Hi J-,
It’s me again here. Sorry that I can’t visit. The hours conflict completely with my work schedule, and I have to be really careful about taking time off. I already take time off a bit for things like my psychiatric and other medical appointments.
I was really angry at my mom for a long time. It started in college. Part of it was frustration that people argued with me constantly over whether circumcision should have been allowed to be forced on me as a child. I think I was dealing with larger issues, like the right to control other’s bodies, as well as concepts of permanent loss and a lot of guilt. To some degree, my mom was a safer person to push off my frustrations on. To some degree, she was still very controlling. It’s also just an instinctual push as a young man to distance ourselves from authority figures, both parental, and as we perceive the government to be as former students. In my case, as a former GI, I wrote a check to the government for use of my body as expendable. I am really lucky I never had to kill anyone, but my life was micromanaged for way too long right down to my medical decisions, including my mental health decisions when I got out.
The way people treated my beliefs about circumcision being medically unethical as psychosis sucked. It’s not psychosis. Cutting off part of someone’s dick without their permission is fucked up. I can have psychosis when I am suffering from insomnia for prolonged periods (mania,) but it goes away as a bipolar person with proper sleep from the correct medication being provided. Unfortunately if shit gets too far out of control, I may not understand I am psychotic, by the very nature of the condition, and I will be afraid of psychiatric treatment. To exasperate this, I have reason to distrust psychiatrists. They refuse to listen to anything I have to say and historically have overmedicated me with the wrong diagnosis and classes of medications. This is partially because I am extremely intelligent when I am getting proper rest, and psychiatrists often have their own egotistical assumptions that certain things I say are incoherent, when they are really just at a level of complexity the psychiatrist assumed I couldn’t lucidly comprehend. This is true on sociological subject matters especially as well as IT and informational security, both subject matters I am academically and autodidactically trained in to a level of understanding they would assume I can’t have as a patient.
Honestly, it also includes medical subject matters at this point, and I am very relieved to have a psychiatrist currently who listens to me and doesn’t simply ignore me like I am retarded. Most only paying attention to the tone of my voice. I married a Kenyan immigrant, partially because I grasp racism is similar to the stigma of being bipolar. I’m not saying they are the same, but people tend to lump me into a sub-human stereotype where I am given no dignity, despite often being a moral person who has a complex understanding of a wide array of subject matters with a rather unusually lucid view of how they relate and the various studies affect each other at their philosophical roots.
J—- is also bipolar BTW. He doesn’t take medication and uses a lot of street drugs and alcohol to cope with the problem, which causes progressive damage to the brain. That’s honestly why he is a little over the top on spiritual matters and has come to noblize Native Americans in a way that’s deep down absurdly racist. It’s cultural mysticism, but the prison system tends to encourage it. This to some extent is because the brain has a built-in safety mechanism of religiosity when it is being progressively damaged in order to radically alter behaviour. While the behavior can become erratic and void of logic, it can take a person off the path of the drugs that are progressively damaging the brain.
Bill Wilson, the person who wrote most of the AA Big Book, was tripping on a drug called Beledona while being brainwashed by the Oxford Group, a semi-cult like religious fraternity. AA to this day still has a degree of influence in the criminal justice system that has, unfortunately, become counterproductive for many alcoholics and addicts. This is true of NA as well. It’s not just the magical thinking of a nanny-god saving the alcoholic. Believing in god is completely not necessary to quitting a substance, and that’s a completely unnecessary stumbling block for sure.
It’s also the fact that many of the individual groups are so overwhelmed with court-ordered people that there is no person in the group that isn’t still suffering from rather severe brain damage and addiction issues. Certainly, stay the fuck away from This is It Eastwood until you have a few years clean and just want to sponsor an entire club of alcoholics and addicts where you will likely be the only person at the meeting not there to ‘have their paper signed.’ That’s been my experience almost every time and most certainly was my experience last Friday. I didn’t even bother to talk. The entire forum was nothing but people bitching about drug court and judges in a rather emotionally unbalanced fashion that often bordered on psychosis. I’ve had better meetings as a group facilitator to the Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital, partially because the group in there is properly medicated.
This brings me to an offer to write a letter of recommendation as a peer in mental health and substance abuse history to the judge recommending they approach your case from a medical perspective where the focus is on mental and behavioral rehabilitation rather than the traditional punitive model of a criminal justice system traditionally more focused on retribution and simply processing defendants through the system. I do find AA helpful, but it would be useless without the psychiatric help I am afforded from the VA. Given a choice between being in drug or alcohol court, and being locked up in the Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital for actual medical treatment, I would take the latter if I were you. As a veteran with some legitimate issues beyond addiction, I am typically put into the VA over the criminal justice system. I am lucky to be dealing with my bipolar rather than just calling myself an alcoholic and drug addict. I think some of my bipolar is even the result of the brain damage from alcohol, pot, caffeine and nicotine. Regardless, I still need medication and medical support at this point, and AA, quite frankly, tends to leave me with people who speak Christianity based jargon that it took too long to realize can only be listened to from a postmodern perspective.
Switching philosophically from existential-nihilism to a mentality of transcendental-absurdism is something that has helped, and AA is largely part of the reason for that change in how I think at the root of my philosophical, moral and cognitive foundations. I had to make a leap of faith that basically nothing in life makes sense, but that death and transcending rebirth were probably the one observation I could universally make that was a consitency in my view of everything around me. All I know for sure is my own self-awareness and deduction that at least I exist, however I could have hope for the future if not for myself, in at least the knowledge that it is actually highly likely, that even though the universe itself will run out of energy, meaning literally time itself is finite, there will be a rebirth of something else outside the perception of consciousness itself that will allow for sentience to be reborn a different way under different laws of physics in a universe beyond my limited comprehension.
As for me as an individual, I needed to accept that this would be enough to help me cope with my individual mortality. Who I am is tied into my brain, though there is enough abstraction to my senses to where I have significant doubts in pure physicalism. It gives me comfort in a way similar to raising a son I love deeper than anything, even myself, does. My AA higher power is not ‘god’ and I wish they’d stop using a word more traditionally ascribe to religious entities attempting to manipulate people. If in AA everyone defines god differently, then the word becomes basically void of mutual meaning beyond their promises that he will make me not drink. Fuck. It’s largely on me not to drink. Stop writing off my individual sense of control. Freewill is likely complete hogwash because I am brain damaged. People talk about freewill in the sense that we make rational decisions. Bullshit. I get that. However, I am always crazier when I don’t have a sensation of self-control.
I get that my home group often manipulates me to make better decisions for myself and my community. I primarily attend a group where we meet at each other’s houses, so I’ve learned how to interpret randomly conflicting mantras as merely guidance in the moment, (that is deniable), from the outside perspective of the AA people I do recognize as having wisdom. Often they hint that my next course of action should be temporary acceptance so that I can rest and wait for a better opportunity to change my destiny than stewing in regret and anger. There is something to be said for having sane people around you. All groups aren’t sane though. I needed more much more than AA. Jail, probation, parole and the prison system are not helpful to people as damaged as myself, nor do I think others are truly in a position to morally condemn me. I have fucked up. I have done many fucked up things. However the good far outweighs the bad. It’s really messed up that because I was doing humanitarian missions, rather than killing person after person, I am often perceived as a veteran deserving a snide ‘thanks for your service’ and then historically not listened to and treated like human trash. Nobody is trash, or at least almost nobody. Maybe the likes of Milosevich and such, but I’ve fed kids in a country I didn’t see an intact building in due to years of war and even our bombing campaign to produce a less hazardous invasion for ground forces like my platoon of cavalry scouts. Life is fucking crazy. It’s okay to be crazy, is my point. Everyone is, some people just let it out in less destructive ways and I hope you find a path to serenity.
So do AA at some point, but first I’d at least look into the option of deferring your punishment to the Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital. Feel free to show this letter to your lawyer if you like. I’m no psychologist and I have a BA, not an MA, meaning I can’t call myself a criminologist. However, academics are overrated and we ran similar paths that intertwined enough. I’m right. You don’t need punishment. You would do a world of benefit from being approached from a medical and behavioural approach over vilification. Yes, the psychological pain of the criminal justice system can cause people to mature out of addiction at times. However, for a system that complains about recidivism, we’re too damn self-centred and arrogant as a society to just try treating the offender with rational compassion instead. Even liberals who advocate empathy often completely overlook it was the police in A Clockwork Orange who were the moral problem in the end, not the felon who was effectively given a gift of a weak stomach to violence. The side effects can suck though. That was in there too. However, a consequence motivated by retribution will always make me question the wisdom of a society doomed to stumble into each other violently in an eye-for-eye mentality that leads everyone blind and vengeful. My wife says I am too nice though. Then again, I know why she married me and thus why I got a keeper this time. Am I evil? No. Bipolar, but oh so much more. How do you want to redefine yourself?
Joker's Wild 