Mental by Jaime Lowe

Author:Jaime Lowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

My mom applied for financial help from a sexual assault victims fund that the State of California had set up—she used it to pay for daycare while she read scripts (her job). She hired a Jamaican woman named Alma who watched me paint rainbow colors over any surface and braided my hair into cornrows and helped me keep my liquid green makeup in line. We spent most of our days together frequenting 99-cent stores and nail salons and grocery stores to buy more cigarettes. One thing that became very clear in this episode if not the first one was that being crazy makes people (including me, especially me) smoke a lot. People with serious mental illness treated in the public health system die roughly twenty-five years earlier than those without mental illness. Tobacco-related illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, and lung disease, are among the most common causes of death in this population (my population). And Americans with mental illnesses have a 70 percent greater likelihood of smoking than the general population.

My mom—and all my parents—were once again uncertain whether I would get better. Jeff’s brother Tom (my uncle), a psychiatrist, told Jeff and my mom that sleep was the only thing that would bring me out of this. Sleep and time. My aunt Sally came to visit, my aunt Carrie took me to get new pants, and my grandma tried to take care of me. When I showed up (with Alma as backup) at my grandma’s house, I took all her scrap material from her sewing projects and started to sew a second magic outfit-cape-slash-thing. She was such a precise seamstress and perfectionist that watching me cut every which way gave her a heart attack (not literally). She did not recognize me. She could not respond to a flurried frenzy of unmeasured energy. Alma took me home, and my mom took note, one less person who could handle the babysitting. It wasn’t all bad—I went to see Saving Silverman with my mom and grandma one afternoon and was so enraptured with the Neil Diamond tribute and the extremely underrated comic genius of Amanda Peet that I stood up and gave it a standing ovation. With God on my side and Jesus in my veins, I stood and clapped very enthusiastically. I even got my hands on the press materials later.

Dr. DeAntonio could see progress, but it was slow. The first lucid moment I remember was sitting across from Jeff at Jerry’s deli in a mini mall near our house in Marina del Rey. We both had soup. I was anxious and frustrated and angry. And so was he. His voice was elevated, which had never happened before in the twenty-three years I had known him. He said, “Do you know what this is doing to your mom? Do you know what this is doing to her?” I mean, I really didn’t, I hadn’t thought about it. The way he said it made my recovery seem like my choice, which I know it wasn’t and I know he knows it wasn’t, but it shook me.

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