One of Showaye Selassie's earliest memories of her mother involves a puppet and Chef Boyardee.
It was Selassie's fifth birthday, and her mom had made a can of ravioli — Selassie's favorite meal.
"I went to stick my finger in to get the little gooey bits of ravioli from the inside of the can, and I cut myself," Selassie says.
Her mom went into the kitchen to get a rag to clean the cut, but instead of bringing back the rag, her mom reached around the kitchen wall with a yellow bunny rabbit puppet.
Selassie was laughing so hard she forgot she had cut herself. "I loved it," she says.
Selassie, now 28, tells her friend, Susan Greenfield, that her mother is one of the most interesting people she will ever meet.
"She was a paranoid schizophrenic," Selassie says. "She thought that people were trying to poison us, kidnap us."
She says that when her mom dropped her off at school, her mom would often wait outside.
"So I was able to look out the window and see my mother," Selassie says. "The kids would kind of make fun of me."
And eventually her mom got worse, Selassie says. "She ended up locking me in my room."
But Greenfield notes that those events have not hindered Selassie. "You're not the kind of person who someone meets and goes, 'Oh my God, what a life she had,'" Greenfield tells her friend.
Selassie is still anxious when she meets new people, though. "Because I'm always wondering ... are they wondering if something's wrong."
Selassie says she's read a lot of articles on mental illness because she is worried that it is something that could happen to her at any time. That it could just "fall out of the sky," she says.
But her life could have been much worse, she says. "I could have had a parent that didn't care about me."
Produced for Morning Edition by Nadia Reiman. The Senior Producer for StoryCorps is Michael Garofalo.
from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131063265&sc=fb&cc=fp
Maybe this is the psychology major in me coming out, but I thought this article was very interesting. Living with people who have mental illnesses can be a very challenging thing and it definitely affects the life that you live, even if it doesn't show it to the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteThere was one line in particular in here that stuck out. It was Greenfield stating about Selassie that she's not the type of person one meets and automatically thinks she's had a hard life. This reminded me of our guest speaker at the beginning of the semester who talked about the 7-11 rule (within 7 seconds of meeting a person you create 11 beliefs about them and the life that they lead). You never know what struggles a person has had or of what they are going through. We all need to go through life with an open mind, stop this prejudging and be willing to really get to know people, not just make assumptions that fit our stereotypes.