I wanted to share another update on my housing situation so it would help me process. I honestly do not understand the difference between a lot of these people’s job descriptions, but they apparently managed to find a new regional director for the group homes. My expectations were low, but on May 22 (Monday of last week), I got this email:
Hi [ApostateTurtle],
I am [T] the Residential Director for [group home]. I have been around the program a few times but could not catch up with you. I know you are a busy person, and I thought the best way to reach would be by email. Looking forwards to get to know you and assist within my capacity.
Thanks,
Email
[T]
I replied:
Hi [T]! Thanks so much for being willing to use email. I kind of freaked out at [house manager] recently because people were trying to talk to me during business hours and I may have been kind of a bitch about it but it really does help to be able to use this medium. I’m not always the nicest to staff. I don’t mean to be mean, it’s just hard living in a group home because I have a master’s degree and I’m trying to be a professional and it sucks having to also be in the mental health system. My diagnosis is C-PTSD which isn’t really the primary thing [organization] treats, so I’m here in this group home with a bunch of people who are severely incapacitated and it sucks to be grouped together with them. So I feel really bad for being a bitch to staff because although there are major systemic problems with how mental health is handled in this country, it’s not their fault and they’re actually very good people.
Right now I’m even more stressed out because in March there was a MAJOR episode in which [housemate/fellow resident] was in full-blown psychosis and had a weapon and staff was unable to call 911 because of “protocol.” So the problem is, [housemate/fellow resident] might be gone (at least for now) but now I know that they can’t call 911 in an emergency because protocol won’t allow it. And if it’s protocol, that means they have to do the same thing next time. My friend insisted at the time that I file a police report. I told her it wasn’t going to work, but she wouldn’t believe me. So I went to the police station and, as I expected, they wouldn’t let me file a report because I live in a group home. So I’m uncomfortable in the house because I can’t call the police and neither can staff and my roommates can get like super threatening. My beloved turtle has been at the sitter ever since and I miss him terribly, but I don’t want to bring him back here because it feels unstable. In a lot of ways, it feels like my life is on hold until I get out of here.
Which was supposed to have happened by now. They said they had an apartment for me, but they ran into a snafu with licensing and subsidies. So, I’m unclear whether the apartment is a guarantee if I wait for it, or whether I could end up waiting here for several more months only to find out that it fell through entirely. I’m trying to look at other housing options in the meantime. I was going to move back to [WA], but their roach problem is off the charts. It’s just absolutely crawling with vermin. So I’m looking at rooms on Facebook marketplace. It’s a crappy situation all around.
I really do appreciate your reaching out. Sometimes I get mad at [organization] people and burn bridges. It just sucks having to be in a system that’s designed for people who are cognitively impaired. Then people find out that I’m not cognitively impaired and they think I’m totally fine. Which, I have a ton of trauma and that really does affect me on the day-to-day. It’s a huge part of why I don’t know how to interact with people who are trying to help me. I only have one memory of being a child and crying and being comforted by an adult, and that was at my grandmother’s house and I rarely saw her. My grandma is also the only adult who I can remember ever holding me. I have no idea how to be nurtured because it was never part of my life. So I get scared and lash out when people are trying to help me. My therapist once said that I’d never had a “template” for help. My family was super dysfunctional. From what I’ve managed to infer of my mother’s upbringing, she also has really severe trauma that she’s never been able to acknowledge or deal with. So it’s not so much that I blame her, but it left her totally incapable of love. All she can do is try to control and manipulate. So I generally assume that people are trying to control and manipulate me. My dad is completely controlled by my mom so no help there. Then, I got diagnosed with C-PTSD and my parents got so offended that they completely abandoned me. They wouldn’t participate in family sessions or anything. One time I almost died of a suicide attempt and they never called. I could go on giving similar examples. But suffice it to say, they really cut me out of their lives entirely and have made it very clear that they don’t care if I live or die. They needed a reason for this, so they threw God under the bus. They’re super religious (they’re part of a weird church with theology similar to Westboro Baptist) and I left their faith and became an atheist, so now they’re shunning me. They spread all these rumors that I hate God. Which I don’t. If it turns out that there is a god, I feel like there would be zero enmity between us. But for example, my whole extended family is in a Facebook Messenger group chat. My mom took the initiative to kick me out of the chat and she claimed she did it because I would go apeshit if they mentioned prayer. (This is not true; I’ve never had any problems with prayer.) Anyway, time went on and one time my brother mentioned Mom’s hysterectomy as though it was in the distant past. I had heard nothing of the hysterectomy and asked why she had it. Apparently she had had CANCER. I asked Mom why she didn’t tell me and she said that she wrote about it in the group chat, and she “forgot” that not everybody was in the group chat. That SHE kicked me out of. That was a long time ago and I just kept trying and trying to reach out to my parents and make things better, and every time they were just absolutely evil to me. Finally I stopped reaching out to them and they never reached out to me. My entire relationship with my parents has been a story of unrequited love.
Anyway, since I haven’t heard from them in over two years and they’re telling everybody that I’m a God-hating monster, I kind of just figure I’m shunned. They even turned my little brother against me. I have limited contact with my sister, which is good enough for me and I love her with my entire heart and soul. Aside from my turtle, my sister and her husband and kids are effectively the only family I have. Once in a while she tries to convert me back to her weird offshoot of Christianity, and I just kind of wait for it to blow over until we can talk about something else.
So where I’m going with all that is that I don’t really know how to be treated gently because I didn’t grow up with that. One time I was prescribed penicillin and had a horrible allergic reaction (full-body rash) and my mom didn’t want to go back to the doctor so she made me keep taking it until it ran out. Honestly there were a lot of medical incidents that I could have literally died from that she claims she didn’t know about and it’s my fault for not telling her. I was homeschooled so I spent a lot of time in my room reading textbooks, but I always came out for dinner. One time I was so sick that all I could do was sleep all day unless I was actively experiencing stomach upset. I thought my mom knew I was sick because I didn’t come out for dinner. About a week later I came out and let her know I was recovered from that horrible stomach bug, and she said she hadn’t noticed that I was gone or that I was sick. We were an upper-middle class white North American family but I still had constant food insecurity. We were homeschooled our whole childhoods, so we didn’t get breakfast or lunch that way, and Mom didn’t cook anything except dinner. Which, she never cooked enough dinner and she always made my sister and me make sure our brother got enough to eat because she thought he needed food because he was a boy. Meanwhile, Mom was permanently on a diet so she didn’t buy any food that wasn’t diet food because she said if it was in the house she would eat it. But she freaked when we asked to eat her diet food. Dad would go to the wholesale club and buy ham, cheese, and bread because he figured we could eat ham and cheese every day. But he bought in bulk so the food went bad. I remember scraping the mold off the cheese and bread so I could make a sandwich. Any time we were at church or whatever and there was food, I would DEVOUR it and the other kids made fun of me for it. But I was clinically underweight and didn’t have access to food. Now I’m obese and I think a lot of that is because I’m used to having to eat everything in sight because I didn’t know when I would get to eat again.
So my point is that I never had access to food, medical care, or any kind of love or nurturing growing up. So then I’m told that staff is worried about me because I was doing laundry late at night. And it doesn’t register that they’re doing this because they actually want me to be happy and taken care of, because I never learned to be taken care of. All I can figure is that they think I’m fragile. Nobody noticed major warning signs when I was a child (like a penicillin rash) so when people get worried over tiny problems like me being up late washing laundry, it’s completely confusing and I don’t know how to handle it.
Anyway. So thanks for reaching out even though I can be kind of abrasive toward anybody who tries to help me. I’m confused what you mean by resident director… are you taking [house manager]’s job?
Sorry for the super long email. Usually when I remember something ridiculously traumatic, I write it on an index card and save it to my collection. I have a TON of index cards at this point. But sometimes I still give anecdotes to help people understand me. I never knew this stuff was traumatic until I went to therapy. I knew *I* was messed up because I was cutting myself and chronically suicidal, etc. It took a ton of therapy for me to be able to really believe that I have a trauma disorder. Which, I had a lot of symptoms beyond my control for a really long time, and I feel like it stole the prime of my life. I’m 33 years old and I don’t have any kids, and all I wanted out of life was to be a mom. I worry that I’ll hit menopause and lose the opportunity. OR that I’ll have kids and they’ll get taken away by [my state’s social services] because organizations like [organization that runs the group home] have been involved in my life. Which is one more reason I really don’t like getting services from these places. My record in [organization] says that I’m diagnosed with “major depressive disorder with psychosis,” but I’ve never gotten that diagnosis from a doctor. I have all kinds of issues but psychosis is not one. So if it’s on file that I get psychotic sometimes, that could really come back to hurt me down the road.
I’m trying to think what else would be useful to know about me. I once was being admitted to [shitty psych hospital that I stayed at for like a week] and during the intake, the nurse got mad when I said I had a trauma disorder. He said he was from Africa (he didn’t specify a country) and he grew up poor, and I was from America, “the greatest country on earth.” He felt like my trauma was way less than his trauma and he was head nurse, so I should have been able to overcome my little trauma if he overcame his major trauma. I don’t doubt at all that he had very severe trauma. And it’s been a really hard journey for me to be able to believe that I have trauma, despite what my therapists have said. So sometimes, I’m still really scared to talk about my trauma disorder with people from Africa, because I worry that they’ll think I’m just an entitled, ungrateful white North American who doesn’t know what it’s like to live in destitute poverty or a war zone or whatever (which I don’t). Nobody at [group home] has ever said anything like what the guy at [shitty psych hospital] said. And not everybody from Africa grew up in poverty. And I recognize that this is a me problem and not a them problem. And it’s basically a form of racism in me that I haven’t figured out how to overcome. Which, racism violates all my core values. And yet here I am. I hope that doesn’t make me a bad person. I’m not a great person but I try so darned hard to make the world a better place. I don’t know what continent you grew up on but just know that I’m really trying my best not to discriminate and I recognize that it is a very serious flaw in me that it’s hard for me to talk openly about my struggles with people from Africa.
That’s probably it for tonight. Thanks for reading this if you’ve made it this far. There’s a lot that I’ve wanted to share with staff but I do a lot better in writing and I can’t always be my authentic self verbally. So thanks for the opportunity to connect in writing!
[ApostateTurtle]
Email
[T] replied:
Hi [ApostateTurtle],
I really do appreciate your email and you opening up to me about yourself. It feels like I know you already even without meeting you in person. [It had sure better feel that way after I gave him my entire life story!]
First Thing first, I am [house manager]’s supervisor, I am not taking his place, and thanks for asking for that clarification. This is just my second week working up here in [city where I live] and I have been to a few meeting related to you housing. This is to tell you that although the process is not moving as fast as you would like, [organization] is prioritizing you housing situation and is making significant efforts. I will continue to follow with every one working on the housing and will do my best where I can to assist. Do not give up hope please, it will work out.
I also know that you deserve better than [group home] but please just bear with the us for the main time.
Thanks very much ,
[T]
Email
I say all this to say that things are improving. Although I do get extremely pissed off at group home staff on an extremely regular basis, it felt good to be able to explain myself instead of always feeling like they think (perhaps correctly) that I’m a bitch. Even more importantly, it seems like they’re understanding the urgency of my getting out of here and they’re not holding it against me. The head of my “team” at the organization was out for a very long time due to shortstaffing on another team, and she just got back. She recognized how much it sucked that I knew something was obviously going desperately wrong with the apartment they had promised me, but no one would communicate with me about it. She suggested that she would be willing to do weekly check-ins with me about the status of the housing. She also said that this is a huge priority for them, not because I’m more important but because of the level of need. They’re even looking at other apartments to see if they can get me in somewhere else faster. And they’re going to do everything in their power to get me out of the group home by the end of June. This is the first time anyone has said anything other than “there is no timeline.” And she was glad that I was able to “self-advocate.”
So maybe Dr X didn’t actually completely ruin my life by sending me to the group home. In his defense, he tried really hard to get me into regular subsidized housing and I responded by almost getting myself permanently committed to a state hospital, which definitely would have been worse than this group home. I still keep this on the wall over my bed and reference it frequently:
I met a friend for coffee over the long weekend. She’s been my friend since 2015 and came to visit me several times during my long hospitalization. She mentioned that my whole demeanor was totally different (in a positive way) from what it was right after I got discharged. This was incredibly encouraging to me. I realized that I had always unconsciously focused my thinking on how different I was at the time of discharge, from how I was when I first got admitted. I thought of the past year as kind of just me trying to remember everything I learned during my inpatient stay so I could maintain the same level of sanity as when I discharged. I had not considered that I might have improved since discharge. But my friend was sure, and now that she mentioned it, I think she was right. I have a lot more confidence now that I’m working full-time, and I trust myself more now that I have survived one year (almost exactly!) out of the mental hospital without killing or maiming myself. I take credit for a lot of this progress. But it is possible that, for all my myriad complaints, this group home actually helped in some ways, too.
