My second tape to T was the first one in which I was fully emotionally invested in building a good relationship with him. I talked more and in greater detail. It also included a lot of talk about other pen pal relationships that he knew either because of shared pen pals (J) or those with whom he had a passing familiarity due to the cross connections between our group of KISS fans. In this tape, I talked about H, who was a pen pal of J's as well. I had recently broken off my pen pal relationship with H and T had asked me why I had done so.
This tape was entirely created while I was driving to and from my job. At that time, I was working in a small city about 45 minutes from my rural home. The length of the drive was notable because I could complete almost exactly one side of a standard 90-minute cassette tape during each leg of my journey. Many such tapes were done with various pen pals throughout my two years working at a transitional living facility for the seriously mentally ill.
When reading the content of any of my tapes from that time, it is important to keep in mind that my work was made up of 24-hour shifts in which I spent an entire day (and night) living in the same house as people who had been hospitalized for their condition. These were not people who were capable of functioning in the world at large. They had hallucinations or delusions. Many had tried to kill themselves. Some had tried to harm others. No small number had been functionally impaired either by their substance use or their life circumstances. They were much more damaged, dangerous, and difficult to manage than the average person on Prozac who struggles to get through his or her day-to-day life.
It was my essentially "living" with such people that informed a lot of the comments I made about my job on tape to T in my distant past. It was a life experience that few people have had or ever will have, and it may be hard to fully imagine how difficult it was to work in such a situation. In this day and age, I would not refer to the people I worked with as "crazy" because it would be politically incorrect and insensitive. At that time, however, I was 22 years old and the world had not yet discovered a need for an ever-mutating kaleidoscope of euphemisms in order to de-stigmatize certain conditions. I leave the offensive terms that I used intact because this is a transcript and I do not wish to change the way in which my history is reflected to suit a modern mentality. It should be sufficient to say that I wouldn't speak in this fashion at this time were I to refer to these situations in the present.
Select transcript of May 23, 1987 tape:
When I have something that I want to say, some feeling, I want to say, "I feel this way." The problem is that sometimes when you say "I feel this way, the other person takes it as, "You feel this way and it's my fault, you're blaming me because you feel this way," and that's not necessarily true. And one of my big struggles in life is that I say these things and I try to make people understand at the time that there is no blame to the situation. What I'm feeling may be as the result of a mis-perception, but, "I feel this way." I feel they should know that I feel this way so that the whole circumstance is out in the open.
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One thing you said was that, if you knew someone obviously couldn't handle what you had to say, then you wouldn't say it. H obviously couldn't handle that. One of the things about the relationship that I had with her was that it was so confined and that was one of the reasons why it was so boring. It became very mundane because there were so many things that we could not discuss for many different reasons. She didn't like conflict so we couldn't discuss religion or politics. If I would bring them up, she'd say, "Well let's not discuss it."
We couldn't discuss anything personal if we had a conflict because she didn't want to discuss that either. She always took it as a very deep, personal insult if I brought up any conflict we may be having—no matter how carefully I tried to word it. I'm not saying that I had insults and I was disguising them. I'm saying that I had feelings that I needed to convey and she got very, very angry and resentful when I conveyed them. I was resricted in that I had to handle her with kid gloves which is hard for me to begin with. We had so many things that are out of bounds in the relationship that there wasn't enough in bounds to keep it interesting. That's why it was boring, because there were things that I could not talk about... there were so many of them.
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What I want out of relationships, and I did write this in the card that I sent, is that they be open. I want them to be interesting, but "interesting" has to be loosely defined. It doesn't mean that you have to have four years of college and be a KISS fan. It doesn't mean you have to be those things. It means it doesn't hurt, but I have a pen pal who is 18 years old and I've been writing to her since she was 15 and she's the sweetest creature. She is so sweet that we have mostly KISS in common, but she's so funny and I love her so much that the whole thing is very, very interesting to me even though we don't discuss theories. We don't even discuss mutual relationships. She also writes to J. It's not that she's not intelligent. It's just that she hasn't had the extra years to mature that I have. Every year—every day—makes a difference in your maturity. You'll never be as mature as you are now. You'll always look back and say, 'That was a really immature thing that I did. I hope I don't do it again. I can't believe I did it in the first place.'
There aren't certain characteristics that I need for it to be interesting, but I need free communication. It's not so I can hurt somebody or say, "Well, there is a problem and I'm going to throw it in your face," but just so that things can grow. If you put a restriction on something, it's going to stagnate and it stagnated with H. That's pretty much what I want and what I didn't get (from H).
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In my experience, my problem is not getting people to talk about themselves, but trying to get them to stop for a minute so that I can interject a thought, or even stick a question in there to help the topic proceed... to help it develop and move on. But, that's my (work), and in my business, people are always talking at you. I once wrote in our staff log books—we do daily logs where we record what (clients)do and what's coming up in any specific behavioral problems—we had a part for staff in the back of the book and I once wrote that I felt like the listening box for humanity where I had to keep listening and listening and listening and it gets to the point where it is very frustrating.
I don't mind it, as I'm sure most people don't mind, because by listening to others, you get these new... perceptions... new perspectives on life. It's a different vantage point so it's very valuable, but when you sit there and listen to crazy people talk for hours, which is not all I do everyday—but I bet you I get in a good four hours of listening to crazy people talk a day—it gets to the point where I think, "Please give my mind a rest. Let me talk to someone who I can have an exchange with instead of everybody feeding off of me."
It's funny because they're filling you up, but they're sucking you dry. I don't know if you can understand this or not, but it's like by talking to you, they're draining you of all of your life. They're filling you with their troubles and you're pumping them up with your energy. As they say, "I want to kill myself. I don't feel that I'm a worthwhile human being. I feel like I'm a crazy person." You're sitting there and saying, "No, no, no, you shouldn't feel that way. You're worthwhile." You send all of your energy into them and they fill you up with their illness and it's very hard sometimes. It just gets to the point where you can't deal with it.
*****
At the time, I didn't realize it, but the way in which both T and I talked about our relationships with others revealed important information about how we regarded relationships in general as well as provided a wealth of information about each other's personalities.What I wanted from relationships was not something that I necessarily demanded of him, but relayed through the failed relationships that I had had with other friends.
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