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By Susan Musgrove
“I don’t advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity-but they’ve always worked for me.”
I began my convocation speech to a high school graduating class several years ago by quoting the journalist Hunter S. Thompson. I said insanity was what had kept me sane throughout high school because, among other things, my teeth weren’t straight enough for me to be a cheerleader. Most of the graduates I was addressing came from goal-oriented upper-middle class families. “Forget about goals,” I told them. “Sigmund Freud said death is the goal of all life. Sooner or later you’ll all reach your goal, so try to live a little in the meantime.” The teachers told me afterwards it was the first speech they’d ever seen their students listen to.
The next day twenty outraged parents phoned the principal to complain. I was pleased that, almost thirty years after I had dropped out of high school, I still had the ability to annoy so many parents. I figured I must be doing something right.
I’ve never been the kind of writer who believes she can change the world, but I’ve always believed it’s a writer’s job to shake things up, to disturb the status quo. My teachers used to tell me I had the wrong attitude. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only kind of attitude to have. I’m happy to say this particular principal supported me, which is more than my own high school principal had done. When I ended up in his office for necking with my boyfriend instead of paying attention in Biology, “the Monk” (as we called him because of the hair growing out of his ears) told me that if I continued on this downward spiral of kissing boys, writing poetry, and skipping classes, I would most likely end up as a prostitute. But I already knew the world’s oldest profession wasn’t for me. I didn’t want a job where you had to work with other people.
I don’t think there is a moment when you realize, This is it, this is who I am, what has just happened to me is going to change my life forever. Instead there are a series of life-altering moments, beginning when you are born and ending when you die, and a great many of these seem to occur in your teenage years
I suppose it was a combination of things-not just the drugs-that sped me through the Summer of Love and into a mental hospital. The truth was, so much peace and love had driven me crazy, so far crazy that I even told the two police officers who picked me, bleeding from the wrists, off my parents’ bathroom floor that they were beautiful people. My deep thoughts were wasted on them. They seemed more concerned about not getting blood on the interior of their new cruiser, and they confiscated my beads so I couldn’t try to hang myself on my way to the psych ward.
At the hospital (which the inmates had nicknamed “the Garden of Eden” because everyone who was committed fell in live, usually with someone else’s lover), I met most of the local university’s English Department, and a few kids my own age who had literally blown their minds on drugs. But fate has always been kind to me. My psychiatrist knew Robin Skelton, an established poet who taught creative writing and edited a literary magazine. He told Robin about “the young girl in the hospital writing poetry,” and Robin came to visit me. Over tea in the cafeteria, Robin asked to see some of my writing, and I showed him my notebooks. He looked up at me after he finished my poem “Going Crazy, Wanna Come?”
“You are not mad,” he said. “You’re a poet.”
Writing those words today, all these years later, I start to cry.
Robin took away some of my poems and published them. I bought my first typewriter with the $100 cheque. He also left me a copy of Sylvia Plath’s book of poems, Ariel, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ginsberg wrote, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Plath said, “The blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it.” Poetry had given me my life back.
Excerpted from Nerves Out Loud: Critical Moments in the Lives of Seven Teen Girls edited by Susan Musgrave, published by Annick Press. Susan Musgrave appears at the Vancouver International Writers Festival with Teresa McWhirter and Laisha Rosnau Wednesday, October 23, 1 to 2:30 pm at the Arts Club Revue Theatre in “Teenage Rebellion-Then and Now.”
For information call 604-681-6330 or visit www.writersfest.bc.ca/2002festival. Tickets $12, 604-280-3311.
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