Looking up the JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association) artical where Dr. Osborne cites the 1998 data that the 4th greatest cause of death in the U.S. was prescription medication caused, I stumbled across this 2010 publication by the FDA that also cites the JAMA publication, a 2000 American Journal of Medicine publication and a 2000 publication by the Institute of Medicine; National Academy Press. I wasn't looking for this information. In fact, I was just checking my email for the first time since the morning and received this Gluten Free Society bulletin mentioning the data...
Oh, by the way, I was looking up the JAMA artical because I found the information a bit surprising... I wish you could understand that if I have doubts, I check references... and verify if the author is exagerating or lying... Sometimes, "when it seems too good to be true..." it isn't... You doubt my memory. But, I can tell you exactly where I got that phrase from, when and why:
It was Fall 1987, I was looking in the newspaper job listings and stumbled across an advertisement for earning up to $400 per day... I imagine it was an advertisement by J & J distributing in Dunellen (Kirby Vacuum Cleaners) and I told you about it... You responded, "If it seems too good to be true, it is." I support that idea to a great extent and am certain I've said it to others... But, maybe for some people, it would have worked out. For instance, Beth has an excellent personality for sales and I am certain is very successful no matter what is the product... not much different from her waitressing skills at gaining very good tips. But, for the average person, if it sounds too good to be true, I'm sure it is...
Yes, my memory fails me... in being able to offer more details or more exact details. I wish I could fill in the story much more completely, instead of leaving it seeming anecdotal... And that's why I don't write fiction. If I can't write the details of my relationship with Fran... Or describe those 5 years in NYC after Randi... Or remember where Randi was all those times I found myself alone in Astoria... and I remember that greatly... I think I remember enough of the important details. But, not enough possibly to gain the true attention of the reader...
I'm certain I'm making a big mistake writing you; it's like befriending the enemy or giving her the opportunity to swindle me again... Truthfully, that's how I feel about you, Sheri and Beth... That it's a very deceitful game the three of you play. And maybe you can call me paranoid. But, I guess I'm calling on the part of you that is truly intelligent and considerate or thoughtful to try and understand truly what happened.
But, why ask this of the "criminal"... or the lier or the swindler? Why as the devil to have a change of heart? Remember the film "The Crying Game"? with Forest Whitaker... He tells a fable about a Scorpion and a Frog that goes: A scorpion asks a frog to carry him over a river. The frog is afraid of being stung during the trip, but the scorpion argues that if it stung the frog, both would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog agrees and begins carrying the scorpion, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature. The fable is used to illustrate the position that no change can be made in the behaviour of the fundamentally vicious. It is this moral that is also illustrated by Aesop's Fables of The Farmer and the Viper, where a farmer saves a snake which then bites its benefactor as soon as it has recovered. The farmer's last words are "I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel" and the moral is "The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful."
Paranoid... and that's why I cited those scientific publishings at the end of what I wrote on my blog last night... You and your family respond to me over the years as if I had just read something and was copying the story of the other... But, what really occurs is that I lived the story and can cite many professional studies/publishings explaining why what happened in my childhood still affects me as today... And in how many ways...? The problem is that you are the "defendent" and you will become defensive... You say that you love me and you worry about my health, but after all you've done over the so many years, those words seem incredibly hypocritical... I claim that you have a very convenient memory that protects you from the difficulties of your responsibility towards what you caused me...
Isn't if pathetic how I've spent my life trying to gain your approval? Don't you have the slightest idea why that would be? And the funny thing is, that you have the tendency of invalidating something that inspires me or that I believe that I have a talent in or a grasp on until you have decided later on that you determined my value... usually when I have decided to put aside the prior endeavor and switch to another... and the game repeats itself... First you must put heavy doubt in my mind about myself and then you tell me what it is I should be doing... But, if I decide what I should do?
One moment you say that I'm your most intelligent child and the next moment you treat me as that child-failure as that idiot... as that irresponsible and reckless person... And I know these words will not make an imprint upon your brain...
Do you know how long we've been going around on this merry-go-round? Do you remember how many times I insisted you join me in family therapy and you were so difficult? The problem was never yours; it was mine... You never saw a therapist for helping you "cope" with all of your lifelong suffering.
What were you hiding from them? From yourself?
And you may ask yourself and your daughters, "What did I do to deserve this treatment?" But, if you were introspective and sincere and considerate and did not have the tendency towards denial... You deny everything you said to me about yourself and why you related towards me as you did... Very convenient.
Or is it possible that your most intelligent child, so much like you who shares so many of your styles/interests, also has such a vivid imagination? He's such a lier and exagerator? Such a failure you must ALWAYS question his next move or his thinking? Sounds incredibly contradictory to me Mom...
Or is the problem in your head and in your behavior? And you're the one who speaks out of both sides of your mouth?
How can you give a child stability if one day you are by his side and the next day you are pushing him away? Or if you spent his childhood years telling him how worthless he was?
I was telling Margarita and Nicolas about how you told me how jealous of me Sheri was after I was born... How possessive she was of Daddy... she was daddy's girl/boy... And how she would pinch me when I was in the crib to make me cry...
And I talked to them about how parents are concerned when their second child is about to be born, how the first child will react. And certainly they will speak to the 3-year-old Sheri about what was about to happen and why she will benefit from having a younger brother, being my big sister...
And when you saw her pinch me to make me cry, didn't you wonder what was going on and what could occur later on? And, later on you knew just how vindictive and possessive and controlling Sheri could be and you told me about Barbara Elementary School teacher's daughter's experience with Sheri when you had hired her to babysit us... and what Sheri had us littlins do to scare the hell out of the babysitter so that she would never come back... And that day that Sheri took the cover off my Sports Illustrated Magazine and put it on your Playboy magazine and placed it in the mailbox making it seem that one of my friends was returning the magazine I supposedly stole from one of your drawers or your closet... And you shoved it infront of my face and said something to the tone of "do you recognize this?" And of course I did not, although I became incredibly intrigued at the photograph infront of my eyes... But, you yanked it away so quickly... And then I don't know what you did beyond berate me horribly for something I did not do... so much so that Sheri decided to confess laying/crying on the stairs to leave me alone, that she had done it... And you saying, "Do you see what you've done? You should be ashamed of yourself, allowing your sister to take the blame!"
And if you believed a few of my words mom... and if you remembered a few of your words and some statements you made to me when I was in the Community College, you would be able to tie together two and two?
And, yes, I stole money from your wallet and stole Sheri's allowance money that one time that I wanted to run away and hid in the garage that night that my signaling drew Lorna's attention... And, yes, Sheri is correct about that day I threw rocks at her... I remember all of that. And I remember why so much rage... Like when Beth and Sheri set me up for raging by teasing me and having me chase Beth out of the house so that Sheri could lock the door behind me and Beth could enter through the other door to lock that one again... And it was a cold November day and I was without shoes and socks... and through rocks at the garage door... And there were times that Sheri decided to be nice and affection to me... But then she would strangely suddenly turn... and give me a horrible cold shoulder for days... And she remember playing go fish with me in her room the nights we couldn't sleep due to you have very loud sex with Joe... And I remember that too... But, she was horribly reactive and changeable with almost schizophrenic behavior... And, I was always that gullible fool, puppydog-like so willing to go back to her when she decided to accept me again...
And do you understand that type of behavior? I'm sure you do. I'm sure it has been clinically described... A form of passive-aggressiveness... aimed at gaining something... What was her gain? Truthfully, I'll never know.
When I was around puberty age, I remember her saying that I would be very hansome when I was 40-years-old... I guess she had just read the books and seen the movie "The Thorn Birds"... This was at a time that I was experiencing horrible rejections from my middle-school peers, especially the girls who did not want to be courted by Ross or the Jew, or the picked-on, or maybe I smelled of urine, since I wet my bed until the age of 12 and didn't have the greatest hygiene... I imagine my breath smelled and I went to school without having bathed... Who knows? But the psychologists are well-versed in why children suck their thumbs and wet their beds too too long... Just as the PTSD therapist understood why I cut myself (self-mutilator) and lit fires...
And the funny thing is that I struggled my whole adult life to reverse all of these problems... Truthfully, all of the therapist hours were a waste of time and money... Nothing was worked out in those series of 50 minute sessions... Everything was worked out through a lot of introspection and trying to understand myself, what happened and who I truly was...
You have absolutely no idea what those 5 artist years in NYC represent for me... A time I would love to return to... I time I consider horribly reckless within which I would never wish to find myself again...
I would have loved to been born in Alan's shoes... having a dad like Bruce. But, truthfully, I really only wish I was born to an Alan Leslie Goldstein who didn't become ill and suddenly die and didn't leave me to the monster you became and Sheri was and didn't give me his illness and know how that would have been... Who I would have become, instead of who I became... Do you understand me? Can you for a moment in your life sense what I'm truly telling you?
Do you have any idea what impact these writings or these experiences have on my heart? I am very aware of it... I feel the changes and take my blood pressure and see it change... And realize how at 2am, it's as if I drank strong coffee at 11pm... although I'm not drinking coffee these day... My mouth doesn't enjoy it...
But, I've come to terms with the fact that I've come a full circle... reading that scientific artical on childhood trauma causing adulthood acute myocardial infarction...
This is the end... Not a suicidal end. But a conceptual end...
What is the problem? What did that Chinese psychiatrist on the upper West Side tell me? That I had too many plates in the air... Who said what about unbearable stress? or excessive stress? there is a better word for that for the suffer of PTSD... You've gotta advance forward. But you've gotta attend to the skeletins in the closet and symptoms caused by the trauma and the aftermath... like developmental disorders or learning disabilities or mental illness...
But am I mentally ill?
Or am I angry and resentful? and trying to distance myself from the people who were insensitive and destructive after realizing that they have no intention whatsoever to understand what happened to me or what part they played within the trauma...
Is it that there are untied affairs that must be addressed...? And there was this scientific artical about childhood sexual abuse and distancing of the family member from the family later on in adulthood... Is the sexually abused child turned adult mentally ill? Labelling someone mentally ill is almost the same as labelling them a criminal... and they will lose friends and family support and career opportunities in the same way as if they were a criminal... and they will also lose their right to make decisions for themselves by those diagnosing them... Just as I don't have the right to tell my cardiologist that I will not take the Statin, although there is plenty of scientific literature supporting my desire to not take the statins...
And why do I continue trying to convince you?
It's like trying to convince a person who hates seafood, especially the smell of it, that they will love the fish chowder or the baked sole...
Something greatly went wrong in your life, went wrong with you, that you decided that it was much more valuable to destroy me and protect your image to yourself and others at all costs, than to acknowledge what you did and what others did to me than try and truly resolve the problem...
You claim you don't understand what I'm seeking to gain with rehashing what it is I believe happened back then. And then you don't understand why I chose to free myself from relations with you and the rest of my family... as if I don't have the right to not have to be subject to your style, to the way you and the others relate towards me... to my personal experience horribly shared with the rest of you that greatly negatively altered my life and my trajectory....
I was 6-months-old, I was 4-years-old, I was 8-years-old, I was 11-years-old... I was 13-years-old... I was 17-years-old... and no one was within a mile of me to have done what I said they did... I was all alone... with my imagination... And you were the incredibly loving and supportive mother; hero that everyone claimed you were... And I must be hallucinating all of these years, although I haven't been diagnosed as schizophrenic...
Mom, tell me one thing: Why didn't you want me to grow up to be like my father...? Or to grow up to be like your younger brother, Uncle Henry? When you visit with Alan Davidson, don't you wish I could have been like him? Is he really that much more intelligent than I? Or is it that he had a million times better family structure/support system and personal support by his parents and his grandmother and aunts and uncles? No one would have placed him in the situation (or left him in that situation) I was in... You don't feel any sense of disappointment at what my life could have been like... should have been like... had you and the other adults responded differently to the situation (my situation)?
Don't you understand a little bit?
"But, we can't change what happened?" But we can be more sensitive and more honest and work more towards understanding and change our ways of relating and behaving towards other the other person... "Look, he reacted towards me again...we're fighting or struggling again...he is defensive/aggressive again... he's repeating the same thing about what I do again... Maybe I should look into what it is that I do that may be causing this conflict with him... Afterall, I am insisting that he let me into his life again... and that doesn't give me the right to behave the same way that offends him again... Is there something I did in his childhood that triggers off this reaction as an adult? Maybe I should consider what he is saying and sincerely work towards not triggering off that reaction... Afterall, I don't know how much more time we have... Or is it that there is this built-in need to make him feel small, susceptable, worthless, faulty? Do I like this game and why I have this tendency towards being sarcastic and offensive...? Maybe I gain something from the conflict? Maybe I've always had something subconsciously against him. Maybe he has a point... Or maybe he's just a piece of shit as I had called him repeatedly over the years and deserves being treated like a bastard, something I called him as a young boy... Maybe I have this inborn need to continue harming him... truthfully, I can't give him peace... But, I must make everyone believe that I am a repeated victim of him... and that I'm the selfless one always trying to bring him closer to us... regardless of the abuse he subjects us to..."
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