How Do You Cope When You're Abused By Your Environment And Have Nowhere To Go?

About 3:30am last night (Jan 2nd) someone set off three enormous bangs on the street where I live.

The first sounded like a firework and was loud enough. The last was a massive boom.

There was a smell of camp/firewood that came and went for a couple hours after as I tried to go back to sleep.

I've learned to not bother looking outside.

I was petrified, but also pissed - this was far from the first round of bullshit that's happened here in the last two years.

I woke up this morning looking through the news for a story of an explosion - there was one, but it was from way earlier in the day and located somewhere else in the city.

I usually get angry about what's happening to me, and then once I calm down, I see the bigger social issue it all represents. Might just be a coping mechanism, but it has kept me feeling like I could get in touch with a larger truth even while it seems I'm being abused - and maybe a new vision of a better future for everyone could come out of that.

This incident could launch me into a thought process about being unhoused in the cold, the cruelty of not having warm spaces open 24 hours a day regardless of temperature, the danger that can cause to everyone - not just those outside...ultimately the need for free, quality, safe housing or official outdoor sites to anyone willing to take them.

Or COVID confusion and people still going out - whether we should be using a kind of "rhythm method" to know when it's safer to congregate in crowds. Avoid everything two weeks before peak and two weeks after? Wondering why people want to get drunk in public at all costs to their own - or anyone else's - safety. Why we can't have "fun" places that don't hurt anyone. How people might not realize they're essentially being harmed in the long run by the places they spend money to enjoy. Why was housing even built here if the noise is so loud as to vibrate the building? That sound and energy can change people's moods - there have been multiple deaths just in the area alone since I've lived here. Imagine how it could be done so that all didn't happen (keeping volumes at a certain level, having people wait an hour in a warm, comfortable setting before driving home, maybe making the area a gun free zone during club nights? A car free zone in general?)

Or authority corruption and the potential for people with any kind of power to get away with doing horrendous things. Or the potential for a conspiracy among people who have been in any one place the longest - they all grew up together and are all friends - everyone else is an outsider to them.

Why does it feel like the city was built for people like me, advertised for people like me, but I didn't make enough money, so no one really gives a fuck if I live or die?

What do I do as someone who literally does not have a home to "go back" to?

If I knew exactly who was behind this crap, it would be easier to make a case.

Everything has been done in such a way to make that very difficult to explain.

So today I just wrapped myself up in bed. I am momentarily out of profound things to say.

Just fuck whoever the fuck is fucking with me.

I've been recording myself nearly 24 hours a day for the last two years, so I got the sound on file.

The eeriest part was the absolute lack of sirens afterwards. 

No one coming to investigate.

You'd think people must have heard it across the river.

I swear I heard the rumble of what I know to be a fire truck and a small honk just after the first firework woke me up, but I didn't hear it on the recording. Might need some different software or something.

There should be cameras everywhere pointed at the street - so that would be easy enough to prove if anyone cared.

I've gotten used to the idea that no one cares, though.

I have nowhere else to go.

I don't want to leave my home.

I've been in this apartment, in this area of the city, longer than I've lived in any one place my entire life.

I don't care who hates me.

You don't get to just do this to people.

I have no clue what I'm going to do

I've written to city officials, state agencies, national organizations

from noise control to the ACLU

about a variety of issues that have made an already stressful pandemic downright torture.

Most recently, I begged for more security in housing.

I have been on the edge of eviction for far too long

and whatever I'm facing inside will only be worse out on my ass.

I'd get a remote job but I lack the technology.

My only recourse is writing and it has taken me years to put together a genuine work of art, much less get it published.

I have no idea when help or luck will run out

and frankly it makes one feel insane to hold on so tightly when the chaos keeps unfolding.

Trying to use my experience to make a case for why people deserve help, but it all feels like a sick joke - having everything that matters thrown back in the faces of anyone who cared.

If I could go back in time, I would have simply tried to find a different apartment in downtown.

If I had been on almost any other street, I wonder how much better my life would have been 

not only during the pandemic, but the four years before that.

I had one shot at landing somewhere and I landed here

and this became my home.

I realize why no one would care

but that's the way it is.

This is already low income housing, too.

If I go anywhere else, even another low income building, it would be more expensive.

I want to bring it all together - make the pain I've experienced and witnessed worth something - make it matter - make it make the world better by advocating for what needed to be different

but I can't shake the thought that those in power already know

they have access to experts, access to resources, access to ideas I haven't even imagined

and they simply don't implement them.

If anyone wants me to do anything, it would just be as a way to make money somehow

off my work or whatever

no one cares what the fuck I do or say.

I'm angry.

Hopefully I'm just not focusing on the bright side at the moment, but if it's real, then it will still be there when I do.

I do still want this all to amount to something more important

but that's just how I feel right now.

This shit is fucking bogus.

Alternative Explanations for Schizophrenia Diagnosis

I talk to myself. A lot. All the time.

I decided to look up some scientific explanation for this behavior to make myself feel better.

I found this healthline article:

It’s Totally Normal (and Healthy) to Talk to Yourself  by Crystal Raypole and medically reviewed by Timothy J. Legg, PhD, PsyD

(https://www.healthline.com/health/why-do-i-talk-to-myself#benefits)

Everything in this article was super comforting to me. 

Then I got to the "When to be concerned" section.

Got me thinking that maybe there are alternative explanations for what someone is experiencing when they are given a schizophrenia diagnosis.

I'm not schizophrenic myself and I don't have a degree in psychology - this is just my opinion - but maybe it could help somebody.

Four possible alternative explanations:

1) neuroplasticity either breaks down the reality barrier or doesn't allow it to fully form

Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change and adapt. Think of it as mental flexibility.

I had an experience as a kid that might seem odd, but it falls in line with many stories you hear about children that are often explained away as being somehow "connected" to sixth senses or other realms. Through analyzing my own memories, I wonder if the real issue (at least in my circumstance) was something more related to the concept of object permanence.

I could look at pictures on the wall and it would seem like their mouths were moving. I've heard plenty of similar kinds of stories of kids seeing ghosts etc.

This sounds super creepy, but if you tell a full grown adult to look up at the night sky and imagine fireworks, they probably could do the same thing. Only their mind has formed enough to know the difference between the reality in front of them and the "overlay" of what they're imagining there. My hypothesis is that - as a child - you're born with a mind designed to understand whatever reality you find yourself in and it's still learning what's "real" and what's "imagined". Not having a solid boundary yet, you get this kind of effect and if the kid is aware enough to notice but not control it, you might seem like you have a problem.

If that neuroplasticity continues into adulthood, without the proper framing, you might end up with what appears to be schizophrenia. 

This could also be very relevant in the false connection between marijuana use and schizophrenia that has historically done little but tarnish the medicinal value of cannabis due to stigma.

2) a coping mechanism taken to an extreme degree

Focusing on the idea of talking to yourself, even the article referenced here will say that everything is pretty much fine as long as no one "talks back". What if people, again, just don't fully understand their own experience, and when they go to explain this to a therapist they end up with a diagnosis that often puts them on serious medication - maybe what they really needed was a support system they could trust and someone to consistently be there for them with their best interests at heart.

I can imagine the combination of loneliness and that level of misunderstood neuroplasticity being a perfect set up for this situation.

3) mirroring popular culture to manifest an identity 

Another totally different option - and perhaps only for a select number of cases - could be that people watch movies (for example) and then feel a kind of way and the only behavior they have had modeled for them to express themselves comes out as a Hollywood interpretation of "crazy". 

I think about the movie Silver Linings Playbook - which I mostly loved - and how one character wipes everything off the table in a public restaurant in a moment of anger. People in the scene clap for her. She seems like a badass. But in real life, I can't imagine this working out in anyone's favor. In fact, mirroring that exact behavior in real life could potentially have devastating consequences. The boundary line for acceptable behavior is up for debate, but I wonder how many - especially teenagers - have simply mimicked what they saw in a movie and it ended up "tagging" them for life or even ruining their lives completely. We don't have a set rule book for how to act, and you almost wouldn't want that anyway. People seem to just do what they can get away with until someone stops them. But the poor and marginalized end up suffering the most from this "calvinball-esque" way of living. One person gets to be an eccentric, the other ends up on medication that may prove more harmful than helpful in the long run and is stigmatized.

4) conspiracy to make someone appear dismissable

If this were happening, I'd think it'd probably be the most rare circumstance. The big problem is that - in and of itself - fearing that there's a conspiracy of some kind against you can be seen as a symptom of a mental health disorder. You'd have to prove people were messing with you somehow. However, if someone was in a situation like that, I see various ways certain tactics could be used to make the subject appear like they're having issues that usually indicate a mental health disorder. It would be an extremely cruel thing to do.

Again, this is just my take. There could be even more possibilities out there. It could be different from case to case. For as much as we know as a modern species, there's so much more we don't. I'm just applying personal experience and observation to the world around me. I'm not an expert - but maybe this could change the way people are seen and how they understand their own experiences in general.

By the way, happy new year.

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https://youtu.be/4Jc54RvDUZU?t=6164

JAMES BALDWIN & NIKKI GIOVANNI - A CONVERSATION (1971) Complete

1 hour 42 minutes 44 seconds:

"...friend of mine - a musician - he said, "you're junkie too". I thought to myself and I mean you know something in the way he said it maybe because I came from the same streets; I knew why he was junkie and I knew what had happened to me. He said, "you're a junkie because you talk to yourself". I had to think about that and I thought about it and I - what he meant was - you have to listen to your own sound. You gotta find a way to listen to your own sound. You live in a kind of echo chamber. And it's true, you know..." - James Baldwin