Viktoria Modesta's Prototype & My 1st Cannabis Arrest

I am inserting a hyperlink to Viktoria Modesta's new music video, Protoype. The words that appear at the beginning are "forget what you know about disability." Startling, moving, transcendent, victorious, those are adjectives that describe this music video and the meaning behind it.

I am not physically disabled, just cognitively disabled, but this music video really resonated with me. It made me think of my own schizo-affective disorder and how I am perceived as broken, incomplete, genetically defective, or worse. How I question the System for the way myself and my kind are treated, both how humanely we are treated and also how our illnesses are treated in terms of medicines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA8inmHhx8c
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On My New Cannabis Charge

I still struggle with paranoia, but I am turning it into something that is not based in fear. My paranoia has begun to turn into a hyper-awareness of my status in society. Would you not be paranoid for yourself if you wrote a blog describing cover-ups of sexual and physical abuse in the psych facilities throughout the past decade, that you personally experienced? Would you not be afraid that county police are monitoring your statements online? I don't change my IP address, so it is pretty easy for authorities to track me down (which might explain why my pc internet connection is so slow on the only computer I use to access this blog). I am no longer paranoid about being killed. I am paranoid about my constitutional rights being continuously stripped away until there is nothing left, just a detainment center they refer to as a 'hospice' for mental patients.

Matters do not help that motorcycle officers keep pulling me over for infractions these past two months (2 fix-it tickets, 1 speeding ticket, and I am currently under investigation for driving while having cannabis and prozac in my system). Yes, I did get a DUI, my first ever. I feel like a criminal for taking my effing medications. I live in California where it IS legal for me drive so long as I had not smoked and then immediately driven away (I played pool for a long time, ate, etc...cop didn't care that I had an ear infection that messed up my balance, said it was cannabis and prozac from the several hours before--8 hours for the Prozac, actually). If this sounds like bunk, it is likely because my city has decided that marijuana is a Latino gang thing that must be eradicated, and to hell with all the medical patients standing in their way. The local newspaper had an article entitled "Sheriff !@&# declares war on pot." This is my home town. I have nowhere else to go until I get some money saved up and my Master's diploma. There is a whole lot more to the pot arrest, but I will save that for the NORML laywer I contacted. Just to be safe, though, if you are a mental patient, be leery of telling police officers what the medicines are actually used to treat. I don't know about the legality of this situation (HIPPA laws v. police) but I do know that once I said the words "mood stabilizer" my chances of him letting me go where all but nil. On the plus side, he did not shoot me over a dozen times like with that poor bipolar suburban teenage girl in the news recently.

Well, if anything goes worse from here, at least you, the reader, will know that for my first 31 years of my life I never was charged or accused of any crimes. The past two months have been pretty harsh, to be honest.

Well, no matter, what, they cannot take what I already achieved away from me. And, if worse comes to worse, there's always a one way trip to Venezuela.

All of us just prototypes for something better, no?

Condition: Grave

"Grave," he said, his face attempting some semblance of empathy. He was my social worker who had been assigned to me during my stay in the psychiatric facility. He was in the process of telling me I had paranoid schizo-affective disorder and that I should go on disability. I remember slowly hunching over until my hair fell in front of my face, hiding my dazed expression. Grave. That was the only thing I could think: I have a Grave condition.


I wish I could say the schizophrenia miraculously went away, or that I Found Jesus Christ and learned to bear my burden---neither is the truth. Currently, I am not religious, nor am I completely sane. Too bad. Sanity and Jesus Christ seem to make life more bearable for the general population.
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I made friends with a grad student who I have in two classes. I just met her this month. She has a major disability in that she is blind. She asked to be my study buddy and I agreed. She does not know that I am also disabled; though in a different sense. I am cognitively disabled due to the schizophrenia. She does not know.

Today she mentioned she used to attend a private Christian college. I decided to steer the conversation away from religion but it was too late---she went off on how great a theocracy would be. Now I love the concept of Jesus very much, but I am not keen on any government that is religious. I like the separation between church and state. It is a brilliant idea; one that should be respected and maintained forever.

As a mentally disabled person, the United States constitution is the only thing that protects my rights and freedoms. It decrees I am your equal. I am writing this only because I don't know how to address my new friend. I like her, I just hold the idea of checks and balances and separation of church and state to be the core values of America. They are my core values, at least.

Then it kind of dawned on me that people with a mental handicap are either made to appear like evil wicked people or like "touched-by-God" people when in fact we are neither--we're just people. It has occurred to me that, due to ignorance, the majority of the population does not see disability as a genetic accident; they see it as some sort of God-inferred state, and this scares me because there is no science behind this.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that I am somebody who believes strongly in a scientific approach to understanding mental illness and disabilities in general.