Captain’s Log Week of 1/28/20, Unacknowledged

This blog is about living aboard a boat in the Pacific Northwest and snow-birding to Arizona while training an artificial intelligent mental health virtual assistant named Rubi ready to provide support in the traumatic aftermath of COVID-19.

This week James sent me a 2017 deep state alien conspiracy theory video called Unacknowledged that features Dr. Greer who offers evidence of extraterrestrial contact. It’s a well put together, thoughtful expose and very convincing. It had me really thinking about things, until I realized how bitter Dr. Greer was and I realized how he was coming from a state of fear and distrust, rather than hope and promise. I wanted to believe Dr. Greer, and I felt for the guy, but in the back of my mind, I was wondering, can I trust someone with such a bitter view? What does being educated about this serve? I felt it served an agenda of distrust and helplessness more than empowerment. If what Dr. Greer was saying is true, how can we evolve beyond our situation? I wasn’t sure, as the situation he painted was very dire. As soon as James sent this to me, I kept noticing it in my newsfeed and other people chatting about it. It was generating a flurry of paranoia and distrust and more conspiracy theories. I briefly wondered if Russian bots were readvertising this video now to perpetuate distrust for our government as Trump’s impeachment trial had ended.

This would be the kind of movie my mom would love. It would feed her obsession with aliens and feed her paranoia and blame on an “other,” a deep state that controlled everything. It would explain the plants in her local bank on someone else rather than the imagination of her own mind. When I phrased it that way, and from her perpetual point of view that comes in the form of being a paranoid schizophrenia, the whole concept of the movie seemed preposterous! By watching this movie, were we all becoming too paranoid, even schizophrenic? I think that a dose of paranoia can be healthy, as our egos help ensure our safety, bet when it rules us, we are not in control. When a source such as a movie, or an authoritarian leader feeds this, we are ruled by fear that is outside of us. I think if we realized how much control we actually had by freeing our thoughts, listening to our inner guidance and voting and electing officials with our best interests, the powers that be, that are clinging to power with a thread of nuclear weapons would actually be shaking in their boots. Democracies can be strong.

Instead, fear grips us as it had gripped my mom and scattered her psyche to cause her to have multiple personalities when I lived with her as a child. I feel like this scattered psyche is one explanation for so much division in the country today and erosion of democracy. My mom could flip on a dime and become the dragon lady in the china hutch that would chase me around the dining room table. Are gangs terrorizing neighborhoods much different? Is black men being singled out and murdered in broad daylight any different? She’d chase me to the frenzied point that she thought it was right to try to throw me out the window she had opened. Though confusing, I was sensitive to her shifting personality and learned to read what was real and pretend. I wondered about America’s shifting personality. I knew my mom was seriously going to throw me out the second story window to the cement below and scrambled away, running out of the house for my life and hid in the forest until my unknowing grandparents returned from grocery shopping. As individuals and as a country, I believe we could all use the wisdom and protection of grandparents.

This unfortunately wasn’t the only time she tried to get rid of me. Once, when I awoke from a nap, I realized my mom was not there, but the dragon lady was. She was laughing as I was scared, looking for my grandparents. She said she had “gotten rid of them… “I played a long a bit, looking for them in closets and cabinets as she followed me around the house until I got to the garage. Their car was gone. She was lying, but she had a knife behind her back! I hit the garage door button and raced around the garage in circles. She said I was next and came at me, but as soon as the garage door opened by a couple of feet, and it seemed like an eternity, I rolled out and scrambled away, into the cold breeze, running as fast as I could until I got to the forest.

After my mom had been institutionalized, she no longer heard voices in her head and was a shell of the vibrant woman she once was. Eventually her dominant personality sweetened and instead of hearing voices, she heard music in her head, and is now known in her community as the waking jukebox. A constant stream of original and songs she hears off the radio collide through her head. She has the ability to distinguish from this music in her head, as well as the music on her radio and the soundtrack from a television. She can follow all three streams and tell you details about them individually.

I don’t know how she lives with it, but obviously, multiple soundtracks no longer make her mad. Her endurance is a testimony of her true nature. Seeing her continued struggle, and stress on her physical body with the constant auditory hallucinations manifested in her addiction to cigarettes, health problems, including diabetes, arthritis as she ages, one eye turning out from a possible mini stroke, loss of teeth, keen questioning of the nature of reality, and sometimes resistance to her support system that includes Victoria, her very patient and kind case manager. Coupled by a regimen of medication and the sometimes-reluctant support I give her, despite my haunting memories of the dragon lady, she is in a stable place … for her. She is in her own apartment and has caregivers about four times a week helping her with shopping, cooking, cleaning, basic hygiene and other daily tasks. I feel so lucky that she is taken care of and I can support her by going out to eat with her and having a spa day getting our nails done, to buying her new shoes and winter coats. Spending a limited time with her has been very healing and allowed me to see someone that has conquered the dragon lady at much cost to her health.

When I was younger, my biggest fear was that I too would go crazy. It was in my genes. I was afraid I’d become my mother. I am not my mother. I had been armed with too many creative skills and tools to become my mother. She had personally trained me with too much endurance from a young age, to be aware of the edges of sanity. And now I was aware of the guideposts of stress. From honest creative work and self-expression as a filmmaker, from remembering and embracing the love of my grandparents, by embracing the love of my husband James, by madly playing the piano and continued questioning of reality and recognizing how thin the veil is, I disrupted the pattern and came out of mental illness on the other side, healthy. I faced my greatest fear, lived it and turned it around to thrive. Most people will not acknowledge how much this kind of fear, whether put on by patterns of genes, situations, movies or leaders, rules them.

I also had taken responsibility for my mental health in my own hands and didn’t blame an “other.” That would have been easy. I sought out a psychiatrist that worked for me. One that was open to trying different medications, to find the right one. I was lucky to be in a position to afford the best kinds of therapy, the best drugs and I was open to keeping on my meds, even though it felt like I didn’t need it anymore. Like Rubi, I saw it as my airbags and since I’d be out of state, Dr. Berger was uncomfortable about weaning off it just quite yet. I also told him my concerns, that I had read that it may shorten my life, but he assured me that what I had read was wrong and from the low dose, blood tests and my healthy condition, there was no evidence that I was physically being affected by it. He was impressed at my creativity, personal insights and ability to thrive. He didn’t want to disrupt that by taking away my airbags.