Mental diseases are a problem that most of the time, they pass by without been noticed. When I arrived at the country, I didn’t knew I was going to live with a person who hasn’t been treated properly and everyone around her thinks that she is just eccentric but she cleared displayed the characteristics of a schizophrenic paranoid individual, that were more visible when she was “sitting” her grandchildren.
I have to say the experience was kind of traumatic, as I wasn’t used to that level of family “violence”, the screaming, the punches, the insults, and not only her but some of her grandchildren also, and nobody even though about doing a thing as most of them thought that was normal.
I remember feeling like Carol Lewis Alice, I was in another world that I never seen before, not only because I was in the States but because I was in the middle of an inner war and I was there watching in first row. I compared the lady with the Mad Hatter, a crazy individual who was immerse in his own world and he wasn’t aware about his psychotic behavior; that was the lady, like the Mad Hatter (even her hair was kind of similar and her nose).
Me being Alice, I was trapped in a world with new rules, rules that I didn’t knew and to this day I don’t know any; someday it was happiness, other it was sadness and rage, those mood changes were so sudden and quick that you were seeing two individuals in one body, one side was happy and go-lucky the other was somber and destructive; you could saw her buying toys for her grandkids and in a blink of an eye, she was a paranoid individual who was afraid of her own neighbors.
When I arrived to that house, I was with my physique ripped off due to it being the first time I was away from home, away from my country and family, I was by myself and I couldn’t think well, I started to hear her words about not trusting the neighbors, racist comments and some superiority complex related words, and I didn’t saw anything strange at first, but when I saw yelling at her grandkids like if they were some kind of animals, I started to see the truth and that was the first time I reacted in the mess I was into.
Not only the person with the disability suffers, the family does as well, they will see the violence spurts as something normal, when clearly they aren’t, violence is not normal, is an aberration and at the same time a part of human nature that can be controlled. I remember that her youngest granddaughter had some similar sprouts as well, by punching and bitch slapping her younger brother with the minimal provocation, I thought that her could have the same disability has her grandma, since both were prone to violence burst with the minimal hesitation.
Her other grandkids had other problems as well, such as introspection and language difficulties, they couldn’t look at the eyes if they were speaking with you and they used to stutter; the youngest one had a dialect problem where at his 3 years of age he couldn’t pronounce more than a couple of nonsensical words, but nobody saw anything different from the other kids, the comments were that it was only a phase, but probably those comments were made as I was there, a stranger who passed by the looking glass into a wonderland.
6 months later after I left that house, I guess I have regained my strength, I do not feel weak anymore and I see that experience as a life experience where not only I could saw another perspective as an individual but I could saw and live to tell the life behind the looking glass.
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