“Gratitude in Darkness,” A Memoir by Dustin Pickering, serialized in Himalaya Diary

Gratitude in Darkness

A Memoir by Dustin Pickering

“Life wasn’t worth the balance
Or the crumpled paper it was written on.” – David Bowie

“Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”  –Psalm 82:3

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, schizoaffective disorder affects roughly .03 percent of the American population. That is, 3 of 1000 people suffer from this illness. When I was a teenager I was misdiagnosed as bipolar, another horrendous and destabilizing illness. However, time dictated that I would be diagnosed with schizoaffective illness.

The symptoms include thought disturbances such as hallucinations and visions, as well as mood fluctuations. As a kid I had a lot of trouble sticking to things because my moods were erratic and unstable. However I was drawn to reading and writing as a child. I wrote stories that impressed my teachers as early as nine years old. I was tutored young by a woman in Mississippi because I came from a troubled background of divorced parents, death and loss, and abandonment and neglect. The chancery courts of Mississippi decided my mother was unfit and my father could not afford to take custody. I arrived at my great grandparents’ home after my mother fled father to a boyfriend. I was malnourished according my grandmother, and there were tranquilizers in my things because I was supposedly a noisy child. My mother tells me I was a quiet baby, rarely even talked. When I met her again at age 30, she informed me that what had been called a kidnapping attempt on her part was a miscommunication of some kind. My aunt tells me there were two attempts at kidnapping after she lost custody: one in the driveway when my dad’s feet prevented my small body from being thrust into mom’s car, and the second at a Pizza Hut where a getaway vehicle was seen. The story in my family goes that my mom planned to kidnap me but police presence deterred her. The police were there specifically to prevent my mom from taking me.

Her mother was killed by a drunk driver before I was two years old. Her friend told me that my grandmother had a dream about me before she died. She held me in her arms and a dark presence she could not explain robbed her of me. She was helpless to do anything. This strange dream was strangely prescient for the death that my grandmother suffered two weeks or so later.

This early stigma led me to isolate. I tested as a genius at a young age on two separate occasions. I enjoyed collecting fossils on the playground before I was even school age.

This did not prevent nor protect me from bullying by others. Teachers often turned away instead of promoting my safety. In third grade my grandmother pulled me off the playground because I was being bullied and the teacher in charge ignored my plea for protection. I was targeted for being the odd kid who read and had the answers in class. I sometimes abused the peer program that was in place: when one child caused disruption, the entire classroom was penalized. I caused disturbances to penalize my peers who made fun of me.

All these events foreshadowed my descent into long-term illness. After graduating high school, I became immensely sick. I destroyed the television I won at Project Grad. I smashed the acoustic guitar I owned for several years as moods became darker and paranoid. I thought the guitar was embodied by the spirit of my lost love’s soulmate. Voices plagued me and I developed a perverse attitude. I was hospitalized in a state facility and put on disability.

Before I was hospitalized, I was instructed by a voice in my head to read the entirety of Shakespeare within two weeks. I was also expected to read the New Testament within 24 hours. This delusion invaded me. I thought I had caused the suffering and damnation of the world by signing satanic contracts. If I completed these reading assignments, the contracts would be cancelled. This imposed a heavy burden on me. I was not able to read all of Shakespeare, but completed half of his works in one week: three plays a day. I not only had to read but had to comprehend the works. At one point I was expected to memorize the Unabomber’s manifesto. I thought I was going to spend my entire life memorizing and reading books.

I dropped out of college after failing remedial math three times. I acted in a way that frightened my grandmother and aunt.

Over the years following I became friendly with the voice which changed tone and character. It began as a human whose telepathy connected us. He was the one who tricked me into signing the contracts, and also had been my worst bully in junior high. We fought on the bus and I lost, but was given a citation for starting a fight by the police. This humiliation must have strained me.

We are all heroes of our own story according to many prominent thinkers. If we can’t view ourselves as developing character through failures leading to a positive goal, we might perish of heartache.

The bullying and abuse I encountered throughout my schooling years strengthened my love for literature. The voice I heard eventually became Satan himself, possibly as a reaction to my deep reading of Paradise Lost. However, one evening I felt all the injustice was enough. I demanded “Satan” to let me speak to God about what I faced.

The voice then announced it was God, to my surprise. I confronted it.

After years of toxic engagement, the voice cradled up to reveal it believed it was doing me a favor by driving me so insane that I destroyed my CD players, music equipment, and threw away many possessions. My deep involvement with listening to music was probably too much of a distraction. Hearing music often gave me chills and goosebumps; it also tore me from the real world where I could not get what I expected and was the victim of injustice.

I won’t cry that I am a victim, but growing up had its pitfalls.

Suffering abuse at my stepmom’s hands tarnished the innocence of my pre-puberty years, leading me toward anger and frustration at the cost of friendships and my reputation among peers. I was twelve years old when she forced me to drink dishwashing liquid for talking to myself and physically beat me for crying. She also made a great effort to keep my legal guardians, grandmother and aunt, distant so they would not know I was not being taken to church as they requested. I was sent to a Catholic school where kids picked on me worse than I had been picked on before that period. They humiliated me, pushed me around, and on top of that I was not given lunch money at times so I went hungry until evening. My stepmom did her best to cover her tracks, of course. When I announced on social media she had physically and emotionally harmed me, she told me to shutup. My grandmother told me to keep quiet about it as well because she did not want to upset my father, her son. My grandmother was a giving and kind woman, but she did not want to stir more turmoil for us. My father, ultimately a stubborn man, said he could never get anything across to her. He said this after her death. They fought bitterly Christmas Eve my twelfth year before my guardians took me back home to Texas. I was not there, but my aunt says it was a difficult and emotional argument to witness. I was malnourished, scared, and would not answer if I wanted to return with them or not. My diffidence led my aunt and grandmother to take me home with them, and we drove across to Texas from Florida on Christmas Day with nothing to eat.

This event precipitated my anger and hostilities toward everything later in life. I sunk into depressions and did not seek affections.

When I finally felt that my dreams were attainable, it was the ruse of a voice in my head that tormented me continuously. My conservative family was not prepared for my destructive behaviors following my teens.

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These behaviors took the form of destroying my own property, vandalizing college campus, shoplifting, and a suicide attempt or two. The voice, echoing a kid who threatened to stab me in high school while we argued outside, told me to stab my hand if I loved the woman I obsessed over at the time. This was after graduation. I stabbed my hand with a paring knife. A few years later, I sliced open my hand with a steak knife for no reason, claiming it was for love. These self destructive behaviors echoed my early near-death experiences as a child when I drowned. My aunt resuscitated me after I jumped on the wrong end of the swimming pool. When I came to my first sentence was, “What took you so long?” I was also almost hit by a truck on my walk to school when I ran in front of it. The act was due to a dare, but I claimed the truck resembled my father’s black truck.

When I was eight, he drove me across several states in the back of that truck. I was dissatisfied with my relationship with him in general, and running in front of the vehicle must have satisfied some perverse urge for self annihilation buried within me. I blamed myself as a child of divorce and rejected youth. Although Christmas that year was kind, bringing wonderful gifts, my stepmom ruined it by making me swallow mouthwash while she clawed my face with her press-on nails. I cheerfully agreed to sit in the back of the truck while the heat and wind bore down on me. My father told me the wind and sun might be too much, so he left a blanket and goodies in the back with me. These tokens of love only solidified my self-sabotage.

My aunt and grandmother were appalled that I was intensely sunburned when they met with me again. My stepmom quipped, “I’m just glad he is with you now instead of us.”

At any rate, as a child I was batted around relentlessly until finally settling with my guardians, grandmother and aunt. My mental health was fine until the truck incident when my science teacher insisted I see a psychologist for the “suicide attempt.” It was my own risky and attention seeking behavior that put me under analysis. The psychologist decided I had ADD because I had trouble with a lot of my studies. Grades didn’t suffer but I was easily bored. I caused my teachers immeasurable frustration. I had toys and cards confiscated by them, only to sneak into the classroom unsupervised and steal them back. My psychologist put me on Ritalin which made me delusional and hyperactive. I was taken off the drug and asked to lessen my intake of red coloring in foods and drinks because it made me hyperactive. My fifth grade teacher disciplined me frequently, but she was kind enough to allow me to win first place in a regional poetry contest sponsored by the Sisters and Daughters of Charity. Well, she didn’t tell the principal how much trouble I caused her so the award was not rescinded. I suspect the principal might have disqualified me if I she had known of my sneaky habits.

These events are the dark road that is my life. The voices that developed in my late teens tormented me until reading quieted them. I read Pablo Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses three times, all of James Joyce, D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and the list goes on, all from boredom and to silence the voices that tormented.

It is not coincidence that my literary journal, Harbinger Asylum, bore the name it did. Transcendent Zero Press was an offshoot of a band name that never took off. I designed its logo at age 15 to resemble the letter ‘T’ and a zero, granting the symbol mystical connotations through Jung only later. As this literary project gathered world respect, I felt that I was vindicated of the patterns of abuse and neglect I suffered.

Gratitude in Darkness is a serialized memoir of a poet’s troubled childhood and mental health struggles. 

Bio of the Writer:

Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, and several other publications. He was given the honor Knight of World Peace by the World Institute for Peace in 2022. He hosts the popular interview series World Inkers Network on YouTube. He is author of the poetry collections Salt and Sorrow, Knows No End, The Alderman, Only and Again, The Nothing Epistle, The Stone and the Square, and several others, as well as the novella Be Not Afraid of What You May Find. His most recent poetry collection Crime of the Extraordinary resonates with themes of guilt culled from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Himalaya Diary urges the readers to check out the new book of poems titled “CRIME OF THE EXTRA-ORDINARY” by Dustin Pickering. Here is the amazon India link: amazon.in/dp/8119858956

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