The Eye (2012) & Hell Year (2025)

The Eye

When you're getting over a near-death experience, the word "fear" doesn't mean anything to you anymore.  In a roundabout way, the reminder that you're vulnerable--that this great steel wall of your skin and brain is penetrable by something greater than you--makes you feel invincible. You become numb to small things, but you're paradoxically vigilant. God threw down a pair of golden glasses that cured your nearsightedness. They hit you on the head.

You're told since you're young success requires fearlessness. Success is to nurture everyone except ourselves. Everyone's slowly dying from being a slave to success. This sacrifice is a universal phenomenon.

I could never be successful enough. I fast-forwarded a death process by not feeding myself. When there was nothing left, I consumed my soul.

I, I, I, I.

You're told since you're young perfection requires success. Perfect is a harmless word with fatal signified.  It's scientific on paper--a harmless semiotic jumble.  Perfect means happy. Happiness is perfection. Neither concentrated entity exists in space and time: it's effervescent brain foam that exists over an invisible horizon. Nobody here is happy until they reach the enlightened state of Objective Happiness.

Happiness in my adolescence and early twenties has been goal-oriented.  Every dream I realized has led to another dream.  This turned into an obsession, and then a disease.  I wasn't disillusioned with life; I was fueled by it. I poisoned the riverbed. People loved my success, and my own love for that success disappeared with the love I had for any part of my being, physical or not.

So, love signifies attachment to everyone except yourself.  Self-love is a sin in the name of counter-production. It's an idea we all take for granted that we understand. But then we stare through it on purpose. (We can't stare into it for too long.)

Commentary: Hell Year

I haven't written much since March of this year.

Last March, I was the victim of a sex crime on the way to work. At the time, I was teaching refugees and the formerly incarcerated on Chicago's West and South Sides, and I continued to do so while we received news in April that there was no more federal funding for our nonprofit jobs--nor generally for any refugees.

A month later, worsening PTSD symptoms from the assault and generalized stress from my job caused me to deteriorate and led me to a behavioral hospital, which led to my husband ghosting me there, which led to divorce. My husband, who was refusing my calls, called the hospital and told the psychiatrist assigned to me that I had been showing x symptoms of borderline personality disorder, which the hospital diagnosed me with three days later (and the formal test takes three to four months). Some bubble tests I took where the report showed the likelihood of mental conditions a patient might have based on percentages. I was ~80% for depression and PTSD, something in the nineties for anxiety, and 11% for borderline. When I checked my write-up, they had apparently diagnosed me with that disorder based on "clinical interview."

The clinical interview couldn't have been with me, because the only interview they carried out with me was for an ASD/PDA diagnosis. I was formally tested for borderline in the months after the week I was in the hospital, and I know for certain that I don't have the disorder after I had been scrambling for months trying to "fix" what must be an intolerably psychotic nature. Being past that, I generally hope for better treatment and destigmatization for those who do have it, because I had never been treated like an evil person before--actually, they treated my very acceptingly.

I've had students with a BPD diagnosis, and the people in the hospital with me who received the same diagnosis (probably 5/7 or 10/14 of the women I met in my wing and 0/15 men) were nothing like those few students. I am not like those students, either. Those students were very lovable but very difficult to handle.

After discharge, I was assigned to an inpatient facility for 3 months and outpatient for one, and I had accumulated ten times the amount of money in debt than I had in my name. The same day I was discharged from intensive outpatient therapy, I moved to another state, the two men moving me modified the digital bill and scammed me out of $600, and I restarted a teaching career two days later with 5 courses to teach from scratch without preparation.

That same month, my best friend was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. Two months later, my car was rear-ended and totaled in a hit-and-run on I94 (drivers in this new city suck worse than in Chicago). A month after (this month), my girlfriend had gotten SSF surgery and I was caring for her on weeknights and weekends. The stress got to me, and last Monday, right before Thanksgiving, my work placed me on administrative leave because I am so exhausted that they think I am going to work and abusing prescription sedatives that I haven't been prescribed. I only tested positive for the blunt I smoked three days earlier on Friday night. They say I probably still have a job, but we'll see.

In that state of liminality, I've been reflecting on my year and how unanxious I am. Throughout my life, it's been very uncommon for me not to be anxious. During that time, I've been looking over hundreds of written pieces I haven't put out there because I think they aren't palatable or well written. That included the prose poem “The Eye,” which I wrote while recovering from anorexia. Many people who are anorexic were sexually assaulted as young people. I had received routine assaults, and that caused some anorexia by way of the same PTSD that put me in the hospital this year.

Snowed in at my apartment and admiring a city in cream, I've been focusing on realigning my life to honor my values: not just made feeble by panicked rumination in bed after workdays and through the weekend, but recognizing time's worth, creating art and playing music again, volunteering, expressing more frequent appreciation for my parents' support, offering support to others again after a year only accepting it. Also, being true to myself after 34 years of exhausting myself masking idiosyncratic traits and habits I found in myself by observing fellow freaks in my class and my own brother and dad similarly. I observed that we had some things in common. I didn't know what "autistic" meant at the time, but autistic individuals whom others found inaccessible were the ones I aimed to be the opposite of. I loved people and still do, each one strongly and unusually, and I wanted to show that. Then I read Thinking in Pictures at 16 at my own mother's recommendation, did some research, talked to some close friends and teachers who said respectfully, duh, and I realized I was probably autistic.

I want to be accessible; my heart is still open and vulnerably so. But I am also pretty fucking autistic, and it's liberated me from some burdens to have realized that.

Thanks, hell year!You told me what I already knew. ✨👸🏼✨