03/30/2012 In Podcast Episodes
Meghan P.
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Paul: Welcome to episode #54 with my guest Meghan P. I’m Paul Gilmartin and this is The Mental Illness Happy Hour, an hour of honesty about all the battles in our heads. From medically diagnosed conditions to everyday compulsive negative thinking. Feelings of dissatisfaction, disconnection, inadequacy, and that vague sinking feeling that the world is passing us by. You give us an hour, we’ll give you a hot ladle of awkward and icky. This show is not meant to be a substitute for professional mental advice. It’s not the doctors office, it’s more like a waiting room that hopefully doesn’t suck.
As I’ve mentioned before the website for this show is mentalpod.com. There is something there on the website that I would really love for you guys to go do, and that’s to sign-up for the newsletter. If you just scroll down a little bit on that homepage, kind of on the right, you’ll see a little type that says newsletter, so just click on that and then you can sign-up, and then I can send you blogs that I find interesting, pictures of me in one-piece bathing suits, lottery numbers for the day. No seriously, I will be judicious in what, in what I send out regarding the newsletter. But should there be, performances or anything like that, maybe I’ll put those in there. And you can, when you sign up for the newsletter, you can select the box for what you want to be informed on, and one of those boxes is not peace in the Middle East, so don’t worry, so don’t worry about that. What did I want to tell you....Oh lots of other good stuff at the website, you can go to the forum, you can buy a t-shirt, you can read blogs by myself and other people. Is it by me, or by myself? I don’t know, it’s my fucking show, I’ll say whatever I want. It’s by me, myself and I.
I would like to read a letter that I got from a young woman who calls herself J.W. and I just got this, this email today, and by the way if you ever want to email me, you can do it through the website or you can email me directly. That email address is mentalpod@gmail.com. And J.W. writes, “I am alone and didn’t know what to do. I can barely breath. I’m writing this to you on the bus ride home from college on my phone. I’m having a panic/anxiety attack and I’m trying to conceal it. The reaction on people’s faces are all the same when they glance over at me and see the tears streaming down my face. Why did I wear so much makeup today? At least it got me a seat on the bus. It’s only 1:30pm and I’m already cursing the time-space continuum. At this point I don’t think I will make it through the day. I fought so hard yesterday, so hard to make it to today. And with success, I wonder ‘what the fuck for’? I tried so hard to get me here. I want to break through the glass window and dive into the four lanes of highway I’m on. I want to be destroyed. I want to hurt so I won’t feel the thoughts going on in my head. I can’t do this today. I can’t handle my own head. Why was it given to me and why can’t I stop crying? People have stopped staring, but I have another bus to transfer onto. The only place I have left to go to today is home and that will destroy me further. I hate it there and I hate me and that’s all there is for me for the rest of the day. Someone help me. The only one I had took a bus in the opposite direction. I am alone again. I can’t stand it. My heart hurts. Maybe, maybe it won’t if it stops beating.”
And I sent J.W. an email back, basically saying that, basically encouraging her to get help. And saying that I have experienced similar situations in my life where I’m just crying for no reason. And this was before I ever got help and I tried to let her know that what she’s experiencing is not reality and that she can not solve this problem by herself and she needs to seek help.
And, she wrote me back and she said, “Thank you so much for reading my email, let alone responding to it. I’ve never emailed someone randomly like that, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from it if anything. I haven’t been able to find help. I know I need to find someone, but I can’t yet. I want to book an appointment with a counselor at my college, but I graduate in less than four weeks, so their services will be cut off to me once that happens. I can’t let myself invest my emotions to someone who will in a sense leave me in a few weeks. I was seeing a psychiatrist for a little bit, a couple months ago and he was no help unfortunately. So I think what I need is a psychologist? I’m hoping to figure it all out once school is no longer in my way. If I can make it that long. Now that I can finally admit that there is something wrong with me, but you are right, I can’t do it alone. I need help. I just don’t know when I’ll get it. Thank you for helping me feel a little less alone and reassuring me that what I’m feeling right now is not reality. Thank you for wanting to share my email on your show. I was surprised to hear that and honored if you did. Thank you again so much.”
You know I don’t think anybody hearing her letter can honestly say to themselves, ‘I’m proud to live in a country where our children are riding around on buses having mental breakdowns, and there is no place that they can just walk into that will help them’. It is so complicated and expensive, that that young woman has to go through that. I don’t know what the answer is but it’s broken if you ask me.
Alright, I have one more email that I want to read to you guys. This comes from a woman who refers to herself as ‘this woman’. “Paul, I have listened to all you podcasts. At times I talk to you, not always politely, telling you to shut up, listen, or stop talking about yourself. I’m not proud of that, but it drives me crazy sometimes. Learn to be comfortable with the moments of silence in your interview. That’s when people are thinking, remembering and gathering their thoughts for what to say next. Let them breath. Try not to disrespect guests by putting words or ideas in their mouths or always presuming that you know just how they feel because it happened to you. The show is not all about you. Maybe at the beginning, but by now, well, oh boy. I’m not saying never to empathize, but you’ve heard this from other people too, so you know what I mean.”
I swear to god, not 24 hours before I got that email from that woman, I got this from a woman named Kristen. For some reason, women seem to be writing me more than men these days. Kristen wrote, “I wanted to ask you Paul since you’ve been creating these podcasts, do you feel like you’re making progress or do you feel like it’s more of a relief? I wondered where you were along in your process because it’s hard to gauge since you don’t talk much about yourself. It’s just me being inquisitive about the interviewer behind the mic. I understand if you don’t wish to answer, I just get the feeling through the words that you still sound kind of raw. I heard you mention the regret that you have with your father’s passing. I hope you’ve found a bit of peace with that. Relationships with parents are so difficult and I understand the infinite sadness that you seem to feel.”
Well for one I didn’t know that I, that I come across as infinitely sad. But, you know, I don’t know what to say between these two emails. I think maybe the only solution is, is Kristen, I’m just gonna give you that woman’s email address and have her fill you in.
Intro Theme
Paul: I’m here with Meghan Parkansky. I’m pronouncing that correctly?
Meghan: Yes.
Paul: And, I met Meghan, she has emailed me and you had just moved to Southern California and I guess this is about a month and a half ago. Or you were actually getting ready to move to Southern California, I guess I can’t remember which was it—
Meghan: I had arrived here already—
Paul: You had arrived here already. From Wisconsin and why don’t you, why don’t you tell the story about how we met.
Meghan: Sure. Well basically I had listened to your show for a while and being somebody who has some issues, you know, I became a fan of it, and there was a really intense bout in my past of social anxiety and I had a schizophrenic breakdown and really serious stuff that I don’t share with anybody ever, and you know, I hear all different kinds of stories on your show that just blow my mind. And you know like I was saying, Steve’s podcast, Steve Agee, is that how it’s pronounced?
Paul: Yeah, Steve Agee.
Meghan: Steve Agee, you know when I was listening to his podcast about how he just would just be in his room hermiting for months at a time and there was one person that was so I can’t believe that people live like that. And then, I look at myself, and I’m like, ‘wow I live like that’. Let’s rewind five years ago, I was in a terrible terrible place, so to me, I thought that I had a personal story that maybe wasn’t explored on the podcast that I had listened to so I contacted you and decided that I wanted to talk about me.
Paul: Yeah. And I’m glad you did, we met and we had coffee. And you told me a little bit about yourself and your story and you seemed safe, you didn’t seem creepy—
Meghan: Yeah, nope.
Paul: And, so, here we are. And you moved to Southern California a couple of months ago, and we won't get into the specifics of the drama you’re going through ‘cause it’s kind of long and involved, but let’s just say you’re having the typical trial by fire that every person has that moves to Southern California.
Meghan: It’s the kind of story where you hear a lot of warnings about how people are—
Paul: Especially on Craigslist. Roommates et cetera et cetera.
Meghan: Yeah. Do not go to the roomshare section of Craigslist please. Or if you do, try your best to not go to the cheapest ones that are in there in the more shadier areas. But just don’t go on there, I don’t know. It didn’t turn out very well, but it was one of those things where, no I didn’t ask for the bad experience, but at the same time I just kind of left for Los Angeles with two grand in my pocket and said, ‘here, let’s just live life now’, so I can’t be surprised or, still feel kind of responsible.
Paul: Well I would imagine Meghan that you’re a nice girl from Wisconsin, you have a vulnerable quality about you. You’re kind of shy, you’re not imposing, and I would imagine for somebody who, is—
Meghan: Has that radar.
Paul: Yeah, has that radar. Who is not afraid or who relishes manipulating people, you’re a probably a prime target. I’m sure you walk in the door and somebody’s like, ‘oh, nice polite girl from Wisconsin, kind of shy, kind of reserved. I’ll be able to get a couple hundred dollars out of her’. You know, so, it, it, and I’m certainly not blaming, placing the blame on you, but you had a couple of instances back to back where is happened and—
Meghan: I just need to be a rock hard bitch from now on. I think I need to carry a facade around with me.
Paul: Well let’s talk about your story, where would you like to begin? You know, one of the things I like to ask my guests when they come on is to think of some seminal moments in their life that were especially painful, embarrassing, or transformative.
Meghan: Sure, I grew up in a very small town of 500 people and just the environment that I grew up in and leaving that environment was a, you know, the environment kind of asked for me to never expand, you know. In any way, culturally, diversity, I, my best friend, my best friend to this day is someone who I went to kindergarten with, and there is never any instances when you live in such a small town, go to a class where there is only 50 people, to meet new people, to experience what the socialization process is and, I mean, you walk down my street and you wave to cars, you don’t know the person—
Paul: I love that.
Meghan: Just a car drives, like, and then when I go through those times. I’ve been moved out of my small hometown for you know, at least seven or eight years now, so when I go through these small towns and I get these waves, I’m like, ‘huh? Okay, that is weird’. ‘Cause, but you don’t think about it, because they’re in my home so I’m going to wave to them. So when you move to Milwaukee and you do that, you get weird looks. You don’t wonder why—
Paul: They think you’re a hooker.
Meghan: Oh! Do you think?
Paul: No, no.
Meghan: Maybe.
Paul: No, I’m sure they see the way you’re dressed and go, you know what, hookers don’t wear flannel shirts.
Meghan: Right, true. So, well, anyways, leaving that—
Paul: And you were popular in your small hometown.
Meghan: I was.
Paul: That was one of the things that struck me about your email to me was you had described that you felt a part of in your hometown, and then you moved to Milwaukee and that’s when the anxiety.
Meghan: Right, it was definitely a story of big fish in a small pond, and then that big fish isn’t a big fish anymore in such a large pond. If you would ask anybody in my high school, ‘who was the most outgoing person?’, you know, it was myself. I talked to anybody, I approached anybody, the most social human being on the planet. And the president of my senior class, everything like that and then, but there was no, I mean, it was, I was growing up with everybody, I knew they knew me. There was this huge disconnect between small towns and the real world. So when I moved to Milwaukee for college it was a large city and, this is the part that becomes hard to explain because I don’t know when I realized or started to feel the actual anxiety, I just know there were long bouts of me just being alone. I smoked pot and stuff.
Paul: When did you start smoking pot?
Meghan: Um, in highschool I started, but always socially. When I went to college I never made an effort to reach out to make any friends. I didn’t live in the dorms, I moved into an apartment with somebody, so there wasn’t that—
Paul: So you’re kind of isolated to begin with, as opposed to living in a dormitory.
Meghan: Right, yes and the—
Paul: And smoking weed is certainly not a social lubricant. Most people get high and you just want to be alone with your own thoughts. And you get a little paranoid.
Meghan: Right, I felt real happy, but I see now that that probably disconnected me. It didn’t allow the connections to be made with, ‘I’m getting depressed’, plus the fact that I had never felt a depression before. So when, when it started happening, it was just something that the lines start to blur and you don’t really know when things went totally south but you know, in a span of a year or two I just made no effort to make any friends. My living situation growing up was, because we were from such a small school, and because the town was so small, the kids that went to school there, came from 20 miles away to us, and I was one of the few of my friends that actually came from the town where the school was. So I would have friends stopping over all the time. I never had to you know, reach out, people would just show up and we would hang out, but outsiders looking in I always had, very intense emotional friendships for me. And that’s actually something very common that I’ve heard that you have this friend in high school before you know anything, where you’re just very emotional with, and you know, you just love, but it’s not sexual. I really honestly never had a sexual thought about a girl until I was 20, I think. Not, not even fantasized, nothing like that.
Paul: Really?
Meghan: 100 percent, but I didn’t have any interest in the penis either. I was just living life, I don’t know, my questioning, my, first came, ‘why don’t I look, sound like everybody else?’. Because you know, you look around and girls care about what their hair looks like and, ‘oh my god, this guy’ and my girlfriends, my friends you know, start to get boyfriends, and like, things just start becoming a little like, ‘where do I fit in here? I don’t want a boyfriend’, and I don’t want to dress in dresses, I never have. But, growing up, that wasn’t something that registered being me not thinking self-consciously at all, and then there came this time where I looked around and I was like, ‘okay, none of the girls are like me, I don’t know who I am’, and that led to a pretty surreal identity crisis. I tried to dress more feminine, like I basically would just go to stores and look at what the mannequins had on and was like, ‘well, that can’t be wrong’. So I wore that, and I was just really really confused, and the confusion came first still with no thoughts of lesbianism. My friends that I had gotten close to, you know, my best friends, they would get boyfriends and I was just get insanely jealous not because I had the thought in my head like, ‘that’s my girl’, but I did have this more naive like, ‘it was supposed to be you and me’, like, ‘what’s up with this? And now you’re hanging out with him more and now what am I supposed to do?’. And I just realized that the companionship that women was just something that I always wanted to be a part of me. And it was a big part of me, and so when I had, you know, gone into this depression because I had moved several times for a few reasons, partially because I did want to switch majors, but anyways, the combination of switching schools and the combination of just going some, I always was moving somewhere else thinking, ‘okay, I’m moving away from that so now it’s going to get better’. It was just running away, I’m running away from that situation I know, but I can’t run away from my fucking lesbo self. So, I was just lesbian me thinking, ‘I don’t know what I need, but I’m going to go somewhere else to get it’, and finally realizing that after, I had I moved to Milwaukee after high school, I moved to Oshkosh for school, moved to Green Bay because I was just depressed to the point where I was like, ‘I need family now’. And went to school there even though I had no idea what I was going to go there for. But that’s where my depression started getting bad enough that I was like I just need some love. You know, from people who love me—
Paul: You had family there?
Meghan: Yeah, my brother lived there and we shared a duplex so, but even then you know, it was not good and that’s when I was like, ‘okay, why is this not good?’, and it just kind of clicked and I was in denial about it, you know, I’d look around my room and it’s all band t-shirts and jeans and you know, homages to Britney Spears. And I’m just like, ‘okay’, so I think what I did when I actually realized it was I wrote down, ‘I love’ this individual that was my best friend at the time who is still my best friend, and it’s platonic, nothing like that, but I wrote down, ‘I love’ you know, fill in the blank and it didn’t feel like a lie. And I was like, ‘well it’s not true, but it doesn’t feel like a lie for some reason’, so I kept writing it and writing it until I was like, ‘oh, great’, like ‘this is real’, and when I decided, ‘wow! Craigslist’. Oh man, no more Craigslist for me! ‘Cause that didn’t end up well either. But I found out about Craigslist ‘cause I had a friend in college who just adored used cars and went on it to find used cars and everything, so I learned about it two years prior, and I’m like, ‘what other resources do I have?’. I don’t want anyone else to know, I didn’t know anybody who was gay, never seen it, never heard it, it just wasn’t something that I felt like was a real thing, so—
Paul: And you were in Green Bay at this time?
Meghan: Yes, so I just—
Paul: You didn’t want to ask people at a Packers game, ‘hey are you a lesbian?’.
Meghan: Nah, no. ‘Pass the beer, do you want to make out?’—
Paul: ‘What are you doing at halftime?’—
Meghan: Right! ‘You want to be naughty with the cheese hat?’. No, nothing occurred to me, so I decided I would, which god bless the internet for that, because even though inevitably I meet up with a crazy I guess, but at least it’s an outlet where people can go to and you know, secondary to finding a girl I looked online for some porn. I was like, ‘well, if I like girls I must like this’, and I think I did, I stuck with it so I think it’s something that I was like, ‘well I guess this makes sense too’. So anyways, I met someone on Craigslist. Basically said, ‘hey, I don’t know, but I think I know and do you want to meet? I just kind of want to kiss a girl’. Was really what it was, just to see. And it was a girl in Madison, so I, just about three and a half hours away, but distance doesn’t matter when you got nothing else to better do and you’re miserable and you’re really curious as to whether or not you’re a lesbian or not. So I basically drove there after having conversations on the phone with her for a while. It wasn’t long, it was probably a couple weeks. But, we talked everyday and it was a very hard drive there, I was gonna turn around—
Paul: It had to be nerve racking.
Meghan: Yeah, it, I feel what I was feeling right now thinking about it actually, it isn’t a good feeling.
Paul: Can you describe that, what you’re feeling?
Meghan: Nope. Just fucking freaked out.
Paul: Was there shame involved or was it anxiety or both?
Meghan: Yeah. It was basically like someone was shuffling you into a room where possibly your worst nightmare was. And you had, to just walk on in. And it—
Paul: Was there any anticipation that it was gonna be good?
Meghan: At that point I wasn’t feeling any positive feelings, I was just scared and trying to come up with excuses to not go. And she was just like, you know, ‘come’, and I stopped a few times on the way and, man, ugh, it’s making me feel all those ucky feelings again to talk about it. But, then when I got there—
Paul: But you don’t feel ucky about your sexuality now?
Meghan: No, no, but just the, that nervousness, makes me feel really uncomfortable.
Paul: I can’t imagine how stressful that has to be for somebody that is just discovering that they’re different from the rest of the population and people might hate you for what you are discovering. That has to be incredibly painful and frightening.
Meghan: Yeah, it’s weird to me to think about how scared I was what people might think because everyone in my life accepted it. But, in that moment, you’re just petrified.
Paul: You don’t know. And I have to tell you, and I’m sure the listener feels the same way too, is it’s like, I want, if I had a time machine I would go back and meet that you, and just give her a big hug, ‘cause—
Meghan: I wish you would have!
Paul: Because it’s so sweet the fact that you, that you, that your attraction to other women was, coming from the purest place, that you wanted companionship. You know, for most people their sexuality is just about genitals and you know, that’s what mine was like when my sexuality came out, and yours is just so much more dignified and pure and yet you had all this shame about it and it just kind of breaks my heart, in a lot of ways.
Meghan: I really wish that someone in my life, because there were a couple of people that said, ‘I think I had a feeling’, and I’m like, ‘then why didn’t you tell me! Do you know how long I suffered?!?’. I was tearing myself apart hours and hours, my life was miserable, if you would have just walked up to me and been like, ‘you like some chicks? I’ll find you some chicks’, like, ‘let’s go to a bar’. It would have been such a better experience, it was just that I didn’t know anybody. I just didn’t know anybody. I didn’t ever see a lesbian in real life, honest to god. It was, the route I was taking, I didn’t see that there was any other way to go about it.
Paul: So you meet this woman in Madison—
Meghan: And I kissed her it was like, ‘this is what it is’.
Paul: Wow. What did you feel?
Meghan: Amazing.
Paul: Yeah?
Meghan: Euphoria, awesome. Just like, I felt like I found the treasure that everyone else found before me, and I was like, ‘cause I mean you watch, you know I never had intimate feelings for guys before. And you watch all these love movies and they’re doing this passionately and it’s all like passionate and then you feel those feelings where you, are able to recognize it in what you’re feeling and realize that it’s real. So it was just, definitely one of the most euphoric moments I’ve ever had.
Paul: That’s beautiful. That’s so beautiful.
Meghan: Yeah...thanks.
Paul: I think about people that live in small towns that are never able to come out and that just, I feel so sorry for them.
Meghan: It’s sad.
Paul: It really is. And then when you see politicians making life even more difficult for them, it just, how does that not make you angry?
Meghan: I was recently talking to, my good friend I visited in Phoenix last weekend. She’s the you know, totally platonic love like a sister, but she’s the one who’s like, I love this person at the time, we were just so close. And we were talking and in high school, like I said, I would have these outrageous, jealous rampages and there was a band teacher who we kind of like, ‘yeah I think she gets it on with the softball coach’. Everyone who sees them objectively is like, ‘yeah’. I mean she’s never been married and they’re really close friends and they seem a little dykey and I’m like, wow, the one class where I just freaked out was in band class, where I slammed the cupboard shut and trophies poured from the top of the cupboard, and she just let me go upstairs and punch a punching bag, and I’m like, ‘she knew!’. Like she’s like, ‘that girl loves that girl. The poor thing’. Like I’m like so convinced that, ‘cause she never said a word who just let’s an individual freak out like that in her classroom, and is like, let’s that one go. I think she, I’m pretty sure we got, you wouldn’t imagine how many people, well the friend I visited in Phoenix has a girlfriend now, and it, my best friend from kindergarten is gay in Portland. There’s just tons of—
Paul: The woman that you were writing I love?
Meghan: Yep she’s in a great relationship. She found I think the perfect person for her. And she’s really happy and yeah, there’s just oodles of gays coming from our small town. It’s ridiculous that anybody should ever feel alone there because it’s just a breeding ground, the one of the guys, the gay guys that grew up in our town went on to own one of the most popular gay clubs in Green Bay. So, I mean, but the small town-ness ruins you because there is you don’t know your, the real world. Your world is who’s around you, and who’s around you is people who just make life miserable if you were to be yourself or—
Paul: There was homophobia in your small town?
Meghan: Oh yeah, for sure.
Paul: Which is not shocking in most small towns, most towns, you know. It’s that way.
Meghan: Yeah, it is sad.
Paul: So, so you had discovered that you were gay and you having this crippling social anxiety...
Meghan: At that point, the social anxiety, yeah—
Paul: Can you talk about the schizophrenic breakdown, or are we skipping something that that’s key?
Meghan: Um, well, the social anxiety came along at a time when I became more engrained in my lesbianism. I don’t know. I wish I could pinpoint it but it was so bad to the point where I would, you know, always hide from people. I would, I worked a couple of waitressing jobs and just got fired from them. Like I was so awkward. I was so awkward and I would, I had this waitressing job in Milwaukee where everybody in a group, you know, it was such a small kitchen, so when you were not serving tables you were in the kitchen, just like in this extremely close group of eight or nine other waitresses, and it was just mortifying that you know, I was just. Like, you wouldn’t recognize me anymore. I was just so scared. And when we went to wrap silverware downstairs, there were these shelves that had all the linens on it and stuff like that and everybody would sit in a group and talk and wrap silverware, and I would hide. I would like hide and take it behind you know the storage aisle, and like I’d hear them talk about me, and I just wouldn’t say anything. And they’d be like, ‘you know you can come, we don’t bite’, and I would just pretend that I wouldn’t hear them, just ‘cause like, it’s so crippling to the point where, it was physically impossible for me to be operating normally, it was weird.
Paul: Now when you would experience this, was there something in your head that you were forecasting would happen if you would interact with these people, or was it just a vague panic?
Meghan: It was, that if they say something to me, I won’t know what to say to them, and I’ll embarrass myself. Because that is pretty much what happened all the time. But—
Paul: Do you think that that’s you maybe being a little hard on yourself?—
Meghan: No—
Paul: You really were. Like what, can you give us an example?
Meghan: I don’t want to. It’s just embarrassing. I really was the most awkward—
Paul: Because I have the feeling it was so much less embarrassing than you think it is.
Meghan: No, no. No it’s not. Okay, I’ll try to think of, okay for instance, it’s hard to remember these things. It’s so, I was telling you at first the really anxious parts of my life everything was just, a blur. I guess the one I can think of is that there was this waitress who I had a crush on, and I was like fawning over, this is over when I thought I was straight, but looking back it’s like, ‘oh yeah I had a crush on her’, but she was trying to get to, everyone was trying to make me feel comfortable and I could tell that. And it was making me angry at myself and at them for trying to make me feel comfortable because I was just like, ‘can’t you see I’m just trying to be invisible. I just want to be here, I don’t want you to talk to me’, and I was getting to the point where I was projecting anger at other people just beucase they were there and I was so baffled at how they could just sit and talk to each other and be normal people—
Paul: Do you think you were jealous of their ability to socialize?
Meghan: Completely. But I couldn’t believe that, because that was nothing that I had felt before, because I was the person that was totally uninhibited, was self-conscious so—
Paul: In your small town.
Meghan: Yeah. So, I was like, ‘okay, this is crazy’, but I legitimately was just walking around pissed and jealous constantly. I was in a college area so you see people having fun all the time, and girls are...it’s just—
Paul: So what was the example?
Meghan: I was folding napkins and she came up behind me and she said something like, ‘you seem like the kind of girl that meditates, do you meditate?’, and I said, ‘I take naps, does a nap count?’.
Paul: What did you say?
Meghan: ‘I take naps, does naps count?’, but I said it so like, sparked up and stilted and who knows, and nothing ever came out of my mouth that made sense and I don’t know. Does that make sense?
Paul: Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like embarrassment, it just sounds like somebody that was just wound a little tight and had a little anxiety, but not like, you know, it’s not like you said, ‘no, do you ever think about cutting people’s heads off?’. You know, that would be like, something that you’d like to take back, you know?
Meghan: Alrighty, well I wasn’t—
Paul: I can think of 50 things probably that I’ve said in my life that are way worse than that.
Meghan: Well I mean, it was never dark but it was definitely weird. Like everybody was, I know, everyone was like, ‘she’s weird, she’s a weird girl, she’s a crazy girl’. And, so—
Paul: Let me share something, let me share something embarrassing with you that I said one time—
Meghan: Please do.
Paul: I had, was writing marketing copy for, do you remember The WB network when it launched?
Meghan: I do.
Paul: I was there when it initially formed, and there was like literally, it was so small there was maybe 20 employees at the whole network, and Jamie Keller, or was it Kellner? I can’t remember how it was pronounced, but he was the head of the whole network, and he was a really nice guy who wanted to kind of think outside the box, and so he would invite everybody to the staff meeting. Even the low level people like me, because he wanted input on you know, maybe some shows we could come up with. Or people we could try to, you know, get deals with, and and I so, and I had just moved to LA and at that point I so wanted to feel a part of show business and that was my first kind of forray into being a part of anything that had to do with television. So we’re sitting around this big conference table and he say’s you know, ‘who might some people be that we could maybe think about reaching out to?’. And there’s this silence and I’m like, ‘this is my chance’, and I go, ‘what’s Cher up to?’.
Meghan: What?
Paul: I swear to god.
Meghan: Were you serious?
Paul: I was. And instantly, two things crossed my mind. One, I hate myself. And two, I can’t wait to tell my friends this because they—
Meghan: They had to think you were joking though, right?
Paul: They didn’t. They didn’t. And it just, it’s one of those things, as soon as it came out of my mouth, I just cringed.
Meghan: Something I just thought about actually, when there’s people like, you or I, whom are obviously socially, and you didn’t mention you were socially uncomfortable, you kind of insinuated you were socially uncomfortable, at your job—
Paul: Oh yeah, yeah. I felt insecure. I felt like I wasn’t enough. One on one I was okay, but when I would get around the important people I would feel like I had to compensate.
Meghan: And did you, visually come off, like you think people noticed you kind of being, I don’t know, were you awkward or—
Paul: No, I don’t think so. I was, I felt 90 percent of the time I felt okay but when I would get around the people who could help my career like the head of the network, I would get into these fantasies about, so it was me trying to be, not, trying to not be myself. Trying to be special instead of just trying to be myself.
Meghan: That could have been a part, that could have been a part of what was going on with me I think, but it was to everybody everywhere. ‘Cause I lost who I was so I kind of just took remnants of who I thought I used to be and tried to put it out there when, in reality I just was not the same person anymore. So I was trying to compensate, come off as happy, like taking my memories of my behaviour and trying to, but it just didn’t work right, because I was just depressed as shit. But, I was just kind of wondering, what do you think is good advice for somebody, who, if you’re experiencing social anxiety seriously, do you just kind of—
Paul: Here’s the tip that, I read in a book, for some reason I don’t know why, but 20 years ago I decided to read a book that Barbara Walters wrote about how to talk to people. And there’s a tip I got out of it that I’ve used to more to this day than anything else. When I’m in a social situation and I feel that panic come up that I’m not gonna know what to say, I ask people about themselves. And they always, there is always something that they will say, that you can then ask another question about that, and then you just keep going—
Meghan: Work your way back into it.
Paul: And before you know it, the conversation is fairly natural and that, and you’ve broken the ice, and that, ‘cause I intensely dislike cocktail parties, and that, all of a sudden you’re standing with three people you don’t know and I just, ‘so what do you do for a living? Oh really? Do you, you know, what’s that?’. And you become genuinely interested in what that person is doing, and it just really really helped.
Meghan: I’ve found myself doing that now that, I should mention that I’m a normal person now—
Paul: You were always a normal person. You were always a normal person.
Meghan: If only we could take that time machine back to these times and just look at that little window, oh my goodness. But—
Paul: But don’t you think that pain is that you lived through and that anxiety makes it more satisfying that you’re more comfortable in your own skin?
Meghan: Yeah, absolutely.
Paul: Makes you appreciate it more?
Meghan: I wouldn’t take it back, which is again, cliche to say, but I think I grew character from it and getting out of it. Which will give me more than, you know, the lion’s share of my friends just went off to college and they found love, and they got that degree and they got their job and it’s way too normal. It’s way too normal. I wouldn’t know how to relate that much to somebody with that story, I like that I went through something that was something that made me gain perspective and kind of fell to the bottom and crawled to the top. Yeah. So—
Paul: Do you want to talk about the, schizophrenic break?
Meghan: Sure. When, and this ties in with my coming out, it happened the day I came out—
Paul: Wow.
Meghan: From, what I, to prepare for this—
Paul: Coming out to your parents or everybody?
Meghan: My parents. I had come out to certain friends at that time, before that time. My parents were kind of the big one.
Paul: And did you know what your parent’s opinion of gay people was?
Meghan: God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve.
Paul: Enough said.
Meghan: So, was my mom, and my dad, I don’t really know. He’s the, my dad’s a great guy and he’s the kind of guy that isn’t really strong minded in any direction. Definitely not a direction that would promote hate. So, I really didn’t know what to expect from him though because it was me—
Paul: Did you feel like your mom hated gays?
Meghan: No.
Paul: Okay.
Meghan: She just didn’t think that it was in the Christian way. So, I grew up Catholic. So my family is Catholic, still Catholic. My uncle is a priest. And so, to prepare for this I kind of wanted to look more into schizophrenic breakdowns because I did shortly thereafter to learn what the hell happened to me. But it was one of those things where I just can’t go back to it. Like it really makes me cringe to want to. It’s like looking at my credit score, I just don’t want to know. So I just decided, I’ll talk with you and hopefully it, you know, I can self analyze or whatever. But I had heard it can come from just, a deep depression combined with a big stressor can do it, so I’m assuming that’s what happened. But it’s the day I decided to come out. At this point I had moved back into my small town, because I you know, was depressed and again, another thing with the small towns, or maybe every town, I really don’t know at all, but the depression and the dealing with it and managing it and recognizing it, if you have parents, to expect them to be proactive about helping you. It’s a tall order if it’s not something again that is talked about a lot, something you don’t know a lot about. You know, my kid’s lying on the couch all day, not really wanting to move, probably they’re lazy—
Paul: You probably think they’re lazy, yeah. You think they’re directionless
Meghan: Right. Sure. Not just crazy sad, but it had gotten to the point where I was really depressed and just enough of the lies. I had broken up with my girlfriend from Madison, moved back from Madison to my small town, and after about four months, I was like, I kind of want to be back with this girl. And so we started getting in contact again, and then I was like, ‘you know what? If we’re gonna do this I wanna come out to my parents’. So that day I was going to come out, it kind of, I think I kind of eased into it. I talked to my friend Jake who came back from Washington DC—
Paul: How do you ease into it? Do you just say something like, ‘Melissa Etheridge is a real talent’—
Meghan: No, I mean, my I was easing into, I was slowly sliding down into this breakdown—
Paul: Oh! I thought you meant easing into coming out to your parents.
Meghan: No. I was pretty direct about that. But it was a process because even before I said the words, or no, oh, this is where it all gets fuzzy. Okay, I take that back. So I sit down, oh my god, my poor mom. She’s so ignorant. I sat her down, I said, ‘I need to tell you something, I’m gay’. She stood up, and looked at me with horror and said, ‘haven’t you ever thought about AIDS?’. So, that’s what she said, and that was, my dad was at work. And—
Paul: Was anything said after that?
Meghan: Um, I said, what do you say to that? I just sat there like, she’s like, ‘wait until your father finds out, blah blah blah’, but that’s why my mom, my mom overreacts. If I put a, you know, a toothpick dropping of water on that table there will be water everywhere.
Paul: I get you.
Meghan: So she was just, you know, freaking out. She was throwing up that night saying, ‘wait til your father comes home’—
Paul: She was throwing up?
Meghan: I heard her, and she doesn’t remember any of this. She says, in her story, she like took it pretty well. But, I pretty much clearly remember her asking me if I’ve thought about AIDS, which, I mean, I think from there I could have only said, ‘you’re right, I hadn’t, maybe I won’t go this route’. What do you say to that? She kind of just went off in her bedroom, blah blah blah. It was kind of just in my own, kind of just in my room. And texting, you know my, well, who I wanted to be my girlfriend saying, ‘I did it’, and this and that. And then heard her puking in the toilet as I walked out to the kitchen. Heard her crying at night. And that’s when I started freaking out and that night was when something broke. It just literally, I felt something break.
Paul: Talk about that.
Meghan: I was, I was out in the area that I said was in the front of our house that was kind of our area. I was out on the couch there talking to my, who I wanted to be my girlfriend, on the phone, and she, we were just talking about what happened. And she just I don’t know, out of nowhere, I remember seeing a red flash in my head and I steel fan and I couldn’t get that out of my head, and that’s when I went for a walk. And I thought that I had all these paranoid thoughts. I thought that my friends were, like my friends from the past were following me or spying on me. I went back to my house and tried to go to sleep and had a huge, what I recognize now would have been a panic attack, but I didn’t know what it was at the time. Just like, throwing around furniture like, ‘I need to get out of here’ type of panic attack. I thought I heard my friends come in talking about me. I was hallucinating and didn’t get any sleep. I spent the whole night covered up on a couch, shivering, and with anxiety and just like holding my chest. I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t try to make anything out of it either. I was just like, it was happening to me, and I was just gonna live through it. I don’t know. It was weird how, I mean, who was I going to go to? I wasn’t going to go, ‘hey mom, there’s people walking around’. Like I don’t know, it’s weird. I was very very trapped so I just stirred in my own thoughts. I got on the phone with my friend who was in Washington DC at the time. I thought before I checked back with him, that he came back because I said I was going to come out and he was going to be there to support me. What he told me really happened was I called him that night, I said I thought he had HIV, and that he needed to come back.
Paul: So you really lost a grip on reality. How long did the, the—
Meghan: Was my grip lost?
Paul: Yeah.
Meghan: Um, I think I was unmedicated going crazy for a couple to a few days, definitely a couple days, and then I guess I was in a mental facility for a week.
Paul: Did you check in on your own or did your parents suggest you check in?
Meghan: At that, when it got, ah they just brought me there.
Paul: They knew something was wrong.
Meghan: Yeah, after a while because I started getting paranoid thoughts about the TV was talking about me. And I guess that’s a thing to differentiate between, are they talking about you or to you. Because to you, and like me interacting with it would be a different kind of crazy because I was always a differentiation they want to make. Like, ‘are they talking about you, or to you, or telling you to do things?’. I just was like watching Ellen, watching Family Feud, thinking that they hints were about, somehow I would twist the hints to be associated about me. And then it turned into I thought I was on a reality show. And then I thought that the government was after me, and everything was a hint. And then it turned into, all these hallucinations and these hints that the TV or music or things were giving me was a hint that would get me to get my girlfriend. Did that make sense?
Paul: You know, what, it doesn’t surprise me that, the human mind could do something extraordinary predictable when it’s confronted by your mother hearing what your, what the essence of you is, what’s important to you, what you want to be, and it makes her vomit.
Meghan: Yeah.
Paul: How could that not be like a lightening bolt of pain to any human mind? My very core, the more important thing that I’ve just discovered about myself, makes my mom wretch.
Meghan: I didn’t care actually. Because my, well, my mom is the type of person to say something like that, the HIV thing, so I already know, that it’s already going to be extreme, ‘I love you, when are you getting adopted kids?’. Or it’s going to be, it’s going to be an extreme in one way or another. I’m just so used to my mom, being over the top, and having overreactions that at the time I was like, ‘that didn’t go well’. But, I mean, it was enough to implant that I thought my friend had HIV randomly. And it just was two or three days—
Paul: Well I’m sure it’s, somehow related that your mom was worried about you getting AIDS and—
Meghan: 100 percent. 100 percent. And I tried to explain that to him at one point, it’s really hard to explain, ‘no, no, no, I thought you had HIV because my mom said aren’t you worried about HIV?’, and I mean, of course he was just like, ‘that makes sense’. He, yeah, it was just—
Paul: How long did it take your parents to become okay, they’re okay now with—
Meghan: Well my father then next day, he worked night shifts, so he came home at 4:30 in the morning, and I had to work in the morning, and when I went to work, my boss could see I was out of it. I went to work hallucinating and, okay this is hard to piece these things together. I know at one point I told her, you know, ‘I’m gay, I’m coming out to my parents, blah blah blah’. I cried, she hugged me. And she brought me to a therapist, and even though I was hallucinating, and things were really bad, when I went to see that therapist, I have at one point gotten records because if you go see a therapist you have to send the records out to someone else blah blah blah, and on his record it said nothing of like, ‘she’s totally out of it’. It was just like, ‘she’s just really depressed’. I’m like, ‘I was flipping nuts! I must just be like really good’. Like I don’t know, but she took me to a therapist and then I think asked me if I needed to inpatient. To a mental care facility and I believe I said yes and when we went there, I was like, ‘no’. So she took me to my parents house and sat with me to tell my dad. I was sitting there, Dad was sitting there, I couldn’t say it, so I wrote it. And I handed it to him and he said, ‘who cares?’. And gave me a hug, which is the best reaction you could ever ask for.
Paul: Wow. What did you feel when he gave you that hug?
Meghan: Well it, I was crazy at the time still. So it was hard to really take it in.
Paul: I see. You were numb, kind of.
Meghan: So, yeah. So, but it felt good. I felt like someone was on my side. And but continually I kept on hallucinating and kept on feeling you know, in my head. You know, I was on reality TV shows, the government was after me, this and that. So God was talking to me, and I even had the cliche attempted spiritual revival, I was like going to church. But just like going to the church. And—
Paul: Pray the gay away.
Meghan: I think, I don’t remember what I would experience in there, but I would remember I was just really angry. And I was like throwing bibles around. So, kind of an extreme visual now that I think about it. That I was in my small town chapel like throwing bibles across the room.
Paul: Doesn’t it kind of make sense, ‘cause that, your mom rejecting you, I’m sure you felt, came from what she had been told is right or wrong in church. I mean, that, the hell do I know, but that is the thought that strikes me.
Meghan: Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t think of that, I just thought, ‘I’m angry so I’m gonna throw stuff’ at the time—
Paul: I’m not a doctor, Meghan, but I am a hypochondriac. So, then did you go on medication for this?
Meghan: Okay, sure. The—
Paul: Well what is the next piece of—
Meghan: Well when I was inpatient-ed, they, I was on Geodon and Zyprexa which are anti-hallucinogenics. And I was in for a week, and the drugs weren’t helping. I mean they may have at the extreme point but I remember when I was let home, to keep taking them there, that they just kept me in a bad spot.
Paul: And the hallucinations were still there or the depression was still there?
Meghan: The hallucinations were there not as much. I think I just, I peaked at a point where I realized I wasn’t actually on a reality TV show. The government actually wasn’t after me—
Paul: They, the government was just gossiping about you now—
Meghan: Right, yes. It was a lot milder than I thought it was. And, I kind of, just came out of it. And realized, ‘wow, that all was not real’. It was about a month process, I guess. But I don’t, I only remember little clips. I don’t remember anything in the right order. And it’s just, you know, it would take a while to piece everything together. So much happened. So much bizarre behaviour, so many like, bizarre ways of thinking and so I just stopped taking the medications about four times, two or three days after I was let out of, let out of the mental facility. I’m just like, ‘these, no. I get it, there is no reality TV show. I get it, there is no, this or that’, and actually, before they had to put me in inpatient, they wanted to take blood from me to see if I was on drugs and take me to a hospital hospital. And I am deathly afraid of needles, so I was freaking out, they thought I was on drugs, so I got strapped down to a lovely gurney like, you know, feet and hands style, and got catheter-ed. And I remember in that moment, and there was a moment similar where, online where I was getting into learning about what had happened, where there is a moment where you think that if you do this simple action, or you know, whatever it is, that you die, or someone you love dies. This guy that I read about, he was in a large gymnasium and he was convinced that if he shut off the lights that he would be killing himself. And I had a similar thought process when I was lying there on the gurney, and catheter-ed—
Paul: Catheter-ed, you mean that there was a needle in your arm and it was—
Meghan: It was through my va-jay-jay. Like—
Paul: Why, why would they do that?
Meghan: I wouldn’t do the needle. I’m deathly afraid of needles. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t remember this part very well, I just know I was freaking out, they wanted to take blood, I wouldn’t let them, so they strapped me down and yeah. Ask them, I have no idea. But my parents came in afterwards and I felt like if I didn’t chose which one I loved more, that one of them was going to die. And I was convinced of this, and I remember just saying, ‘I love both you guys’. And then that was like the release and nothing happened, and then another thought about it. But I really thought in that moment, one like, ‘one of you’s going to die if I don’t say which one I love best’. I was convinced.
Paul: Wow. So which one died?
Meghan: Both of them. So, yeah, I don’t know, where do you want to go from here? I mean, there’s just a ton of bizarre stuff. Do you want to go into more of the bizarre situations or do you want to get through to the healing?
Paul: Let’s get through to the healing. I think we’ve got a good picture painted of the...
Meghan: Sure. When I realized I just kind of decided to get off these drugs. The Geodon and Zyprexa. And I was unmedicated for a year after that. And the process from there was I did therapy. You know, I called the emergency hotlines whenever I was feeling, really bad. Now that I think about it, the social anxiety must of had a lot more to do with me being closeted than I thought.
Paul: That makes sense.
Meghan: At this point, it was kind of like, after my dad was okay with it, my mom felt okay with it. Even though to this day she’d be like, ‘I accepted you, what do you mean?’. But—
Paul: ‘I accepted you and your AIDS’.
Meghan: Okay, I don’t know. Like I can’t explain that part about her.
Paul: So the healing came from therapy and—
Meghan: Well they had then diagnosed me, when I went to get medicated, they had diagnosed me with bipolar disorder. And started me on Lamictal, so that’s kind of the only drug that I really was on. And I was on that for two years, I believe. And I thought it was weird, like I didn’t feel like I had mood swings. But I mean, whenever I would talk, ‘oh I’m depressed and this and that’, I mean, all the psychiatrist has to do is open that up and see that, and ‘she’s either schizophrenic or bipolar, one of the two, and she went a year unmedicated and never had any episodes like this before, so she’s not schizophrenic, so she’s gotta be bipolar’.
Paul: But you didn’t have any instances of mania did you? Although it sounds like it when you’re throwing bibles around and you’re slamming stuff—
Meghan: I think what I have mania is things classified as mania, but it’s also then on my level hard to differentiate between, because then when they had classified me as a manic bipolar, that the anxiety, I think looking back, a lot of times when it was anxiety and panic attacks I mistook it for mania, but then when I talked to them about it, they said that well the anxiety is a product of the mania. So to this day, you know, I think it was, I don’t know. It’s hard to pick things apart when the professionals are telling you one thing, you kind of, I feel like you have to go with it but, you know, anxiety resonates with me more than having mood swings. I don’t know.
Paul: And do you take anything today?
Meghan: I don’t. I was nervous about saying that because I don’t want, that’s not the message that your show really tries to get across—
Paul: No, I’m not pro or anti medication at all. I think each person is their own unique case. I think medication should be the last choice for people. I think they should try other organic things before that. You know, therapy, meditation, exercise, changing diet—
Meghan: Lifestyle.
Paul: Getting some type of spiritual, try to lift your spirits up. I’m definitely not like, medication fixes everything and everyone should be on medication. In fact I think sometimes if people go on medication before exploring whether or not it’s a spiritual thing, then I think it just masks what was happening. And the reason I feel that is because I got to experience a year before I had known that I was an alcoholic I went on meds ‘cause I was very very depressed, and I had stopped drinking for a little while, so the depression went away, but I wasn’t addressing the spiritual part. The selfishness, the self-absorption. The only caring about my own pleasure, so I had all these good chemicals going through my brain, but it was just leading me to be manically into myself—
Meghan: Oh, I see what you’re saying.
Paul: So it, it didn’t really, it addressed one problem. It addressed the chemical problem but it didn’t address the spiritual problem.
Meghan: I understand.
Paul: So that’s why I think the spiritual kind of thing to get first, because for some people that may be all it is. Is just that you’re completely wrapped up in the materialistic society and that’s what's causing you anxiety.
Meghan: Well I do know that, I’ve seen five different therapists at this point and it is so important as much of a pain in the ass it is, is to sift through them to find the right one for you. Managing my anxiety was the biggest thing for me personally. And ever since I’ve learned how to manage it I’ve been mentally a lot healthier.
Paul: And how do you manage it?
Meghan: Well, when I had went to therapy for it, to the therapist back in Green Bay I liked best, she had pointed out to me that I hold my breath when I get nervous, and I don’t realize it. So my, physically my body reacts, and then mentally I freak out—
Paul: Yeah, ‘cause your heart’s gonna start beating faster ‘cause it’s trying to get oxygen.
Meghan: It just feeds your emotions, your emotions feed off your physicality and it, then things get out of control. So she taught me some breathing exercises. Exposure, I think I wrote in one of the emails, after this happened, for a year or two afterwards, I was still you know, where I was kind of a loner, like I genuinely, generally don’t go out in large crowds. And go in a lot of social situations, but my girlfriend, my second girlfriend was extremely social, and that was when I needed to tackle my social anxiety or else. And for some reason she stayed with me, I’m not sure why, because it was crazy. When we went out to dinner with, I mean, having dinner in public was out of the question. I would freak out, or, I take that back. I wouldn’t freak out, but I would shut down, because there’s the fight or flight. It’s either you try to hang on stay with it, be alert, be in conversation and struggle with that, or you say, ‘screw this, I’m kind of just checking out here’ and you know, tune out, is what I would do. I would be in social situations, but I would be absent from them, not knowing purposefully so that I avoided the anxiety. So in being exposed to social situations all the time, you know, along her side, we were sitting in this restaurant at dinner and people I didn’t know were there. Her sisters, future in-laws and stuff, and this was after my first appointment where she’s like, ‘fight or flight, you know, do this to feel better, and if you have to check out, check out’. And this kind of comes back to the part where it was when the waitress at my old work tried to make me feel comfortable and I would like get mad at them like, ‘just leave me alone, I’m invisible’. And so her sister, just said like, ‘you’re pretty quiet’, and I was like, got up, left, didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the keys to our apartment, we were about a block away from my place, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’m like, ‘how do I explain just being spoken to and getting up and rushing out of the restaurant’. It’s just like this cycle of like I get a panic attack, and I just leave, and there’s so much embarrassment. So much, ‘how so I explain this?’, and now I’ve got to like, face these people that don’t understand me, they’re gonna think I’m a bitch. They’re gonna think that I’m weird. They’re gonna think that I’m crazy. I mean, they’re probably partially right on the last two, either way, I don’t want these, even though they’re strangers, I don’t want them to, probably never going to see them again, but I’m like, ‘how can I go back into that situation?’. So, with that exposure, made me realize how badly I did need help, and but at the same time, just being in those situations, you know, warm you up to being a social being again.
Paul: I suppose it’s like practice.
Meghan: That’s exactly what it was. That’s exactly what she said. You know, just, go into them, don’t avoid them, and after awhile, I mean, it was a painful just stressful, probably five months maybe of trying to get back into feeling comfortable is social situations. But can’t say I’m the most socially graceful person in the world, especially in those kind of smaller group, out at a bar settings or whatever. But, I wouldn’t have got there without therapy. I wouldn’t have. I needed it. And that’s why when I have friends that I can see need therapy and aren’t pursuing it, it just makes me so devastated because I know that everything with a little nurturing from somebody with a little more wisdom than you do, then you have, it just works. And some people just won’t do it.
Paul: Yeah, it’s hard to watch. It’s hard to watch. But I’m glad you sought help and I’m glad you contacted me. Let’s, we’re running low on time, so what do you think about going out with a love-off?
Meghan: I’d love to.
Paul: Well then that’s your first one.
Meghan: Sure. I love love-offs.
Paul: Do you want to start, or do you want me to?
Meghan: Sure I’ll start. I love when I wake up feeling driven and ambitious instead of waking up and being like, ‘ugh a day’.
Paul: I love when someone trips or falls right after saying something arrogant.
Meghan: That would be nice—
Paul: Even if it’s me.
Meghan: I love when I’m new to a workplace, and fellow workers remember my name.
Paul: I love realizing it’s not time to get up, I actually have a couple more hours to sleep.
Meghan: Oh that is good. I love when a friend brings up a great memory from the past that I would have otherwise never remembered on my own.
Paul: I love crying into someone’s shoulder and not feeling apologetic, embarrassed or rushed.
Meghan: I love feeling anonymous such as going to a movie by yourself, something like that.
Paul: I love watching the Chicago Blackhawks play well.
Meghan: Is this your love list?
Paul: Oh yeah this is my love list.
Meghan: Oh, good. I love laughing til I cry and how rare that moment is.
Paul: I love having a good night playing hockey and feeling like my teammates appreciate me.
Meghan: Well I’m going off my script and saying, I love when the Packers win the Superbowl.
Paul: Yeah. I love apologizing to an opposing player I got into a fight with, and both of us laughing about how ridiculous we are.
Meghan: I love talking with my significant other about forming our future together, which isn’t anything I currently do, but it’s good when it happens.
Paul: I love leaving the dentist’s office.
Meghan: Mhmm. I love the sound the garage door opening when my significant other comes home from work, which again doesn’t happen currently, but it’s a good feeling.
Paul: I love the edges of muffins.
Meghan: Ohhhh, I just had a muffin. Oh right. These are good ones. I love that eating a shit ton of junk food and watching TV is a good way to grieve.
Paul: I love any kind of fruit pie.
Meghan: I love listening to the rest of yours.
Paul: I’m not gonna share anymore ‘cause I want to, I don’t want to burn through all of my love things, although I suppose though you should never run out of things you love if you’re really open.
Meghan: Absolutely not. Well there is a lot of them, but there is that part that you want to be creative, so I leave out most of the obvious ones, but yeah.
Paul: Well I’ll end with this one. I love somebody, and maybe this is cheesy, but I love having somebody come on as a guest, that I only knew a little bit beforehand, hearing their pain, and hearing that they’ve moved through it and gotten some clarity and they’re functioning in society and have some perspective about it.
Meghan: I love that too.
Paul: Meghan, thank you so much for coming on and opening up, and—
Meghan: Thank you.
Paul: Many thanks to Meghan. What a, what a sweet wonderful person. Just tomorrow, I find out she’s a serial killer. End of show. Before I take it out with a listener survey, I want to remind you guys there are a couple of different ways—first I want to thank the people that help make this show possible. My wife Carla for all of her great support and advice. All my guests. The guys that help keep the spammers out of the forum. My nice friend in Vancouver who wants to remain anonymous who helps me with my social networking. Stig Greve who does the website. And I’m sure I’m forgetting other people. But, there, I also want to remind you that there are a couple of different ways that you can support the show. If you feel so inclined if you want to support the show financially which is greatly appreciated in these days of my unemployment, you can go to the website and you can make a donation through our PayPal link. You can, when you’re doing your Amazon shopping, you can do it through our Amazon link, and that way they give me a couple of nickels and it doesn’t cost you anything. And you can support us—and you can also buy a t-shirt. And you can support us, non-financially by going to iTunes and giving us a good rating. Boosts our ranking, brings more people to the show. And the more people we have at the show, the more money we can get when an advertiser decides to advertise with us. So, there you have it.
I’m going to read a survey response from a woman who calls herself, Little Miss Shame Writer. She is bisexual, she’s in her 20s. She was raised in an environment that was stable and safe. She actually writes, “a little too stable and safe”. I’m not really sure what that means.
You ever been the victim of sexual abuse? She checked the box, “some stuff happened but I don’t know if it counts as sexual abuse.’ And then she explains, ‘my first and last time having anal sex with my boyfriend, he knew it hurt me, and he wouldn’t stop. I thought I was doing him a favor by trying to be open towards it, but it hurt and I was crying. I told him to stop, but he didn’t, until he finished. It was a horrible experience”. I don’t think anybody hearing this described thinks there is any grey area on whether or not that is sexual abuse.
What are your deepest, darkest thoughts? Oh and by the, just in case, you’re, obviously, what I’m saying by that is I think that was sexual abuse. What are your deepest, darkest thoughts? Not things you would act on, but things you are ashamed to think about. She writes, “I always think about sex and sleeping with people. I always think about sex and sleeping with people I know and strangers. I have these strong urges to go to a random bar and sleep with anyone I can find. I imagine humiliating and embarrassing girls who I think are prettier than me and make their lives a living hell. Sometimes I tell myself I’m going to stop eating so I can look like a skinny model. Sometimes I tell myself if I just do meth one more time, it will be fine and no one will know, and I will be happy again. I contemplate selling drugs so I actually have enough money to support my daughter by myself and not have to get help from anyone. My old landlord is screwing me over for the security deposit and I imagine ways I could hurt him or make his life unbearable.”
What are your darkest secrets, things you have done or things that have happened to you? She writes, “the thing that is killing me right now is that I almost slept with a coworker who I really didn’t care for in the first place. He’s ten years older then me and single and an easy target. God, that makes me sound like a horrible person. Anyway, so I seduced him through email and one day over lunch we went to my place. We both took our clothes off and I started going down on him when I realized his penis was smaller than my thumb. Hard. I had never seen one that small in my whole life and it freaked me out a little. So I look up, and staring me in the face was his huge, old-man, pot belly, and I wanted to puke. All I could think of was, ‘oh my god, what am I doing? Get me out of here, I don’t like this’. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by telling how repulsed I was, so I kept going. I’m so glad that soon after that he got soft and wasn’t able to get it up again, so things didn’t really continue. On the ride back to work he kept saying how embarrassed he was, and he felt he let me down and wanted to do this again so he could prove to me how good he was. I tried to tell him nicely that it probably wasn’t going to happen. The worst thing about it is he sits right behind me at work, and I have to see him everyday, and am constantly reminded of the whole situation. He’s become the creep, stalker, coworker who want’s to talk and hang out all the time. Man, what a horrible mistake. I also was addicted to meth for a year, so while taking Zoloft, I feel like I damaged my brain to a point where it can’t heal correctly. I sleep just to get away from the world.”
Did these feelings and thoughts, do these secrets and thoughts generate any particular feelings toward yourself? She writes, “I really feel like a slut and a horrible person. It makes me want to puke. I think I’m a lowlife. It makes me think if people really knew who I was they wouldn’t want to be friends with me or even talk to me. Ashamed, regret, worthless, dumb, gross. Sometimes the guilt gets so bad it feels like there are little, sharp talons scratching at the lining of my stomach.”
Any suggestions to make the podcast better? “The only thing that I can think of that would make the podcast better would be if you came to my house and interviewed me. Just kidding. I would ruin the whole podcast and no one would listen anymore. Laugh out loud.”
I don’t even know really where to begin with that one. ‘Cause I think anybody else listening to that letter that I just read, just wants to give you a big hug and say, ‘man, you’ve been through some stuff’. And you should talk to somebody about that pain that’s inside you, ‘cause it’s, you deserve, you deserve a better life than the feelings you have towards yourself. So much more. You deserve so much more happiness than you think you deserve. And I wouldn’t underestimate the damage that was done by what happened with your boyfriend, you know? I’m not a licensed therapist, but I was almost on Evening at the Improv, in the late 90s. And my penis is slightly bigger than a thumb, not by much, so I think that qualifies me to weigh in. But I want to thank everybody that sent me emails and continues to send me emails. I want to thank Meghan. The women that helped contribute the letters and surveys that I read for today’s show and remind anybody that’s out there, that they’re not alone. There is help if you’re willing to reach out and connect to people and talk about what’s going on inside you. And thanks for listening.
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