Mental Health Affairs

My husband and I had come to an impasse. It really hit home with me on July 12, 2022. I was recovering from COVID-19 in the back room of the apartment, sleeping all day and waking in the early hours of the morning to do my writing, music, smoking, and wandering things. At one point, I looked at the time. 3AM. He was still out. 

I dialed his number. 

“HI,” he says. 

“What time are you coming home?” I ask him, having no idea where he is. “Why?” 

“It is 3 o’clock.” 

“So? I’ll be home at 5.” 

“I want you to come home.” 

“Why?” 

Good question. I really had no answer other than that I was scared alone. I considered him a bodyguard, occasional sex partner, and roommate who paid half the rent. He was not really a husband. So, I had to admit, “Why come home?” was a question I had no good answer to. 

In the days since my last book, I became aware of narcissism. I had a pretty bad case of it. My writings were dronings, entertaining but self-involved treatises on what I did and how I felt. Writing in the second or third person was alien to me. She, he or they were just not that interesting to me. I was diagnosed as psychotic and narcissistic to the bone. 

Things weren’t going to change much. I paid attention to the guy, but it did not come easily. The past few weeks, while sick with COVID-19, I became aware that he was not a caretaker and that my emotional and physical well-being was really up to me. 

Now, the cage door was open. And it was up to me to plan, decide and act. 

My writing workshop is coming up in a couple of days. I had started taking Zoom workshops in the past couple of weeks, and I still had to process them. How did a person become a writer? They wrote. But there were all sorts of disciplines to do it.

I did not think an MFA was on the horizon. Lucky for me, I had just ordered two Hemingway books before that phone call, so I had some good reading to look forward to. One of the writing instructors online had made me aware of a creative process that I could do on my own. 

Learning formulas for essays, memoirs, and novels was good, but it was really creating that was key. The instructor had made me jealous. She said writing screenplays to her was like making mudcakes. The mess, fun, and sheer bliss of making mud cakes struck home with me. 

Memory is an easy way to find inspiration, and I turn to it now. 

In 1989, I was driving through Coney Island with my fiance. In my life, I have had many fiances, boyfriends, sex partners, and a couple of husbands. My confusion and lack of organization spilled over into my dating life, and it has been a mess since I was young. 

I don’t entertain the notion that I will somehow become organized and clear anytime soon. My goal was never in question. At eight years old, I decided I would be a writer. Everything I have done since then has been toward that goal. I wasn’t confused about that. I was a self-taught writer and, therefore, had taken the notion that writers need experience in life—they need something to write about. And so I embraced the experience. 

It manifested in half-baked plans, various love interests, several colleges, a host of half-mashed jobs, several psych hospitalizations, and a degree in counseling. Then every night I would go home and write at least two pages a day about the whole quagmire. 

My counselor has taken to staring at me while I talk. Then, he takes a deep breath before he plunges into feedback, which I am sure he is ambiguous about. 

“You are a restless soul,” he says. “You have polarized desires. You want to be free, and you want to nest. So everything you do is trying to integrate those desires.” 

Michael is a good counselor, and he takes me on against his better judgment. With him, it is a love thing—a charity thing. I pay him half his rate and call him for a session at the most unlikely times. We’ve known each other for thirty years, and I think his marriage is just about that long. 

So now I am flying the nest and embracing freedom. I have been watching pigeons. Pigeons peck, fly, flit, and walk on the ground a lot of the time. Then they perch. So my job is to fly, peck on the ground, and find a perch. I also need to look out for the hunters. 

I am a mad bird, multi-colored, and without a family, so I have to be extra bright in the wild. I don’t mind visiting cages if the door doesn’t shut on me. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t visit cages,” says Michael. “Can’t always be sure that fucking door won’t bang against your ass.”

Where was I? Yes, in Coney Island. I was with Jamie, the man of the moment. I was twenty-nine and sporting a lovely diamond on my finger. The sun shone brilliantly on the road. Jamie drove, and I blabbered on about some man I knew who used to play chess in the park. Maybe I remember the scene because of something I said. 

“Expletive, expletive, expletive.” 

Jamie could not believe what came out of my mouth. It was summertime and a perfect time for driving to the beach, driving down that highway, as it were, and Jamie and I were fated for a breakup before our January wedding. 

It snowed on January 20, 1990, and I walked to the weeping willow tree in Bronx Park. This was the date I had planned to marry, but it had all fallen apart by November. The snow fell beautifully on the low-hanging branches, and I prayed about my future. I was going into a psych rehab, living with my parents, and I didn’t know what was ahead. I needed help. 

That day, like so many days afterward, I turned to the saints. It makes sense because no human could really help me. I was headstrong, with little judgment. I took crazy risks. The only thing that tethered me was my journal, my poetry and the ambient dronings therein. 

I suspected I might be expected if I married Jamie, but those dreams were dashed. I looked forward to an uncertain future. 

My husband did not leave entirely of his own volition. It was only yesterday that I stood in my room, looking out at his mess of clothes and papers, and wished he would disappear—not just leave, but disappear. It was a genuine wish. I wasn’t angry, just totally fed up. 

And now, the next day, for all intents and purposes, he had done just that. 

A lot of people might feel sorry for me. Save it, I say. Living with the knowledge that I had made a mistake and couldn’t rectify it, ten years of frustration taught me a few things. 

A woman can make it on her own. 

Some women are better on their own. 

Cleaning and cooking for somebody else isn’t necessarily a prize job. 

Marrying outside your culture and faith brings a lot of problems. 

When someone constantly criticizes and berates you, flee if you can or at your first chance. 

So now here I am, at the desk, writing. A picture of St. Anthony is nearby, and the air conditioner is on. I am 62, compromised by COVID-19, with more health problems than I had ten years ago, but ten wasted years are better than twenty. 

The cage door is open. For years, I lay on my bed. Some songs go around in my head:

Take these broken wings and fly… 

Fly, fly like the wind… 

There is the ecstasy of feeling your heartbeat as you soar upward, the rush of perching on a crag high above the ground. Fly, fly like the wind, never to be caught again. 

COVID, heart conditions, and inevitable aging cannot compete with the glory of being a captain, a sailor on the sea, and a helmsman of a ship leaving the harbor. 

We writers, we poets, we are minstrels, songsters, and storytellers. We thrive on moving without a satchel, without a hook. We are tethered only by the notebook.