Whenever I’ve begun to think I know who I am, my life circumstances have altered in some extreme way that leaves me all-at-sea again, wondering where am I now, who am I now. My parents were both survivors of catastrophes, my father of the holocaust, my mother of institutional psychiatry and electroshock. Neither survived intact, up to the task of parenting, so I had to figure it all out myself as best I could. Thank god for children’s books, and teachers who were kind to an intensely shy little girl.

but I ended up coming out of the largest and poorest high school in my county with a scholarship to a great college, just because I accompanied a friend on a nice road-trip upstate for his admissions interview at a place I wouldn’t have dreamed of going to myself. He told his interviewer a little about me, they fetched me from the waiting room, ended up admitting me on “early decision” before I even filled out their forms.

The aspect of life I find most striking, at the moment, is that even when all signs suggest you’re stuck in a sad sad story, you never know what’s ahead, no kidding, you have no idea, anything’s possible (including some terrible stuff you therefore can’t anticipate, so don’t try), and absurdly high hopes turn out to make sense. I majored in philosophy, to the great annoyance of those who thought I’d be wiser to work toward a career that might get me out of poverty.

Except to say I felt I’d be stupid to not take advantage of the opportunity Vassar offered me to explore in a well-guided way, what wisdom IS, how to make the big decisions, all the possible ways of thinking about why this and not that… And, I suppose, how to survive the depressions that had arrived with puberty, not that I knew what to call those states of mind I suffered for months at a time, especially in winter, when the dark and cold entered me and displaced all joy and hope and comfort.

The experience that may have jump-started my becoming a psych-rights activist happened after I was talked into voluntarily admitting myself to the psych unit of a local general hospital, the one I was born in, as a matter of fact, with the story they could somehow relieve depression in that rather depressing environment, strangely different from the rest of the hospital.

I became an activist the day smoke set off the building fire-alarms, and while preparations were made to evacuate other hospital patients, some of my fellow psych-unit patients naturally tried to open the door between us and the rest of the hospital (and the exits) and found it still locked.

Now I’ve survived cancer, too, twice–and met and married a man too good and loveable to be real, then been forced to survive his death. We met while helping the same guy, who was being electro-shocked against his will (legal in New York, and many other states).

My husband Kim was a passionate and dedicated fighter for the rights of people most likely to be stripped of their rights, “for their own good”, people who’ve had the bad luck to be labeled mental patients. (With a higher income, you’re eccentric, or, better, interesting. Poor people aren’t interesting, they’re crazy.)

I liked that job, it really was interesting, and everyone I spoke to hung in there, more or less. Mostly I just keep surviving stuff that tends to make staying alive difficult. I spend a good part of my time being amazed, and looking forward with hope that I’ll have many more opportunities to be surprised at the ways people, and life, can surpass expectations.