Monday, November 7
My friends Judith and Sharon and I are doing a writing group together on Monday nights. I wanted to work on the understanding that what looks like a failure might actually be following the voice of your soul. Judith does a weekly comment on the Torah, and I found this week’s suggestion for writing beautifully appropriate.
From Judith’s commentary on the Torah:
Do you know of this voice that comes to you and says:
Leave the home known to you, leave the self known to you, go to search for the land of your soul?
Often this voice comes in the form of a crisis, a tantrum, a sudden life upset from without or within.
Did this voice call you one time or several in your lifetime?
Is this voice calling to you now?
Written in Monday night’s writing group, with Judith and Sharon:
I was in Davis, California, at the University. I was seeing a therapist. One day I told him about my childhood. He said “You must have been very frightened.” In fact, I had been given far too much responsibility for the younger kids. I went back to my apartment and wrote in my journal “It was OK to be frightened! It was OK to be frightened!” Later I thought that must have freed something in me. The next day, since I hadn’t heard from my boyfriend since I got back from Christmas, I decided I was fed up with him, but I wanted to borrow his truck to take home a door I had bought to make a big table with. I went to where he lived and knocked on his door. But he wouldn’t come to the door. I could see that he had another woman with him. I went to my car, got the jack and started breaking his windows. Two cops came walking up the street. I knew that would be upsetting for David because he was dealing drugs — something I had tried hard not to know, but did know. I went back to my car. I heard David telling the cops he wouldn’t press charges.
I went to my friend Kathi’s and told her what I’d done. She said “But, Jenny, you can’t do that.” I freaked out, and took myself to the Student Health Center. They took me in, and put me on Mellaril. They kept a very close eye on me, I think they were afraid I was going to commit suicide. I was freaked out — some combination of excitement and fear. I kept going to classes, but the medication was really slowing me down. When I finally got out, I stopped taking the medication cold turkey, and had a rather freaky withdrawal. But I survived. and decided that I had had enough of California and that I would go back to New England.
I kept what was left of the bottle of Mellaril. I thought it was a tranquilizer but in fact it’s an anti-psychotic. It turned out to be a good thing I thought it was a tranquilizer, because that first winter in Portland Maine I was suicidal. But I had been told of someone who tried to commit suicide by taking a whole bottle of a tranquilizer. He didn’t die, but just got very tranquil. Years later, I worked on a suicide hotline and discovered that the minimum lethal dose of Mellaril was 600 mg. I had been taking 300 mg a day when I was on it. I had easily had enough to kill myself but fortunately didn’t know.
I think now that this whole experience was my soul saying “California is the wrong place for you. Let’s go back to Maine.”