How, At Age 40 The Only Thing I Owned Was My Integrity
Introduction
What type of steak is this, I wondered as the waiter placed my order in front of me. An oblong chunk of pinkish grey meat, half the size of an American football was seated in a broth on a white plate. It looked nothing like what I ordered, it was too tall,surely. I had never before seen such a thick cut and I was a steak lover; my first and hopefully my last tall steak because this was way too much meat. Before any anxiety kicked in that perhaps the chef had sent out the wrong order, I picked up the steak knife and attempted to make a dent in the grotesque abundance from the top. I already knew that I was going to have only a few chunks and take the rest with me to be fried with scrambled eggs and onions for breakfast, the next morning. The steak was tasteless in my mouth. I asked the waiter for some steak sauce. Looking around while sipping on my wine, I observed the other people sitting in the lakeview room of the neatly tucked away restaurant. They were finely dressed, as was I, perhaps even pompously. I was wearing something from my spring cruise wardrobe although I had never been on a cruise; their clothes matched their dinner plates and manners as a fair haired boy wearing a long sleeved, white dress shirt indicated that he would have some ground black pepper on his salad. I was alone at my table but no one stared or even seemed to notice. I had smiled comfortably, upon being seated. I looked further beyond the three tables near me to see if anyone else was alone. I was not surprised that there was no other. This was not a progressive big city where folks had no qualms about dining alone. There were couples and whole families, mostly families; a lot of chatter and laughter. Were they talking about their adventures of the day? Did they go yachting or for a drive in the cool and fresh, April country air. Maybe they spent the day in their backyard sipping cocktails and admiring their own boats at the pier, reminiscing over accomplishments that had got them far in the world.
People watching was a pastime that I had developed in New York City some years before. I just could not help it in such a multicultural and fashionably diverse place as that. I turned my head slightly to the right to observe the view on the water beyond the glass windows. The steak sauce arrived. I put a few dollops in the thin broth, swirled it around with my spoon and doused the steak in it, laying it on, spoon by spoon. This section of the steakhouse was semi circular in design and the curves of the concave glass window seemed to fit in nicely. It was dark outside, but some lights allowed me to see a glimmer of the shiny surface water, but mostly I saw myself in the curved window and my oblivious dinner neighbors in the background. I chuckled inwardly as I continued to sip Cabernet Sauvignon, my textbook wine order to accompany steak. At first, I had a glass of the house Red because my budget was thrifty. Most of my money for the week had gone into renting the lake house about seventy yards further down the hill. I had walked here and left my car behind, parked on the road above the rental because I wanted to get an authentic feel of what it was like in this ritzy neighborhood to walk to the steakhouse for dinner. I knew somehow that I was the only one who had walked to dinner. I embraced being different, instead of feeling demeaned by my differences. I was glad that this bold acceptance of my quirkiness was natural and not forced. I poured some more wine from the carafe and started contemplating the bill. I had eaten at steakhouses in a few big cities so I had an idea of how much the bill should be. I had not looked at the exact price when I ordered my dinner because I knew that I could afford what I ordered, otherwise I would not have made the reservation. I do not remember now the name of the steak portion and this does not freak me out as such things used to. There was a time when I knew which parts of the cow was best for what purposes. How mundane my life used to be, to have known such things as memorized meat cuts and even wine pairings. Through reading I discovered that it is not uncommon for people who spend a lot of time alone to inundate themselves with details of the physical world around them to keep themselves entertained. Introverts are prone to this as we tend to occupy ourselves with our thoughts and not with interacting with other people. When I had finished my wine, I asked the waiter for my bill and a doggie bag. He took my plate and returned my wrapped leftovers along with my bill. I left a sizable tip as always because I knew some waiters and they were all poorly paid. Taking a last glance at the chattering families, I left the crowded restaurant noticing that they were all White as I weaved my way to the exit. A fleeting thought of racial insecurity flashed into my mind based on what I had read online and seen on television about racial stereotypes in affluent communities. I walked up the stairs, out into the fresh night air and down the hill to the lake house. It was around half past nine. When I arrived at the vacation house, I placed my left overs on the kitchen counter because I knew that I would eat some more before I went to sleep. There was so much meat and I was sure to get the munchies. At the time I was a heavy smoker, of medical grade marijuana and it gave me great appetite. I had traveled with my supply.
The lake house had many rooms with many views. It was a very large house. The owners who had met me briefly two days before at the house to hand me the keys, had put a lot of work into making it a relaxing abode, a haven. Every room had a theme. My favorite room was the one with nautical decorations and multiple beds, including single beds and bunk beds, the only bedroom with a lake view. It ran half the length of the upstairs floor. It had no fancy furnishings but was full of windows and light. The sound of the lapping waves from the lake was heavenly in this room. I slept there at nights but during the day I took turns napping in the other bedrooms of which there must have been five.
I was vacationing alone and was awkwardly content, that my partner did not come with me on vacation, but at the same time felt a tinge of sadness about the fact that I was on vacation by myself. In retrospect, I was the side girlfriend and not the main girlfriend, so my partner did not come with me on vacation. As an open-minded woman of the world, I accepted this with a little hesitation but without anger. When I admitted this to my friends, they insisted that my calm reaction was not normal, and so I abruptly dropped them as friends. A stranger could have stayed with me on vacation and I would not have been bothered. I did not like being that grandiose by myself, but I nonetheless enjoyed the space thoroughly. I smoked a few pieces of marijuana from my glass bong that looked like a seven-inch penis with glass testicles. It was a gift from my partner and in a moment of dark humor I realised it was a substitute for him. I smoked in every room of the house. I did this conscientiously and with positive vibes because I had met the owners and they were respectful, otherwise I would not have cared. I lit incense in each room every time that I smoked there. I had traveled with my favorite scented candles and room sprays and I used them also. The details in the house made me admire artistic people and appreciate their creative eye. I took pictures of all the beautiful details of color, lines, structure in everything that drew my attention in the artwork on the walls and end tables. I walked through the house admiring its beautiful architecture. I sat here and there in complete relaxation leaving everything as I had found it as part of my generous spirit of thinking of the owners as having to do as little cleaning as possible. I called this appreciation and gratitude, but it also covered by obsession with cleanliness. I had purchased the most realistic plastic butterfly I had ever seen, at a decor shop in the neighborhood. It was something like a monarch with orange and black detail. I placed this butterfly in a flowering plant arrangement on the kitchen table. My obsessiveness with perfection tied right in with the owners’ attention to detail. It took me about thirty high minutes to find the perfect placement for the butterfly within the flower tops because I felt like I was leaving a little of me behind. I took a picture which is somewhere on the internet if my obsessive desire for a clutter free life has not already made me delete it. Since it was the off-season the deck was packed with covered furniture and full of debris.. I had brought my juicer along in the hopes of enjoying some homemade local juice pierside or on the deck but squashed that idea and enjoyed the deck view from the living room, the windows of which provided a lovely view.
This was seven years ago. Today I rarely eat any meat although I have not committed to vegetarianism because I love my neighbor as Jesus loved me in as many ways as possible. Just as Jesus showed me love the numerous times I had watched meat eaters delve into their slabs of ribs, roast pork and smothered chicken, steaks, lobsters and crab buckets, I do the same sometimes to return the favor, a bit lofty, but I do it with sincerity. The love came in the form of me experiencing new things which ultimately assisted me with eliminating all that was not good for me.
Alcohol
When I was a college student, I used to joke with friends that if they wanted to hear my confessions, they should wine and dine me, then wine me some more and if they wanted to see my demons they should hold back the wine altogether and offer me liquor instead. They took me up on this proposition many times but it was not until I was thirty years old when I got drunk for the first time and this, considering that I had been drinking wine, beer and rum of all kinds since I was a teenager. Both facts are to me embarrassing statistics. All of my teenage drinking was done either at home or when out and about, with adult supervision so there was no chance of drunkenness. Later, as a young adult who enjoyed alcoholic beverages to excess I had tried every tempting cocktail on the bar menus I came across from Saint Lucia, to New York, to Cancun, to London to San Francisco. I used to brag that I could drink with the best of them and not get drunk although I had seen many drunken women, puking in the toilets at clubs, crashed onto the dancefloor, passed out in a parking lot, and even those who had asked strangers to help them get home as they stumbled out of the club in the early morning hours onto the streets because they were so highly intoxicated. None of these things had ever happened to me until I went to New Orleans, or as I called it, the City I Will Never Again Visit Unless It Is The End of The World.
I was dating a Christian, non alcohol drinking, health fanatic at that time, and of all the places I chose for vacation, it was New Orleans, but he did not protest. I prayed that this was not a subconscious seed that I planted to sabotage a great relationship. I thanked Beyoncé for this adventure. The cost, including airfare and hotel of watching her perform in New Orleans was cheaper than watching her in Madison Square Garden, in New York City. It was a three day mini vacation and the concert took place on the second day. On the first day, we checked out the local foods and I drank all day, experiencing the usual buzz. I dared myself to find the beverage which would get me drunk or at least very tipsy. This was New Orleans, how could I not get drunk in New Orleans? I started asking around. I asked waiters at restaurants and people on the streets. I tried their recommendations but to no avail. Finally we walked into a bar with a name I could identify with, Hurricane, since I was from St.Lucia a chance promise of drunken chaos I thought. It was there that we settled in after chatting with some bar patrons, and I scientifically went about the process of getting drunk. My boyfriend sat on my left, sipping local juices, enjoying a jazz band. On my right was a grey-haired, long-bearded man with such a happy smile that I asked him what he was drinking. I then went on to tell him my story with alcohol and how I had never been drunk. Well, he said that I was in the right place. He then called out to the bartender and placed an order for me. When it arrived, it seemed to come at me in slow motion.The science had worked.The cocktail glass was bigger than my head, with green and white, alternating layers of frozen potential, topped with off- white frothiness and what I can only describe as crystal coconut goodness floating on top. I whispered in my boyfriend’s ear that I was about to embark on a life-transforming experience. He grinned, and said that he knew that it would make me happy, meeting such a base goal. He was nine years older than me and understood because he used to be a heavy drinker himself. I dove into the glass tub of a drink with a mega straw. It was delicious, sweet and tangy, fruity yet tart and smelled of morning sunshine. I sipped and felt my eyes getting brighter when I started giggling and talking loudly. I ordered another halfway through, I got up from the bar and started dancing. My boyfriend joined me, our first and last time dancing to jazz. The crowd had picked up and was vibing to the old jazz tunes. I looked around, it was a bar full of middle-aged and elderly folks. I had not noticed this before, a peaceful place. We left, with our drinks in plastic cups and walked down the street sipping. It must have been around nine o’clock. My boyfriend held my hand, grinning the whole way down Bourbon street, sipping on his juice. Now you may wonder how I knew I was drunk. The fact was, I did not until the next morning when I woke up in our hotel room and asked my boyfriend what happened the night before. I could not absorb what he said because the details were too weird graphic for me, and I was glad that I did not remember. I knew that I did not want to be drunk ever again because I could not recall what happened after we left Hurricane. I was however grateful for the experience, because I grew up in St Lucia in an alcohol driven culture. Drinking was part of our daily lives whether we were at home or out and about, alcohol was standard fare. Everything we did seemed to be accompanied by alcohol, both work and play. When we were at parties I had the liberty to drink without reprimand. At home, I would hide my alcohol use by raiding the bar with my coffee mug. My teenage alcohol use was used to cover up insecurities about the things I could not control in my life as a teenager including sexual abuse. Our culture was pervasive with alcohol. In my mid teens I fell subject to self sexual abuse, which is what I called my excessive masturbation at nights to thoughts of fantasy sexual trysts with my father and his many friends from his work network who were in our house often. I used to keep a diary about this, which was embarrassing to read later in my late twenties. My alcohol consumption as a teenager, helped me with this because I was able to deal with the awkwardness of talking to these people with a straight face knowing the thoughts that I would have about them at nights. By the time I was living on my own, I drank about two bottles of wine a day and numerous cocktails. This was no big deal to me because I did not get drunk and the habit curtailed my introverted nature. It did not interfere with my going to work or my studies. The laissez-faire attitude of my family and friends was that it was in my DNA. I preferred the cultural explanation.
Drinking was such a big part of my life that I brought it up to my General Practitioner one day in my thirties. She was horrified that I was drinking so much. She suggested that I see a psychologist. I told her that I was already doing so. She came to my chemical rescue and gave me prescription medication to stop drinking. I was so blown away that such a thing existed because I knew many alcoholics and none of them had mentioned trying it. I was so glad that I was getting such an opportunity to be rid of my alcoholism. It worked within one week, taking three pills a day. I was bowled over that I no longer craved alcohol. I was ecstatic that it was no longer master of my excursions in extratroversion. It had been defeated by a pill. Thanks to biochemistry my worst subject in all my academic career, I had become a normal social drinker as opposed to a heavy daily drinker.
Drunkenness was fun one time only, the first time. The fun came from the fact that it happened after decades of thinking it could not. Since then I have been drunk accidentally a few times, by this I mean I did not set out to get drunk. For example I have drank a few drinks without eating first. Without the fatty foods and carbs in my stomach to absorb the alcohol I got drunk, or I have drank carelessly, that is, drinking multiple types of drinks, such as beer, wine and rum all within an hour. There was no fun and enjoyment in these bouts, it was only headaches, vomiting, dizziness, bewilderment and diarrhea. By the time I was forty I did not get drunk anymore. It served no purpose. Alcohol, however did serve a purpose when I used it conscientiously or in moderation. A glass of wine helped calm my nerves and a shot of vodka lowered my inhibitions and sometimes pesky social anxieties. I also used alcohol in remedial potions whether it was as preventive or curative care, something I learned from the elders in my family. One of my favorites was when herbs and tea leaves were infused with brandy to which honey and lime were added for treatment of a cold.
Lesbianism
“ Hey, long time since I saw you, is that your mom?”
an acquaintance asked as I entered a house party with a six foot tall female companion. I could see how he thought it was my mom since the two women had a similar build and complexion, but the resemblance ended there. She was my date and lover. Writing this now makes me blush that I went through the phase of dating women. It was just that, a phase. The seeds were planted decades earlier when my mother abandoned me, at least that is how it appeared to me. I was seven years old at the time, when she left my three year old brother and I with our grandparents, to make a better life for herself, and us ultimately, overseas, not atypical of the Caribbean culture. I woke up one morning and she was gone, not to be seen again until eight years later. My brother never expressed any feelings of abandonment to me, but I felt differently. My attachment to women began then, a healthy attachment at first as I sought out family members who played a motherly role, until a few years later when I made a pass at a young woman at a sleepover. She was nineteen and had been charged with supervising a group of nine to eleven year olds one evening. When it was bedtime I asked if I could sleep in her room instead of with the other kids. She acquiesced. It was an innocent, touchy feely, one-sided interaction as I recall asking her if I could touch her for comfort to fall asleep. At first, she was startled but when she saw that I was seriously distressed by her silence, she asked me what I meant and I was relieved when she said yes to my request of touching her vagina. I had forgotten all about it, until I saw her decades later at a taxi stand in my hometown.
In high school,a biology teacher taught me that during teenage development it is normal for teenagers to have crushes on members of the same sex, and that this goes away within a year. The year was nineteen eighty eight. I remember clearly because it was the very next year that I had huge crushes on three of my teachers. I was embarrassed by all this, but recalling what I had learned in class, waited for the phase to pass, impatiently.
I attended an all girls Catholic school where one of the teachers was a young nun from Venezuela to whom I would give teddy bears and other gifts, something I was scolded for by my family members who had bought me the gifts for they said that they were for myself only and not for others. They did not understand that I was giving my personal gifts to a teacher, whose class I was not even in, because I had an awkward crush, but they accepted it. My grandmother had given me a beating when I lived with her for stealing money from her purse to buy a gift for a classmate, when I was seven years old. I learnt my lesson about stealing for others from that, and instead gave away what I owned or what was gifted to me. If it was good enough for me then it was good enough for someone I liked, albeit a crush. My second high school crush was a middle-aged, Christian woman who taught me geography and always dressed formally in navy suits. She had a serious demeanor. I found it intriguing that she never smiled, and decided to write her a letter about how I felt about her. When I handed her the letter, in naive teenage fashion I told her that a fellow classmate had asked me to give it to her then ran off. I was thirteen. The following day during class, she asked me to come to meet with her during lunch time in the classroom. I eagerly went and was promptly chastised for writing the letter. I denied that I had written it. She said that she was not stupid and knew my handwriting. I was given a lecture about how it was inappropriate for students to write such letters to their teachers and I must not do it again and that I should not lie either. To my relief my crush on her vanished after that because I decided she was much better at teaching than talking about feelings. This was no wonder, she looked too straight-laced to know anything about them. As an educated adult I have since developed great respect for her for the way she put an end to my thoughts about her.
My favorite high school crush was the one I had on my eccentric science teacher. She was weird and a little frightening and this fascinated my teenage mind that such a person was teaching at a Catholic school. I loved the way she dressed though, red lipstick and black clothing, sometimes leather. Considering the tropical climate, she looked very comfortable but she stuck out because she appeared so different from the other teachers, like she landed from the outer universe. I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to ride in her car and go to her house for lunch, perhaps make love to her in her bedroom. Those were my private fantasies, and the extent of my private interaction with her was assisting with lab cleanup after school or getting extra help with something I did not understand in class. If I were male I wondered, if my female teacher crushes would have had sex with me. The teenage years passed with me having sex with neither boy nor girl, neither man nor woman. This, was uncommon in the St Lucian culture I grew up in according to my other teenage siblings who were sexually active.
I did not lose my virginity until much later, at twenty years old. I hated it. I had sex twice at that age. The next time I had sex with a guy, I was in my mid twenties and it was with my husband. Sex with men was barbaric, uncomfortable, unnatural. My mindset back then was unless you are a woman trying to have a baby, there is no reason why a penis should be in your vagina, besides there was in vitro fertilization.
I simply decided one day in college that I must be a lesbian. It was not a feeling it was a well thought out decision. I listed the pros and cons of being a lesbian in New York City where I attended college and lived. The pros out-weighed the cons, so I tried it, and made it my life for five years. At first I dated casually to check out what type of woman I liked physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially and geographically. I may have gone about it too rigidly because each one of them called me heartless for leaving them. It was not my fault, I had to know if I was a lesbian or if I just had mommy issues as the Americans would say.
I had found women on internet dating sites and at lesbian clubs. At first I kept it purely sexual mostly because that part had not worked out with guys, so I was anxious to know if it was better with women. I brought them into my bed based on their body type, hair color, skin color, fashion sense, the fragrances they wore and how they carried themselves. When that did not work I focused on their bank account, and mine, their education and interests, and family life. I drove and flew thousands of miles trying to be the other half of a lesbian couple. I had read somewhere that I should be the person that I wanted to date or marry, a little on the narcissistic side, but I tried it and boy oh boy, was I surprised when none of the relationships lasted longer than a few months, even when that included changing residences, and doing all the typical family life things that lesbian couples did in America. The double income, no kids trend which had sounded so promising did not pan out with any of the fellow professional women that I had relationships with. I felt lost. Not only did I conclude that one must not date or marry someone who is just like them, I was glad that the lesbian phase was over. It left me disappointed because I had been with some amazing women; beautiful, successful, smart, creative, fun, and educated yet the sinful insatiable nature of the sexual act itself made it unnatural for me. It was simply put, too much lust. I felt that by having sexual relations with other women, my soul was being consumed by lust, stolen even. The tall woman who reminded my acquaintance of my mother passed away within a year of our meeting and I was guilt-ridden for a while that our lustful desires had something to do with it. Her daughter informed me years later that she died of heart failure.
On the brighter side, my intimate relationships with women had made me more in tune with my negative emotions regarding sexual relationships and more sympathetic to the feelings and issues of the people living lesbian, gay and queer lifestyles.
Cigarettes
Two of my grandparents smoked. I saw them do this as a kid. My father’s father smoked cigarettes like the cigarette was part of his mouth, he even talked without taking it out. My mother’s father smoked tobacco from a pipe while lounging in his favorite chair, when he watched television. As a teenager, I lived in my father’s house and saw only one of his male friends smoke. Every time he visited, he would stay in the balcony, to smoke and drink. Except for that one time he visited on a Saturday morning when I was home alone about to head into the shower, and he forced his way into the bathroom behind me and made me give him a blow job. None of these three people had any influence on how I came to start smoking cigarettes because I was in my thirties when I had my first puff on the so-called cancer stick and it was an entirely random event, with no pre-thought.
I had invited a woman from Caledonia, Western New York, whom I had met online one summer morning for a lunch date in Rochester city, that very day. I invited her over to my place afterwards. At that time I was living in a fancy urban loft in a gentrified neighborhood in the city and she was from the countryside, so I was showing off my place which I had put great effort and financial resources into. I had made some weed brownies the previous day and wanted to share them, because they were awesome. I already knew from our online communication that she used marijuana daily. The brownie recipe, I had gotten from an acquaintance after I had eaten them at her dinner party and they had made me see orange clouds in the ceiling for three hours on end. When I brought out the brownies, the woman from Caledonia shrieked that I had massacred the marijuana by burying it in brownie batter. I had no idea what her dismay meant, so I asked her to explain. She preferred to demonstrate and pulled out her own weed stash and asked for some from my medical grade, mixed it with hers and in what seemed like a ritual to some deity, rolled up what she called a blunt in some brown cloth-like paper with the texture of an oil cloth; lit it up at one end and asked me to inhale; and I did with no hesitation. She then lit a cigarette, passed it to me and I did the same, well almost, I did not inhale. I simply puffed on it. It was harsh. It was pungent, it was ghastly. I lit up the incense.Then she kissed me. My first cigarette and my first weed puff was sealed with a witch’s kiss from a woman who had called me a child because I had never before seen anyone smoke marijuana not even on television. I did not curse her out nor ask her to leave right away, as was my first inclination. I had some wine instead. She had her own stash of liquor in her purse, another thing I had never seen before. Out of generosity I gave her some cash because she was poor. She did not tell me this, it was obvious. I found out later that she was a chronic alcoholic, a thing that I had been ten years prior, and that she lived with a boyfriend,a registered pedophile. She made lunch dates online to get food and cash. I drove her downtown to find her way home and on my way back stopped at the local convenience store and asked for their best cigarettes. Such was my nature, if I was going to ingest something labeled as not good for the body, it had to be the best kind. They did not know what I meant by the best so I asked for the best tasting one. One girl behind the checkout counter handed me a pack of her favorite brand and the twenty sticks cost me about fourteen dollars. I smoked the entire pack in three days. Over the next four years, my usage increased to a pack a day. In the morning, as soon as I woke up, I had two with coffee. During my work breaks I got in my car and smoked or went outside the building with my coworkers. Some of the most easy going, laid back, simple people I met because of this habit. In all my life I was not aware that such people existed who smoked literally twenty four seven as I became one of them. I smoked whilst driving, something that I simply became efficient at. This was one of my favorite things to do. I smoked at the bars. I picked the ones with outside lounges like my loft apartment, from which I was eventually evicted because the tenants in the neighboring apartments complained of the smell of marijuana. I should have stuck to my brownies. I pray the alcoholic witch woman has made her peace with her smoke God because surely that was an evil work. How do you introduce someone to smoking cigarettes? Only Native Americans in my experience can get away with this.
The high cost and uselessness of the cigarettes led to me driving to the Indian reservations in Upstate New York where by now I had found out that I could buy a wide range of smokes in quality and price. After smoking the sky-high priced yet smooth a-pack-a-day brands that I found in the city, I decided to try the organic, homegrown, no additives kind; the blends manufactured by the Native Americans had different labels which promoted healthy alternatives. They tasted like nature, more like tobacco and less like cancer. It literally felt like my lungs, after readily inhaling the Indian brand was filled with an earthy spirit. My brain was on another wavelength, the Native American wavelength. I admired Native Americans for this, they still had some integrity in their pure smoking and I believe wanted to share this with us less educated city people who did not know better. I bought a few cartons of different grades and stored them in my freezer. My smoking friends from the city were not fond of them. My smoking friends from the suburbs enjoyed them. As much as I enjoyed them I felt a bit of guilt about the lack of artificiality that had come from the mass produced brands. Despite the guilt, I smoked about five cigarettes a day of the organic blends instead of the habitual twenty. They were that positively potent, a well embraced effect. This pureness did not last long. I soon took up again the brands I found in the city. I smoked them to augment the more natural ones. I called this finding a balance, because it made me feel better on my hectic drives to and from work. I appreciated the joy of going to work in an urban setting when I had the artificial sticks. Alcohol and marijuana tasted best with a cigarette as chaser as I called it. I did not inhale them much, just mostly blew out the smoke. I tried the electronic ones but still went back to the originals. Cigarettes became my companion, in a very quiet existence. They determined which apartments I rented, who I socialized with at work and after work. Everyone I knew and everyone who knew me, smoked,whether it was the really introverted me or my more extroverted alterego. Cigarettes got me through stupid relationships and well-thought- out lesson plans . They calmed me down and riled me up as needed it seemed. The cigarette Gods were probably entertained, I thought. They helped me talk to people, and like alcohol had lowered my inhibitions.
As far as I knew I was responsible with my smoking. My car interior was professionally cleaned weekly. I spent lots of money on car fresheners, room fresheners and clothes fresheners. It was costly but fun. My diet was also costly. I bought organic everything, fruits, vegetables, meats, vitamin supplements, the best and healthiest waters. My skin care regiment also cost a lot despite having medical insurance for dermatological use. I learnt that spending money on the best and healthiest choices introduced me to a new socioeconomic class and culture that I did not know about before. I visited my general practitioner for advice on smoking cessation because it was the responsible thing to do. She directed me to a heart specialist and a lung specialist who put me through numerous tests to determine the effect of my cigarettes use on my heart function and my asthma. She gave me a prescription regimen to control my asthma, it worked. She gave me a prescription regimen to lower my naturally high blood pressure. It did not work. She also gave me a prescription regimen to stop the cigarette craving. It did not work. I simply accepted those things in my life. My smoking decreased over the years as I became poorer. I could no longer afford the best of anything, least of all cigarettes. Whenever my income increased I made sure that my cigarette use did not increase automatically. This took self-discipline, self-love, and self-care. Needless to say this was not a perfect system; I smoked only a couple at most, intermittently throughout the week and try to find balance in a healthy diet and exercise.
My maternal grandfather died from complications of tobacco smoking. I used to relish in thoughts of paying him homage by dying the same way, a dark homage, but I credited that way of thinking to spiritual poverty which made me feel wretched at times. My paternal grandfather died from complications due to diabetes. Before his legs were amputated, he used to walk around with his tall, elegant gait without what seemed like a care in the world puffing on a cigarette. I liked that about hin. I take pleasure knowing that my mother’s father, Pap, as he was affectionately known, used to thoroughly enjoy his smokes, until he was ordered to stop by his doctor. By that point he was using an oxygen tank at home for breathing. This was twenty three years ago in Jhetwine, Saint Lucia, he was the only person in the neighborhood with a mobile oxygen tank. Local children and men stared at me when I would smoke cigarettes in public in Saint Lucia. Some would even come up to me and tell me that it was a bad habit. I wondered if they thought that I did not know this. I was not rude, so I gently warned the chastisers to not start the very thing they were reprimanding me for. I had tried to nullify the habit to the best of my ability. Secretly and with a dark amusement, I would sometimes think that genetic disposition could overwhelm societal norms and that I could literally drop dead from smoking a cigarette, so I avoided it. However when I did smoke, I did this prayerfully asking God for help in complete cessation of the habit.
Marijuana
I was too stoic, I had no feelings. I was numb. I was too quit. I was morose. These are the comments, I heard over and over again from friends, family members and coworkers until I tried marijuana. It started with a weed brownie, unknowingly. Dinner party with some girlfriends had me in giggles, my first Black dinner party in Rochester. I recall asking my then girlfriend and lover, for the Black people, having just moved to Rochester from New York City to live with her. I found them that night, at a dinner party, along with marijuana deserts. This was my first experience with marijuana. We had a great time. Gone was the uprightness and surface rigidity. Marijuana brought to my daily existence an awareness that I was friendly despite all the criticisms I had endured over the years of falsely perceived selfish solitude. It certainly helped me navigate my social life better; as opposed to being escorted or accompanied everywhere or limiting my favorite interactions to online exchanges, I was now so exuberant and sociable that going out into the world alone, no longer came with forebodings. Guts and bravado were now part of my personality on the social scene. Suddenly my attentiveness to my own feelings brought me more pleasure and satisfaction in all relationships both private and professional. When I first started to smoke weed, I began to dislike my girlfriend because of the slow realization that we were incompatible. She was Black, but not. I had not seen how White and racially biased she was in her choice to exclude Black people from her social life. She was born and raised in Seattle, perhaps this had something to do with it. While high, I was able to keenly observe her attitudes and behaviores and could scarcely believe that I had driven three hundred and twenty miles to live with her in the snow-riddled Rochester winter in hopeful bliss of double income, no kids. I read somewhere that man is entitled to his private motives and thoughts, and upon further investigation of my own, while high, I realised that I had moved to be part of the very community whose race I was accusing her of being part of with such assuredness. The irony is that it was so glaringly false for her and I had not seen this prior. To put it simply, we broke up because she was not Black enough for me anymore. This newly found singleness gave me freedom to date while high at thirty five years old. Seriously every smoker whom I met had started smoking and dating in their teens.
My materialism and aesthetics also changed. My sense of style transformed from conservative to trendy. This included my wardrobe, furniture, hair and makeup, and accessories. The newness brought me much happiness because it was so freeing, so light. I was able to just be myself without foreboding, and this made me really question the previous three decades of my life where I was following the dictates and statutes of friends and family, all the time. Now I did what felt justified to me.
Deeply seated feelings surfaced and my life changed as my marijuana use increased. I was free to love, free to be happy, free to laugh. The laughter really was the best part. I had been so tightly wound, while this new version of me was so approachable and joyous. In New York City, I had partied hard with the best of them, but I always had a sidekick, now in Rochester with the introduction of marijuana I did not just party, I connected with people personally. I did not just go to work, I cared deeply about what I was doing as opposed to doing it robotically, something I was used to doing my whole life. Listening with purpose as opposed to simply being polite and having no attachment beyond kindness, made me feel more human. It was refreshing. Enjoying the company of friends instead of demanding their companionship was elating. Simply inquiring about people’s lives, was no longer rewarding. I became entrenched in their lives. Marijuana made me discover what it meant to share the human experience, to go outside myself. It did not mean professional success which I already had, it did not mean trying to achieve the American dream with all my t’s crossed and all my i’s dotted. It meant understanding the human condition. Awareness of self, beyond what was seen publicly led to deeper, more meaningful connections. My lower appetites and higher callings both became intrinsically present in my quest to find the source of my prior numbness. It was lack of love, both in giving it and receiving it. All this time I thought I was loving others but it turned out that being generous with possessions and money, does not necessarily show love. Wealth could have been a permanent part of my American life, but it never occurred because there was no love, the missing ingredient for the person whom God had made me to be.
I was kind, I was good, I was loyal but I did not feel love. All these discoveries came to me while high. Demonstration of love for me was based on what I had read and seen, not on what I felt because my feelings were suppressed for so long. Marijuana brought all these issues to the surface, and I started to learn how to love myself. The hardest thing I have ever had to do. The exterior, stoic toughness vanished. A barrel of emotions tumbled out, and there I was, smoking an ounce of medical grade marijuana a week while all this was happening. Finding love in this manner was costly, but worth it to me because I had never experienced it before. I resisted the temptation of accepting that what I called love, was just me being high. The high life was the journey, the marijuana was the tool and I was the vessel that was shattered to reveal a gem of love inside. It was frightening. What was I to do with these newly found things called feelings which felt like a whirlwind of waves? Old friends were replaced by new ones. Life had new color and meaning. What I had considered love from some, turned out to be abuse and loathing, both by myself and others. What I had considered the social normal was just one viewpoint of a myriad. I had spent decades being single-minded, in my view of self and how I fit in to society. This was covered up by a hard-earned education, professionalism, manners, and most of all charity and generosity, the latter being a sort of laissez-faire giving regardless of the person’s need. The more I smoked the more I realised that I had grossly overcompensated for the lack of love in my life. My new friends because my new family members and brought this grossness to the forefront. They helped me deal with the horror of self-realization and to cope with the fact that my previous life was a sham, and that I had my own deeply rooted standards and talents which had been suppressed my entire life. I felt like I was shedding at times, like an arachnid, other times I felt like my newness was peeling away layers of repression from my soul, like hand-peeling an onion and stripping it to the core, tears and all.
I was thirty seven years old when I realized one early morning in December at about three thirty after I had been smoking for eleven hours continuously, in a basement apartment, that I should have had a glimpse of the falseness of my life many times prior. The first time was at Saint Joseph’s Convent, the high school I attended. I had reported a matter of sexual abuse to the school’s principal and her reaction caused my anger to rise to the point where I informed her I was going to quit school to get back at the perpetrator of my calamity. She informed me that if I did this I would only be hurting myself and that I should just be courageous and carry-on. She was a nun, a mother superior. I listened and followed her advice. The second time was when I made the decision at the age of seventeen to go live with my mother in Brooklyn, after having lived with my father since I was ten years old in Castries. His reaction was that if she had me move to New York City, to live with her, then she would mess up my education. This, from a highly educated and accomplished man, who would preach to his family that travel is one of the best forms of education and who believed in the benefits of a changing environment. His reaction surprised me negatively as I no longer trusted him and this changed my view of him forever. The third time was as a first year undergraduate at the then Polytechnic University of New York, when I had to undergo mandatory therapy sessions as an international engineering student, who had also applied for the peer tutoring program. The guidance counselor informed me that I had lived a harrowing life in Saint Lucia and I burst into tears telling her that she did not know what she was talking about and asked her to refrain from bringing up such a painful thing again. The fourth time was as a doctoral student. The pressures of the program literally sent me to a psychiatrist midway through my first year, who recommended prescription anti-anxiety medications and a thrapist so that I could get help to deal with buried emotions and memories. The fifth time was when I started my tenure as a teacher. As a new teacher in the New York City department of education I had a teaching mentor who also suggested that I talk to a therapist. I made an appointment through the employee assistant program, kept it but never returned a second time because of pressures from the Caribbean community that it was bad form to talk to therapists when I had family and friends who could help me. I did not realize at the time how false that ideology was and how brainwashed I was by my own cultural beliefs, despite two graduate degrees.
My high times brought all these incidents front and center and I finally decided to be a responsible adult, and went to therapy for six years whilst I was a teacher in Rochester.All those new insights and emotions had to be dealt with, my therapist had informed me. It had taken a few attempts but I finally accepted a therapist who put me on the path to feel secure in my newly found self. She did not approve of medical marijuana however. She recommended that I quit my full time job as a high school teacher and work part time at a community college because my life had spiraled out of my control with all the discoveries I made during therapy, as well as my own self-actualization process. I literally could not handle so much darkness covered up as love. Mental health prescriptions did not help me, marijuana did not help me anymore. Not even alternative therapies helped me stop the spiraling, because I had no moral support from the persons I loved the most. It was too much confusion all at once. I was granted a medical leave of absence from my high school teaching job to get back on track. My therapist suggested that I return to my hometown of Saint Lucia to regroup after I was denied both unemployment and disability benefits. My friends and family in New York agreed. My savings were nil, my monthly loan and credit card payments along with my rent, were two to three months overdue, and no one I knew could help me financially. My attempts to get a different, slower-paced job brought nothing to fruition and I returned to my hometown, to face my demons at forty years old. If I had been allowed to face them when I first became aware of them at ten years old, my life would have been very different. Coming face to face with my demons almost destroyed me. It was as if I was uprooted, tossed around in an angry ocean and then replanted in the dark lonely soil, but my best friend who just happened to be a marijuana smoker, along with my newly found spirituality helped me maintain my sanity. He encouraged my healing as my emotional wounds turned to inner scars, invisible tattoos on my heart. Marijuana was no longer part of my life.
Sex
At eleven years old, I was approached by a neighborhood boy in the balcony of our home . I had said hello to him many times because he was popular, very good looking at five feet ten inches with a grinny smile, and participated in his school’s competitive sports. He was a senior at one of the best high schools in Saint Lucia. I admired him for that. He came into the yard and asked me if he could come into the balcony. He was still in his black and white school uniform. I was in my primary school uniform. He whispered something in my ear about sexiness and proceeded to touch me inappropriately through my uniform. I was in shock but giggled in nervousness and discomfort. I asked him to leave before anyone caught him and I never spoke to hin again, after that. That was my first time hearing the word sexy. I had heard the word rape two years before when I lived with my grandparents in the countryside. I had reported an incident to my grandmother one ordinary school morning and we ended up going to the local district police to report an incident of rape. It was very disturbing, that one minute I was getting dressed for school, enjoying the view from the bedroom window and the next minute I was calling out to my grandmother to tell her that I had seen a big black man who had been walking up the road, watching me in the window while I was getting dressed in front of the mirror. Next thing I recall was screaming out to her for help. The rape incident shattered part of my innocent trust in our small close-knit community and made me miss a few days of school. It changed my young life forever, as I was told mostly by my absentee father, that I would no longer be living with my grandparents in the countryside, something which devastated me because I loved them very much, and instead I was taken by my father and his wife to live with them in their new house in the city . Those were my first experiences of exposure to anything sexual. None of them was by choice and all of them left lifetime scars as I discovered decades later.
When I was thirteen I was chastised by my father for kissing a boy at a youth outing organized by our neighborhood Catholic church. I was raised Catholic, which according to my young teen experience, I was convinced, a religion for people entrenched in guilt. The youth group met on Saturday mornings for Bible study and after Sunday mass for reflection.It was run by the daughter of the matriarch of our small church. I traveled on the church bus with the other members of the youth group one sunny tropical Saturday. We drove about twenty five miles on the narrow western roads of the beautiful country of Saint Lucia to a small rural community, where we joined another youth group to coordinate a visit to the elderly and shut-ins who lived on the outskirts of their community. We met the other group on their own church grounds and as our leaders were going over the agenda, a small group of us headed to the back of the church to check out the view. It was there that a boy a few years older than me, with dark curly hair approached me. In a moment of hormonal surge, I asked him if I could kiss him because he was cute. He said yes. I kissed him boldly. It was gross and sloppy and tasted like saliva. I do not recall what I expected a kiss to feel or taste like but I knew that saliva was not it. That was the first time I kissed a boy. I had already forgotten about it by the time the visits were over. The next morning when I was getting ready to go to mass my father approached me and asked me if I had asked a boy to kiss me during the youth outing. I was flabbergasted. How did he know this? I answered truthfully. My grandmother had instilled honesty in me while she raised me for the first decade of my life. His reaction, when I admitted that I had indeed asked a boy if I could kiss him, was one of outrage and disbelief that his daughter would be so lowly and I was scolded never to do this again, for it was unbecoming behavior for a young girl. I acquiesced in childhood obedience. The reaction to the kissing experiment had left such a bad feeling in my heart that it was not until I was seventeen that I allowed another boy to kiss me. He was my first boyfriend. I was raised with a lot of rules, regulations and discipline from parents and grandparents alike. I adhered to all their rules throughout my teenage years, something which most of my siblings did not understand. They would look at me in absolute consternation that I was such a goodie-two-shoes. One of my sisters even bullied me sexually, for not being sexually active at a young age, as she was, which in turn led me to sexually bullying others as a young adult including my middle sister.
My relationship with my first boyfriend turned out to be a mild teenage rebellion, and just barely because I was seventeen. He was my age, raised in one of the poorest sections of the city’s capital, Castries, in a crowded tenement building complex where people depended on the government to subsidize their rents.My idea of rebellion at eighteen years old, was going on a round-the-island trip with him by public transportation. We made multiple stops along the way and finally crashed at his uncle’s ranch house nestled in a beautiful wooded forest, and having sexual intercourse. I was an awkward, repressed teenager. This was both by nature and by nurturing design. I recall his fair, almost white skin next to my brown skin and the contrast made me feel like I was as black as tar. This falsely perceived body dysmorphia made me very uncomfortable. I lamented about this to him but he could not understand what I was talking about. His seventeen going on sixteen year old brain and hormonally, sexually charged body were singularly focused on his own sexual pleasure. I was focused on the discomfort and near-horror that our skin color did not match. Later over the years I discovered that this was called low self-esteem and insecurity about my body. He had said that I was a beautiful girl and that I could be a model. As he writhed to and fro all over me, I kept trying to push him off . I continued to whine about the awkwardness of how our bodies appeared to me, and that I was getting no pleasure. He was not deterred and said that I just needed to relax and have a good time. I looked at my watch praying that it would be over quickly. There was blood on the beige sheets. I wondered if we were going to have time to wash and dry them before his uncle returned. I sighed, shoved him off from me, and stood up when I had enough of the violation of my vagina. My boyfriend laughed at my carryings-on. I was cold, chagrined. That was how I lost my virginity, there was no pleasure in it. I prayed for no more sex with him. That was not to be so. During our eight month relationship we had sex about five times. To me each time was wilder than the next. He assured me that it was not wild, it was normal and that we should do it more. I asked him what planet he was from that he considered it normal to sneak me into his upstairs bedroom while his mother was cooking him lunch downstairs. How was it normal to ask me if he could video record our sexual activity or to take photos, or to watch pornography while he attempted what he observed? How was it normal to indulge our bodies for his pleasure, for I got no pleasure from any of these things? He laughed and assured me that there was nothing wrong with his requests. I was not abnormal though, so he must have been lying. My relationship with him ended because of his horrible sexual normal and my sexual repression or as I see it now, because we were raised so differently. He did not share that viewpoint. He thought that I was simply either heartless or cold hearted. He cursed me when we broke up and told me that I would end up alone, without a husband. I retorted that I would look him up then and we would marry since he liked me so much. My interest in having another boyfriend was nil after the first attempt failed.The second time around I skipped the boyfriend phase and went directly to marriage. My grandmother asked me to explain this to her. I could not. She had told me about the sanctity of marriage as a child and that I should never accept the first marriage offer. I do not remember if I had asked him to marry me or vice versa. Within a year it had ended.
We had met in Brooklyn, New York in undergraduate college during an introductory engineering class. We were paired up to determine how to drop a raw whole egg from the roof of a three story building without breaking it, fun times which led to marriage shenanigans. After a few dates we agreed that we would move in together because we were both in stressful and uncomfortable situations. We were both international students from the Caribbean living unhappily with relatives in Brooklyn. I was trying to get away from the sexual advances of my stepfather and he was told by his aunt that he could afford to pay his own rent elsewhere. We had similar educational and spiritual values. We did not want to just shack up, so we married first, a practical convenience with hope of future love. I regret not asking him to see his penis first because its size ultimately became the tangible cause of our divorce. He was huge and obsessed with the size of his penis, an anomaly in my very limited experience.
He was a typical West Indian twenty two year old as far as his social cues and awareness. I found out later that he was racist. Apparently he was also a typical male as far as his sexual urges, anti to my softer feminine appetites . When we were at home his mind was consumed with mostly sex and soccer. He was not even worried about meals or bills. He would give me a monthly allowance so that it was not his concern. My concerns were with curtains, furniture, bedding, dinner settings and laundry. His preoccupation was in determining how many places in the house and with what frequency, and quantity of configurations and fantasy guises we could have sex. I was not pleased with his obsession. My Deoxyribonucleic acid strands dictated to my brain that performing sexual acts with the opposite sex was for the purpose of procreation, but the way he went about it assuredly made me not want to have children, especially a daughter. His fascination with teen pornography was a negative in our life. It grew like an addiction and in no time I was exposed to all kinds of wild pornography and began realizing the horrible truth that our college education was put on a backburner. I was not ready for this kind of false maturity and accepted later that I was a late bloomer in all such matters, as I myself went tthrough my own pornographic phase when I came across a family member’s hidden collection. We were quickly divorced because my anxiety about sex issues led me to shut down emotionally and I pushed him away. I was fine with this. I accepted twenty years later, the underlying reasons for my anxieties and that I had a right to my anxiety. I vowed after my failed marriage, that my future husband must be an alien, not from the pool of typical earthly males.
Not long after our separation, my mom had invited me to a Christmas party that her in-laws were having in Harlem. I put aside all bad feelings towards my stepfather and tagged along with them. It was a typical Caribbean gathering. They were from Trinidad. I was twenty four years old with a primary focus of completing my interrupted college career whilst earning a paycheck at the same time. During the failed marriage, I had dropped out of engineering school and worked full time to pay the mounting bills. I then enrolled at the City University of New York where I completed my studies.
At the Christmas party I met a thirty four year old engineer from Trinidad. He was employed with the city’s electrical company and was going through a divorce. We swapped relationship stories as we gave each other a lending ear. He expressed a romantic interest in me. I was very shy about hearing anything like this because I had just broken up with a medical doctor whom I had dated briefly after separation from my husband. He had turned out to be a cheater and womanizer. The Trinidadian assured me that he was nothing like that and in fact he was very faithful to his wife, who was having an affair for almost a year all while persecuting him with her guilt. We left the party and went for a drive in Westchester ending up at his townhouse. He told me that the sex with his wife was amazing and he wanted to demonstrate his skills to me after I told him that I never had an orgasm. He took me up to their master bedroom where I refused to get in the bed so we did it standing against the bedroom wall. It was fine, not gross but there was no orgasm. We drove back to the party afterwards and started dating the next week. Within three months he purchased a condominium and moved out of his house, leaving it for his wife and I moved in with him. Our relationship lasted four years during which time I was exposed to online sexual trysts, strip clubs and stripper sexual fantasies, international prostitutes and escorts and realized that I was sexually boring after still no orgasm. This did not bother me. What bothered me was that my low self esteem had resulted in us breaking up and him asking an eighteen year old to marry him as a rebound. I understood, she was pretty. It did not last because she cheated on him during the engagement and became pregnant by another. I felt bad for him. His wife had cheated, his fiancé had cheated. I had not. We remained friends for many years after as we exchanged stories of our lives including relationship updates. There was something morbid about us relating to each other what went wrong and with him I got a sickly sadistic pleasure in giving him sexual details and extracting similar from him. He was a great support during my lesbian phase.Five failed relationships later, I gave up all sexual relations and decided to develop my spiritual self and as a reward, the masters of the ununiverse lovingly sent me the perfect alien male, I had prayed for to be my companion. I was grateful for the start of my spiritual journey and development, to have someone to share it with, my soulmate. It was then that I began to understand the pleasures of sexual intercourse. I had read somewhere that about ten percent of the population did not experience an orgasm during sexual intercourse, and I lumped myself in that group because at forty years old it had not yet happened for me. This changed with my soulmate. First I had to get over some embarrassing hurdles, the biggest of which was how to embrace his affection without scaring him off with my own emotional scars. Then I had to accept the truth about how I had sex, as he told me with frankness. No one was that prudent with me before. He was very patient with me. I was grateful.
Education
Academic education was on top of the list of priorities for most Caribbean children. I was no different in that regard. The middle and upper classes also value a well-rounded education, beyond academics. I fell into the former category as a teenager because of my father’s and step-mother’s combined income. As a young adult my mother had informed me that when I was a child of about four years old I used to help my eight year old cousin with his homework. I found this incredulous but it made me smile because my Chemical Instrumentation college professor once told me that I was slow, I also found that incredulous and had smiled winningly as I aced the course. I embraced both comments and applied them to how I learned. This may have resulted in disrespect for, and mistrust of authority, and a perseverance in repetition to correction, and perseverance until perfection.
I was born in the mid nineteen seventies in my maternal grandparents house in a small rural community where agricultural products such as coconuts, mangoes and bananas were the main source of income. If one did not want to be a farmer or a housewife, one obtained a local education to become a teacher. I knew by the age of seven that I wanted to be a farmer’s wife like my grandmother and I had already met my husband, a local neighborhood resident who had his own farming business. She said that seven was too young to marry, and that I should wait another decade, perseverance.
There was in my grandmother’s backyard in the savannas of Jhetwine, St Lucia, a plum tree, or as she called it in patois, pietpween, with branches which seemed like log benches. In my early school years I spent many afternoons sitting within it’s comfortable nooks, reading. I was a voracious reader as a child, I never liked the word bookworm, not because I was teased about it, but because there was nothing creepy or crawly about me, book monkey I felt better about because I liked reading in the plum tree, and as I got older, I read under trees in the parks. I was even scolded once by the principal of my secondary school for reading a novel in the school courtyard, long after the end of lunch bell signaled a return to class. In my future classrooms, as a high school teacher when my students asked me what I got in trouble for in high school and I told them that it was for reading the book, Triad of Knives by Tom Cooper they were not amused.
My father had a small library of popular fiction in the living room where I did my homework. When I was done with my homework, I read everything that he read. Ken Follet, Michael Crighton, Robert Ludlum and Stephen King were my favorites. My mother also had a big collection of her favorite authors in her Brooklyn apartment and I foraged through Robin Cook and Lee Child, whenever I visited. I read the books they had, like most people eat potato chips, once you have one you consume the whole bag. As I got older I created my own library and started with Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Voltaire whose works I wished I had known about as a teenager.
One of my favorite classmates in grade eleven had a birthday party at her parents’ house one summer and I showed up with a book in hand. It was The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follet and I told her I had to finish it that day, after she wondered out loud how I could come to her party with a book I had already read. She was a real friend and understood that I was having as much of a great time reading my book at her party as were our classmates dancing. On vacations I would be poolside or beachside reading with a cocktail while others went scuba diving and dolphin watching. Beyond popular fiction, I was intrigued by the writings of nonfiction authors. This became a full-fledged fascination in the college years. Many hours were spent in bookshops, libraries and cafes, even professor’s homes enjoying the insights of brilliant minds of doctors, researchers, scientists, psychologists, religious people, and philosophers. Titles like The Art of War and Forbidden Knowledge jumped out at me. Reading was my academic first love. This was replaced temporarily by mathematics.
My father was a mathematician in his work and writings during my teenage years. He was also an insomniac and an early riser. I used to wonder when he slept, I never asked him this because I had learnt that he found these conversations annoying. I too was an early riser, so in the mornings before breakfast he would hand me a sheet of math problems to work on to keep myself occupied constructively. He was pleased with my work so when he wanted to check the validity of a math problem for his math book with his target student audience, he would give me more exercises to see how fast I came to the correct answer and how well I followed instructions on how to work out the more difficult problems. This was fun. He had an intriguing way of teaching and I realised this in full effect when I would accompany him to his Saturday lessons which he provided for high school students preparing to write their senior year mathematics exams. I experienced a similar level of learning satisfaction during college integral calculus, when a brilliant Russian mathematics professor told me how excellent my systematic and patient approach was. I thought he was being sarcastic until I started acing his exams. The height of my entertainment with mathematics education came with Quantum Chemistry and the fun hijinx of the Schrodinger equation and its applications. I was all too eager to solve multiple page equations and score high marks.
The delight of some of my professors was a strong motivator in most of my college academic success. Inwardly, I thought that their approval of my success in their courses stemmed from the fact that I was Black. I almost had a full fledged sexual relationship with a languages professor because she was so good at bringing out the best of me. She professionally declined my advances even as we shared the same bed. I ended up telling her instead that my first career choice as a teenager was working for the United Nations as a language translator, a decision which my father thwarted, something I did not understand because I was an excellent French and Spanish student in both junior and senior years. He advised me to stick to chemistry, a wet science perfect for girls. My parental obedience was so strong that it never occurred to me during my college years in America to change my major from Chemical Engineering/Chemistry to Foreign Languages, to pursue my wish of working for the United Nations as a translator. The irony of telling my Spanish professor this story, besides her profession, is that her wife worked for the United Nations as a lawyer for refugees.
Reading, mathematics, languages and sciences have played an extensive role in developing my self-esteem and academic success, while the visual arts literally blew me away with the depths of the artists’ works. The Museum Mile of New York City was a favorite haunt and I also sought out neighborhood art galleries wherever I lived. Art became part of my regular life because it afforded me creative stimulation to live my own life which always seemed to be full of personal struggle. This interest was developed after taking an introduction to fine arts course in college. My sense of style many times was inspired by hours perusing through painting galleries. This was fun. Sometimes I felt like I was walking through the paintings, invisible to the other patrons around. My academic grades from preschool to graduate school were good. Maintaining a B average came easily while in the classroom and lecture halls but many struggles and sometimes hardships came in my real home and social life, but I persevered and sometimes it was ugly. My father had told me as a teenager that education takes place not only in the classroom, a useful philosophy. I used this as a mantra to get through the toughest times in high school and college, navigating through personal distractions, graduating with honors. These accomplishments gave me sighs of relief because my whole life I had trouble with real world discipline. Helping others with this came easily, as for my own self development it was very trying. If it was not for a well rounded education beyond the textbook I would not have been eventually successful at this.
At many points in my life, I considered the very same academics, distractions from real life, and that attitude was part of the reason it took me so long to complete my college education. There was not an honest balance between school and home. I often joked that I would have dropped out of school at some point earlier than the doctoral program, perhaps high school, and marry an elder, rich gentleman or become an author and adopt twelve children, if it was not for my learning beyond the classroom. I used to consider the many successful people in society who did not go to college and some who did not even complete high school, but I did not compare myself to others because everyone had their own unique path. Overwhelming anxiety was the root cause of my quitting the doctoral program. Trying to keep a B-plus average was not worth the perzonal, emotional and spiritual costs to myself, after completing two Masters already. I quit after the first year because I had no support system except a hundred thousand dollars which could buy food, housing, clothes, travel, entertainment but try as I may it was not able to buy me the love I needed at the time either from self or family to complete a doctorate in Soil and Water Chemistry at the University of Arizona. Anxiety and false beliefs impeded me every step of the way until I could go no further even after reaching out in great despair to family and friends for help in Saint Lucia. The let down was shattering.
I had taken the maximum two year leave of absence from the university with not even a glimmer of hope that I would be able return to finish something I enjoyed so thoroughly. Desolation set in followed by horror that I would not be a research college professor or scientist like my family and friends wanted me to be. I wanted a successful career but it was not happening smoothly as planned.
Repeatedly as a teen, I was told that no man is an island and that I should do what my superiors asked me to do and not just what I wanted to do, when left to my own devices. I pouted a lot as a child because I hated this. As a young adult however this epitaph allowed me to conquer struggles because I am an introvert by nature. The struggle was to be less so. Growing up in the West Indies I had to find ways to push beyond the introversion because in a sociable, party culture this set me apart for ridicule, misunderstanding, emotional and psychological abuse, sexual abuse and bullying. It just would not do in my family, to have me always quietly off to myself, wanting my own space, my own everything to myself all the time, only because it caused me great distress to have people touch my things or to be in my personal space.
My father used to make fun of my lack of speech and encouraged me through what was called tough love to speak. I preferred to be left alone to entertain myself, but this was curtailed so that I could fit into the Saint Lucian societal norms and not be bullied by my more extroverted peers. To my family and friends my introversion went beyond shyness and privacy. They thought it was rude and unhealthy. That is how I came to hear almost on a daily basis of my teenage life that no man is an island. Remembering this when I was finally on my own in my adult life, encouraged me to interact with others, and came in handy when I was completing my Bachelors and Masters. It proved unsuccessful when I was in the doctoral program.
Throughout my entire academic career, I reached out to classroom peers, work colleagues, and persons in the community. I also used travel and technology to prevent me from drowning in a pool of anxieties that came from doing everyday things in the world. At times it was debilitating. I became very attuned with my behavior in various settings and joined support groups as needed to push through, to avoid losing my sanity permanently. I temporarily lost my sanity a few times for pushing myself too far into the world of extroverts just to please others and to fit in with what was expected of me. Finally, after decades of suffering, I had to shed societal expectations and familiar ties to take a look deep within in a search for my own natural self-expectations. That to me became the ultimate education, but the combination of academics and real world experience helped my learning and integrity in self-actualization.
I Have Been: A Poem
I’ve been to California,
Three times:
San Diego to see my brother, San Francisco to see my lover, Los Angeles to see my mother.
I’ve been to Mexico
Once: vacation
Cancun, Isla Mujeres.
I’ve been to New Mexico,
Once: education,
Las Cruces.
I’ve been to London,
Once: acquaintance in distress.
I’ve been to Arizona,
I’ve been there once:
Scottsdale nights, Phoenix real estate, Tucson vistas, PHD failure
I’ve been to Barbados,
Twice:
Cultural expansion, immigration, business.
I’ve been to Canada,
Three times:
Toronto streets, Montreal cafes.
I’ve been to Chicago to visit my brother.
I’ve been to Indiana to visit his son.
I’ve been to New Orleans.
I’ve been to Seattle, Washington
For a lover’s sake.
I’ve been to Washington, DC,
Twice: Social protests and education.
I’ve been to Maryland.
I’ve been to Connecticut.
I’ve been to New Jersey.
I’ve been to New York,
I lived there
Nine times, nine lives,
City and state.
First, as the life of a tourist
Last, as a stop during exodus, emigration.
I’ve been to Saint Lucia
West Indies, that is
I lived there
Seven times, seven lives.
First, as life given by God
Last, as a full stop in life given by the God of Eternal life.
As I’ve been, so I am: Life
I’ve been and so I am.
Money Woes
The love of money is the root of all evil. At forty three years old I wondered if I had squandered money over the decades because I loved it or because I hated having it.
My first memory of money was when I was in primary school. The school was having a Christmas party and each student in my fourth grade class had to bring a gift for exchange of gifts with another fourth grade class. I had gone looking in my grandmother’s purse before school the day of the party and took fifty dollars. On my way to school I stopped at the local shop ran by an uncle on my father’s side. I purchased a brown plastic kitchen bowl for my fellow schoolmate, it was both practical and expensive. I spent the rest of the money from the purchase at the school where I bought some of my favorite homemade treats such as tamarind balls and coconut sugar snacks. By the time I had gotten home that afternoon my angry grandmother was waiting for me with a whip. She had gotten to know about my splurge purchase at the shop because my uncle had reported it to her and had discovered that money was missing from her purse. The whip startled me because I had never seen one before. It was made from a thin tree branch the leaves of which had been removed. I told her that I had taken the money because I did not want to show up empty handed for the exchange of gifts. She raised the whip to give me a lash and I ran off. The tail end of the whip caught me on my eyebrow, as she warned me never to steal again. I was eight years old and had already experienced the pain of not having money of my own. I never stole from my grandmother again.
As a teenager I lived with my father and his wife and they would give my siblings and I a monthly allowance dependent on our age. As the second of five children I always had money to cover my teenage lifestyle and never had to ask for extra money. This experience developed in me a sense of comfort in having money, that I would always have it. When I went to New York City for the first time to visit my mother, I was sixteen years old. That summer I became aware of budgeting on a salary because she would mention having to pay her bills, and how much she needed to spend at the supermarket with the use of coupons and that shopping for clothing and accessories at department stores only happened when items were discounted. My only brother who was twelve caught onto these habits quickly and managed his monies well, his entire life. I however felt a sense of despondency that I was not receiving an allowance from my mother and had difficulty accepting that everything I needed, she provided. A part of me always felt that there was something I had to buy. That sense of lack did not stop me from enjoying the greatness of the wonderful sights and sounds of the many cultural experiences of the diversity that is New York City. I returned to Saint Lucia at the end of the summer and soon forgot about other people’s budgeting since I was back on an allowance a practice which my father and his wife continued until I was nineteen years old, when I left their home to attend Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York. Upon arriving for college my mother’s adamant financial advice to me was to not get any credit cards. She said nothing further along the lines of explanation although I asked her what she meant. I had never heard of credit cards in Saint Lucia but as a college student there were numerous credit card offers with all kinds of perks and I applied for a few of them. By my sophomore year I had four credit cards and by graduation with my first degree, I had eight including department store credit cards. My stupidly naive philosophy was that I would pay all the credit card debt when I got my first job. This did not happen. By the age of twenty three I had already accepted credit card payments as part of my existence. My monthly income was a thousand dollars and my debt payments were more than two thirds that.
One day, while at the automated teller machine depositing a check for the first time in the Bronx, I noticed what I considered a glitch, which allowed me to deposit multiple checks of any amount and during the same transaction withdraw significant amounts of money whether I had the cash in my account or not. I took advantage of that opportunity to pad up my wallet with cash for my weekend partying wardrobe. This lasted for a few months because thank God finally I went to the bank and noticed that the feature was no longer existed. I was not surprised when the bank shut down about a year later. This habit I discontinued after having heard on the news of people being jailed for check and bank fraud, I realized it was risky behavior and I was glad that I terminated that alarming experiment. At about that same time of frivolous spending I stole three thousand dollars from my mother in what I could only call an attempt at wicked punishment for her not being there when I needed her the most as a child. She forgave me this cruelty and claimed that she must have deserved it.
My financial problems continued because although throughout my college education I received scholarships and financial aid monies totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a ten year span, I never seemed to have enough money because there was always something to spend money on or someone to give it to. My total financial demise came from not taking care of my needs first before my wants. I blamed this on anxiety about self-care and lowly valued self-worth. I used to put my wants and likes before my needs. This applied in all aspects of my spending. My home rental and car payment bills were very high because of my poor credit card history and score. This placed great strain on my yearly income. The most income I ever received as a non-student was when I was a fourth year teacher who tutored part time and made sixty two thousand four hundred dollars that year. This, I used to pay for food, shelter, clothing and transportation all beyond my means because of my mountain of debt. I just was not able to get the hang of spending below my limits even after consulting a credit recovery services company. When I would go shopping for groceries I went without a list and walked from aisle to aisle putting the things I wanted in the shopping cart, regardless of prices. This practice surmounted huge tallies at the checkout, something which caught up with me one summer at thirty seven years old at my favorite supermarket in Rochester, New York. I had not had near enough to pay the food bill. I did not have the financial survival sense to realize that all I had to do was make a list of my needs and compare that to the amount of money I had and then shop and pay my bills accordingly. I saw my friends doing this on a monthly basis but yet I was unable to. My overspending got so bad that I would go to the supermarket, get what I wanted and sneak out without paying for it. Soon, I also began stealing at department stores, a habit which lasted until my last days in America at forty years old in Midtown Manhattan.
My poor financial habits got me on the radar of the Internal Revenue Service. Since I did my own taxes online I would take much leeway in claiming tax refunds during the last three years I worked in the United States of America and when my struggle was greatest. A refund of seventeen hundred dollars with some dishonest finagling would magically be changed to six thousand dollars. The tax service sent me a tax bill when I was thirty eight years old, which in addition to my student loans totaled seventy five thousand dollars. All my financial irresponsibility became overwhelming and I was on my way to becoming homeless because I was unable to pay my housing and car payments and received many repossession and eviction notices. On top of these troubles, one extremely cold Rochester winter I discovered the warmth of gambling. A handful of friends were into it and finally coerced me to check out the casinos of Western New York with them. I gave in one pay day Friday, and discovered the joys of slot machines. Table games such as Black Jack, I had experienced during an Atlantic City spring break vacation in college, but slot machines was a world of repetitive behavior that I had found comforting. I had entered the casino with three hundred dollars hoping to turn it into something more but soon I was playing just for the fun of it, losing money mostly. Casino trips became very frequent and at one time period I would go on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays with different friends. I knew it was very bad when I started taking money out of the automated teller machin at the casinos. This was a huge mistake because those monies were already set aside to pay my high pile of bills. My gambling lasted until I had no money left to gamble with, this was about a year after I started my frequent trips. My love for gambling had ended at the great cost of usurping all my cash.
The twenty years I spent in America were riddled with financial woes from credit card debt, student and car loan debt and bank and tax fraud as well as gambling. On the other hand my financial graces included income from hard earned employment or scholarship monies and generously giving in the spirit of abundance to those in need. I was unable to pay my debts and prayed that with some mighty intervention I would be able to control my lower appetites and learn how to balance my needs with what I already had and so eliminate my sense of lack and misfortune.
Christian Awareness
It was on the morning of January tenth, my fortieth birthday that my boyfriend had broken up with me by text message with no explanations. I was still living in Rochester, upstate New York. That was my seventh breakup in eleven years and the only one which I did not initiate. I lamented about the breakup to my friends. Most of them had said good ririddance except one who thought that we should get back together. I disagreed with all of them as I had done with most people who over my dating and relationship experiences had given me opinions about relationships because their points of view always felt wrong to me. The loss that I had felt from that breakup summed up all previous ones. It seemed that no one understood me and loved me enough throughout our relationship ups and downs, hard times and fun times. It had not mattered over the decades, their income, wellness, career, beliefs or lifestyles the result was the same. Something was missing within me and it was self-love. This was the worst feeling at forty because I was penniless, jobless and under medical care for abuse of prescription medications and marijuana. I had always known the saying love your neighbor as yourself, but rerealized that I loved others but not myself. What I considered self-love was simply vanity and that is partly why no relationship lasted. I vowed at forty that there would be no more breakups.
About a week after that, one of my younger cousins from England, was visiting his sisters and an aunt of ours in Brooklyn and he checked up on me. He was shocked to hear about my hard times and insisted that I leave America and return to Saint Lucia after I had told him that comma, my therapist had suggested the same. He and my aunt in Brooklyn along wwith a friend in the Bronx and my eldest sister in Queens had made arrangements for me to return to my hometown for a fresh start on life. I was at once both ecstatic and apprehensive. On the one hand I was ecstatic because I was returning to Saint Lucia, land that I loved,and always wanted to come back to, to live, but on the other, apprehensive because I had not lived there since I was a teenager.
Upon arrival at the airport one month later I was picked up by my dad and youngest sister and felt right away that something was very different and wrong about how they interacted me but I went along because I did not have a choice and chucked it off to my anxiety issues. I lived with them and my stepmother for eight months in the house that I grew up in as a teenager, during which time all of my old American habits and behaviors such as promiscuity, marijuana use, cigarette and alcohol abuse or as my family called them, demons, resurfaced and attempted to ruin my life once again. In those eight months I had already lost a teaching job which paid five thousand dollars a month, my place of residence with affordable monthly rent plus a social life, and a church family. I was exasperated and alone except for my best friend, companion and lover who was relentless in preventing me from drowning in my losses. He and I both knew that I could not continue that way and thanks to what I called divine intervention at forty two years old, I was removed from that wrong path of poor lifestyle choices and put on the correct path of a personal, heart, mind and soul search. That path was very rocky and hellish at times. I once read on Twitter, that when going through hell keep walking. It certainly felt like hell, leaving behind all the pleasures and comforts that I was used to as I lived a stripped down and simple life in order to correct all that was wrong about my life. I would take great care to avoid the very things that had plagued my life and enslaved me to near self-destruction.
With the help of a Catholic priest I learned that Jesus’ love was there with me during all the highs and lows of all my addictions including gambling and shopping and during my nearly relentless quest for love from others. He showed me that if he had not been, I would not have been able to accept him as my Savior on my path to Redemption. One of my favorite memories of knowing that he was there was from when I taught at a high school in Rochester. This was the last school at which I worked before returning to Saint Lucia. The principal used to walk the hallways some mornings before the first bell, playing a song on his cell phone called Break Every Chain by Sinach. I realized while talking with the priest that the song had left a big impression on me because when I began my Christian journey I remembered it clearly. It was Jesus, not I, who had broken the chains of oppression many of which I had blindly inflicted upon myself in search of worldly pleasures, acceptance and love from others and material gain. Christianity showed me that the only acceptance that I had needed was the love of Jesus. Instead of being dejected and persecuted by my unemployment, I focused instead on the spiritual woman within my heart, different from my public image of brokenness and asking for charity. I began to pray daily sometimes all day and night, for interior knowledge of God and slowly the illusion that I could have the same type of job and life that I had in the past was erased. I rejected the ideas of teaching again or of being an analytical chemist because attached to having those jobs was having a sizable salary which put the fear of God in me because I knew that I could be subject to the same temptations which I had left behind. My poverty brought great humility to my life and as I sought a source of lasting joy and peace, the self-consciousness of my poverty vanished. I prayed further that my God-given natural talents would manifest in my life as I put in the background or deleted those, which I had gained from the world.
Benton Ruisseaux 