I had been traveling for 5 years when I decided that I had to go back to the United States. I had left five years before because I was depressed and suicidal after my mother had died. I couldn't continue in the philosophy PhD program that I was enrolled in at the New School. It was too much pressure and I needed a change. I took a leave of absence from the New School and I decided that I would spend a year teaching English in Indonesia, a culture that seemed fascinating. To me this felt like the biggest change I could possibly make, life seemed new to me and I was excited.
I decided that I needed to get a TEFL certification before I went to Indonesia because I had spent three months in Istanbul teaching English two years before and I knew the kind of job you can get without a TEFL certificate could be dodgy. I enrolled in the program at Oxford TEFL Prague scheduled for August 2011. Before I went to Prague I decided to spend 2 weeks in Berlin, a city where I had spent two months the winter two years before.
During the two weeks I was in Berlin something happened that would change my life for the next few years dramatically. In Berlin this German named Lily came up to me at a concert and we hit it off immediately. We ended up having a one-night stand and a month later she visited me for a week and Prague after I left my TEFL program. It was one of the best weeks of my life and we had a blast. We made a connection that touched us both. At the end of it I wanted to go back to Germany with her but I knew that I couldn't back out on my plans to go Indonesia. I made my way to Indonesia via a month long stay in Thailand.
I continued talking to Lily the three months I was in Southeast Asia and we grew ever closer. I eventually knew that we had a special connection and that I wanted to pursue it. With the encouragement of my friend Joey I told Lily wanted to be in a relationship with her and I asked her if I moved back would she be interested in this too. She said yes.
At this point I must discuss some more things about myself. This was a major step for me because at this point I was 32 and I had never been relationship. I have cerebral palsy and growing up I thought that no one would ever be attracted to me becausemy body had been mocked growing up and girls had constantlyrejected me. I had lost my virginity at age 27 from prostitute and had some experiences after that but I didn't have anything close to a relationship. I was taking a chance and in the end it panned out.
In my relationship with Lily, I can say I was less depressed and that I have never loved anyone as much as I loved her but our relationship was fraught with difficulties. She was 13 years younger than me, I couldn't find work, and I had problems with my Visa. Because I was on SSDI I couldn't marry her because if I married someone who was not on SSI or SSDI I would lose my disability benefits. At times I would get very depressed, and this doubtlessly contributed to problems in our relationship.
I must say more about the regulations not allowing people on SSI or SSDI to get married. The regulation states that if someone is on SSDI or SSI and they get married to someone who is not on SSI or SSDI that they will automatically lose their benefits. This strikes me as a throwback to 19th century eugenics when disability was thought as something somehow contagious. Disabled people were thought of as people who should not be allowed to breed with non-disabled people and people thought disabled people should not be allowed to live a normal life. The fact was if I got married I would lose all of the $915 SSDI payment that I depended on to live. I had previously been on SSI where you aren't alIowed to be out of the USA more than a month and you only get 733 dollars a month as an individual. With SSDI at least they let you travel.
I ended up having to leave Germany and go to Turkey and Lily and I ended up in a long distance relationship. Long story short I spent a year in turkey and my depression got worse. Istanbul is a beautiful and incredible city with a rich culture but I missed Lily. In the end my relationship with Lily was not able to endure the separation we had because we were only able to see each other 3 times the whole year. By the end of the year she ended up deciding to leave me for another man and I decided that I needed to get as far away from Europe as possible.
After the breakup, I went through an intense depression and was often suicidal. I knew I needed help with my depression and my teeth were in very bad condition. I needed to get over ten teeth pulled and get partial dentures. Many of my friends and family were deeply concerned about me and many suggested that I return to the United States. I knew that I needed help and I knew that being on SSDI I was entitled to Medicaid benefits that would cover all my expenses. At the same time returning to the United States did not seem like a feasible alternative to me because my SSDI payment was only $10,980 a year which was below the poverty level.
I decided to do what I had always done before and go as far away as possible. I chose Bogota Colombia because South America has always seemed really interesting to me. In Bogota, I met some really great people but my depression was really out of control. I was often suicidal and I was aggressive and alienated a lot of people. It didn't help that I couldn't speak any Spanish. After 6 months I had burnt out on Bogota. My friends and family again suggested that I move back to the USA. I again felt that I couldn't afford to live in USA on my SSDI and I felt trapped. I felt that I might be better if I move to Mexico City. At least I would be able to afford to live.
In he first month I was in Mexico City I was enthralled with the energy of the city and I thought that my decision to Mexico City had been the right one. After a while, however my depression returned. I was doing everything to try to be active. I would go to the gym, went out out to meet people, and I took Spanish classes. Despite all this I was still very depressed. During this time my sister, father and my friends suggested that I should be on meds. This was an idea that I had been against all of my life because I had some bad experiences with medication during my adolescence and I always felt that if I could put myself in the right situation that I would be happy and I just had to keep searching and struggling for the right situation. I never found what I was looking for but just kept going in circles. I began to open to the idea that medication might be able to help me.
After being in Mexico for 6 months, I had to leave the country to renew my tourist visa. I decided to go to New York because it was the city in the world where I had the most friends and because it was cheap to fly there. I had a great time in New York seeing friends that I hadn't seen for 5 years. I returned to Mexico refreshed but after a month I became depressed again and I decided to return to New York and seek the help I needed.
I headed to New York on the 3rd of August at 10:30 p.m. and my friend Kristen picked me up from the airport. The next day I went to United Cerebral Palsy in Manhattan to see if I could get any help. I figured that United Cerebral Palsy would be a good organization to start with because I had Cerebral Palsy myself. When I arrived at the office I was told to fill out paperwork while he staff found the woman I was supposed to talk with. When this woman arrived she was very cheerful and idealistic and explained to me that in order to get help from UCP I would need to go to the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities of New York State and and be evaluated as having an IQ of less than 98. I knew I didn't qualify for this because I had a master's degree in philosophy and had completed two years of PhD work. I asked her why you have to be certified as developmentally disabled in order to get help from UCP, when cerebral palsy was a disability that often hindered people's ability to work physically and not mentally. She told me that she disagreed with it too but that the majority UCP's funding came from OWPPD. At the end of the meeting she gave me a list of organizations that help with low income housing.
The next day I called all the numbers he gave me and the majority said I would have to be referred from the Department of Homeless Services and that would require me to be in a homeless shelter for 2 to 6 months before I could be referred to housing. The homeless shelters in New York City seemed pretty rough and I didn't think that with my disability that I do very well in them. Some of the places I called suggested that I could be referred to them By a mental hospital. I called some other organizations like CIDNY (Center for Independent Living New York) but I ended up in a game of phone tag. I figured it would be better if I went down to their office.
When I went to see CIDNY, I had to wait a bit in the waiting room, but in about an hour I was sent to the office of the social worker. The social worker gave me a lot of useful information, like how to renew my Medicaid, how to apply to NYCHA housing and section 8, and she gave me a list of affordable housing throughout New York. Unfortunately, the NYCHA waiting list was several years long, but I signed up. The Section 8 waiting list had been closed since 2009 and was not accepting new applicants and unfortunately the majority of the affordable housing options on the list that I was given were Section 8 only. The other apartments that were listed range from $600 to $800 a month plus deposit and that was too much for me to pay because I only got $915 a month with my SSDI.
During this time, I was also struggling with places to sleep. Initially I stayed with Kristen , who was a professor of psychology and needed space and could only put me up for a week. After this I went to my friend Justin’s place and he said I could probably stay for 3 or 4 days but I had to leave after two days because the landlord’s mother lived downstairs and his roommate was afraid that if I stayed any longer the landlord would raise their rent. I was getting nervous and depressed and I was wondering if I should have stayed in Mexico City were at least I could afford to live. The night after I stayed at Justin's I ended up sleeping in the basement of C squat , which was a punk squat in the Lower East Side, but they made it clear that I could only stay there one night. Thee next day I wandered around New York City looking for a place to sleep until I got a call from my Mexican friend Amilicar, who told me I could stay with him for a week.
Amilicar’s place was in Washington Heights and the hospitality him and his brother offered was great. After a week the brother was working again and his kids would be staying with him so I couldn't stay there anymore. I contacted some friends on Facebook who said I could stay with them but they didn't respond.
I ended up sitting on the street in Bushwick, Brooklyn with nowhere to go. My move to New York to seek help had failed. In the last month that I was in New York my depression and anxiety had not improved. I was in constant fight or flight mode and now I was about to be homeless. I had gone through cycles of being suicidal for years and I knew I was about to enter another one. I needed help immediately.
I decided that I needed to check myself into an emergency room that night and get myself into a mental hospital. I talked to my friend and asked him what would be the best hospital to go to and he said Columbia Presbyterian so I took the train to 168th Street and Broadway.
I got off the train and into the emergency room. I told the receptionist that I was depressed with suicidal thoughts and they had me sit down for about 5 minutes. I was then called into the back room by a nurse where they examined me and asked me some questions. They had me change into hospital clothes and took me to a bed where I stayed for about 7 hours. I slept a bit, watched some TV and wondered what would happen next.
After 7 hours, I finally got transferred to Columbia Presbyterian’s Mental Health ER. After being interviewed by an intake nurse, who asked me why I had come, I ended up in a large room that was full of beds. I was in the mental health ER for about 30 hours but very little happened there. I mostly slept, watched TV, and called my friends to let them know what was going on. At this point I wasn't on medication. I was interviewed by a doctor two times. Two things that happened there which were strange was once I was awakened by an elderly Hispanic woman rubbing my face and another time there was an African American male who started pacing around the room and ranting that he wasn't supposed to be there. When he started yelling damn cracker, and I was the only white person in the room, I knew it was time for me to leave the room and make a phone call.
The next day at 1 o'clock in the afternoon the ER transferred me to another hospital they had on 238th Street and Broadway. They took me away on a stretcher. When I got to the other hospital I was served plain rice and vegetables. After that I went to sleep and later I hung out a bit before the next meal.
It is hard to stress how little we did in the mental hospital. Really a lot of the time was spent sleeping, playing cards, or watching TV. Almost all of us were on meds of various degrees and I was on Citalophram to help with my depression. Every day there was gym or ti chi and I always attended these because physical activity always makes me feel happy. There was one group a day but it was centered on rehab issues so I didn’t go. The whole day in the hospital was basically centered on the meals and people in general ate a lot.
I spent most of my time hanging out with the Latino women in the hospital . There was extremely bright and cheerful Peruvian woman named Amelia, a Dominican woman named Victoria who was very friendly and a very motherly Dominican woman named Maria. They all basically took me under their wings and we would spend time talking, laughing, and playing cards. Being with them gave me a chance to practice my Spanish and it made it a lot easier to go through this difficult situation when I had such friendly people around me.
Occasionally people got volatile in the hospital. There was an elderly black man who would go on biblical and islamophobicrants and one time there was a fight. The mental hospital was a place where people were dealing with a variety of conditions from depression to paranoid schizophrenia and it made sense that some people just cannot handle it all the time. I made friends with a young pregnant black girl who heard voices and sometimes would freak out but at heart she was very kind and intelligent.
Almost every day I was able to see the doctor and she had made the suggestion that it might be possible to be referred to some kind of housing from the mental hospital. The meds had been working and I figured if I could find a place in NYC and be around my friends that I would be pretty ok. It took me almost 4 days to see a social worker and when I finally spoke to her she informed me that the only thing that the hospital could do was refer me to Bellevue homeless shelter. Two years before she said it would be possible to refer me to an organization that could find me housing but the laws had changed since then and now that is impossible. Bellevue homeless shelter has a very bad reputation and as a person with a disability I didn't think it would be the most healthy environment for me.
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