When I first met Bruce, he was taking six different psychiatric medications.

I’ve only taken two in my entire life: Wellbutrin, to quit smoking, and Prozac — which I took for three months after I was diagnosed with complex PTSD in June 2006.

Bruce is a very bright, highly-sensitive man with a lot of ACES (adverse childhood experiences) who has been involved with the mental health and healthcare systems for his entire life. After my grandfather died when I was 13 years old, my life became a maelstrom of coping with a severely mentally-ill caregiver, my grandmother. My wide-flung family was afraid to take her on. If you had known her, you would have likely felt the same.

Where Bruce and my stories diverge is: he had lots of professional help as a young man. I didn’t.

When I was young, I could have easily been categorized as a “problem drinker.” As a college student, I prided myself on having a “hollow leg” just like my Russian Jewish father, who easily held his alcohol (and never drank too much).

Many friends and even more acquaintances were already taking antidepressants. People at school routinely threatened and a few even attempted suicide; I callously scoffed at them as I would head out for another night of mad partying with my fiance and a group of the most popular boys.

A respected teacher, the poet Karin Swenson, lived in the guest faculty suite in my dorm. One day, seeing me wandering down the hall at 11 AM with a warm bottle of beer in each hand and a smoldering Uncle Norm cigarette* hanging from my mouth, she pulled me into her apartment and asked if I’d go to AA with her.

AA? Me? You must be joking.

I used to call my generation the “Rehab Generation.” Now, apparently, they call it Generation Jones.

At least 10% of the kids I went to school were diagnosed with severe mental illness or substance misuse disorders.

Drunks, heroin addicts, cokeheads, tweakers, maniacs, split personalities, narcissists, suicides — by their own hands or by cop.

Doctor shoppers, ER room visitors, pill poppers …

John Belushi Chris Farley Mitch Hedberg

Heath Ledger Michael Jackson Whitney Houston

Anna Nicole Janis Jimi Jim Kurt

Elvis died on his toilet and Marilyn was found in the nude …

All our favorites.

These days, the writing business is overwhelmed by upper-middle and lower-rich class bourgeois who think they’re smarter than everyone else but who are in reality, engaged in a ceaseless, tireless race by any means possible to exploit the bestseller of the month before anyone else does.

Their goal is to perfectly, seamlessly capture the dominant narrative; they are today’s versions of Velasquez’ dwarves at the court of Philip IV of Spain.

I’ve watched this devolution happen my whole life, but back when I was a favored candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship, Watson Fellowship, and admitted to the UC Irvine and Iowa Writers’ programs, the “tortured artist” stereotype was dominant.

Here I am, alive, over 40 years later.

Not just alive, not just surviving: thriving.

I never could write a romance novel despite being offered many paying opportunities.

That’s because until I met Bruce, I had never really known what love and romance was.

What I am, as a writer, is what I am — 

And if you would have told me what kind of writer I am over 40 years ago when I was wandering down the halls in my dorm doing two-fisted warm beer drinking at 11 AM on a Sunday, a rare instance of my rising before 2 PM after being up all night partying — 

I would have been like “What?”

I was so thoroughly marinated in the liberal arts education and loving preservation of the Western Canon and bourgeois attitudes about art, life, success, and “power,” that I could not even begin to imagine the life that I live today.

I did imagine the general world we live in today and it is portrayed in my early stories and first novel.

They not only used to teach us that creativity and mental illness walked hand-in-hand, they emphasized that the daily bread and meat of all whack-a-doodle writers was substance misuse, served up with a gigantic side order of poverty and untimely, tragic death.

I was working on it. Just like Bruce was working his program of how to cope with our lifestyles of the bourgeois, Keeping Up With The Generation Jones’ sex, drugs, violence, rock-and-roll, and Wolf of Wall Street soulless corruption with the help of modern miraculous Pharma.

Bruce tells me that when he was young and taking even more psych meds than he did when I first met him, his hands shook so badly he couldn’t lift a double-scotch to his mouth without spilling it all over the bar. He had to lean his head down to slurp the booze — in his 20s.

My uncle Victor was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age; my father, his twin brother, was one of the sanest members of our quite-nutty family. My grandmother had severe clinical depression as well as a fulminating, horrible personality disorder that she could not alter, even as she knew it made her life, and the lives of all who were close to her, fearful, stress-filled, and miserable. Oddly, even though I never spent that much time with uncle Victor, I could always tell whether he’d taken his medication or not, and I could also always tell him from my father even at a great distance; the two fairly often used their similarities to play tricks on friends, family members, and acquaintances.

A new friend read my account of what happened after my baby Anthony’s death in 2005 and said, “You have got to be the strongest woman I’ve ever known.”

When I was first prescribed Prozac in 2006, I was terrified to take it. “I won’t be able to write,” I thought.

That turned out not to be the case, but the medication numbed me until the terrible PTSD symptoms I was experiencing calmed down. It enabled me to sleep, work, and function. I took it for three months, and it helped me to maintain my sanity and the best functionality I could have at the time.

I was very fortunate that I was able to discontinue the prescription and didn’t need to take it for longer than three months. But there was a time in my life where I felt that I had to take prescription medication — Wellbutrin — to function at all.

That was not true, and fortunately, I no longer feel compelled, and do not have a need, for any type of prescription medication.

When I met Bruce, he was taking six different prescribed behavioral health medications. Now: he takes none of them. When Bruce met me, I was drinking almost as much as I had back in my college days, and smoking my cowboy coffin nails in preference to consuming solid food.

I didn’t care. I was disappointed that I hadn’t died young and left a good-looking corpse.

It wasn’t my life: it was someone else’s. A stereotype. A fake image.

An Imago.

Today, I not only don’t smoke tobacco, I don’t smoke anything. I drink very little alcohol, and my primary vice is caffeine, closely followed by writing.

Until I had the benefit of experiencing life sober, eating a healthy diet, and caring for my physical body, I didn’t know who I was. I had ideas; this is why I called my publishing business Chameleon. I knew I could change and would change depending on the situation I was in, but I didn’t realize that some of these different “mes” were me, while others weren’t.

Most people in the U.S. and nations impacted by constant war and economic upheavals are in a maelstrom right now, as unstable and frightening as trying to survive living with my grandmother after my beloved grandfather Bampy died. She stopped speaking and many other activities of daily life following his death and her severe, untreated depression. This went on; I went to live with my father which was, in its own way, as bad or worse, and I moved myself back to live with her until I finished high school and left at age 17 for my four years of supposedly full scholarship funded bachelors’ degrees (2) at Scripps College.

I been around.

Sometimes I think, am I today’s version of Cato the Censor? A moralist wrapped in futurist clothing.

No, I’m just someone who managed to survive that which has killed countless people. Absolutely countless, numberless, untold numbers of people whose souls have been stunted by abuse within the family and without it. Cultural, societal level abuse.

Do we live this way, all of us, on a daily basis? Of course not!

I live in relatively rural (and rapidly-developing) area in Southwest Florida now. At our older ages, Bruce and I have managed to cope with constant disruption, health challenges, economic disruption, a 2700-mile cross-country move during COVID, and making new friends at age 60+.

Everything’s changing, so fast, just like that day when I got off the school bus and walked into my living room to see my entire family sitting there and my brother Sam said, “Come out back with me” and he sat on the swing next to me and told me Bampy had died.

It’s happening to all of us, more and more, every day.

Our society offers us precious little care for our bodies and our minds, much less our souls. Instead, it’s an endless series of pills, injections, and inhaled medications.

My best friend was married to a horrible man who not only cheated on her and gaslit her in almost every way, she found that he had printed out maps to the homes of dozens of women to pursue his psycho cheating habit. Bruce was miserable and miserably depressed for decades, working in high-stress jobs he hated to support a family that — looking at their subsequent behavior — was just using him to maintain their upper-middle-class lifestyle.

I’ve had an insane life filled with stratospheric highs and abyssal lows that has somehow turned out well in the end. I’m content, happy, and as healthy as I can be at my age.

I used to say “Free your mind” — we all know the other lyrics to that song.

That is indeed the start, but to truly make healthy, well-informed decisions for ourselves, our bodies need to be healthy and free as well. It’s very difficult to make those types of choices and have a clear head when taking many different psychotropic medications. When combining them with self-medication in the form of alcohol, tobacco, and even highly-processed foods — 

It’s just about impossible.

I speak only for myself here, but I believe that many behavioral health medications mask underlying trauma and prevent real healing. I’ve managed, mostly by accident — though now by design — to escape the trap of pills that keep me in an unhealthy, unhappy situation.

I look at the entire history of western literature as being something similar. Fairy tales: to frighten, to calm, to confuse, to addict, to thrill, to escape — 

And the wild thing is: the real adventure is just beginning.

*My uncle Norm was one of the world’s top urologists and a unrepentant drunk whose personality combined all the most notable traits of TV’s House and conservative commentator William F. Buckley.

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