This is an excerpt from Sherry Goes Sane: Living A Life With Schizo-Affective Disorder.
The greyhound made a stop at Boys town. I bought Doug a postcard with a picture of a statue on the face of the card. The picture was of a boy carrying a smaller boy on his back. It read, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” Mom wrote a letter and said that my brother was hurt when he received my postcard. That made me feel sad! It’s really hard to think about it now. On the other hand, it was a right move, and my brother couldn’t have sent me off to be with a sweeter man than Joe.
When I arrived at Joe’s in Illinois, I was having a painful bladder infection, and there was every indication that the medicationI took for it was interfering with my psychotropic drug, Stelazine.
I notified the doctor, and he told me to stop the Stelazine for a couple of weeks. My chemical imbalance, with all its hallucinations, fired up in full force again. Episodes of my onset grew too intense. I will relate them here.
I enroll in a sculpture class at Kishwaukee community college. Out of pine and walnut, I make a table with the help of Joe. It has a swerved stand done by a lathe machine and a box foundation with a polyurethane top with playing cards all round it. Out of clay, I concoct a set of miniature bowling pins with a blue glaze, which are dried in a kiln with clay thumbs on the sides of the pins. They fit on top of the table.
I work with alabaster rock and have to file it down. In addition, I take a drama class and play a role opposite a character named File.
I make a dollhouse, and I am touched and hurt when one of my dolls breaks her foot. I am bewildered when the bread I am making at home won’t rise. I direct the play Man of La Mancha for our drama class, and I play the part of Dulcinea, while File and another guy costar with me as Sancho and Don Quixote. Something doesn’t seem right. I am getting too much variety of activity.
It is when I take on the role of Charlotte in the play Marat/Sade. My partner is to be the actor who played File in my first play.
I have my lines memorized. While we are rehearsing, File takes off his shirt and his back is loaded with those gross pimples, like the guy who tried to strangle me in San Francisco. I thought, My God, that’s him. Why did he follow me all the way here from San Francisco? He even came to my house to rehearse!
The next day, when it is time to say our lines, I let someone go ahead of us. The teacher says, “You can be the monitor, Sherry.”
I keep yelling at the actors, “Line!” at the most inappropriate times. Hurt and hurting everyone else, I stop yelling.
The teacher then says to my partner and me, “We don’t have time for yours today.” My partner and I are disappointed in not doing our improvisation of Marat/Sade.
I try out for Summer and Smoke, and I stop smoking prior. I get a small part in that play and can’t take any more pressure. Trying out, memorizing lines, and dealing with pill pressure, I snap. I get anxious to go back to Oregon to Doug’s high-school graduation. I take wooden boxes in our apartment and place Joe’s Newberry’s photo machine pictures and paste them on the box. Every time that Joe talks to me harshly, I put a penny in the box. I think he is a priest, and I confess to him.
The book is available as a trade paperback and as a Kindle ebook.
Arts and Writing by Sherry 