Tag Archives: anxiety attacks

my fosters and one among many reasons i’m going to hell

after i got out of juvie when i was fifteen, i was sent to an emergency foster home in downers grove.  emergency meant i could only stay for three months.  but i needed someplace stable so i could go to college.  i’m not sure why i was trusted with finding a family.

this is denise.  she was my roommate at the emergency group home in downers grove.  many years later, i’d be at a diner and she was my waitress.  it was awkward.

i went to north philadelphia to meet with gwen, whose family i lived with for close to three years after the emergency foster home.   gwen has not seen her daughter in ten years but is negotiating a reconciliation and while gwen is supported by social security disability for the rest of her life because the lid of the trunk of the car she drove smashed down on her back, she works at creating a comic book adventuress jenny everywhere who can be seen at

http://quarktime.net/

this is holly.  for hours every day, she rocked in a chair placed directly in front of the speakers while listening to peter frampton’s first record.  she lived in the bedroom across the hall from me and denise.  i can’t stand peter frampton.

gwen and her partner maggie had similar life trajectories and the two of them connected on facebook in the mideighties.  you say facebook wasn’t invented yet?  ha!

we had dinner at their favorite chinese restaurant and the evening was over before i was able to accomplish what i had come to do:

okay, post ativan:


good morning, new york!

on december 30, 2010 a lot of people were making new year’s resolutions. me, too! mine in previous years have generally included losing weight and not drinking and getting better organized. this year, i decided i would meet every facebook friend i have. at the time it was a little more than three hundred.

i work at home, my kids are out of the house. i’ve always had trouble with strange and unfamiliar places. always had trouble with anxiety attacks, particularly when i’m away from home. i would probably turn out to be a gal with sixteen cats and nobody finds my body until three weeks after i’m dead.

i picked meeting my facebook friends because it was a big enough project that it seems impossible (and believe me, every morning i wake up and think this is impossible) and because it would be a public humiliation to give up. i’m meeting facebook friend number 58 john r. douglas later this morning. i’m in new york. i’m doing it. but i can’t say i’m doing it very well.

some of you who have read this blog remember that my trip to tallahassee to visit my father justin (who is f2fb #30) was a disaster because he suffered from a prescription drug induced psychosis. i had to cancel seeing jonathan boyd, dale morgan, sarah loeffel roberts, and sammie scruggs in order to try to care for him. f2fb#32 reggie came and stayed at my father’s apartment to help. at the end, as i was leaving for the airport my father’s paranoia turned towards me. he attacked, i fled, and hours later he was institutionalized for four days.


i will be very happy to be at home soon. i will feel safer. don’t get me wrong. new yorkers are fun. new york friends are great. but i’m wickedly nervous. maybe some coffee at cafe europa will help.

i have been so lucky to get messages, notes, posts, emails, phone calls from friends this week–i really couldn’t do this at all on my own.