Go To The Hunger Center

By Beryl Jean Khabeer, MA

It’s  close to dawn.  I sit this night, no food in the apartment rented out to the “severely mentally ill.”  And I grimace over how in a span of decades, I’ve attempted escape from this Poverty-stricken Hour in which I now anger.

How in 1976, I procured a BA degree after a psychotic experience, and on 1800mg of Thorazine, I struggled from Seclusion room to Seclusion room and I graduated, Deans’ List from a prestigious, private New England college.  Only to go home to an employment agency that, personnel advising, still more school or more skills!

I garnered all required education classes successfully achieving the merit to Student Teach.  Only to have my Student Teaching Advisor in 1981 ominously ask, “Did you change your name?”  And almost as soon as I nodded, “Yes,” she remarked, “Well, since you’ve changed your name, no matter how well you do in this Student Teaching, you will NOT pass.”  I withdrew before any damage to my record could be done.

Without skipping a beat, I applied for graduate studies in Philosophy.  Got in with a Teaching Assistantship.  I tutored Logic after experiencing a Catatonic State with many of my charges going on to successfully complete Law School, Social Work.  And me?  The beautiful MIND behind it all?

I matriculated with merit and minority monies in 1993 to Michigan State University; A PhD Candidate, only to be told by a “liberal” professor in the Philosophy Department that “Having black PhD’s is like Housing.  You can NOT have too many black professors, because, then the white students won’t come to the university.”

I guess, I AM JUST TOO SHIFTLESS AND LAZY TO ADMIT TO ANYTHING.  And I’m too dumb and helplessly insane to survive any other way than by America’s good hearted charity processes.  So on this night, even as the pensive anger rises in this charity “box” in which I sit with no food my red-hot fingers dial that last chance.  “I’ve had enough” crisis hotline-only to hear the worker’s societal solution as my reward for all my challenges over which I have triumphed, “Go to the Hunger Center.”

(  2July 18, 2006) 

Postscript:  For those needing recent memory feedback, in March , 2006, I asked the counselor in the Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) at Windsor Hospital what will it take for me to successfully enter the mainstream of society?  He asked me only TWO questions, and then gave his verdict.  First question to which I answered in the affirmative, “Do you sometimes see things other people don’t see?”  And second question, “Do you hear things sometimes that other people don’t hear?”  After I truthfully answered “Yes” to each question, he answered very firmly, “You will NEVER get into OUR society!”

2011 (happy) Addendum:  seen/been in Twin Towers 9/11 in Aug. 1974.  MIND experts had diagnosed:  ‘delusional thinking, hallucinations.”

I had heard a Voice say in June, 2009, “Behave yourself.  Go to law school.”  I was accepted into a law school, 2010 tentatively I will attend it in another city, start May, 2012.

(December 3, 2011)