Mental Health Support

This was years before high school photo ID. I'd ditch school for picture day, for make-up picture day, and for Double-Plus-Mandatory-They-Send-a-Note-to-Your-Third-Period-Teacher-Excusing-You-From-Class picture day. Not Pictured: Hunter and all the other misfits and weirdos.

I'd already learned it was best to be invisible. I didn't want THAT picture to be the one in the newspapers or on television if I went off the rails.

I was already hiding.

I was "asked" to leave college twice. It was all very gentlemanly, nothing on paper, just take some time off, Hunter, until you get your shit back together.

The "or else..." threats were largely unspoken.

I quit high school but I graduated from college eventually (many events...) for the simple mundane reason meds were improving. I sometimes imagine what it must be like not to take meds with unpleasant side effects every day. When I was young and stupid I'd try to power through life by sheer force of will, without meds, and end up in the E.R.. I've avoided that sort of silliness since the mid 'eighties.

I was also lucky not to have any disturbing (to employers anyways) gaps in my employment or academic history. Out of school I was capable of heavy semi-skilled labor -- warehouse work, furniture moving, loading and unloading trucks, that sort of thing. All I had to claim to any potential employer was that I was taking a break from school because I needed the money. It was like a secret handshake that elevated my status. Nobody had to know about my feral human, dumpster diving, occasionally homeless self.

Thinking back on it all, I often see my grandma. She was bat-shit insane by any modern measure but intensely proud that she'd never missed a day of work. Her life outside of work was a never-ending soap opera and bloody catastrophe. When she retired with a comfortable pension, enough for any reasonable person to travel and enjoy life perhaps, she instead lost whatever sanity she had left and eventually had to removed from the home she owned outright as a danger to herself and others. It's somewhat amazing the cops didn't simply shoot her. It's a miracle she hadn't remembered her guns. My mom thought she'd removed all the guns from grandma's house, but we found some more later.

After that my grandma bounced back and forth between "assisted" living places and my parent's house whenever an assisted living place would have no more of her.

My grandma directly set in motion the worst long weekend of my life, culminating with a friend of my girlfriend trying to kill herself in my bathtub. My grandma also played a staring roll in my brother's first marriage and divorce. Fortunately for me, by the time I met my wife my grandma was much less a Holy Terror and was near enough charming and gracious at our wedding. She passed away about a year later.