After coming out of the mental health facility, I felt oddly hopeful. They weren’t able to find me an outpatient psychiatrist, but the Zoloft seemed to be working. Or so I thought.
In congruence with my healing, I started taking on projects. Lots of projects. Collecting antiques. More than ten thousand dollars worth of antiques. It wasn’t just a binge: I was preserving history, bringing new life into old things. Oil lamps, typewriters, magic lanterns. I used the antiques to build a TV studio set to film a show called Dog Eat Diogenes, which was going to explore how to overcome workplace abuse with dignity. All my furniture went out the door. Clocks. More clocks and more antiques, filling my apartment. I started dressing bizarrely, including in Victorian wear. I wore dog ears and started living out of a dog crate, like Diogenes. It was for the show but the show bled into real life. Everything was connected.
I finally had a purpose: all that suffering at Amazon had meaning. I could use my pain to heal others, and Dog Eat Diogenes was that vehicle. I wrote, I animated, I illustrated, I learned lighting and photography. I read—oh God, I read— Slavery and Social Death by Dr. Orlando Patterson and American Slavery As It Is, cover to cover. So many papers and articles and notes, I did loads of research.
While I took on these projects, I started to neglect myself. I stopped showing up for work. I stopped eating. Then I stopped sleeping. That’s when things finally broke.