Hi. I got several, positive responses to yesteday's mailing. Here is an
exceptional, insider's testimony which should move you deeply.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Caroline Aiken
To: Ed Pearl
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 6:33 AM
Subject: Re: Patricia Williams: The Tiger Mama Syndrome
Thank you for the interesting "Tiger Mama" email.
I know a mother who supported her daughter, who kept her in the same school
district the daughter's school life.
Her daughter was in the exceptional classes from the age of 6, who played cello
from the age of 7, who has recorded and toured nationally from the age of 8,
who won 3rd natioanlly, 1st in GA, the National Teacher's Association's poetry
competition at the age of 12, straight A's honor star student, HOPE
scholar...who couldn't get any help or guidance because of her 'majority'
status.
Here is an essay she wrote last year in her distance learning english course,
from prison.
It is anonymous because her case is waiting to be reviewed by the GA Supreme
Court.
Her essay was published in the July 2010 GA MUSIC HALL OF FAME music magazine.
Thanks for what you do, Ed.
Caroline
- - -
August 1, 2009
Emotions Anonymous: How the Fear of Feeling Has Defined My Life
"It works if you work it, but you've got to work it everyday"
As I repeat those words mechanically, standing in a circle of hand-holding,
recovering drug addicts, the thought strikes me for the first time: I am not
working it.
Perhaps that is why it's not working. Not that I'm not grateful for these
twelve-step Groups. I know I need help, and I will gladly take advantage of
every resource that the State Department of Corrections Program for Mental
Health wants to throw my way.
However, I have come to the realization that I don't believe in Alcoholics
Anonymous. I don't believe it can work for me anyway, not anymore. I have been
clean and sober for over two years now, and the first step still does not sit
right with me. Call me stubborn, but I don't want to admit powerlessness. I
don't want to be powerless over drugs anymore and I don't want to spend the
rest of my life in meetings talking about them with other addicts. I don't want
to use. I am done. I hit my bottom when I plead guilty to armed robbery and
gladly accepted a prison sentence of ten years without parole. If I had gone to
trial, I would've faced twenty-five years to a triple life sentence. In AA, I
am told that incarcerated clean time does not count. I am also told it is
healthy to be scared of getting out and using again, of being in the free
world, surrounded by temptation. I no longer find the idea of sticking a needle
in my arm tempting. What scares me now is the reason I sought oblivion in the
first place. I carry it with me always, in the shade where it's safe, where I
don't' have to meet its stare, while I pretend it isn't there. I am powerless
over my emotions. I empower them every time I refuse to acknowledge their
existence. I am terrified of feeling, always have been, and I know this
crippling fear is destroying every chance I have at success. I have had to
force myself finally to sit down and write this paper after avoiding it for
months. I didn't have to choose this topic, but I believe that writing about my
emotions may be the only way I will ever be able to face them, and I don't want
to take the easy way out anymore.
THIS State Women's prison boasts the best and most decorated mental health
program. The Twelve Step recovery groups are offered only to inmates rated
mental health level 2 or higher, though 90 percent of the women incarcerated
here are in for possession, selling, manufacturing, or trafficking drugs. So,
once I had convinced them I was crazy enough, these and other "activity
therapy" groups were made available to me, including crochet and my favorites,
yoga and pilates. The state-employed psychiatrists will gladly prescribe
medication, if sedation is in order. Many people here seem more than happy to
sleepwalk through their sentences. I, however, have already spent half of my
life in catatonia, and I do not need any more sedation, prescribed or
otherwise. I have found that I like the waking life. The best perk of all is
this: I get my own personal shrink, who sees me once a month like clockwork.
Today, I walk into her office, plop down in an armchair that is the most
comfortable thing to cradle my behind since last month, and say, "I still
haven't finished my paper." She knows exactly what I am talking about, maybe
because she takes meticulously detailed notes, scratching away at her clipboard
while I unload my issues onto her. I realize it is perhaps a bit egotistical of
me to expect her to remember my problems above a sea of 200 other inmates' on
her caseload. Soon enough, though, after apparently reviewing the minutes of
our last session, she asks, "Have you decided what you are comfortable sharing
with your readers?"
I start to tell her that I'm not so sure if the fact that slicing my skin with
an exact-o knife helped me to cope with my emotions as a teenager is
appropriate for me to share with anyone, let alone my teacher whom I've never
met, when my eyes begin to get all watery.
Here we go again, I think. Where does this come from? For someone as
emotionally handicapped as I am, I sure can cry from out of nowhere, without
rhyme or reason or understanding. If one is crying, one should know why. "Maybe
you're not ready for this," she says. Maybe I'm not. I have started writing
this paper eight times now, at least, but I cannot seem to finish it. I don't
want to let this beat me. I can't give up on this, it would mean giving up on
my abilities the way I always do. This time, I think to myself, I am
going to finish what I have started.
The emotion that dominated my teenage years was sadness. I let my anger control
my
external life, but inside I was just sad. "Sadness' is a broad and inadequate
term, but it
encompasses all of the feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and despair
that were my
constant companions. In the murky depths of my memory, it appears to me as one
monstrous and all-consuming emotion, though in all probability it was all of
them
combined and indistinguishable from one another. It was this beast I sought to
escape
through sex, drugs, and self-mutilation, but these all only served as a
catalyst which
propelled me down a darker, bleaker, and ever more sinister spiral. I became
fascinated
by horror movies, the bloodier the better, and I even went to film school in
hopes of
making my own. Looking back, I think I regarded this death obsession as the
ultimate
triumph over human emotion. Ironically, I was unable to see that my life had
become
more horrific than any cinematic nightmare.
Only in music did I find true freedom. When I played, I knew who I was and what
I was
put here to do. It gave my life meaning, and it kept me sane. Still, drugs were
an ever
present escape, and it was my downfall- my refusal to believe that I was strong
enough to
cope with life without them.
Emotions have always been extremely uncomfortable for me. Growing up, I tried
to
drown them out in everyway I knew, but no matter how numb I managed to become,
music made me feel. There is something about music that my very cells can
connect with,
recognize, thrive in. It moves me to tears. It opens my eyes.
As far back as I can see, it was the only thing that was ever really real to
me. There were
certain chord progressions/intervals that cut me to the core, and songs so
perfect they
made me cry. It was the ability it had to express truth and tragedy so
perfectly, and
without any words at all. Words have always been dear to me, but they often
simply fail
me, when I try to express what I feel but cannot explain. Music made me see
that there is
awe-inspiring beauty in all human pain. All of the indistinguishable emotions
that would
have smothered me, rage and madness and desperation and grief, were unleashed
at once
and I was free. I may have hated living in my own skin and it felt inside, but
when I
played I could create something bigger than me, and it made living worthwhile.
When I
sang I heard my own pain in my voice and understood that in releasing it, I
could turn it
into something beautiful. To know I could reach someone who hurt that way was
enough,
that I might be able to offer a beacon of hope in someone else's night. It
seemed I had
stumbled upon my very purpose for being, while I was stabbing in the dark to
find some
mercy of my own. When the whole world was black and I had nowhere left to run,
I
could make a certain sound and fill this ugly place with beauty. Sometimes is
sounded
wrong, but it felt right. Sometimes it was ugliness itself, but it was utterly
perfect, always.
If this makes no sense to you, I will blame the incompetence of words, and wish
that you
could understand the language that has freed me from the boundaries of
terminology.
Then perhaps you would hear what I mean.
I scare myself into weak attempts at explanation, but there is none. I was
tired of trying
before I began.
Now every day at noon, I am free for a while. I take my miracle, my blessing,
my gift
from God, my guitar, into the library, where I play for an audience of books.
The first
time I touched it, held it, I had not played in almost two years. I tried to
tell the woman
who gave it to me, who had somehow gotten it approved with the warden, how much
it
meant to me. I tried to tell her she must be an angel of mercy, but I was
sobbing too hard
to manage anything except, "Thank you." Surely I don't deserve this. After all,
it is my
fault that I had to give it up in the first place. I chose drugs over music.
But I won't ever
let it go again. Now I am ready to surrender my fear. Now I can let it out, one
song at a
time, until it no longer has any power to hold me back. Now I can get on with
my
neglected schoolwork, my recovery, and my life. There now, exhale. That wasn't
so hard
after all.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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