A Response
January 8, 2008
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
I am blown away that people are actually reading my journal. I really didn’t expect any kind of a response to my petty musings on my life. And I am flattered that people would think of it as a story or a tale (although "tales of woe" seems a little excessive to me--for a real tale of woe, see the link in my post titled The Morning News). Since nothing particularly interesting happened yesterday and we didn’t spend any money that I feel the need to account for, I think I will take the opportunity to respond to some of the comments left on a previous post.
My intention with this blog is to be blatantly, unapologetically myself. This is extremely hard for me, since that is exactly what I am not in my day to day life. Therefore, I write what is in my head and I resist editing so that I can get as close as possible to my true thoughts. This means that there will be many holes and tangents and circles because that is how I think. My train of thought is never focused on one topic, but on many at once and when something interesting pops up I will usually pursue it to the end before returning to the topic at hand, if I do at all.
This journal serves several purposes, the most important being therapeutic, allowing me to look back at my actions and decisions then to analyze and interpret them to both learn more about myself and learn how to avoid repeating mistakes. God has been trying to help me grow into a better person for years through my circumstances, and I have been stubbornly resistant to His guidance. I think it’s about time I stepped back and looked objectively at all of the things I am doing wrong. I am hoping it will also allow me to make an accurate and complete (to the best of my knowledge) record of where exactly all of my money disappears to. This will make it easier for me to identify and stop financial drains such as the fast food I bought last weekend. What was I thinking? $16 could have bought a box of 100 diapers at Wal-Mart and I wasted it on a lousy 2 meals?!! Most importantly, this is for me and not for you. Making it private would negate the whole point of being myself in public, no matter how impersonal, so I welcome people to read and comment and even make suggestions, but your judgments and criticisms will not change anything. I am an adult, even though I don’t always act it, and I am aware of the risks and consequences involved in the decisions that I make. I am not at peace with any of these decisions and I am working on changing my attitude and my thought processes, but it will not happen overnight.
This brings me to my next point. I have never and will never claim to be rational, logical, sane, or smart. I may have possessed one or two of these qualities at some point in my life, but they have long since been burned out of me by past drug abuse and emotional trauma. And trust me, the ability to earn A’s in school does not by any stretch of the imagination translate to true intelligence. Actually, I am only able to write with some degree of intelligence and eloquence due to spending my developing years with only the fictional characters in my books for good company. I have spent so much of my life in books trying to shut out reality that now even my thoughts come out sounding like a narrative. It was too much trouble to make friends in real life. I was painfully shy and very aware that everything about my life was incompatibly different from these happy, clean, playful children that I was surrounded by, a feeling that was compounded by the incessant teasing over the fact that my parents didn’t have as much money as theirs. I really didn’t know anything about having friends until middle school, when I discovered the undeniable coolness associated with anyone who used drugs, would try anything, and generally lived life on the edge. Finally I was free from the burden of trying to impress these people who thought they were much too cool for me, and I could instead scorn them as the boring “good” kids. And for a long time, I thought this is happiness, I finally found it and I know what it’s like to be loved. Now looking back and understanding, it was nothing of the sort, and that “loved” should be replaced with “used”. I’m still not sure I know what this feeling called happiness is like, but I do finally know what it’s like to be loved unconditionally, and that is beyond words. Knowing that I can always turn to God for comfort no matter how broken or lost or hurt or disgusting I am is the only thing that gets me through the day anymore. I am ashamed that I pushed this free gift away for so long in my childish pursuit of goddesses and faeries and elements and other Creations.
Judging from the comments, I will have to assume that some of the people who have read my posts have no idea of the current market value of narcotics and have never lived with a person suffering from schizophrenia or addiction. The typical prescription of 12 generic Percocet costs exactly $3.49, and selling one of these would more than make up for the initial cost. The prescription he got from the hospital on Fri. was for 60 plus a bottle of prescription strength ibuprofen and the total for those was $12.00 so if we had decided to sell them (which was unnecessary because we sold our extra washer and dryer set instead), we could have made up to $230 after subtracting out of pocket costs but we probably would have taken less because we would only be comfortable making that transaction with a close and trusted friend and would have wanted to give that person a break. While we can afford the remarkably small co-pay on prescription pain pills, we cannot afford the 50% co-pay on psychiatric therapy, nor can we afford the loss of income if he were to do any sort of an in-patient rehabilitation program. So these things get put on the back burner, and we focus on getting through each day with the least possible amount of stress so that he can avoid a full on schizophrenic episode, complete with visual and auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. These usually require me to find a babysitter for two days and both of us to miss at least a day of work, since we don’t want him to scare the kids and he’s in no condition to work and usually needs to be under constant supervision or he will attempt suicide. Therefore, we do everything we can to ensure that his mood is stable, and that includes setting aside $30 for an eighth every two or three weeks so that he is able to sedate himself if he starts getting too anxious. He doesn’t understand how bad it is because he doesn’t remember anything that happened after it’s over, and he is resistant to treatment with prescription drugs because of the severe side effects he experienced as a teenager when he was in a psychiatric treatment facility. He already knows the side effects of marijuana, and they are much easier to live with than some of the things he went through when he was on the drugs that are legal. Everyone else I know who has been through this experimentation phase with the prescriptions for mental disorders has told me pretty much the same story, and I remember when my best friend in high school started this process she had constant visual hallucinations for a week and gained 60 pounds in a month. All of this just to get rid of a few voices and some excessive paranoia. It’s no wonder so many mentally ill people try to self-medicate with illegal substances. At least you know what’s going to happen and how you’re going to feel when you smoke pot or take pain killers or even shoot heroin.
Also, my husband is not “laid up”. If he is able to stand, he is able to work, and he chooses to work with whatever injury or pain he may have and do so without complaint so that his children will have a warm place to sleep and food to eat next week. After all, I think it’s pretty clear that I didn’t marry him for his outstanding social achievements, remarkable emotional stability, or even his impressive intellect (see his brilliant idea from last Thursday). But the reasons that I did marry him vastly overwhelm those shortcomings, and his devotion to his family and his stubborn commitment to moving forward in the face of any obstacle are just a few of the many reasons that I will gladly spend the rest of my life by his side.
And, finally, this issue of bouncing checks. I am no longer able to write checks to the stores in our area that accept them, because I am terrible with math and numbers—which are not concrete like cash that I can see and pick up and count—escape me, so any time I use my debit card or write a check I run a very real risk of overdrawing my account. I have just realized that this is my problem in the past 6 months or so and now I usually use cash for everything, but desperate times call for desperate measures, right? I know, that’s really not an excuse and I can’t really delude myself into believing that such irresponsible behavior is justifiable. What I can do, though, is pretend that everything will be ok because I have spent my entire life doing exactly that. So I decide that I will not go to a park, let the kids wear themselves out on the playground, and sleep in the car like I used to do when my daughter was a baby and we were homeless just because I don’t have enough gas to get us home and back to work the next day. I decide that instead I will find a way to get home tonight and I will find a way to get back to work tomorrow and fuck the consequences because my children will not grow up the way I did, with no security and no safety and no peace. And then I tell myself over and over and over that everything is going to be ok, things are going to get better and then I can right all of the wrongs, then I can make peace with the past, then I can resolve all of the problems with what I am doing right now until I halfway believe it, and feel better about making sure that my daughter is able to sleep in a real bed every night even though I had to steal gas to do it, regardless of whether I intend on coming back and paying for it later. Intentionally bouncing a check is basically the same as stealing, except I am leaving my information as a guarantee that I do intend on paying them, even if I can’t pay them right now. But the intention to pay doesn’t make it right. And it would have been exceptionally simple to be able to just switch batteries with the truck instead of having to bounce a check to get a new one. So simple, in fact, that it was the first thing we tried a few weeks ago when it became clear that this battery would no longer hold a charge. Since my husband works so much closer to home and leaves the house well before I do, it would make sense for his car to be the one going to crap instead of mine, and since we can’t fit all of the kids in the truck legally (important because we don’t have insurance and need to be perfectly legal on the road at all times so we don’t get pulled over and get a ticket for driving without insurance) and therefore I can’ t take the truck to work, we immediately tried to put the car battery in the truck instead. Sadly, they are not compatible. So now the only grocery store in the area I have never bounced a check at, intentionally or accidentally, is Wal-Mart, and the only reason for that is because they have this program that treats the check as a debit card. Little Whip kindly informed me that it’s called CheckSys. Wal-Mart is the only place I have ever seen this at. It is a very good idea, and I’m not surprised that other areas that may be more urbanized have switched entirely to this system.
Of course, I may be making this all up as some have speculated. With some editing, I think it might make a pretty good book, don’t you?
My intention with this blog is to be blatantly, unapologetically myself. This is extremely hard for me, since that is exactly what I am not in my day to day life. Therefore, I write what is in my head and I resist editing so that I can get as close as possible to my true thoughts. This means that there will be many holes and tangents and circles because that is how I think. My train of thought is never focused on one topic, but on many at once and when something interesting pops up I will usually pursue it to the end before returning to the topic at hand, if I do at all.
This journal serves several purposes, the most important being therapeutic, allowing me to look back at my actions and decisions then to analyze and interpret them to both learn more about myself and learn how to avoid repeating mistakes. God has been trying to help me grow into a better person for years through my circumstances, and I have been stubbornly resistant to His guidance. I think it’s about time I stepped back and looked objectively at all of the things I am doing wrong. I am hoping it will also allow me to make an accurate and complete (to the best of my knowledge) record of where exactly all of my money disappears to. This will make it easier for me to identify and stop financial drains such as the fast food I bought last weekend. What was I thinking? $16 could have bought a box of 100 diapers at Wal-Mart and I wasted it on a lousy 2 meals?!! Most importantly, this is for me and not for you. Making it private would negate the whole point of being myself in public, no matter how impersonal, so I welcome people to read and comment and even make suggestions, but your judgments and criticisms will not change anything. I am an adult, even though I don’t always act it, and I am aware of the risks and consequences involved in the decisions that I make. I am not at peace with any of these decisions and I am working on changing my attitude and my thought processes, but it will not happen overnight.
This brings me to my next point. I have never and will never claim to be rational, logical, sane, or smart. I may have possessed one or two of these qualities at some point in my life, but they have long since been burned out of me by past drug abuse and emotional trauma. And trust me, the ability to earn A’s in school does not by any stretch of the imagination translate to true intelligence. Actually, I am only able to write with some degree of intelligence and eloquence due to spending my developing years with only the fictional characters in my books for good company. I have spent so much of my life in books trying to shut out reality that now even my thoughts come out sounding like a narrative. It was too much trouble to make friends in real life. I was painfully shy and very aware that everything about my life was incompatibly different from these happy, clean, playful children that I was surrounded by, a feeling that was compounded by the incessant teasing over the fact that my parents didn’t have as much money as theirs. I really didn’t know anything about having friends until middle school, when I discovered the undeniable coolness associated with anyone who used drugs, would try anything, and generally lived life on the edge. Finally I was free from the burden of trying to impress these people who thought they were much too cool for me, and I could instead scorn them as the boring “good” kids. And for a long time, I thought this is happiness, I finally found it and I know what it’s like to be loved. Now looking back and understanding, it was nothing of the sort, and that “loved” should be replaced with “used”. I’m still not sure I know what this feeling called happiness is like, but I do finally know what it’s like to be loved unconditionally, and that is beyond words. Knowing that I can always turn to God for comfort no matter how broken or lost or hurt or disgusting I am is the only thing that gets me through the day anymore. I am ashamed that I pushed this free gift away for so long in my childish pursuit of goddesses and faeries and elements and other Creations.
Judging from the comments, I will have to assume that some of the people who have read my posts have no idea of the current market value of narcotics and have never lived with a person suffering from schizophrenia or addiction. The typical prescription of 12 generic Percocet costs exactly $3.49, and selling one of these would more than make up for the initial cost. The prescription he got from the hospital on Fri. was for 60 plus a bottle of prescription strength ibuprofen and the total for those was $12.00 so if we had decided to sell them (which was unnecessary because we sold our extra washer and dryer set instead), we could have made up to $230 after subtracting out of pocket costs but we probably would have taken less because we would only be comfortable making that transaction with a close and trusted friend and would have wanted to give that person a break. While we can afford the remarkably small co-pay on prescription pain pills, we cannot afford the 50% co-pay on psychiatric therapy, nor can we afford the loss of income if he were to do any sort of an in-patient rehabilitation program. So these things get put on the back burner, and we focus on getting through each day with the least possible amount of stress so that he can avoid a full on schizophrenic episode, complete with visual and auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. These usually require me to find a babysitter for two days and both of us to miss at least a day of work, since we don’t want him to scare the kids and he’s in no condition to work and usually needs to be under constant supervision or he will attempt suicide. Therefore, we do everything we can to ensure that his mood is stable, and that includes setting aside $30 for an eighth every two or three weeks so that he is able to sedate himself if he starts getting too anxious. He doesn’t understand how bad it is because he doesn’t remember anything that happened after it’s over, and he is resistant to treatment with prescription drugs because of the severe side effects he experienced as a teenager when he was in a psychiatric treatment facility. He already knows the side effects of marijuana, and they are much easier to live with than some of the things he went through when he was on the drugs that are legal. Everyone else I know who has been through this experimentation phase with the prescriptions for mental disorders has told me pretty much the same story, and I remember when my best friend in high school started this process she had constant visual hallucinations for a week and gained 60 pounds in a month. All of this just to get rid of a few voices and some excessive paranoia. It’s no wonder so many mentally ill people try to self-medicate with illegal substances. At least you know what’s going to happen and how you’re going to feel when you smoke pot or take pain killers or even shoot heroin.
Also, my husband is not “laid up”. If he is able to stand, he is able to work, and he chooses to work with whatever injury or pain he may have and do so without complaint so that his children will have a warm place to sleep and food to eat next week. After all, I think it’s pretty clear that I didn’t marry him for his outstanding social achievements, remarkable emotional stability, or even his impressive intellect (see his brilliant idea from last Thursday). But the reasons that I did marry him vastly overwhelm those shortcomings, and his devotion to his family and his stubborn commitment to moving forward in the face of any obstacle are just a few of the many reasons that I will gladly spend the rest of my life by his side.
And, finally, this issue of bouncing checks. I am no longer able to write checks to the stores in our area that accept them, because I am terrible with math and numbers—which are not concrete like cash that I can see and pick up and count—escape me, so any time I use my debit card or write a check I run a very real risk of overdrawing my account. I have just realized that this is my problem in the past 6 months or so and now I usually use cash for everything, but desperate times call for desperate measures, right? I know, that’s really not an excuse and I can’t really delude myself into believing that such irresponsible behavior is justifiable. What I can do, though, is pretend that everything will be ok because I have spent my entire life doing exactly that. So I decide that I will not go to a park, let the kids wear themselves out on the playground, and sleep in the car like I used to do when my daughter was a baby and we were homeless just because I don’t have enough gas to get us home and back to work the next day. I decide that instead I will find a way to get home tonight and I will find a way to get back to work tomorrow and fuck the consequences because my children will not grow up the way I did, with no security and no safety and no peace. And then I tell myself over and over and over that everything is going to be ok, things are going to get better and then I can right all of the wrongs, then I can make peace with the past, then I can resolve all of the problems with what I am doing right now until I halfway believe it, and feel better about making sure that my daughter is able to sleep in a real bed every night even though I had to steal gas to do it, regardless of whether I intend on coming back and paying for it later. Intentionally bouncing a check is basically the same as stealing, except I am leaving my information as a guarantee that I do intend on paying them, even if I can’t pay them right now. But the intention to pay doesn’t make it right. And it would have been exceptionally simple to be able to just switch batteries with the truck instead of having to bounce a check to get a new one. So simple, in fact, that it was the first thing we tried a few weeks ago when it became clear that this battery would no longer hold a charge. Since my husband works so much closer to home and leaves the house well before I do, it would make sense for his car to be the one going to crap instead of mine, and since we can’t fit all of the kids in the truck legally (important because we don’t have insurance and need to be perfectly legal on the road at all times so we don’t get pulled over and get a ticket for driving without insurance) and therefore I can’ t take the truck to work, we immediately tried to put the car battery in the truck instead. Sadly, they are not compatible. So now the only grocery store in the area I have never bounced a check at, intentionally or accidentally, is Wal-Mart, and the only reason for that is because they have this program that treats the check as a debit card. Little Whip kindly informed me that it’s called CheckSys. Wal-Mart is the only place I have ever seen this at. It is a very good idea, and I’m not surprised that other areas that may be more urbanized have switched entirely to this system.
Of course, I may be making this all up as some have speculated. With some editing, I think it might make a pretty good book, don’t you?