VOICES OF OUR REGION
Paul Lee
Transcript
My name is Paul Lee.
Currently stay in the Mt.Oliver area of Pittsburgh. I just recently moved from the ah North Oakland area as a part of a program that I was in, a housing program that I was in, relating to mental illness and substance abuse. The program was originally for two years, and I have done such a good job that I was there for about three years.
So I’ll just go back to how I originally heard about Voices for Our Region. I’m actually a peer counselor at Peoples Oakland. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Peoples Oakland.
I believe that I’ve accomplished a great deal over the last four years in recovery, I thought that maybe my personal life experiences and the darkness, if you will, that I experienced for so many years, and being like transformed into this wonderful life that I have today, where the odds was so against me, overwhelmingly against me, dealing with mental illness and additional substance abuse, I thought that it would be a good chance or opportunity to express my unique experience, and hopefully bring hope to someone else who may have had similar experiences.
I’m originally from Pittsburgh, but my Dad is from New York in the Bronx. My Mom is from Pittsburgh. There was twelve of us, seven boys, five girls. We grew up in the inner city. It was very difficult. My Mom and Dad split up when we were very young. I was probably about four. She took us to Pittsburgh, back to Pittsburgh, cause originally she had went to New York and met my Dad and it didn’t work out. My Dad had a very dominant, as well as a lot of members, siblings in my family are very dominant predisposition to schizophrenia, and coupled with alcohol addiction.
You know, it’s very difficult sometimes to talk about it sometimes because I’m also a recovering addict. So being in the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous and being in this new way of mental health, the mental health new way of doing things and reinnovations of how we look at things in the mental health system, I find it that having courage to disclose personal things is can be beneficial to other people, so that’s what I do.
My dad’s father is a mystery. Till this very day, I don’t even know if he was white or black. There were some secrets that my grandfather was protected from because he did some unthinkable things with his children. And is has, and I’m forty-two years old, and then it has come to our attention that a lot of my aunts have died with these secrets, and they didn’t want to disclose it because it has just recently come out that he had incestual relations with his daughters and there were other children born that we probably don’t even know exist. And that enhances the ability for increased state of mental illnesses.
So it was difficult growing up in an urban society, feeling different, but yet wanting to fit in. And not having the focus or the concentration to feel like we were a part of a bigger society, our family gravitated towards drugs and alcohol as a means to divert our frustrations.
And my mom was like 5 ft 2, too, and she had all these kids, and she never smoked, never drank, and she, we put her through a lot, an awful lot. She did the best she could. I remember coming to Pittsburgh from New York and the house was like literally like a shack, and that house right now is worth like seventy thousand dollars. She laid the carpet herself. She got a loan, fixed it, remodeled it. She was a wonderful woman. She just couldn’t understand why her children were so counter-productive. And it bothered her, and she thought that drugs and alcohol was the key component to this counter production, and in some respects, in a large respects, it was. The part that I don’t believe that my mother was willing to even realize or accept or even embrace, was the mental illness side, she was the opposite of my dad and the combination of them both, I really believe, represents who their children came to be, so there’s like, almost like a dissociative persons within us, you know. And if you couple that with the sexual abuse, because it continued when we were up in New York, cause my dad came back to Pittsburgh and kidnapped us and took us back to New York. Yeah, so if you couple that with the degrading living circumstances, and his mental illness and his inability to provide for us as a functional person, along with his drinking and, you know, not being there while wolves surround his children, was extremely difficult.
My mom went back to New York, got us back. I was a very confused young man, very isolated and lonely and I really had no sense of identity. I remember going to playing baseball, football, basketball, and no one saw my games, nobody in my family ever came. I was supposed to be the good child. I wouldn’t come outside except to play basketball, football and baseball.
After I played sports and nobody came to see my games, it just brought more of a self-inclusion within myself of isolation and, I would say, suppressed anger and the experiences of my past much more deeper and that’s when I gravitated to alcohol and drugs, around twelve, thirteen years old. I remember drinking a half a can of beer and being drunk. And I remember being upset at the fact that everybody else could drink about five beers and not be drunk. I wanted to be so much away from who I am that I was willing to force this alcohol in my system against its will, just to fit in and be a part of everybody else,
My twin brother, had a severe schizophrenic, but there was times where as he exhibited clear thinking. His chess game was superb. You couldn’t beat him. It’s almost like I believe that mental illness and autism and everything, that there’s just so many qualities that we possess I just that that we just don’t know how to put it together, whereas we can balance, and I think that that’s where the direction that the mental health field should focus more on.
Growing up, it was very difficult because my twin brother possessed a more major, I mean severe symptoms of paranoid schizophrenic. Where as mine was more moderate-to-mild, and my little sister, she till today, possesses it as well, more severely than my dad did and a couple of my siblings. But we also possess this side of us that is very intelligent, insightful, not confusing, but clarity, drive, determination, desire, strong will, it’s just that I fought, I can’t really explain how I fought it, but I remember for years, like, you know, you had the old adage of the good angel, bad angel. I remember for years, and I never really exposed this to nobody, but I remember for years feeling like this disease or this problem was right on the back of my head, and for years I remember having my own private war, and I always seemed to refuse the paranoid schizophrenic that just wanted to overtake me.
I believe in hereditary and predisposition, and I believe that I have it, but I also believe that there is something in me that can combat it, and I believe that’s what happened with me, except when I was using drugs and alcohol I didn’t have that. But I remember having my own personal war and never giving in to it, because I seen what it did to my twin brother.
One thing that I believe is productive in my own personal life and the professional counseling that I’m achieving academically is our belief systems. Can we get ourselves and society, to believe in ourselves, that we are not the people who we are labeled to be. And then work our way up the chain and have society-this way we won’t be giving society that power. We take the power, because it’s ours in the first place, and then as we continue to demand who we are and not allow society to dictate who we are, I believe that we have a much better chance at coming to some discovery of what we can really do in society, getting real with what we can do and what we cannot do.
I had all these things going on, and I had so many different conflicts within myself, and it was only through a stage of events, that I believe that God set the stage, that I got to the point where I was just so desperate to find out what I can achieve on. I got so desperate that I wanted to know. I always knew that, that’s why I believe in people with mental illness. I always knew that there was some qualities in me. I always knew that no matter how many years I’ve used drugs and alcohol, I always knew that there was some good qualities in me, that I wasn’t an ignorant person, that I did possess some things that, intellect and desire and stuff like that doing something good for humanity, but I couldn’t find that um, that spirit of recovery. It was like I knew it existed, but I couldn’t find it.
The first step was being willing to go get help. And my life has turned around dramatically, and I have reestablished relationships with my teenage daughters down in Memphis, Tennessee. I have a nice car, I pay bills, I have a lot of credit cards that I am very responsible for. I pay my bills on time. I go to school. I just graduated from college and going for my Master’s degree, and till this day I somewhat still struggle with the concept of having mental illness, because I’m doing so well, but at the same time I recognize that it’s there, But I don’t allow it to dictate my life, and I think that just like a normal person, I think that person with mental illness, if they just, if we can get a person to activate their hopes and their desires and potentials and put it in proper perspective,
I just got that degree and I’m like looking at it today and it’s like “Wow.” It was hard work. I’m not going to lie. It was hard work. It was difficult. I was under a lot, going to NA meetings a lot I was starting my new job as a peer counselor. I was going full-time because I’m old, and I wanted to get to moving, and I did it. And when I went to graduation about three weeks ago, I was like, I wanted to cry. I was like, “Only if they knew it.” I’m looking at everybody else, they’re not crying, but inside of me, the struggles that I went through, the abuse, the self-abuse, being victimized and the drugs and the stigma and the degradation that I mite of put myself through, coupled with the paranoia and the depression, severe depression, and the anger and the unresolved hurt, that’s why I say that courage is truly the major intangible for recovery for me.
So I would have to say that I’m proud of the courage that I’ve displayed.
Interviewer: Who has been the biggest influence in your life?
I would have to go back to my mother. She’s in a nursing home and she has dementia. She believed in me, and I guess it’s ironic that that’s one of the main things that I’ve used in my own counseling, is that I believe in people. The spirit that she instilled in me, that she believed in me, carries me on. And I do believe without a doubt that twenty years from now, that people with mental illnesses will be, like I said, will be working in fields and being highly productive and actually becoming better with their own mental illnesses, in more so but also being highly productive in their jobs, and how they think on their job, just from the fact that they are now more accepted, and that they believe in themselves.