A RAVING LUNATIC

(Fragment: continued from last)...

I know it’s been a long time and thus it may seem out of place to be on the receiving end of this. And yes, especially given all the years passed, I'm not really sure if you'll be interested in reading what I'm here attempting to express. But to be honest, given the relationship history we share I am finding it difficult not to include you (and the memories of our time together) in the process of self reflection I'm presently engaged in.

I’ve been fortunate to find a therapist who’s willing to see me on a donation basis, and I can say right off the bat the process has not been easy, with a lot of emotional triggers popping up from the first sessions, during which I’ve been facing up to a lot of the denial I had been living under until my life started to collapse out here in these last few years. In the process, I am finding that, despite my character flaws and my personal shortcomings in our relationship, you're the only person I've been intimately close to in probably the last decade.

Not too long ago you told me that "my only job" was to take care of myself and work on my own healing process, and I honestly feel that this letter is a big part of it. I therefore apologize if it seems pestering or out of place in any way, but as you'll see, I've spent the last few years out here living on survival mode while sorting through a lot of personal baggage, and as a result I am finding there are lingering issues that still and to this day haunt me on an almost daily basis, some of which I desperately need to get off my chest and bring some sort of closure to.

Particularly after the first couple of therapy sessions, I’ve been facing up to the fact that my life is in ruins, that my life was in ruins even before coming to this country, that the whole experience, compounded by all of the adversities, the challenges and obstacles, delivered in the end a crippling existential blow to the core of my being, one which has literally devastated me in more ways than I had initially acknowledged. This has brought to the surface a lot of the personal issues I had kept under the rug during most of my adult life, while forcing me to look at the series of personal tragedies which led me to this place: officially disabled and living on welfare, unable to work, while struggling with chronic pain and psychiatric, mental health issues, to say the least.

One of my biggest and most difficult tasks of late has meant facing up to the disastrous consequences of my actions and behaviours in the past, while coming to terms with the most valuable things that I've irretrievably lost in the process.

In hindsight, after looking at what actually happened back East I've come to realize how my career was actually dead in the water the minute my grad school application went through, and the manner in which, slowly after that, my life out here has taken on the form of harsh punishment. After countless labour jobs my spinal condition is severely compromised and I struggle daily to keep myself aligned and away from the very real threat of crippling atrophy as the years go by.

However, when taking stock of all that the years have brought and taken away, I've come to realize that one of the biggest losses I’ve mourned out here, is you. I know, it's been years since we parted, and the fact that I'm bringing it up can too easily be perceived as nothing short of ridiculous. Because, if I'm honest with myself, the first thing that comes to mind when writing this is questions such as: "Where were you, when she was going out of her way to make things work out between the two of you? Where were you when she was in the grip of those anxiety attacks after she lost her medication? Where were you when she was booking and cancelling flights in a final attempt to come see you? And when she was helping you out financially? When she was putting everything on the line to salvage the relationship?

The answer is simple and we both know it: I was obsessed, caught in the downward spiral cycle of a manic depressive psychological disorder as I headed towards the thick of that study program. It was too important. It was my shot at raising above the pervasive and crippling sense of mediocrity which I felt had forever haunted my professional life.

Especially after having applied for grad school programs abroad countless times in the past, that program was my shot at making something solid of myself and my career. Not surprisingly it only took the first few months after the whole thing began to get completely wrapped around it, like a racehorse wearing side blinders to keep focused on the task in front of me. Everything took on second or third place after that, even you, and on top of that, to make matters worse I took you for granted and betrayed your trust.

To this day I struggle coming to terms with the level of self-denial I've clearly been capable of. This has shown me just to what extent I've been prone throughout my life to sabotage every good thing I've been granted every time I am presented with that ego driven vision of career success. And the way I was set to accomplish that was to firmly take the reins and to run with it, to take it as far as I could. And in the process I got lost, it broke my spirit, and in the end the whole thing brought out the worst in me.

Before the first year was over I was stressed out, paranoid and frantic to an extent beyond anything I had previously known. My physical and mental health had taken a heavy toll and the worst was yet to come, as little by little I began looking to evade the reality of my situation in any way possible. Given the psychiatric treatment I had been undergoing before moving to this country, compounded by the prolonged self isolation and high stress situations I came to face here, including the slandering campaigns and hostile environments I was submerged in for four consecutive terms, I can safely say I was in over my head and not handling it well, to say the least. Thus, I slowly drifted into a severe form of schizophrenia as I fell into further darkness.

You mourned our parting when it happened, and I didn't, at least not fully, not from the core, as I have of late. I wasn't there, I was caught under the full weight of that study program and all of the adverse elements it comprised. In the end the whole thing simply crushed me, and in all honesty I have not been able to put myself together after that.

Slowly during that time my psychological condition collapsed under a staggering information overload, writing full time for grad school assignments after getting literally brushed off by the university psychologists and dropping the psychiatric treatment I had been undergoing back home. I was getting zero exercise for over a year and not drinking enough water or eating properly, not to mention the sugar-caffeine intakes perpetually fuelling my stress cycles by day while making it difficult to get decent rest at night. After a couple of visits with the school doctors I got on anti inflammatory, pain relief, and sleeping medication. During this time I became familiar with things like codeine, which I only took when in extreme pain, and even then I quickly learned to dislike the opioid effect on my nerves. While sleeping ceased to be a problem getting quickly knocked out at night under the effects of heavy medication, getting out of bed for class, and then enduring the day, was a messy endeavour. I began to find myself secretly having nervous breakdowns during class and too tired to keep working at the library by mid morning, and especially as our class environment was by then escalating into an all out political battlefield under the table, the whole thing started to seem like some kind of contest for psychological endurance.

Especially during that second winter, I could feel my heart beating erratically every morning as the alarm sounded and I attempted to bring myself out of deep dark dreamless sleep, and that’s where it caught me. Trying to come back to life after some kind of comatose limbo, still not fully awake I started reaching for my phone and browsing adult rated content. It was the one thing sure to get my heart rate going and my body moving, just enough to make it to the shower and make coffee while I came to my senses before stepping out into the snow and getting on my way to class.

And that, I think, is what those people at school used as their biggest argument in their secret accusations and their slandering campaigns, as they started circulating a fabricated narrative making me out to be some kind of sexually perverted sociopath with an escalating addiction to the filthiest pornographic content one could ever hope to find on the internet today. It’s funny to consider how, until I found myself being monitored and spied on by faculty members and their political networks, I had always assumed that being an artist endowed me with the license to freely explore the full array of content that our present day, “freethinking” information society offers to the “liberal” mind.

Needless to say, while I sincerely admit my own responsibility in all this (OBVIOUSLY!), the extent to which this whole thing has escalated is frankly tyrannical, and malicious beyond anything I’ve ever known. I’ve lost count of how many nervous breakdowns and psychotic episodes I’ve been in the grip of, how many doctors and psychiatrists I’ve seen after attending that graduate program. And I get it! Those people gave me the biggest break of my life with that admission letter, and I miserably blew it. But knowing what they clearly knew about me, and knowing the type of environment I would be facing, the level of privacy infringements I would be exposed to, and therefore the particular way in which I would surely be perceived by the entire faculty, I was basically thrown in the cooking pot and left to boil over, in order to give all those people a reason to have their way with me.

You have to take into consideration the level of data mining capabilities that university institutions wield in today’s internet world of academic research, along with the type of ideological secret wars these people in the post modern Humanities and especially in Fine Arts academia like to play, and the type of career advancement and assassination industry this means under the current culture war.

Particularly when you’re being considered for a scholarship award, they have to figure out, to the farthest possible extent, just just what kind of person you are, and what you’re really all about. To this end these people have all kinds of technological means at their disposal, making the capable of a level of espionage unimaginable to most, from privacy infringements on your social media profile, to infiltrating of all of your communication means, email, text messages, and phone calls, to a given username’s entire history of internet browsing, to the point where any little word that comes in or out of your device is used to further develop their arguments against you.

It’s funny how, when my next door neighbour living on the Plateau tried to imply one evening over a couple of beers what I had been slowly and painfully figuring out during that two year program: “They know everything about you!” I had to wonder just to what extent that $20,000 scholarship had been the bait they needed to reel me into their web.

It’s incredible how these faculty members play the role of a secret police network surveilling and investigating anyone who comes into their increasingly expanding A.I. powered scope of awareness, and then deciding how to use people to best serve their interests. They need people to accuse, they need people to suspect and to investigate and to provoke in order to advance their ideological-discourse, to fund their research and their study programs, they need potential sex offenders, they need homophobes, they need hate speech, they need all of that in order to justify their totalitarian means and the level of political power this grants them. And in me they found the perfect “all-in-one” candidate to cater their interests: “See? I told you he’s a homophobe!!! I told you! HE’S A POTENTIAL RAPIST! HE’S A MISOGYNIST!”

It was kind of painful to realize all the hidden ways in which, according to their agenda, I was the perfect candidate to have attending their courses, sitting in their classrooms and walking around their library buildings. They must have found it irresistible to jump on what they found out about me, looking for possible ways to turn me into one of their thralls by way of blackmail. Funny how that bomb went off before they could use it.

Now, do we really need to ask ourselves: “how could it have been otherwise?” or “How could they not have known?”and “Where did all this risk assessment crap fail to factor-in my internet browsing history?”

That’s how people break in academia, don’t they? People break facing that high pressure, cut-throat environment, all the time. I mean, it might ring a fucking bell for them to know how, by that second year I was writing for FIVE GRADUATE LEVEL COURSES, being pushed and provoked ongolingly by classmates and profs until I ended saying something so offensive that it got me to be perceived as some kind of a terrorist threat. After that I was completely shunned and repudiated as a newcomer in that city, and there, in the simmering distress of prolonged isolation, the psychological hammering of looming deadlines and insane study loads, no to mention all the sleeping aids and codeine hangovers compounded by toxic remarks and hostile glares at school and countless other places, the deep emptiness of that dark cage began to close in, and suddenly there was nowhere to run from my prison guard, that alluringly hypnotic ghost of adult entertainment media, and in that fateful day I was embraced into the arms of perdition.

I thus gave you a reason to think that I wasn’t really the person you knew, but a monster, a threat, something to keep young women and children away from, and in the end it’s been precisely this whole psychological rug pulled from under my feet that’s gotten me completely derailed, homeless, crippled and unemployed.

So many things were rattling around in my head, disrupting my thought process while I tried to write those papers during the final stretch of that study program, working through several sleepless nights around two separate university libraries, while the thought of sitting at that table during our morning class discussions was enough to cause physical discomfort. By the time I started to visibly notice my hands shaking while my heart started beating at top speed, I quickly realized I was having anxiety attacks in the middle of class. And no wonder, I was depending on a full medical cocktail to make it through grad school on a decent note, just as the internal dialogues in my head had turned into the loudest most aggressive arguments I’ve had to endure in my life.

It’s ironic to think how foolish it was of me to assume that my student medical insurance would be able to provide the level of psychiatric care I was receiving back home before moving to Canada. and how all of that progress was “gone with the wind” the minute the university psychologist denied my query: “you’re just stressed out, get used to it, welcome to grad school.”

Let’s face it, if they are that good at what they do, they knew everything they needed to know about me before deciding to throw all that money into my hands. Regardless, this clearly explains why my request to access the psychiatric council services was denied on the spot and flat on its face, I mean, that lady at Student Medical Services didn’t even bother looking at the extensive documentation of psychiatric medication I had been under for up to a year before coming to Canada.

A long time ago, when contemplating on what exactly this long distance arrangement between us entailed, you asked me if I trusted myself. To this day I feel I responded with not a lot of consideration to the level of trust you had placed in me. And to this day I've deeply regretted not being honest with myself, and years after that it's been difficult to work through the level of self loathing that my lack of personal substance had ensued in the face of that. This has provided me with a glimpse at the long standing character flaws and patterns of behaviour which, perhaps unconsciously, have dictated most of my adult life. I am now fully realizing the extent to which I have become an expert at avoiding painful emotions and uncomfortable realities about myself and my relationships, for practically decades, by mainly submerging myself in all kinds of occupations and endeavours as a means of distraction. That’s how I was able to isolate myself for months on end, year after year, in order to produce all that artwork in the past. It's how I was able to successfully carve my niche in the public university system I worked for back home. And that was how I was able to make it through that grad school program, despite the huge toll it took on my mental and physical health after four consecutive terms of full time high stress. I had to become somewhat of a heartless workaholic in order to make it through the whole thing. Little did I know that same level of heartlessness would ensue my undoing. Perhaps I did know, but was too emotionally compromised to heed the warnings. Although I had been aware of the possible consequences, I was caught in the middle of that study load, and could not allow myself to get distracted by dwelling on thoughts of you and the emotional turmoil of our unresolved issues. I was afraid of getting hopelessly derailed from the crucial task that this grad-school writing process represented at that time. And to be honest, I don’t think you ever understood the reason behind the level of obsessive compulsion that whole thing brought forth in me.

Ever since that time when you showed up at my place on the Plateau, having put our failed relationship in the past, while looking to be friends and congratulating me on the study program I’d just finished, despite all of the issues I was trying to share with you about being targeted by a bunch of strangers out there, while being gripped by the god awful realization of my uncle’s sexual harassment, let alone all of the repudiating looks and the toxic attitudes and remarks I was still going through at the end of those two years. I was shell shocked and burnt out, confused and honestly frightened by these people and their political intimidation drills, my health had decayed after four terms of high stress the level of which I had not known until then, caught in the tightening grip of what anyone else in my shoes would have easily deemed a fairly well justified level of paranoia at the end of that grad-school program. But somehow, to my shocking dismay, you couldn’t hear any of it, and immediately minimized all of the deep personal concerns I was trying to voice for the first time (after being spied on and followed around by faculty members and what seemed to be some kind of secret police) as the whole thing had clearly followed me everywhere I went (even after I graduated and got my degree), I was finding myself covertly harassed by perfect strangers around the neighbourhood, along with every single course and labour gig I ever got involved in after that. To you it was all a fabrication of my creative mind caught on hyperactive mode, or something like that. To this day, the level of ease with which you brushed off all of that is honestly a bit disturbing.

But even then, as I’ve said before, I can’t (and I honestly don’t) hold it against you. Because honestly: unless it happened to you, who in their right mind would want to complicate their existence with all of this covert political warfare conspiracies being waged in academia?

But there we were, attempting to communicate over a bottle of rose wine at some random terrace bar. I was obsessed with trying to make sense of my whole situation, attempting to hash out these deeply troubling issues, while you were dead set in getting me to “lighten up” and look on the positive side. Your solution to my petty dilemmas was to go out dancing and, not surprisingly, get super hammered.

Despite the fact that “celebrating” was the last thing I felt like doing, it felt wrong to say no to your invitation, especially after being isolated writing papers for literally four consecutive terms. Regardless, it was really stupid of me to agree, as that night could not have ended on a worse possible note.

It’s funny, especially in your company I always enjoyed a good bottle of wine, but clearly, based on past experience and given my psychiatric history, the level of emotional turmoil that strong liquor is likely to stir up in me was disastrously devastating, especially as the full weight of reality spilled out from behind your smiling face: “Don’t fool yourself, I’m in a new relationship, it’s over between us... we’re just friends.”

I should have expected that particular blow coming, and I may even go as far as to say I probably deserved you rubbing it in my face like that, as you clearly meant to. I deserved being crushed under the full weight of the consequences of my actions. You never saw or heard me shedding tears at the loss of you, and because I never said anything after that, it could be easily implied that I just as easily moved on to the next thing, the next romantic pursuit, or anything along those lines. Despite the character flaws and inconsistencies that had been exposed about myself, I honestly feel that you assumed a lot of things, and that's exactly what I am not willing to sit with anymore, and in a big way that's what this letter is about.

It’s funny because apart from you, there have been plenty of people looking to get a piece of me and rub in my face their two bits of political retribution "in the name of all women." It was not enough to suffer the level of personal loss I had ensued between us, as evidently I had to go through all those self appointed “radical activist” types and their social smearing and career assassination campaigns. And I get it, I really do (I have a soul and a conscience). To this day I’ve deeply regretted every single gesture of unfaithfulness that, until we got involved, I did not know (or didn’t want to admit) I was capable of.

As you can probably understand by now (I hope), especially after the way in which financial matters had been raised in our relationship, I was side blinded from the beginning by that whole “international successful career track” I had been riding since the spring of 2015 after being admitted into grad school, on a full scholarship. It’s funny, but despite the “free spirited” front I’ve learned to portray myself with over the course of my life (bohemian surfer starving artist type), I had always felt inferior when it came to financial capability.

Despite the safety net that my parents provided, I had spent too many years living the life of a starving artist. And even when I started working for the public university system, I had been struggling for years to position myself and gain a solid foothold in their ranks, with somewhat of a decent salary despite the high stress workload.

That winter we met after you had graduated was the first time I had ever been able actually afford a decent holiday for myself, renting a crappy room where I could work on my paintings, while being close enough to the beach and able to surf most days. While on the surface it seemed as though I had reached a new plateau, sooner than later my unstable financial situation, along with my anger management issues and the high stress work mode I seemed to permanently be in the grip of, would rear its ugly head and become an issue in our relationship. And especially after you confronted me and called me out, the thought of getting on a higher income track became paramount in the face of what had clearly been, until then, just a step above mediocrity and failure in terms of a professional career.

I completely understand why you had to simply remove yourself from what had clearly turned into a harmful relationship, plagued with trust issues after the level of self deceit I had been rendered capable of: "You need to dump this guy, and you really don’t owe him any explanations." To you it was a matter of survival, of self preservation, and in all honesty I take my hat off to you for that.

But as you may be able to tell by now, as the years went by I never stopped thinking about you.

I never stopped thinking about the blissful times we shared, the history of our friendship, the intimacy of our embrace. And in the process, I learned to loathe the part of me I had too easily allowed to come in and practically ruin what we had, leaving nothing but a pile of ashes in exchange for the thrill of the chase, what a classic idiot I was.

I never said anything because I simply felt I had no right to, I had acted selfishly and had proved myself unworthy of your trust. I never said anything because I had to accept the staggering reality of that personal failure. I had a lot of stuff to figure out on my own, I had to figure out my next move, I had to survive the long winters, I had to work.

I had to accept and come to terms with the fact that, even before coming to Canada it had mainly been my own pervasive and uncontrollable anger which had already compromised our dialogue. And that I did. Through years of trial and hardship, I did. And in the end I can say there's not a lot of things I wouldn't do to repair the damage I caused. This process of psychotherapy has brought into the foreground the matter of my anger management issues, and with it, the countless occasions in which it hampered our communication on an ongoing basis.

I wish there was a way to make up for every lack of sensitivity, my lack of honesty with myself, my lack of presence in the relationship we shared back then. I wish I could go back and fix everything, I wish I could talk to you more often, I wish I could come see you and spend time with you, and laugh at your jokes, I wish there was a way to make everything right again. But there isn't. That time is long gone. We're different people now. In many ways, I feel like I'm actually worse off than I was before I got here. Physically, psychologically, financially, you name it: I'm fucked.

During our time together, especially as the psychiatric consultations became somewhat of a routine to follow up on every two or three months, it became apparent that I was under some sort of chronic condition related to PTSD, and that it was imperative to seriously take on a more substantially therapeutic track in my personal life both physically as well as psychologically. Oddly enough, especially once that grad school admission came through, the exact opposite was ensued. And throughout the following years as the stress and frustration piled up I feel like I've only gone from bad to worse.

Sure, you could tell me that "my life has been enriched" with "insightful experiences," and though I don't disagree, I can also say that a lot of it has been severely traumatizing in so many ways, and that I would actually pay money just to forget a lot of it.

I could even go as far as to say there are those around me who would gladly point out to the fact that this whole thing has brought forth something exceedingly more pathological than what I had previously observed in my behaviour: after finding myself at the mercy of these political mafias and secret organizations, I've clearly turned into somewhat of a raving lunatic, a distorted, fragmented mirror image, a shadow of myself. I've had to, as a measure of self defense, after realizing just to what extent they've been able to get into my head, while realizing in utter dismay the tangled web of manipulation and deceit I've been subjected to, practically since that grad school application went through.

… (to be continued), S.