I recently re-watched Star Trek, The Next Generation episode "Tapestry"

[hunter]

2. If only I knew how Hunter's quit-his-meds, or faded-meds, learned to cultivate social safety nets.

My very worst self is an extremely paranoid and very very invisible human, dumpster diving, living in my dead car in a church parking lot, or the garden shed of a very messed up, maybe worse than me, Vietnam war vet. (He once handed me a gun to hunt the possums in his attic. Nope, no Gary, I'm not your guy. Never shot a possum, never will.)

"But they are pooping up there!"

He really couldn't accept that they were pooping up there. In his attic.

My wife didn't quit me when I jumped out of her car, same spot a few years later in Berkeley, stopped at the traffic light. We were having a minor newlywed tiff, nothing that warranted my behavior. I ran away, and walked near an hour up into the Oakland hills where her sister lived, and where my wife had landed. I begged forgiveness from all, which was miraculously accepted.

My next visit to that spot, years later, was with a friend.

I threw up out the window of his rented car.



He dropped me off back at his hotel room to crash. He was in California recovering from an ugly divorce, not of his making, his wife had run off with her successful businessman boss who was not some perpetually impoverished science and science educator dude, and my friend had just met a woman he could do science with in Alaska, and I'd met her and offered whatever blessings mine were worth.

No, I'm not quite ready to tell my 2016 locked-psych-ward-story yet, something to do with fading meds (ah, the merry-go-round, sometimes meds stop working and your doctor retires, maybe because he's worn out by difficult non-complaint patients like you) but I've never ever been a danger to others. (

Not like a Wild West grandma and great grandma who flamed out of this world as Berserker dangers to others, as well as themselves.

Those times I'm a very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing, I always do my best to apologize.

Maybe forgiveness, that's the secret.

Or maybe my stories are why I got booted out of my last group therapy, and maybe even the psych ward.

My newest meds, and the stories, they keep me sane.