In 2011, I sat in a Karis Community meeting with the staff and 17 other community members, including artists, writers, accountants, snowboarders, nurses, chemists, geologists, playwrights, dog walkers, and hikers. I never thought I’d be surrounded by every color from the book What Color is Your Parachute?. But somehow, my parachute landed me on a comfy couch listening to Logan extend gratitude to Melanie for helping him mow the lawn. I never expected to be in a room that exists, according to the Karis website, for people with “serious and persistent mental illness.” I never knew I’d be on the roster with anyone here. The main thing I shared was the desire to have something in common after bouts of loneliness.
At twenty-two, I had my first manic episode. At twenty-nine, I created art alone in my room to self-medicate and became increasingly detached from reality. The jaws of life finally came into my home in the form of paramedics, and I was hospitalized. After ten days, a tiny version of myself pushed me through the darkness to fight for my life and stand up amid the rubble at rock bottom. I moved to Karis Community—a stigma-free haven that proved to me the universe was compassionate.
It was the first time I felt a sense of belonging in years. It was the first time, in a while, that I had an inside joke with someone else. It was the first time people told me I mattered for no other reason than the fact that I existed. Nobody was screaming. Nobody had done a school shooting. Nobody was cutting their ear off. At Karis, the bleeding, gashes, and scars are carved into people’s bones, muscles, reflexes, joints, organs, and souls. Hidden by skin and covered by clothes. Hidden by years of practicing how to appear scarless in a society that insists on perfection. When does society graduate my scars from shameful secrets into celebrations to be written about in a memoir? When do my scars make me a hero just for getting out of bed?
During my first stay at Karis, I had yet to understand that I didn’t need to start a creative empire to be equal to everyone else. I didn’t need to fit two weeks of work into one week to keep up as I was never behind to begin with. So, I sat in the community meetings contemplating my projects as Tommy cried and Jessa handed him a tissue. My mental “to-do list” multiplied as Sam talked about how he couldn’t stop ruminating either. I tried not to brainstorm as Violet announced she got a promotion. I clapped with everyone else while trying to sew my career parachute back together. But the parachute was never finished. The parachute always needed to be bigger and more elaborate. I couldn’t risk it failing to open and having to go back to a job in finance where I was silenced and isolated. So, I worked and worked, creating and creating even when my artistic successes grew in tandem with my instability. I traded my sanity for a false sense of security. Desperation disguised as progress.
On August 5, 2014, I quit my 14-years of doctor-prescribed Adderall, and my synapses were stunned silent. My career parachute disintegrated. My bed was my lifeboat, and I moved back to Karis for a second time. Through groups and check-ins, I realized that I was rushing through life and missing out on genuine human connection; that creative achievements weren’t worth risking my physical and mental health. The staff at Karis, along with the Community Members, helped me rewire my neural pathways until I gained the energy to take walks and laugh with others.
Now in 2021, I am seven years sober from Adderall and work addiction. I’ve lived on my own for seven years and walk my poodle three miles a day. I’ve finished a semester of grad school for Buddhist psychology, where I meditated on a two-week retreat for seven hours a day. I regularly connect with my Karis friends through the Alumni Group, where we’ve weathered the pandemic through text messages and zoom meetings. And I take creative writing classes to celebrate my scars in a memoir filled with the adventures I had with my Karis friends whose lives were changed there just like mine.
Caroline P., Alumni