the old-school guestbook archives
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pins and needles ~ 2001-01-10 - 08:06:32 my internal clock is all out of whack, which is really nothing new. I crashed out bizarrely early last night-- like, 9:30-- and so now it's 5 am and I'm wide awake, and not, for a change, because I've been up all night. this is probably a good thing, since it gives me the chance to live by a daylight schedule for a bit. there's a lot of things it's hard to get done when you don't see much of daylight hours. I've always been more or less nocturnal... which is kind of ironic, because I need a certain amount of sunshine in my life in order to feel good and happy. then there's the fact that the rest of the world operates on a first-shift schedule... last fall I had a third shift job, I was the awake overnight counselor at a group home, which would have been fine except that I was dating a guy who was on a regular sleep schedule... so instead of sleeping all day, I'd be up and spending time with him, and then way too often I'd only wind up getting an hour or two of crash time before I went back to work. my memories from last fall are all kind of blurry and surreal from sleep dep. I'm used to operating on very little sleep, though. in high school, I had chronic insomnia, and way too often I would be awake for 48 hours or more. high school was a nightmare in just about every way. I slept through my classes all the time, and the teachers thought it was because I was lazy. I was doesn't-work-up-to-potential girl. it pissed them off because they knew how smart I was. a teacher would start out the year determined to be the one that got brilliant work out of me, and by the end of the year, they were trying to pretend I wasn't there. there were a rare few who cared about me and tried to help me out, and I'm still grateful for that-- it meant a lot to me. I still have this really vivid memory: I'd slept through a class, with my head down on my desk, and I woke up when the bell rang. I got up to leave the room, but my legs were so deeply asleep that my muscles had stopped functioning. when I stood up, my knees and ankles refused to lock. my legs buckled under me and I collapsed to the floor. the teacher ignored me, and so did the rest of the class, they just walked around me and out the door. I could have been having a siezure, a heart attack, anything-- and no one would have done a thing. I never again want to feel as alone as I did in high school. that's why I like working with teenagers. they're amazing, intense beings-- just really discovering themselves and their place in the world. and a lot of them have a really hard road to walk to adulthood-- especially the ones who realize how fucked up things are, how many lies they've been fed. they need someone on the other side to say hey, you're right-- things are totally fucked up-- but make it out of high school alive, and it gets better, I promise. I'm haunted by naomi. she was one of the girls at the group home I worked at last year. 14 years old, a little punk rock girl-- funny and sweet and smart, with a heartbreaking smile. she hooked up with joey, the other punk rock kid in the house, and we all thought it was so cute, even though he was 17. they wore their hair in liberty spikes together. we were all taken in by joey, who had a sweet smile of his own. we really believed he was clean. it was joey who turned naomi on to heroin. by this time I had moved up from awake overnight to supervisor. I lived at the group home on weekends, spent a couple of nights there. it was a friday afternoon, on my shift, the first time naomi didn't come home from school. I had to call the cops and the program director and the social worker and file a bunch of paperwork. joey came home a little late, himself, and claimed not to know where she was. I couldn't tell if he was high or not-- joey's symptoms were weird, not typical of most heroin users-- but I knew he was lying about naomi. at 2 am I was woken up by the awake overnight-- naomi'd been picked up by the cops, and she was under the influence of heroin. we went to court on her behalf and managed to get her released back to us. she was under house arrest for a couple of months-- couldn't leave the house unless we called a hotline number to report it, and kept her within sight of a staff person at all times. she was on probation, and had to go to group counseling sessions. her house arrest ended-- but not her probation-- and then she fell out again, got taken back to juvie. I saw her there when I went to teach the poetry workshops I did there once a week. we went to court again, and managed to get her back-- but it was not long after that she and joey both got busted doing heroin in the house, and then it was all over with. I saw her back in juvie, and the courts had decided to send her back to michigan to live with her father. she'd run from her father's house more than once, and we all believed he was sexually abusing her. I knew she'd be back on the streets soon, and this time, she was addicted to heroin. all the poetry she wrote in my workshops was about wanting the freedom to live life her own way, and to do as much heroin as she wanted. I still have one of her poems-- you try to tell me what I should be/ but what you don't understand/ is that I love what I've become. I tried to tell her that she was right to want to live life in her own way-- but that being a slave to something like heroin was no kind of freedom. god, I hate that drug. I've seen it destroy so many beautiful people. joey was in jail last I heard, for manslaughter. he and another girl who used to be in the group home were doing heroin in the woods with a couple of friends. one of them OD'd, and the three of them just ran off and left him to die. I never heard from naomi again after she went to michigan. I think about her a lot, send energy and prayers in her direction. I hope, I hope, I hope. may she make it through the hell of adolescence, and come out alive on the other side.
(((rings))) |