Authority and Identity

     My friend works in the mental heath field.  She is in charge of her patients, and takes responsibility for their treatment and care.   Her choices effect the lives of those around her, and fortunately she is wise and good of heart.  Making these decisions has shaped her wisdom and compassion giving her a title and an operation in the world which she continues to aggrandize with goals of graduate school and doctorship.  She’s athletic, and been practicing a disciplined yoga routine.  Being a psychology major, of course she wanted to go to the Stanford prison experiment movie playing at the Ritz movie theather.  I had nothing better to do, so I was down to see it with her. 

     I keep having these mental breakdowns at night.  My attendant leaves at five pm, the door shuts and locks.  Unless someone is free to hangout, I am now stuck for the rest of the night alone in my apartment.  This doesn’t always bother me, but currently my power wheelchair isn’t working and I can’t take the scooter on the bus without people making comments “Why don’t you go to driving school?” or angrily shouting at me to hurry the f^ck up.  I can’t turn my head to navigate because of my fusion, and I can’t turn the scooter into the seat area for wheelchairs because it’s just physically impossible.  I am lucky that I have the option though to even try, before I got the scooter for Christmas there was no other alternative when my chair breaks.  I try to keep myself busy when I’m stuck inside: write songs, talk to people online, watch movies with the brightness turned down because it affects my vision and headaches.  But a lot of the time I lose control and totally become nothing.  My eyes focus off and I’m still conscious and sitting up but I’m not here.  I go into a catatonic state of depression and depersonalization; I don’t move, I don’t think, it’s just a lucid surrender.  People ask why I didn’t answer their texts later I tell them I was sleeping.  It usually lasts until there’s someone around again who can help me manage myself and my surroundings.

     So my friend came over last night after my attendant left and we made the plan to go get dinner and see the movie.  She asked me which restaurant I wanted to go to, I told her I didn’t care because she was driving so it’s her call.  We ended up going to a Cosi and getting the most watered down health sodas with some pretty good soup.  She got a cookie and I got the James-and-the-giant-peach sequel size of an apple.  There weren’t any singing dancing claymation insects on it, unfortunately.  We went to the Ritz, and she helped me get around and into the seat.  In the back row I noticed on the other side of the theather was a man lighting a lighter with his shoes and socks removed and repeatedly burning the bottoms of his bare feet.  I thought maybe I should say something with the flame being so close to the fabric on the seats, but didn’t.   The movie started and I put on my sunglasses.

     Most people know of the Dr. Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment.  The psychology doctor on a totalitarian power-trip.  His experiment on power, personality, authority and prison behavior, that was really just a simulation of how cruel college fraternity kids can be to eachother. A bunch of young boys volunteered to be subjects, with a coin flip half were given the role as “prison guards” and the other half the role as “prisoners.”  The only difference between giving the kids the title of “prison guard” and three greek letters was that they had no codes to follow as guards.  Only rules to create.  They chose to be abusive, and the prisoners were harassed, punished without crime, and robbed of all personal freedom.  Within seven days they had to just down the experiment that was supposed to last for weeks because the “prisoners” had broken down mentally, many of them needing therapy to recover afterwards. 

     The movie overdramatized it a lot, in the experiment the prisoners were not physically harmed, but in the film they were thrown around violently and beaten with nightsticks because physical abuse is far easier for people to understand than psychological.  It’s a movie for American audiences so it needs visuals to be intense.  I saw in the previews they are doing a movie on the Milgram shock experiments, I wonder if they’ll make the electric shocks real in that just for the dramatic effect. The weirdo in the seat on the other side kept massaging his feet which he had up on the seat in front of him, I think he might have had a mental illness.   As I was watching the movie and the scenes where the prisoners lost it psychologically in different ways I realized I’d been through all of those stages myself with my disability.

-The deprivation of identity: you are not who you were when able-bodied.

-The distress of rebellion: the harder you fight, the more it hurts.

-The loss of control and the abuse of the controllers.

My controllers or “prison guards” are as followed:

1.           My disability.  It tells my body what it can and can’t most, most of it cants.  It puts me in severe amounts of physical discomfort pain that I have no choice to get of aside from heavy narcotics which is its own type of torture.  The quadriparesis weakness I have no choice but to accept.    

2.           My government.  It tells I can’t have a substantial income without losing my insurance and my attendant care services.  It tells me I must stay welfare poor, living in a ghetto in subsidized housing.  Of course I feel like a prisoner, there are bars on my windows.  It tells me that if I am ever to try to go to college, have a career like those I admire, I will be screwing myself over.  Because I am chronically ill and disabled, I must not be anyone of authority to those who are not disabled.  I am not allowed to marry a person with an income greater than mine without losing what little independence and freedom I have. 

3.           My society.   It tells me where I can and can’t go.  It ignores me and people like me with barriers of architecture, keeping the minds of people ignorant and inaccessible. 

     With acknowledging these controllers in my life I can accept them even less.  The Stanford experiment was shut down after seven days because it was deemed as inhumane.  This is a lifetime of imprisonment without crime for many people unless it is changed by those in power.  The doctors, the politicians, the communities.  They need compassion; they need to make the choice to be compassionate.  Otherwise they are just as abusive as those prison guards, who in the end repented and felt horrible for their actions.  I can beg until I break for change, but I cannot make that happen.   I am not a criminal, but I do not know who I fully am because I am not given the authority to be that person.  This is why I’m crazy.