Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hey and welcome back to another episode of Life Changing Calendars.
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I'm your host, brad Minus, but with me today.
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I'm so honored to have Ruth Poniarski.
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She is an artist and with you know the painting stuff.
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She's also a writer.
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She has a book out called Journey to Self and I am very happy to have her on and very honored Ruth, how are you today?
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I'm great.
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Thank you for having me.
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Definitely so.
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As I ask every single one of my guests, can you tell us a little bit about your childhood?
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What was the complement of your family?
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What the environment was like?
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Okay, I grew up in Glen Cove, long Island, new York, a little city amongst an island, and I had a pretty good childhood.
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It was a post-war, post-world War II.
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A lot of children in the neighborhood, my parents.
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We had a split-level home amongst other homes.
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They had a community beach.
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I went to the public schools and my brother and I spent a lot of time outside playing all the time.
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It was a different time than today and we went on little ski trips and we rode through routes through New York up to Vermont when the interstate highways weren't there as yet.
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It was a real adventure.
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Life was an adventure.
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Interstate highways weren't there as yet.
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It was a real adventure.
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Life was an adventure.
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And as far as art, I was introduced to art by my mother, who was a little bit eccentric.
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She took me to a life drawing class when I was about six and a half years old.
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There was a nude model, a nude woman model, and she said to me I want you to draw.
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You know everybody in the class were going to be drawing and depicting this nude model and she told me not to laugh.
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Well, I didn't laugh.
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I took her very seriously and I drew this Picasso-like drawing of this nude model and I got the torso correct.
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It was like very much ahead of its time, precocious.
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I was precocious in art.
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She always said to me Ruthie, I don't want you to become an artist, it's too lonely, it's hard to make a living, you'll be isolated and whatnot.
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So I took a direction.
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I went to public school and I excelled in math and I excelled in physics and art.
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So I put all those things together and I decided to pursue architecture.
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So I enrolled in a very difficult technical school up north I won't say any names Rensselaer Polytech.
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It was second to MIT, very difficult program and I really had a very difficult term and my story the book Journey of the Self, starts in 1977, when I was in my third or fourth year of a five year architecture program, and it continues to 1987, which was the heart of my episodes that I have been suffering.
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But I have to bring you back to the beginning in 1977.
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Sure, tell us all about it, okay.
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So my troubles really started in 1976.
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In my sophomore year I was in like an Archie clit I call them Archies, they're architect students, my peers Archies, and we were a group of about eight of us in the collective and we would do projects together and spend all nighters doing design projects.
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Very tedious program, asked a lot of you and a lot of your creativity.
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It was straining but it was rewarding creativity it was straining but it was rewarding.
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Anyway, we indulged in smoking marijuana at these little parties and cooking delicious meals.
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One time I smoked so much I blacked out.
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I was like comatose, blacked out for about four hours, woke up to myself.
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Boy, I'm lucky.
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I woke up and I said after that moment I did not smoke marijuana anymore, hardly drank any alcohol that was an addition, but I never, never.
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I went clean.
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It's too much.
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But it left me lethargic, passive in my studies, goalless.
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I had a difficult time setting small goals.
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It left me a little paranoid and depressed and a low self-esteem.
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These are all shady but lingering with me throughout my years.
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So you had done marijuana prior to this.
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Prior to the 1977 incident.
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Yeah, no, no, but I mean prior to the incident where you'd smoked so much that you were passed out for a few hours.
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You had done it prior to that.
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This was in 1976.
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Right right, 1977.
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Okay, then it hit.
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I went off the edge and I'll tell you how I went off the edge.
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But I went off the edge and I'll tell you how I went off the edge In 1977, the fall of 1977, my fourth year, my boyfriend did not return.
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We were very close, we were going out since our junior year and he transferred to another college in another continent.
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So I never saw him again and it kind of left me again.
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It left me isolated and alone because he was really my buddy.
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And also why I felt also isolated, I had dropped the core design course in the architecture program.
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In my junior year I found it, I couldn't do it.
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Instead I took an art course, but that course really unified my classmates.
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We were together in the design.
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The design was the core of the whole program.
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I had dropped it.
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So in my senior year, when my boyfriend didn't return, I felt really alone because he became my buddy.
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So that's the backdrop of all this.
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Meanwhile the lingering effects from the marijuana were still lingering and there I befriended an older gentleman.
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He was about 28 years old, he was a graduate of the architecture program.
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I kind of looked up to him.
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I liked him in a platonic kind of a way, very friendly kind of a way, support kind of a way.
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He was mysterious, very quiet, nice, a little bit off, anyway.
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Serious, very quiet, nice, a little bit off.
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Anyway, he and his roommate had a little party at their apartment.
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I had just returned from a weekend with my parents for Thanksgiving.
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It was a Sunday evening and I had gone to the party and his roommate was a PhD physics student and his roommate was a PhD physics student and he had fellow PhD physics students come to the party.
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I said this is terrific, I love to talk.
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I talked the whole party Didn't eat anything, didn't drink anything, the whole party.
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I talked with all these majors.
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Came time to the end of the party, everybody left and I stayed behind because I was close.
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We'll call him Joseph.
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I call him Joseph in the book.
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I was close with Joseph and his roommate, which his name was Hans, and I was sitting there and Joseph offers me a brownie, delicious brownie cake.
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Well, I ate it, beautiful cake, because I was hungry and I didn't know.
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I just took it.
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It was laced with PCP, very like angel dust, which is a additive for large animals like.
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Well are large animals like horses and elephants okay, so PCP is actually a hallucinogen in it.
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That's what it is.
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It's a medication for large animals.
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So it's PPP.
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That's what it is.
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I hallucinated.
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I saw a bed of white candles in a cavernous space.
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I wanted to jump out of the window.
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Joseph held a bath to be shelving out the window.
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I went off the edge For about an hour.
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I had to sit down and calm myself down.
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Then I left his apartment.
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I got into my car.
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I started driving aimlessly.
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All of a sudden, a paranoid ideation came over me that there was a revolution going on between the capitalists and the socialists and I was going to be abandoned and my people were leaving in spaceships.
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This is going through my head and I'm driving.
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I drive to Route 90, and I drove west to New York State Thruway, a highway, a state highway, that goes to Buffalo all the way down to New York City.
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I get on it going south towards New York City.
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I abandoned my car on the shoulder of the highway.
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I parked it on the shoulder, I got out of my car, I started walking, looking for the base launch pads for the spaceship in my head.
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I walked on the shoulder of the highway south and I walked probably from midnight till dawn till the sun came up about 12 miles, I finally hitched a ride back to my college town, troy, where my apartment was located.
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The guy left me off.
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He didn't come back with me because he was afraid of what people would think of him, but anyway he let me off at the beginning of town.
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I walked several blocks to my apartment.
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In my apartment was Joseph and his roommate, my two female roommates, and my father was.
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Joseph and his roommate, my two female roommates and my father, who came from Glen Cove.
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How did he get there?
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It was unbelievable.
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The state police looked in my car and found a registration to my father's business.
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So they called the business and told him that they found his daughter's car my car and he came immediately up to my apartment.
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That's why he was there, anyway.
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So I was still in a paranoid state and I was in my own bubble of fantasy and my father took me home to Long Island.
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I had to abort the architecture program.
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That was it.
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He took me to a psychiatrist when we got to Long Island and the psychiatrist told him that I had a nervous breakdown.
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And then the psychiatrist said I can heal at home.
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So my father took me home.
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I was very quiet, I didn't say a word.
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This was like the first time in a doctor's office, a psychiatrist's office, anyway.
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So he took me home, and my mother wasn't exactly the nurturing, loving type, and she had a hard time dealing with the reality of what I just the scope of what I just went through.
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Anyway, though, what she did was she had me do art projects every day for the next two or three weeks.
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We would do collages, cutouts.
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I did a painting of apples, I did other little projects.
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I would have a structured day, three meals a day.
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Everything was structured, everything was stress-free.
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Actually everything that they talk about now.
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Oh yes, she was ahead of her time.
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Yeah.
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So I just want to step back just real quick.
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When you talk to the therapist and probably what some of the that you lived through and also probably in the research that you've done was in that time period, was that a kind of a default diagnosis that you had a nervous breakdown?
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At that point he couldn't pinpoint if I was a paranoid schizophrenic, he couldn't pinpoint any of that.
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He didn't know me, I wasn't a bipolar or any of those things, bipolar or any of those things.
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He just said that I the nervous breakdown, I guess, is a lay term, a layman's term, but that's what he, that's what he said, and there was no real, there was no what's the word?
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Because he didn't really know me.
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He just saw me for a half an hour, you know, and he and my father told him what happened.
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I wasn't talking at all, I was just, I'm still, I was thinking still that the revolution was going on in my head, oh you know.
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But he said that I didn't have to go to the hospital.
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Okay, all right, well, that makes sense.
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He took a risk in saying that, but I did get back.
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He gave me also this medication called Thorazine, which is like a staple of that time.
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And eventually I was able to sleep.
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I couldn't sleep.
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I was so overtired and over manic that I couldn't sleep.
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But around the second or third day I was able to sleep and the sleeping was healing.
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You need sleep.
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Insomnia is a very big problem.
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A lot of people have insomnia.
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So I got better and then I went to work part-time for my father.
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He was in the construction roofing business and eventually I transferred to another architecture program in Brooklyn architecture program in Brooklyn.
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So I commuted from Glen Cove to Brooklyn every day.
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In this architecture program I was able to transfer credits, whatnot.
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Now that nervous breakdown was the first of many.
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Every six months to about a year I would break down.
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Now this psychiatrist I would say he was an invasive.
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I call him Dr Samuels.
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He was an invasive psychiatrist.
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I say that because my symptoms kept getting worse with each breakdown and he didn't alert me to the signs of an oncoming breakdown.
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He wasn't able me to the signs of an oncoming breakdown.
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He wasn't able to identify the trigger.
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Yeah Well, not only what triggered me, but with the symptoms.
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My symptoms were not eating, not sleeping, paranoid, insecure, and also what happened was my self-esteem compounded.
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I had a very low self-esteem and I was in a lingering depression and that all, as I said, started from the marijuana that I smoked.
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It never went away.
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It would surface.
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So things compounded, it, compounded, compounded, it compounded.
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And what triggered me?
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Like going to the architecture program again.
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It was a difficult program.
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You were always forced to be creative and creating buildings and whatnot, and social stimulus would really get me off the line and I didn't share with anybody what I was going through every six months to a year.
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So I had friends but they were sort of superficial.
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I couldn't really be truthful or lean on them or anything like that.
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I didn't tell them what was happening.
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I was ashamed of it.
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Mental illness back then it wasn't talked about, it wasn't tell them what was happening.
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I was ashamed of it.
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Mental illness back then.
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It wasn't talked about, it wasn't out in the open, it wasn't anything like that.
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So that compounded also.
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That really added to my low self-esteem and I thought that everybody around me was superior and they were going on with their lives and they were getting things done and they were graduating and all kinds of stuff that ran through my head.
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Anyway, I had a lot of superficial acquaintances.
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I traveled to Finland with a seminar group from the school for about two or three weeks.
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We studied the works of Alvar Alter Beautiful, beautiful architecture, wooden, beautiful wood architecture in Finland.
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We were there for two and a half three weeks.
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It took me about till 1981, 82 to graduate from this program.
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But all during these breakdowns that I would have, I led a life.
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I had superficial friends.
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I had boyfriends.
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I traveled alone to Europe.
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I traveled alone to Paris.
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I was okay because I lived in an apartment with an elderly Lebanese woman and her son.
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I was okay.
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I made a trip to Greece.
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That was a disaster.
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That happened in 1980.
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What happened was with my symptoms.
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My insomnia kept getting worse and worse.
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This trip I went to tour the ancient ruins of Greece.
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It was a seven-day, very stressful bus tour.
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I was one of the only Americans on the tour and nobody was my age group.
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They were all a little bit older than me or older than me.
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So I kind of below I befriended an elderly gentleman but I was really alone and they weren't exactly friendly to me, the Europeans.
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They spoke other languages.
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The tour guide spoke English.
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She was very good, very knowledgeable of all the rulings in Greece.
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Very knowledgeable, very tedious.
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Anyway, I went without sleep.
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Each night I went without sleep, I didn't eat, I didn't change my clothes.
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I went seven days without sleep.
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Whoa yeah, seven days.
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It just compounded itself and my feelings inside, plus the stress of the trip, just compounded itself, didn't get that sleep.
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I went back to Athens, we landed back and we started in Athens and then the tour ended in Athens.
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I was in a hotel.
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This was the sixth night and what I couldn't sleep.
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I was just.
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It was just tense and paranoid and then just my body.
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I was disengaged and I was with reality and I was just tense and about.
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I couldn't sleep.
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So at about 1130 or 12 o'clock I walked out of the hotel.
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This was in Athens.
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So this is midnight and I'm walking around Athens.
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Luckily a Greek soldier was around.
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He asked me if I had a light for his cigarette and I said no, I don't have a light for your cigarette.
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I'm sorry he goes let.
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He said, let me escort you around Athens.
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So he and I I locked out because there were dangerous citizens of Athens.