Guest post: Laurie Finkelstein

Continuing a month-long focus on authors from RWISA:

the Rave Writers International Society of Authors. 

Throughout August we'll be showing extracts from the work of these authors. 

For more information about any particular writer click the link under their photo. 

Bulletproof Vest

by Laurie Finkelstein

The bulk, padding, and steel plates weigh me down. The protection of a bulletproof vest is necessary. No matter the weather, I wear the cloak. The weight is a burden, but I trek on because wrapped is the only way to navigate my journey. The jacket protects my heart from being blown to crimson shards of death.

A direct hit is avoided for days and nights, lulling me into calm and complacency. “All will work out fine,” I tell myself. The truth tells a story I want to change. All my will and might does not make an impact to stop the bombardment.

Laurie Finkelstein

Experience and time separates me from tragedy. At any moment, the bullets strike. Inside or out. My house cannot provide security, nor can a million people surrounding me. With nowhere to hide, I am a target. Shelter and safety are nonexistent.

Discharges are held back while luck and grace harbor me. The slugs will come, however, in a piercing barrage without warning, and will pummel me.

Knocked to the ground, I am immobilized and rendered helpless. My breathing is halted. My movements are stopped, and I understand what assaulted me.

The shockwave subsides, and in small increments, I am able to take in air. Incapacitated, I continue to lie until I am rescued by the rational thinking buried under an avalanche of pain, doubt, and fear. My thoughts check my vitals to make sure I am in the here and now. “Stay in the moment,” I tell myself. “I can manage this. I will persevere.”

“Rise,” I command. The mass of the garb constricts my movement, but I stand, analyze what must be done, and begin to act. The warrior in me comes out. Battles will be fought. My impervious attire gets me through another crisis, and its weight comforts me. Without the guise, I am unable to prevail against the onslaughts, which pop out of the dark corners of another day.

Yes, my vest is cumbersome, but without my swathe I will not withstand the painful projectiles. Clips are filled, ready to punch and knock me down, disabling me should I forget for a moment to cloak myself within my protective armor.

My bullets are not made of lead, surrounded by a dense metal. The projectiles do not come from terrorists intent on decimating me. The ammo does not come from a police state or a dictator’s command. A barrel is not involved.

My bullets are made of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Composed of irrational thoughts, insipid ideations, and ignorant rationalizations, they are crushing invisible forces. The capacity to shatter my resolve and render me dysfunctional invades me.

My unsociable enemy is treatable, but never disappears. My therapists validate my experiences of being trapped, resentful, guilty, shameful, ill-equipped, grief-stricken, lost, uncertain, and disabled. My growth in therapy helps me accept the challenge with compassion and empathy in my heart.

Throughout my lifetime three stages will haunt me.

Stage one is the onslaught of rounds. The crisis mode. The shock and pain.

Stage two is being slammed down, breath taken away. Sabotaged. Terms and feelings of the emergency are acknowledged.

Stage three is advocacy for myself. Stand. Breathe. Make decisions. Tools in hand to counteract the depression and anxiety and OCD. Utilize appropriate response and care.

Encouraged by others, I enroll in Toastmasters. Time for me to improve my public speaking and thinking on my feet. Professional and compelling ways of expressing my views is a talent I want to possess. Persuasive interactions are in reach. My computer with Google as my guide, I find the Toastmasters website. The rules and guidelines answer many of my questions. Ready to take on the challenge, I enter my credit card information and become a member. A direct thrust knocks me down.

At first, I don’t understand what attacks me. My heartbeat begins speeding up. My gasps for air speed up. My head spins with dizziness. The mighty effects of terror hammer me to the ground. Despair sinks me deeper into the attack.

Stage one. The thought of standing before people enunciating in a clear voice avoiding “ums” and “ahs” strikes with negative force. In a semi-frozen state of fear and regret, I struggle to make sense of my attacker. Groups of Toastmasters are warm, safe environments to learn public speaking and leadership skills. “Warm and safe,” I remind myself. Still my heart beats faster and my breath diminishes by the second. A ghost of recognition appears before me. Panic is familiar.

Stage two. My history tells me to take an extra Klonopin. Scared to death is not an option. Upon reaching my medicine cabinet with weak, wobble-producing legs, I discover my pill case empty. In my next move, I check the bottle. Empty. My heart beats faster and my limbs go numb. Sweat trickles down my forehead. My last attempt before I collapse in a heap of despair, I call my pharmacist. My trembling voice separated from my body explains my attack and lack of pills. “How fast can you fill the prescription?” my quivering voice speaks out. “Is ten minutes okay?” the pharmacy technician asks.

Stage three. My inner voice tells me to be brave. Think of a serene place. My happy place. Take deep soothing breaths. My toolbox is ransacked for more options until I come to grips with the present. The dispensary is too far to hike, so I must drive to pick up my pills. Cranked engine. Foot on pedal. Brake released. My self-talk takes me on a wild ride to the drug store. My trembling legs walk me to the back of the aisles. The friendly face of the tech reassures me. The credit card transaction is signed with a jellylike hand, completing the purchase.

Back in my car, I down the remedy with tepid water from an old bottle sitting in my trash. My panting is steadier, my heart pounding a little less. Within thirty minutes, I am relaxed, able to pursue my day. Ready to reassess my decision to become a Toastmaster. The choice is sound and important.

My bulletproof vest is worn as a badge of honor and survival. Without my garb, I would be a prisoner in my house, hiding in bed. Sick to my stomach. Useless.

The stigma of mental illness must be broken. My vest is worn with pride. I am a survivor. I am the voice of one in every five Americans experiencing the assailant. I am not alone.

Thank you for supporting this member along the WATCH "RWISA" WRITE Showcase Tour today!  We ask that if you have enjoyed this member's writing, to please visit their Author Page on the RWISA site, where you can find more of their writing, along with their contact and social media links, if they've turned you into a fan. We ask that you also check out their books in the RWISA or RRBC catalogs. Thanks, again for your support and we hope that you will follow each member along this amazing tour of talent. Don't forget to click the link under the author's photo to learn more about her.

The Weight of Elephants

The Weight of Elephants is an odd arthouse-type movie filmed in Invercargill, New Zealand, by first-time feature director, Daniel Joseph Borgman. Borgman is a New Zealander, though most of his earlier film work has been done in Denmark, where he has made several short movies.

The great strength of the movie is the outstanding performance by Demos Murphy, an 11-year-old first-time film actor. Murphy brings all the vulnerability and depth of a lonely boy to the screen, a boy on whom the weight of the world (let alone of elephants) seems to have landed. His mother has left (there's no word of a father); his grandmother is bringing him up with a lack of warmth that's hard to credit; his live-in uncle is chronically depressed; he's bullied at school and even his reasonably close friend betrays him, preferring to side with the macho boys in the school.

Even the girl next door, who's a little younger - she's played by Angelina Cottrell with considerable intensity - seems to want to boss him around and hone in on his tenderness. Only her little sister is open and warm towards him.

All of this angst is beautifully filmed in a recognisably semi-rural New Zealand.

That's the plus side of the movie. The negative is that there's no story: bits and pieces float along together, but form no cohesive whole. The mystery element (three small children go missing) is mishandled and left hanging. Such incoherence might convey how Adrian, the boy, feels about his life, but it's an unsatisfying experience for the viewer. Given a child who can act with such depth of feeling as Murphy can, it's a shame to have almost wasted him in a part that seems to go nowhere.

The script cries out for someone to pull all the elements together; unfortunately this hasn't happened, and we're left with a half-story with lots of long reflective pauses that finishes up stopping in the middle of nowhere. Just before the screen suddenly went dark, I was thinking: the writer has painted himself into a corner. And he has. Borgman himself is the writer, and he's loosely based his movie on a bleak Australian story by Sonya Hartnett, a story bleaker than this movie by all accounts (!)

To his credit Borgman provides the kids mostly with dialogue that rings true. However, a number of the lines given to Nicole, the girl from next door, might ring true in the mouth of an adult. In the mouth of a child, they just sound false.

Emergency and depression

I'd never heard of an Emergency Medical Technician until today, when I saw Emergency Medical Technician Jobs advertised.   One of the jobs is advertised this way: Responsible for the pre-hospital care of patients who are in need of this care as a result of accident or illness, which sounds to me pretty much like a person working an ED or ER situation.  Which is what my new daughter-in-law does, even though she's not called an Emergency Medical Technician, but a Physician's Assistant.  No doubt someone can inform me as to the difference between these two; I'm sure there's enough of a difference for them to be classed differently. 


Admittedly my daughter-in-law can work in non-ER situations too, so perhaps that's an element of what is different about the two roles.  


Skipping through my clippings (that bit of rhyme is kind of appropriate to what I'm about to say) I came across a description of Australian poet, Les Murray, and his fight with depression.    It comes from a review of Murray's book, Killing the Black Dog: a memoir of depression.  At the age of 50, Murray fell into a deep depression, "occasioned, he believes, by the chance comment of an old high school tormenter who came to a local reading given by Murray and who “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me 30-odd years previously.” (Murray had experienced a less severe depressive episode at the end of the 1950s.) Within days, his fingers started tingling painfully, and he later developed a sudden aversion to nicotine. He landed in an emergency room with what turned out to be a panic attack. A doctor sent him to the psychiatric ward, where his depression was diagnosed."


Ah, the panic attack.  I know these horrors well.  Murray would have up to four or five a day, as well as suffering from the “the 4 a.m. Show” in which you find “your troubles and terrors ripping into you with a gusto allowed them by fatigue and the disappearance of proportion.  I wonder why 4 am is such a significant hour for depression sufferers?   I know 4 am well, but the same process can start earlier at 3 am too.  Though I haven't suffered depression for some time, ordinary anxiety can bring on these early morning calls, when you wake with a snap and suddenly your brain is in full locomotion mode.  It takes quite a bit to get it to settle down again, although I've found that reciting old Psalms and poems I've memorised helps to distract the brain that wants to go and do something now!  The brain likes you to get up rather than lie in bed, and sometimes that's the only solution: getting up and taking a pen and writing down what is bugging you.  Writing it out of your head certainly helps. 


Another poet, Billy Collins, has an apt line regarding this in his poem Journal, where he writes:


And when my heart is beating
too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe,
open it [the journal] up to a blank page
and try to settle on the blue lines
whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Side effects

Methadone, the treatment that's used at a Methadone detox rehab treatment center, has an alarming number of side effects.   Why I comment on this is because when I watching a TV ad last night in which they discussed medication you could take for depression, you could read along the bottom of the screen - if you were quick enough - so many side effects that you'd actually think twice about taking the drug. 

Of course, those lists of side effects are just what might happen in the worst of all possible worlds (although a person with depression doesn't really need to know any more about the worst of all possible worlds, they're often there already), and having taken two different kinds of medication for depression over the years (both of which worked, and neither of which appeared to give me any side-effects) I guess the cure is somewhat better than what might happen.   They've got to warn you, after all.   And then, like Russian roulette, you play the game. 

Here's a list of the possible side-effects of Methadone:

• drowsiness
• weakness
• headache
• nausea
• vomiting
• constipation
• loss of appetite
• weight gain
• stomach pain
• dry mouth
• sweating
• flushing
• difficulty urinating
• swelling of the hands, arms, feet, and legs
• mood changes
• vision problems
• difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
• decreased sexual desire or ability
• missed menstrual periods 

It certainly covers all the options:  difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep?  A bit like having your cake and eating it, isn't it?

Panic mode

Seth Godin's blog is one of the few I read virtually every day. Though it's primarily focused on marketing and business, he manages to sneak in quite a bit of ordinary everyday commonsense into his posts. Well, 'sneak' might be understating it; often he publishes posts that are plain commonsense.
I don't always agree with his posts, and I found his latest book, Tribes, not that exciting, even though the concept is worth a thought.
But the post for the 28th April (Might as well panic) I agree with entirely. There's a mindset now in the world that if there's a possibility of something going wrong, or even if something does go wrong, we should all rush around like headless chickens. YK2 was the prime example, and the World Trade Centre attack caused so much panic that the US went to war over it - without any real justification. Then we had the bird flu pandemic. Pandemic? How many people actually died in that pandemic? Far fewer than are killed on the roads of many major countries each day.
Along came the RECESSION. Well, that's supposedly what it was. Yes, I know people have lost jobs, and there's a great furore over the behaviour of the banks and CEOs and their billions, but in fact, this is not a crisis like the Great Depression, and may well not get to be. For the most part it's a sorting out of the poor financial management of a number of large companies.
And our latest cause for panic is swine flu. It's dreadful that even a few people have died of this in the world, but again, the actual number of people who have died have been miniscule in terms of the population (or compared to the Great Flu that followed the First World War). I agree with Godin that it seems in the nature of human beings to panic. My suspicion is that this is a fairly recent phenomenon, aided by the media needing something to get excited about.
Godin ends his post by saying: "We have enough caution. We don't need an abundance of caution. That's too much."
Mr Godin, I concur.

Quoting?

I was reading Management Matters at work today, and came across a paragraph by Kevin Vincent, CEO, in his editorial at the front of the mag.

He said, "Ruth Le Pla is quoted in in the magazine, "NZ Business" as saying:

What do HP, Sports Illustrated, Burger King Corp and the Wikipedia Foundation have in common?

Vincent apparently continues to quote her by saying: They all started off in times of depression surviving the 1929/30 period, the tail end of the 53/54 hard times and the more recent post 9/11 difficulty. Many other very successful companies can alos be added to that list including Hyatt Groupa and Fed Ex."

This would give the impression that all these companies have been around since the late 1920s, and anyone would his head screwed on would realise this is nonsense: Wikipedia sticks out like a sore thumb from the list for a start.

The reality is that Hewlett Packard began in 1935, Sports Illustrated as we know it now didn't turn up till 1954 and neither did Burger King; and of course, Wikipedia began in 2001. Fed Ex dates from 1998; the Hyatt Group (Corporation) from 1957.

When you go back to Le Pla's original article, you find she says the following:

They all started off in times of recession [not depression]. Collectively they span the Great Depression which kicked off with the Black Tuesday Wall Street crash of October 1929, the tail end of the hard times in 1953-54, and the more recent post-9/11 recession in the US.

We could add to that list companies as diverse as giant international hotel chain Hyatt Corp, research hub LexisNexis, FedEx Corp and MTV Networks.

Slightly different. Still not as clear as it might be - the 'collectively they span' is a bit difficult to get in focus - but obviously not quite what Vincent is saying, and certainly not what he 'quotes.'