when I would stand up and cups of blood would pour down my legs, when all I could do was lie on the couch and hold on, I was fine. I was grateful, actually, and content. I wasn’t in pain and I was just weak like a Victorian invalid. I could embroider, I could watch Supernatural on Netflix, I could go to my half-time marketing job most of the time. I was making beautiful things like this bead-embroidered corset with every ounce of strength I had. Just not being depressed was such a delicious, rapturous, heavenly feeling, I didn’t care about anything else.

Not being depressed feels exactly like being on heroin when you are depressed.

aklamio 5 year anniversary party berlin by Suzanne Forbes June 17 2016They told me in treatment in 1989 that I had been self-medicating as best I could for the variety of symptoms I had, since I was thirteen. Now that I’ve been in remission from depression for four years, the longest period since I was seven, I have a glimpse of what life is like for people who don’t have depression.

It doesn’t mean my other symptoms went away. Actually, this summer I had totally insane PTSD symptoms. Nightmares where I kicked my husband awake or kicked myself out of bed fighting off dream attackers. Intrusive flashbacks. Obsessive thoughts. But it didn’t depress me or make me want to die- it just hurt, so I cried.

Life hurts, life is scary, sometimes I cry.

suzanne-forbes-self-portrait-berlin-fall-2016-editedThe horrible results of the US election wiped both me and my husband out; we average 14 to 18 hours of sleep in our house. My fatigue problems have cycled back. When I wake up, when I’m strong enough to sit up, I run to the work table or easel and work on art. My head is absolutely full of ideas and visions and creative projects, and I do what I can of them, as I can.

My heart is full of love. I love our life, our home, our city. I cherish my loved ones. I thrill to the cuteness of our cats, to the sound of rain, to the taste of ice cream. I am truly, truly not depressed, and it is amazing. You can get better.

You can be helped. Things can change. I promise.

Resources:
RAINN’s links for recovering from sexual violence.

The National Institute of Mental Health. Links to clinical studies, info on ECT– hey, I was desperate enough to try anything, and if you’re reading this, you might be too. Suicide Prevention. Hotlines saved my life so many times. If you don’t like the person you get or they don’t feel safe, hang up and call back to get someone else.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

The NHS resource page, if you’re in the UK.

New Zealand resources.

Rob Delaney’s amazing post on depression and getting help.

Allie Brosh on depression. Her experience of depression differs from mine, but this powerful and beautiful work of art seems to help many depressives feel understood and to help people understand depression.

* I believe the photographer who took this was named David Selig, a guy who lived in the East Village in the 80s. He took some devastating, beautifully honest photographs of me.