It was fun to write tho. Anymore writing is like fishing; You spend five to eight hours sitting and staring and hope something worthwhile comes out. I'm wondering if the community here thinks I should actually turn this one in, as I wasn't planning on it (it seems too counter-productive).
Trigger. Evokes images of Tonto and the Lone Ranger, I think Trigger was the name of the horse. Wait, no, that was Silver.
“You better take care of me, Lord. If you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.” - H.S. Thompson
Any medical terms I use here, if I get their meaning wrong, I apologize in advance. I have been diagnosed psychotic, borderline, and a few other tasty labels. I'm in therapy. If you tell me not to kill myself and that love is the answer I'll politely thank you and giggle, but this isn't a cry for help; I don't need salvation.
Nothing I wrote here about the Marine Corps is meant to be anything more than my own perspective.
This is me, dancing, at the end of my rope. I’m doing the Charleston.
{}{}{}{}{}<— Visual representation of where I’m dancin’. Dirty dancin’. Footloose. Patrick Swayze. If you’re a guy, this whole paragraph is meaningless. If you’re female, it isn’t. See, I can play psychologist too! VROOM! Now I’m an airline pilot!
Just kidding, mostly. Ok, I’m going to start for real now. I did warn you I was verbose, right? I write like a lawyer having a bad psychedelic trip, but that's just my opinion. Anyway, here we go:
Hi there. I was going to type about my mental whatever but instead I’m going to monopolize this moment to lay to rest, once and for all, exactly why I cannot respect psychiatry and psychiatrists.
First off, all doctors, to some degree, suffer from an ailment caused by having a severe overabundance of non-common sense knowledge stuffed up in their heads, resulting in them not being able to remember exactly what the layman can be expected to understand. This is a great quality in a conventional doctor, as you don’t give a ***** how well they socialize compared to how competent they are at healing you. In psychiatrists, however, the detachment goes much further, and you have someone who is not only secure in their knowledge, they can become rather pompous about their own sanity.
My issue with this sense of smug self-righteousness that these psychiatrist ***** exude is that psychiatry is an evolving science. A psychiatrist must follow the DSM, however, a community of psychiatrists, every so often, can update the DSM. The message I take from this is that one of you may be fallible, however a group of you is less so. Sadly it seems modern psychiatry has crossed out the “less so” part and substituted “not”. You admit when you give me mood drugs that you have no idea how it will effect me. You “think” it might do this or that, based on the way it has effected other people. You’re not even 100% sure what chemicals in the brain are effected; while most pills seem to target a few key chemicals such as serotonin, if you read the fine print on many of them they admit that the affect could be from some unknown source.
Physics is a respectable science. *****, I can even grok the concept of Newtonian physics, although I don’t understand any of it. When scientists are talking about something like gravity, which is a variable force, yet measurable and fairly well understood, I feel confident that they are reporting accurate information that I can independently test. However with psychiatry, it’s “well, I’ve seen how other people respond, so I think maybe this might have some positives”. Holy *****. Do you see the difference? One feels pretty ***** sure, the other more a buckshot approach to medical care. I’m the admitted self-destructive member of our relationship, but let me ask you this; where the ***** do you even begin to get off telling me not to ***** *****, while simultaneously offering me pills that potentially cause side effects including seizure? Do you not see the mental disconnect there? I theorize that if you’re a psychiatrist you cannot; your head is too far up your own ***** to understand the difference between relating to and caring for your patients. You’re more concerned with “how do I return this person to normalized society” than “how do I help this person feel better”. I realize why society wants the former more, but as the little cog in the giant wheel in question, my own perspective is totally focused on the latter. To put it simply, if I could restore myself to calmness, and cease wanting to inflict injury, I wouldn’t need social rehabilitation because it would already be done. I could just go drive a ***** 18-wheeler and leave you people the ***** alone.
Tangent: If I ever snapped, I think I’d arm myself with a stack of throwing knives that I could stab people with and simply leave in their bodies, creating a trail of bloody handles as I go. Is there some psychological penetration anxiety going on here? What the ***** would Freud say? He would probably say “Get me some more cocaine, or I’ll stab you with this throwing knife”. Maybe we’d be better off just asking Alfred Kinsey.
I dance with death like an Emily Dickenson poem; I can’t wait for him, but he kindly waits for me. I play with spiders containing neurotoxins stronger than that of a rattlesnake, without gloves, and that’s what I call a fun Saturday night. Ever see a widow bite? Cricket goes :twitch: :twitch: and then it never moves again. I respect Miss Widow, in fact, I want to be just like her. I want people to see me and think “Death. That is death right there. Don’t touch it”.
Why am I like that? It was a response to the Marines; the only way to impress killers is to threaten to kill them yourself. Over the last ten years that homicidal resolve has grown, and I used it as strength, and frankly it worked out great. The only people who want to mess with me are "bad" people themselves, and are usually confident enough with weapons or a martial art to feel capable of handling me. That doesn’t really help me much, I suppose. Now that I’m not surrounded by the Marines I should really stand the ***** down.
I wish I had realized this before I ***** myself up on ***** *****, but perhaps I couldn’t have seen it before. Yay for small comfort.
Dr. *****, they tell me you want another appointment with me. If it was not already apparent, I do not particularly see that happening. I simply do not have respect for your profession and the way it makes you act. I don’t care about the justification that you are working for the government and toeing the party line; the fact is you do not have my best interest at heart, but rather your perception of my best interest that has been filtered through political and God knows what other lenses, and based on my observations of your profession to date, I am going to assume that any psychiatrist, by job definition, is as a source of knowledge marginalized by the fact that they can’t admit that they do not, in fact, know everything. If it makes you feel any better, I’m terminating our relationship here as much as I am able, before your name gets added to the short list of people I'd like to (verb deleted). I have enough battles that I’ve committed myself to without starting up new ones every time someone wants to poke around inside my head.
There will be a new psychiatrist, and the same cycle will start over; I’m not going to jump through hoops trying to act mentally ill, some days I’ll be pretty calm, some days I’ll want to kill everyone, because that’s how life is for me. I’m sorry that doesn’t fit into your schedule, but you see me one hour a year; I don’t see how you’d get any ***** idea what my life was life from that. In fact, I think it’s pretty ***** disrespectful for anyone to think they can psycho-analyze someone else from a one hour interview. To start with, you treat everyone like they’re lieing, yet simultaneously you expect them to open up to you. You don’t see that as hostile, and you don’t understand it being interpreted as being hostile. I could fill a book with the things you obviously don’t understand. Paranoia, for example, but I already explained why your head was up your ***** on that one, in person. There was one VA psych (and I don’t remember his name, which is sad, because the man deserves a ***** medal) that treated me with respect, like the words I said were actually honest and worth respecting. Just. One. That includes the ones I saw while I was in the military. I don’t feel the need to prove anything to you people; It is your job now to simply to record that I existed, I don’t need your diagnosis anymore. Sane, sober, whatever you want to call me, go for it. I’ve subjected myself to a ***** of a lot worse than your idiot curiosity, and I expect worse before my time here is done.
In summation; The world is ***** and the VA is the world in tiny, dysfunctional microcosm. If you wanted to help me, you ***** should have been talking to me back in 2001, when I was begging you for it, instead of jerking me around with your bureaucracy for a decade then telling me in “20 to 30 years” things might be better. Great. Can’t wait to be 60 years old and hit the job force with no skills and 40 years less experience than everyone else. I am not generally suicidal, but ***** like that makes me wonder if I’m not going to have to just pop myself sooner or later. Such is life, but do you even realize that’s how your words are going to be interpreted? CAUSE I’M SITTING HERE ***** TELLIN YOU HOW I SEE IT, IF YOU GIVE A ***** *****, WHICH AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, YOU DON’T.
Now ***** off so I can stop typing all ***** day, I hate you people and I hate thinking about you people and I hate having to justify myself to you people and ON AND ON AND ON. You’re not even the Marine Corps. You’re just a bunch of ***** ***** civilians. Someone needs to throw you up on a beach into land mines and machine gun fire, then you come back and talk to me about REALITY and how SHINY HAPPY PEACHY NICE LAND it’s ***** supposed to be. No, I never had to go up a beach, but it was certainly in the job description. I was ready to put my life where my mouth is, so to speak. You have this idea that the Marine Corps doesn’t want psychopaths that is simply not correct, or at least, it sure the ***** wasn’t the order of the day in *****, Camp LeJeune. You know we were the ***** Battalion? You have any idea what a legacy like that instills in a command? You don’t just have to be the best, you are A BLACK MARK ON THE HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE ***** CORPS if you don’t fail to sacrifice every ***** thing in the pursuit of excellence. The easiest, most realistic way to get this done is to assemble a large, functional collection of psychopaths. That’s why Marines will ***** ***** and kill *****; the ***** is not a ***** Marine, and the ***** could have been carrying a bomb. I’m supposed to jeopardize the lives of my fellow Marines for some random civilian? You better be a spectacular ***** ***** civilian, because I know these guys’ parents, and I’m going to have to explain how I let their son get blown up because I hesitated to put a threat down. [deleted.]
I’m going to finish this one with ***** lyrics, which you probably won’t read, because who ***** cares what the ***** some PATIENT has to say about POETRY and ART and god forbid you actually have to INTERPRET THE WORDS THEY ARE SHOVING IN YOUR FACE, so without further ado, I bring us to our denouement for the evening, a lil bit o’ Tom Waits:
And they all pretend they’re Orphans
And their memory’s like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember
Tell the things you can’t forget that
History puts a saint in every dream
Well she said she’d stick around
Until the bandages came off
But these mamas boys just don’t know when to quit
And Matilda asks the sailors are those dreams
Or are those prayers
So just close your eyes, son
And this won’t hurt a bit
P.S. – It occurs to me that functionally, the VA is like the red cape that the Marine Corps throws out to distract me from the people who actually did me wrong. Perhaps instead of sitting here listing miscommunications and ranting about subtle differences in psychological philosophy, I should be attempting to (I’m just going to leave the verb out of this sentence if you don’t mind) SSgt *****. Ha. Now that’s a concept. I’d like to see that man suffer. Like? Love. Cherish. You know the way kittens make you feel when they do something cute? That’s the way I feel when I think about ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** SSgt *****’s *****. Just sayin’.
P.P.S. – The funny thing about writing is it’s very easy to do when I’m writing non-fiction. I like the truth because you can blow it up like an exploitation film, and it’s still the harsh ***** truth. I don’t need to exaggerate to impress, I just obscure how much a roll luck played in everything. That’s really all it takes to impress people, anyway; Succeed at something, make it look easy. [deleted] I’m not proud of it, but I’m a bit awed by the fact that I actually got away with it all. But then, the mafia did ok until they started messing with booze and drugs. In America you can be a low grade thug and there’s really ***** all anyone can do about it until you start slinging weight or carrying a gun. The More You Know _=*
P.P.P.S - Is it just me, or does cheap peach-flavored tea taste like its been mixed with bug repellent?
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