DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

9/5/16

My Days at Luther South

Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of fifteen is a very traumatizing event, although I think I got the good end of the deal.  I have a history of schizophrenia in my family but my doctor diagnosed me with BP.  My grandma on my mom’s side had schizophrenia, and I’ll never forget the stories my mom told me about growing up living the not-so-good life.  Ninety percent (9 out of ten) of the kids in the mental hospital where I was checked in after a fight with my former best friend had bipolar.  Jason, the eighth grader with a deep tan, had bipolar, as did my roommate who also had red hair.  A bald kid that self-baptized himself as a skin head had something else, maybe schizoaffective effective disorder.  All of the energy in the dayroom always revolved around him and his flamboyant ways.  Being an inpatient was terrorizing because the whole time I had the idea in the back of my mind that I would have to come back to the problems that remained at school.  So I transferred to an all-girl school where I had some grammar school friends.  When that backfired in horribly embarrassing ways that I would rather not tell to even my own unborn children, I transferred to Luther South.

The school and the student population was extremely small compared to the schools I had attended in the past.  People knew each other better and there was a more intimate environment.  My counselor placed me in honors English as a junior even though my GPA was shitty; leaving my first school I had a 1.0, and at the second it was even worse.  During classes I would wing it, and the only thing that kept my eyes from rolling to the back of my head where the snapshot moments that seemed to make my depression get better by the micro-percent each day. 

Junior year honors English had its ups and downs.  After being hospitalized the thing in me that would keep the peace with everyone around me died, and all that remained was a bad attitude that matched a cross-eyed facial expression.  I sat in the front row in English, so I didn’t have to deal with the girl bullies that became a new manifestation of my ultimate nightmare that I experienced while I was awake, along with another guy bully I had to face every day in photography class.  There are snapshots of good memories I have from that class that I will always carry with me, just so that I am able to repress the other more unpleasant memories that took place.  One of the girls that sat near a girl bully in the back used to be loud and spout random facts of information, such as a few words from the theme song of the Nickelodeon show “Eureeka’s Castle.”  I remember a big assignment of the class was to present a speech to the class, and a boy that I remember trying not to shame with my cross-eyed facial expression, because at the time I associated him with the antisocial thing that made me realize my inner problems that I had just realized existed, gave the funniest speech I had ever heard.  I remember losing it in front of the class with laughter, but no one responded or cared in any way because I had put myself out there so many times before unabashedly, like a hoar that craved the attention that no one would give because they all left their wallets at home.  Another good memory I have of the class is when we formed small groups to discuss a book, I think it might have been The Scarlet Letter.  I sat across from a boy I used to antagonize in my head and later out loud after a certain incident that I still don’t fully understand except for that it was a major turning point in my high school career.  Yup, things changed after the day when I saw a girl lingering in the doorway of my English class smiling at me in a way that I knew would never exist in any dimension twenty-four hours earlier.  During the group activity I saw that same girl trek across the classroom in a boy in the class’s shoe that was a million times too big for her.  The boy across from me kept it real by being friendly to me for no other reason that I can think of except that I was pretty. 

The place where I would hang out when I wanted to leave class because I couldn’t take the bullying thing, and the problems that arose from it, was the secretary’s office on the first floor by the lobby.  The secretary was my friend because she knew I was socially screwed and depressed.  She would always let me in when I got to school late.  I could call my mom to ask to go home sick, even when she knew that that wasn’t the problem.  I would take my meds daily, embarrassingly, in front of other students.  I remember one time a girl saw me take them and in a snotty tone of voice she commented on the fact that the lid was on upside down.  Me or the secretary (can’t remember) told her that was the non-child-proof-lock way to screw it (on).  Sometimes I would sit on the bench that was across from the secretary’s desk. Behind the desk on the right side of the wall there was a portrait of Jesus, mostly his face.  Before my hospitalization I would have thought nothing of it, but in those months after it I found myself feeling some type of faith I didn’t recognize just in his eyes.  I guess this is because after things get crappy in life you start to look for faith and happiness in different ways.  Right when I got out of the hospital I saw a picture of Michael J. Fox on the cover of a magazine and I remember feeling a meaning I had never felt before, like the promise of forever in his eyes gave me the strength to go on living like he could be my best friend, boyfriend, and higher power all at the same time.  I kind of felt like this with the Jesus picture, because 1) he was a guy and 2) I needed that promise in his eyes at the time and he was the only masculine thing I could imagine at the time as not bad in the building.

I saw the bully that I had to face every day in photography (except on the days that I ditched) in the secretary’s office one day.  After word got out that I pissed in my pants when I got scared, people looked at me with a million and one percent disgust instead of a million percent.  The boy that wore his hair gelled all the way to one side made a joke with the secretary in front of me about burning his pants.  This was one of the times when I didn’t know if he hated or loved me, because I was still a pretty red-haired sixteen-year-old.  Sometimes I didn’t know if that was the reason many of my fellow classmates hated me even more, because at the time in my weakened mental state I didn’t know how to respond to the compliment properly.

I got an F in Photography, because it was one of the classes that I bullshitted my way through, except for those moments that I had with my classmates that kept my interested in life.  The bully with the side-swept hair made me cry a few times, although I remember him looking at me in a flirtatious way a few times also, one being at the beginning of the semester/quarter where the teacher was explaining how to work the photo lab.  He stood on one side of the room, and me another.  He fixed his hair and looked at me as to draw attention.  One time outside of class he walked past me, not looking at me but acknowledging my presence at the same time, like he was out of his mind, like he wanted to invite me into his badass, all-knowing of the school world.  I had never been more turned on, because it was one of those moments where it was just us, but we were in front of people.  The only other time that I can associate with this feeling some-type-of-way is when I passed a boy in the hall, in the chaos of after school, smelling like a bowel movement because it had been a rough day, and the boy got a slightly dreamy-eyed look on his face.  The last time I smelled like shit in front of a class in school, a bully thought it was an invitation to harass me to the point where I needed to be hospitalized. 

Photography got interesting sometimes, to the point where I almost didn’t know what to think of some of the people in it. One day a girl circled the place, twirling around a stream of toilet paper, and the bully commented that the girl was crazy.   Another time I heard a girl that I was afraid of having the time of her life in the dark room.  She was loud and I was silent(ly) sitting in a chair, outside of the room.  The teacher sold candy from a small room to the right of the dark room and many a times I asked to go to my locker to get some money to buy candy.  I bought many a crispy rice chocolate bars.  Sometimes I ate them in class, sometimes in the bathroom (after an incident where I fell asleep on the toilet in school and some people heard me snoring, I had pretty much lost any self-respect that would make me eat outside of the bathroom when I had the urge to eat in one, out of loneliness and denial of the need to think of what others thought of me). 

I had a few other memories that took place in photography.  I remember one girl did the walk-in-front-of-me-without-thinking-shit-of-it in the classroom where we had our midterm/final.  She wore the same down vest as did another girl, one that ran track.  I saw the track girl wearing the vest in the same spot outside of the secretary’s office where I saw her wearing her letterman jacket.  The photography girl wore a hoody under hers.  While writing this, I wonder if I should associate the track girl and her varsity jacket with a dream I had, where I was almost alone in a classroom with the bad feeling that kids get off about (in an adolescent type of way) because their brains haven’t manifested what evil and bad things are yet, fully, because they lack life experience.  In the classroom a kid walked in with the type of book bag that I remember seeing in the Samantha section of American Girl Magazine- the type of thing that students used to carry their books in the 1900’s, where straps go o’er a stack of books, and then someone carries it by a handle on the top.  The kid walked in from the doorway, past the teacher, and sat down in a chair to my left.  Then a boy walked in front of me, maybe a teenager, maybe a twenty-something, and stood in front of me so that his back was facing me.  He wore a letterman jacket, too, but instead of there initially being the name of the school on the back of the jacket, something swirled into it.  It was a University of Wisconsin jacket, but instead of there being the badger mascot thing, it was just the words “University of Wisconsin.”  That was one of the dreams that I have had that I will never forget, because I can easily associate it with something that happened in real life.  I often wonder if my subconscious, whatever is in the back of my mind, is trying to make me realize that these incidents have deeper meaning.  

The turning point for me at that school was when people stopped treating me like crap, the day when I saw that girl standing in the doorway looking sympathetic.  The rest of the class knew something I didn’t, but I didn’t mind, because I wasn’t the class piñata anymore.  That summer I went to summer school as a person who was no longer a scapegoat.  People knew who I was, and they didn’t address me as Amy, but there was that thing there that created the barrier necessary to be able to act and talk humanely.  Some people thought I was a joke, but I didn’t care, and maybe that’s what I needed to create that barrier, along with whatever happened that made the whole class know that it wasn’t just my fault that I was socially awkward, that there was something that happened outside of school that changed things.  That happened in March or April of junior year at Luther South.  At that point, when I walked down the halls, I didn’t feel like I was about to be pounced on socially.  I didn’t feel like half of the class was about to beat the crap out of me, and the other half was about to watch.  Things changed, and I felt better.  Summer school was interesting because kids from other schools attended.  My class was interesting because at that point I was able to do the thing where I could talk out loud without anyone saying anything.  I discovered this when I was thinking aloud the expression “Abercrombie and Bitch,” and all the kids around me looked at me with googly eyes.  My men’s Adidas sandals were dorky, and everyone knew it, but I didn’t feel physically and mentally threatened.  I felt the thing where kids from the school where I had a breakdown came and were able to ignore me and flaunt their jerk nature at the same time.  The most prominent of these memories was that of a boy I had a big crush on freshman and sophomore year at Loyola; I saw him at the bottom of a staircase wearing a red baseball cap with an “A” on it, while I was standing at the top of the staircase.  When I realized the hate between us, I knew things had changed, yet again.

Luther South was one of the schools where I went through the stage where I had to figure out how to survive.  I had many bad memories, and some good.  I guess that’s how it is as an adolescent; if you don’t go through it as a kid, you’ll miss out on future life opportunities.  

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.