Homelessness | Kathryn M. McCullough

I heard someone say the other day that home is where your story begins. It’s where we’re rooted, what grounds us in the present and gives us a history to remember.

I’ve been fascinated for years by the notion of place and the impact it has on who we become. I’ve even oriented my composition classes around questions of space and place, exploring how who we are is so often affected by where we come from.

So it seems unsurprising then that I might orient my memoir about recovering from mental illness around similar concepts. I’ve posted pieces about fearing homelessness, about my inability to afford housing in any remotely comfortable way, about wanting the hospital to be my home. I even took this one step further yesterday when I mentioned now owning a home.

However, an important part of this progression toward home ownership involved twice living in government housing—not a lovely place by any means—but not the housing horror folks often expect.

In June of 1998, I moved into Lakeland Manor—a government-subsidized, semi-high-rise for the elderly and disabled in Dallas, Texas. I decided this move made sense when it became more and more difficult to afford the small, one bedroom apartment I leased on Northwest Highway. I scraped and scavenged each month to pay the rent, making myself abide by outrageously restricted spending limits that may have reinforced patterns of neglect and denial I carried over from childhood. The apartment at Lakeland Manor saved me more than $200 a month—what to me amounted to a small fortunate at the time. The year before, I had told my therapist that if I could only make $100 more a month, I would feel rich.

I’d gotten to know a woman who owned a home in a neighborhood near the complex, and visiting her home, I’d noticed the place was not-so-bad. In fact, my friendship with Jeanette impacted my decision to move, as I began to recognize the impact proximity might have on my recovery.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is not a small place. My apartment was far from my therapist’s office in Plano—an expensive place to live, and I knew how not having a car kept me isolated, if I didn’t have friends nearby. I had been fortunate to have my friend Ellen living in the complex on Northwest Highway.

I frankly adored Ellen. She was my friend from Tulsa, my first openly lesbian friend, one who had also moved to Dallas for treatment purposes. Ellen was witty, brilliant, creative—great fun to be around when she was sober or not psychotic. Unfortunately Ellen’s efforts toward sobriety left her more psychotic, more often, and in some ways less available.

My move from Northwest Highway to Lakeland Manor had no conscious connection to Ellen’s decline, but tragically Ellen died suddenly shortly after my move, having visited my new apartment on only one occasion. Ellen’s death devastated me. There seemed no clear medical explanation for her dropping dead one afternoon in the parking lot of the apartment complex where we had lived. But once Ellen was gone, I was relieved to have already moved. I don’t imagine I could have tolerated living there with her gone.

This issue of proximity made one friend I met at Lakeland Manor enormously important, as I finally had a friend who was bright and creative living in the same building. Elaine was a classical musician who played the French horn—an SMU grad who loved to laugh as much as I did. Elaine had had a stroke a number of years back, as well as a kidney transplant, so her physical disability qualified her to live in the building.

Elaine was a friend in every sense of the word. She was my age, came from a similar educational background, and was finally someone with whom I could socialize, without either transportation or finances being issues.

Except for Ellen, when I lived on Northwest Highway, none of my friends lived nearby. Without transportation in a city like Dallas—especially when you don’t live in a particularly safe part of town—it’s logistically difficult to go out with friends after dark. And given all the other battles I was fighting at the time, dealing with getting home after dark was more than I could manage—so mostly I stayed home.

However, I couldn’t afford to socialize either. I couldn’t afford movies or going out to eat or shopping—activities most folks not fighting poverty enjoy. This created a financial incongruity in almost every relationship—leaving me feeling isolated and alone.

With Elaine, all of this changed. Neither of us had any money—neither of us could afford to go out—but there were countless evenings when Elaine would come down to my apartment or I would go up to hers, so we could cook dinner together and watch T.V. The meals were simple. We ate lots of pasta.

dinner with Elaine at my apartment, February 1999

I remember we spent Christmas of 1998 together. It was icy outside. We couldn’t go anywhere, but that didn’t matter. We were friends, and we were together. Ironically, I owed this friendship and the joy it provided to the fine folks at the Dallas Housing Authority.

So Lakeland Manor, government housing or not, was in many ways a relief to me, my apartment a retreat—a place I could finally comfortably afford. Plus, since the rent was based on income, I never really needed to fear homelessness again.

Home is where ones story begins, and the home I made at Lakeland Manor is one that ultimately allowed my recovery to take hold—grow roots—be strengthened. I gained confidence while living there. I felt good about myself and proud.

Yes, my apartment had roaches. It has linoleum tile on the floor. It was ugly.

less-than-lovely linoleum floor

But I worked hard to make it feel like home, and quite honestly I loved it, linoleum and all.

So, home is where one’s story begins, humble as that home may be.

I was hospitalized in the winter of 1997. And from what I can tell about that
time—reading journals, watching video-taped therapy sessions, looking at art—I was unequivocally crazy, insane in every conceivable sense of the word. Not that I wasn’t exactly that during other hospital stays. However, during February and March of ’97, my insanity was off the charts.

I’m still trying to understand what happened—still trying to assemble some sense of where I went wrong, what set me off. And to be honest, I’m not sure I understand any more now than I did before. I was so insane, none of what I wrote helps me recreate what happened.

I do, however, notice at least two themes I’ve alluded to before—namely my fear of homelessness and my sense that the hospital was home.

I guess this takes me back to the mental health housing series I began a month or so ago but never finished. The first post in that sequence explores my belief that the hospital was where I belonged, where I felt safe, especially during an inpatient stay during the spring of 1990. However, that feeling returned during the times I’ve been most ill in subsequent years, as well. And the winter of 1997 was no exception.

For example, at 8:30 pm on February 2, 1997, three days after being admitted, I wrote:

I want to stay in the hospital for a very long time. I want this to be my
home . . . . I’d just prefer to stay here.

I went on to explain that I knew this desire was crazy in and of itself—that it was not normal, nowhere near normal, to want to be locked up in a psychiatric facility.

However, this refrain repeats itself often during the course of my illness—regularly and without fail. I remember thinking this from time to time, but I hadn’t realized how often I expressed that desire overtly in the journals I kept.

It’s clear the illness terrified me. I knew I was sick. I desperately wanted help and apparently knew on some level that the hospital could keep me safe—not so much from suicide (as I was not often actively suicidal at that time) but from a profound inability to function and take care of myself.

I’m not sure what precipitated this collapse, though just before this admission, I was obsessed with a fear of homelessness again—seemingly because my social security disability benefits were being reviewed, I feared losing them, and knew I was not able to function well enough to work. It’s hard to imagine how that fear impacted me, whether that’s what triggered this dizzying psychosis.

However, just two weeks before being admitted and around the time I began to unravel, I made this list—a seeming attempt to survive should I lose my little apartment in east Dallas:

As I review the video-taped therapy sessions, I realize that my therapist repeatedly encouraged me to share my financial struggle with my family—something I refused to do, insisting that the very real possibility that my only remaining parent would respond with indifference to my dilemma, was too
terrifying a risk to take—that my psyche would not be able to tolerate that
degree of rejection, especially since, when I one time needed help purchasing
medication, I had, in fact, met with unwillingness.

So, I don’t know now if that was an accurate perception on my part. I’d like to think I was wrong.

However, during this same hospitalization I also did a decent amount of what I think is called mirror writing–writing words backwards and forming letters in reverse.

In one instance, I was cognizant enough to make a list of things to tell my friend Georgia–to create a list of items I wanted her to bring me, but crazy enough to compose the whole thing in reversed writing:

In other instances I would begin sentences in the bottom, right-hand corner of the page–writing from right to left, bottom to top, as I did in the ramble about “woods” and “wolves” below:

The three lines at the bottom read:

I will tell that lady the story of my life in the big woods and under the trees where the magic flows.

I truly have no idea why I suddenly began writing in reverse, if perhaps it was paranoia that motivated me–fear that someone might read what I wrote. I’m baffled by this and have not found any explanations in the literature as to why I might have suddenly done this. I do know that Leonardo da Vinci wrote all of his personal journals in reverse and that left-handed people are more able to do this than are the right-handed. I don’t understand brain chemistry well enough to offer a reasonable explanation, and don’t know if something neurological might have been happening. However, the most obvious explanation remains paranoia, I assume.

I might also surmise that there was something about this particular psychosis that made me obsess about mirrors and write in reverse as part of that obsession, for some of the mirror writing I did was in fact about mirrors–quoting the line from Snow White, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all:”

I clearly lack the clinical expertise to explain any of this, though it seems my thinking had the bizarre features associated with a fairly severe psychosis.

The fact remains—I lost my mind. I lost it in a big way

I expect more evidence of this will follow in subsequent posts, as I think I got worse that winter before I got better—so stay tuned for more detailed descriptions of Kathy’s wacky ways in the winter of ’97— ways weirder than this semi-sane version of me might like to admit.