It was the fall of 1977 when I returned to my fourth year in the architecture program at a university in upstate New York. Despite my nervousness and enthusiasm, I was extremely disappointed that my boyfriend, Jeff, did not return to the program. Instead, he transferred to an architecture program in Sweden.
Even though Jeff was my best friend, I soon became depressed and isolated, dropping my Design Studio core course last semester and losing touch with my colleagues.
We met in a studio space in an architecture building and worked on design challenges day and night. And I quickly realized the harsh reality. Since we are continents apart, I may never see Jeff again. We were his two peas in a pod, sharing many common values.
There, I became friends with the assistant of a visiting professor who was teaching a seminar on “Architectural Forms Influenced by Socialism.” Assistant Joseph He is 28 years old and graduated from the architecture program. He was building homes deep in the woods for his clients, and I visited daily to observe Joseph’s carpentry work.
I was drawn to Joseph as a friend because he was a very quiet and mysterious gentleman. This friendship could not quell my psychological demons that had reappeared from the previous semester, and I had great difficulty creating a comprehensive drawing of the building to be sculpted from cardboard models.
I was a failure and my low self-esteem and extreme frustration were through the roof. Joseph was aware of my oppressed situation, but he did not come to my aid.
I became close friends with Joseph’s roommate, Hans, a PhD graduate from the Netherlands. He is a physics student. we had a great conversation. After returning from our home on Long Island at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, I attended a small party at Joseph and Hans’ quaint apartment. I spent the whole night talking to everyone but Joseph and not eating anything.
After everyone left at the end of the party, I stayed behind and Joseph offered to make me a juicy “brownie cake” which I devoured.
By the next moment, I was trembling like a leaf, my head spinning, and holding onto a thin thread, I had hallucinations of a dark, cavernous space filled with lit candles on the floor. The flames were eerie as I clung to Joseph. He held me tight and kept me from jumping out of the apartment window. I desperately wanted to free myself from the constant burden of mind-boggling. I managed to calm down and rest in his bed.
I’ve been drug free since second grade when I smoked a lot of marijuana, which made me depressed and reluctant to study. Recurring low self-esteem, a dizzy mind, and a goalless attitude were the demons that made me exhausted by the drug.
A combination of ingesting a brownie cake kneaded with PCP (Angel Dust) And my lingering demons took me to the edge of a cliff.
An hour later, I left Joseph, got in my car, and drove aimlessly until I reached the New York State Highway. By that time, extreme paranoid thoughts had surfaced and I believed that a bloody revolution was taking place between socialists and capitalists and that my people were about to leave Earth in spaceships. .
I abandoned the car and trudged 12 miles south along the freeway shoulder in search of a spacecraft launch pad. As the sun rose, reality briefly dawned on me and I hitchhiked back to my college town.
I walked the few blocks to my apartment, where my bewildered father, evil Joseph, friendly Hans, and inconsiderate roommates awaited my return.
I ignored all of them except my father, living in my own bubble where reality and fantasy contradicted each other. My father and I left school and the infamous struggle for Long Island.
I saw a psychiatrist and told my father that he was having a nervous breakdown and that he would recover at home. This episode was the first of many breakdowns that he would repeat every six months to a year.
the doctor practiced Freudian treatment: Communication was minimal as I was expected to do all the talking in conjunction with dreams and free association thoughts in order to delve into my past and uncover the seeds of my mental illness. The doctor offered no insight or common sense that would have been so helpful to me as I was living a life full of too many stimuli in between episodes that seriously challenged my limits.
For example, when I transferred to another architecture program in Brooklyn, I moved to Manhattan, a complex city to get used to, with an acerbic friend I met at summer camp when I was younger. She was competitive and jealous of me, and when I messed up she was thrilled.
Eventually I had to abort that living situation. After an uphill battle to finish my studies, I worked all over Manhattan and changed companies frequently.
I traveled to Europe by myself and collapsed while on a bus tour of the hinterland of ancient Greece. I was one of three Americans feeling stressed and isolated in the crowd of tourists. I haven’t slept in 6 days. On my seventh day back in Athens, when the world was asleep, I wandered aimlessly through the city until dawn, escorted by a Greek soldier whom I met on my journey through the empty streets.
In the morning, I took the next flight back to New York. During the flight, I had a psychotic episode.
I fantasized that the male passenger was amused and displeased with my disheveled appearance and slapped him on the side of his face. I hadn’t washed or changed my clothes for days. When I returned to New York, I was arrested and handcuffed.
My father came to the transit police station at the airport and took me to a psychiatrist, but his verbal communication was mechanical. Fortunately, with the passage of time and medicine, I was cured. Thorazine, Helped me slowly overcome my severe insomnia.
As time went on, my regular breakdowns got worse.
A combination of severe insomnia, feeling abandoned and waking up to an apocalyptic world, and even low self-esteem, everyone in my life is better than me and I have no problem moving forward in life. There was a belief that I desperately lost hope for my future.
My employment in the construction sector was getting stuck in a rut, with no progress and repetitive assignments of rudimentary tasks. Being a woman in a male-dominated field and lacking a mentor also hindered her success.
My demons kept coming back when I experienced stressful social situations, and several years passed with periodic crises.
He had a hard conscience and would ruminate on conversations when I got too personal. I thought that my embarrassing breakdown was transparent and anyone could see through it. He believed he was the only one with mental health problems. I felt isolated and unconnected on any level, even though I had friends and boyfriends, which spurred a life of isolation and loneliness.
In the fall of 1984, I got a new job drawing parking lots for an engineering firm that primarily designed highways. I was finally taken seriously and assigned relevant drafting tasks. I rarely talked to my colleagues like I used to. Revealing my personal life and ruminating about inadequacies and melting barriers.
For seven years, I was regularly ill and under the care of incompetent doctors my health did not improve, culminating in a tragic break.
After a month at my engineering company, I was able to take three days off to attend a five-day psychology workshop recommended by a colleague. I was led to believe that the workshop began with a lecture on how to be assertive in life. Instead, it consisted of confrontational exercises between participants that challenged my confidence and threatened my fragile stability.
I barely made it through the first day of the workshop. I moved back from the city to an apartment in the suburbs. I hardly ate dinner and couldn’t sleep. The next day I was distraught and struggled to get back to work all day. I returned to my apartment again, but found myself without dinner and unable to sleep.
I called my psychiatrist and he recommended that I should not continue attending workshops.
When I got home, my neighbors were renovating their apartment and I could hear the constant sound of a drill, piercing my sensitive ears. I became paranoid that my neighbor was trying to kill me with a digging tool. I was a social outcast, isolated, thrown around, and downtrodden.
My parents, who lived nearby, were on vacation, so I had no contact with them, and the only contact I had was with a psychiatrist who failed to recognize the patterns and symptoms that led to my decline in mental function. did.
I still can’t sleep on the weekend. On the sixth day, without sleeping, I broke into the doctor’s office and tried to tell the doctor that I was not feeling well, but to no avail. He ignored my asking if I was asleep and was adamant that he had other patients at stake and should return at the appointed time on Thursday.
The next day, Wednesday, was Halloween, and it was the seventh day I couldn’t sleep. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t ignore my harsh conscience and tragic loss of hope. I had to flee, but I couldn’t walk out the door of my apartment in paranoid fear that my survival was being threatened by my neighbors.
It was 1 a.m. when I tied the flannel bedsheets together into ropes. I then secured the ends to the steel posts of my kitchen table. I proceeded to the window about 6 feet away from the table, grabbed the rope and headed out the window, intending to rappel down the 30 foot wall.
Gravity was powerful, pulling me down in iron chains. Within seconds, I planned how I was going to land on the sidewalk. First it rolls onto my feet, then onto my side.
I lost consciousness and woke up in the emergency room of a local hospital with no recollection of the fall. I broke my hip and both ankles.
12 hours of surgery, 2 months of critical care and rehabilitation, 6 months in a wheelchair, then getting up and walking.
In January 1985, I found a suitable “high risk” psychiatrist. George was a Quaker and a World War II veteran. He actively communicated during my therapy sessions, advised me to curb the stimuli in his life, know his limits, stop living on the third floor, and stop traveling alone to Europe. He gave me He wrote essays on dealing with insomnia, building healthy relationships, investing his resources, eating right, taking vitamins, and more.
Over the next two years, I improved in my work. I designed a lingerie store while working for an interior design firm and remodeled my father’s 3,000 foot office space. In 1988, George encouraged me to paint. This medium allowed me to focus my manic energy and imagination to create complex and surreal stories.
The frequency of failures has decreased, and the frequency of failures has decreased.
I learned to notice my recurring symptoms and patterns, lack of sleep, irrational thoughts, and loss of hope, and pay attention to the episodes looming. George instructed me to imagine a post-apocalyptic world and not to look 30 years into the future, but to cherish the day.
In 1999 I was prescribed an effective antipsychotic and eventually established the correct dosage. After 2010, I didn’t know any episodes.
I have been married for 36 years, have two children, and continue to draw. I also improved my writing skills (poetry, memoir publication) self journey, historical fiction. )
I encourage my fellow sufferers to keep a journal. It helps us look at ourselves objectively and emotionally in detachment, discern our habits and patterns, and ultimately avoid self-destruction during times of tragedy, stress, and temporary hopelessness. Look at yourself from afar and succeed in solving problems “one second at a time”.
George always said, “The best cure is outside the cure.”
Ruth Poniaski is a painter and author of self journey.