Kristy's Cacophony of Chord Curdling Cat People

#bodypositive #bodyimage #loveyourself #bipolar #recovery

*EVERYONE WHO DONATES RECEIVES A FREE, SIGNED COPY OF THE BOOK**

I’d like to send out an important message,
Art Saves Lives!

Seven years ago, I was told by a social worker I would never work a full-time job and that my only real chance at success depended wholly on my qualifying for disability. She actually had the nerve to suggest I find a “rich man” to take care of me. On my walk home, I cried so hard I could hardly see the pavement. The devastation, the hurt and embarrassment gave me a surge of determination. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, living in transitional housing with my two sons—one diagnosed with autism—I struggled with an addiction to alcohol, to make a living and to recover from a divorce.

I was curled up into a little ball of smallness and rickety shame, terrified that I was nothing more than a statistic, an illness, a condition. Instead of crumbling I pulled myself up by pursuing literary and visual arts. In the end, the urge to create, to write, to paint and to nurture the beauty that I had in my life,  allowed me to transcend my circumstances.

Years later I was able to return to the social worker’s office sober, employed and with a graduate degree. All the while creating a world that blended magic, pain and salvation while raising my children.

I want to share what art can do for anyone that feels marginalized. Recently I recieved formal training to teach poetry to at-risk youth through Pongo Teen Writing and I intend to use sales of my book to pursue an endeavor that will help others find their voices and to know that their ideas matter.

This is where you come in. Please help me publish my first book, “The Gift of an Imaginary Girl, Coco & Other Stories.” By donating to this project you’re not only helping to realize a personal dream, you’re supporting the message that art can save lives.

Thank you for your donations!

For additional information about the publishing of my book please visit my publisher’s website at: A Word With You Press

We’re only $100 away from the halfway mark. Can you help??

Seven years ago, a social worker told me that my financial future and security depended on me qualifying for disability.
“You’ll never work a full time job or be able to support yourself. Do you really want to be a burden to your children?”
She proceeded to rattle off a horror story about a middle-aged woman with severe bipolar disorder who bounced between homes of adult children who couldn’t wait to unload her on the next sibling.
“That will be you,” she said, pointing at the center of my chest, “IF you don’t get on disability.”
I thought about the time when my oldest, only fifteen years old at the time, had yelled at me on the Seattle ferry after I’d laid into him about his behavior at school and home, “I’ve been putting up with your bipolar, alcoholic behavior all my life.” His face red, his whole body shaking. I remember how something had finally clicked, and though I’d had several epiphanies beforehand, transformations, even, they were always temporary. This one, this one was so dead on, so brutal, it stripped me bare.
The last time I ever saw my social worker, I’d lost two sources of income and had come to her, a stone in my seizing throat, all but begging for help. She made it clear we were beyond that now. She told me, “You will always need help, you are just one of those people who will never, ever make it on your own.”
She put her hand on my back and offered one last piece of advice, “Find a rich guy to marry,” and she smiled, her teeth like a coyote.
On my walk home, a small check in my fist, I cried so hard I could hardly see the pavement in front of me. I was broke, newly sober, and still had a year of graduate school to complete. Underneath the devastation, the hurt and humiliation, I felt a surge of determination, that even though it was tinged with rage, proved strengthening. The social worker believed, actually believed, that I left crying because I was being cut off from her “help,” help I had not asked for in nine months. Help that I only accepted when I had no other route.
She didn’t realize what pained me was her complete lack of faith in my abilities, her absolute underestimation of me to the point where she believed the only thing that would save me was a man or a disability check. She smiled while I choked through tears, as I told her I was not quite a year sober, I was working part-time and in my second year of graduate school, she smiled as if to say, “That’s cute, but you won’t amount to much. Trust me. I know these things.”
I wondered what had happened to this woman, this social worker. I wondered if she had followed the lives of any of her clients after the first two obligatory years of the program. I thought of some of those clients, neighbors in the same transition housing I lived in with my children. I thought of the young couple I often babysat for, the girl barely seventeen, her husband in his early twenties. Day and night, they were either fighting or fucking, always in stereo, the children never seen outside. I thought of the only African American family in the complex, how they were kicked out for smoking cigarettes inside their unit, while the young couple with the two small children, drank and used drugs and had loud parties, with little to no consequence.
I want to know if this social worker who’d married a millionaire and who had no degree in social work, was a type of voyeur, wanting to see how the other half lived. I want to know if she was jaded and jilted by former clients and their inability to “clean up their acts” or if she’d become proud of her ability to prophesy their demise, if maybe she felt vindicated, a psychic case worker for hire.
I returned to the social worker’s office with two years of sobriety, a year of full-time employment, a promotion, and a raise, and a graduate degree under my belt. But my social worker had retired.
What I want to know is, as hard as things still are, even now, even with all the changes, the progress, did my social worker really believe what she was saying to me? Did she really expect me to fail? Or was she hoping all along, to piss me off enough that I would prove her wrong?
I’ll never know, I guess.
I know that I will live every single day of my life striving to prove not only my social worker wrong, but trying to prove myself wrong, too. Because I can’t blame her, not really, not entirely. I have underestimated myself, too. I have curled up into a little ball of smallness and rickety shame, terrified that I was nothing more than a statistic, an illness, and a condition.
In the end, the urge to create, to write, to paint and to nurture the beauty that I do have in my life, won over the demons that told me I didn’t deserve to rise and conquer.
Someday, I hope to see my old social worker again, not to tell her off, not to spite her or tell her “Look at me now,” but to thank her for forcing me believe in myself when no one else did.
#ArtSavesLives, #MagicalRealism, #BipolarDisorder