Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I still hate driving by the mental hospital. I have no choice, it is right there at a nexus of roads so no matter what route I take, I have to go by it. Sometimes it’s enough to ruin my night. Or at least set me off into a tailspin of terrible thoughts and memories. I have a lot of guilt about this. My arrest/detainment was almost two years ago now. That’s almost how long I’ve had this blog. I finished the book here and just kept writing. Bought the domain. I’ve tried to move on. I think I’ve done a pretty bang-up job, actually. I took on another job not long after getting out. The one at which I’m still clinging, because I really like the money and it’s way more interesting than my VA job, even if it is also profoundly disturbing and triggering sometimes. I started performing again. That is fucking huge, I was not planning that, I was not anticipating that. In fact, I was worried about what I was going to do with myself – a huge reason I got so suicidal before was because I felt I had no future, I couldn’t bear another 10, 20, 30 years of…this. Performing again is literally a reason to live. Maybe it isn’t a very good one but even now, I’m painfully short on good reasons to live.

Soon I have to help drag queens and other LGBT people from the bar in which I perform find their own reasons to live. Part of my project for grad school – I have a ghost of an idea, a skeleton of something…I’m just not fully sure what yet. But that’s the big news, the big awareness of the day – mental health. In particular, of trans people. I’m noticing it a lot in the lead up to this year’s Pride parade and festival – a hyperawareness of the attacks trans people are facing. What to do about all this floats at the periphery of an idea and I haven’t quite figured out what it is.