5:56pm July 27, 2014

I just remembered this and it is weirding me out.

So… there was a time period when I was living in a residential facility, and they had me so heavily drugged that no matter where I was, I’d fall asleep and drool all over the place.  They wouldn’t let me lie down, though.  So I’d sit on the couch and one second it would be light out and the next it would be dark out, and I’d have my head on my chest and my shirt would be soaked with drool.  Or I’d be in “school” in the barn, and I’d end up with my head on my desk and drool all over the desk.  To the point where eventually they decided I was “getting away with sleeping in class” which was demoralizing the other students and making them think I was getting away with something or… something… and put me in a big chair behind all the desks, facing away from everyone, where they put headphones on me and blasted an audiobook copy of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in my ears to try to keep me awake and to claim they were still “educating” me.  (I did not manage to stay awake even with the audiobook.)

I was actually on a toxic dose of meds at that point.  As in, when they finally did a blood level, it came back with a handwritten note attached that said something like “600 = normal, 900 = toxic, 1800 = Amanda”.  So there was a reason that I couldn’t stay awake and that I was having seizures every few seconds towards the end.

Later on I was in special ed, on a lot lower dose of a different set of meds.  The teacher showed me a drawing a classmate had done of a girl who had her head on the desk drooling, and there were various artistic things going on that she was telling me about.  (He’d basically made her ponytail and head look like a mountain scene or something.)  And she told me that it was because of her meds and had happened years before I got there or something.

And I tried to tell her that this had happened to me as well.

And no matter what I said.

She kept saying, “No, this was different than that,” and then giving me more details that showed it was exactly the same sort of situation.

The thing is, she didn’t even know me when this happened to me.  So why on earth did she think she knew anything about it?  Why did she insist that my experiences had to be totally different than this girl?  

I mean… if you’re overmedicated, and you’re in school, and you’re falling asleep, your head is going to fall on the desk and you’re going to drool.  That’s the only physical position that is possible to happen in that situation when you’re sitting at a desk in school.  So it’s probably super common for people who are on too high a dose of their meds (or on meds they should never have been put on in the first place).  It’s not like it’s an exotic, unique situation.  Oh, and we were on the exact same medications, it turned out, when it happened – it was details like that that the teacher kept adding to tell me why my situation was ‘different’ and I kept saying 'but that was exactly how it was for me’ and she kept saying 'no it wasn’t’.

So… WTF was the teacher thinking, and why did she insist it was a different situation when she didn’t even know me at the time I was describing?  (In fact, from the description, it was probably happening to both of us at the same time, in different places.)  She was very insistent and very angry and it really confused me and made me angry.  Still does, when I think about it.  

It was pretty rare that I made the effort – and was actually capable of the communication – to communicate about experiences like that, and whenever I did, people had this sort of reaction to it.  Like they were always telling me what my experiences were and were not.  They believed me if I lied, and they believed me if I just said random shit that wasn’t true (but wasn’t deliberately lying, it was just that I didn’t quite understand how communication was supposed to work, so I said a lot of things that I was just repeating from other sources), but if I was able to actually express something real, they acted like… not necessarily as if I was lying, but as if I didn’t understand something.  And as if I was stupid.  

And it happened every single time I expressed something real, so it acted almost like reinforcement against being able to communicate.  Because people approved of it when I communicated wrong or actively lied, and disapproved, very strongly, in maddening ways, when I communicated right and was capable of actual genuine communication of something that was going on inside me. 

25 notes