Tag Archives: Pittsburgh

Burnout

16 Monday Jan 2012

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Cartoon of a patient consulting a doctor about a burn-out (Dutch -- "You are having a burnout."), April 17, 2008. (Welleman via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It’s a word I rarely admit to. One that I usually notice signs of, but try to work through anyway. But as I’ve learned over the years, I’ve needed to acknowledge and understand my burnouts before moving forward and avoiding the conditions that produced it in the first place.

My first experience with burnout was my sophomore year of high school in June ’85. It came after three solid months of applying my memorization skills (some would say near-photograph memory skills) full-time, without the time and space to study at 616 or the support of good teachers that year, especially in Chemistry with the not-so-great Mr. Lewis. That, and no food at home during finals/Regents exams week made me actually sick of school for the first time (see my “Hunger” post from June ’08).

I went through something similar in late November and December ’89, the end of the first half of my junior year at Pitt. I had put together what I called a “total semester” plan for the first time, to organize my life so that I’d have a life outside of my classes and to take a shot at a 4.0 that semester. Only, I was dumb enough to take third-semester calculus a year and a half after my last math course, and I was now a history major taking writing intensive courses.

That, and finding out that one of my closest female friends was attracted to another, much shorter guy — also a friend of mine — meant for a rocky last three weeks of ’89. And I’d unwittingly helped to set them up. I managed a 2.98 GPA that terrible semester, including a D+ in multiple integrals and differential equations. Terrible, at least by my own standards.

Burning Brain (cropped), January 16, 2012. (Selestron76 via http://dreamstime.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws.

I was beginning to understand that my occasional burnout wasn’t just because of school or work, but because some area of my life had caused me significant emotional turmoil, which in turn affected my performance in other areas. The period between December ’96 and September ’98 was a long period of burnout for me. I have written here before about my battles with Joe Trotter and Carnegie Mellon as I completed my dissertation at the end of ’96 — too many times for some people’s tastes. What I haven’t discussed is the emotional toll that process took on me and how long it took for me to recover.

I spent most of ’97 and ’98 angry, raging ready to actually strangle most of the folks on Carnegie Mellon’s campus after finishing the degree. I couldn’t look at Trotter without wanting to wrap piano wire around his throat from behind and feeling him squirm as I cut the life out of him. Yeah, it was bad. As my now wife of twelve years can attest, I’d get into arguments with cashiers at CVS over a nickel and their complete disdain for their duties, ready to throw a punch.

But I also couldn’t write, at least write in the ways in which I wanted. I could execute the mechanical exercise of writing well enough, even put together papers for presentation and articles for publication. I even wrote an editorial on race with my then girlfriend that was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in March ’98. Still, I was writing mostly because I didn’t believe in writer’s block or in burnout, this despite all the contrary evidence.

Add the fact that I’d learned that my own mother was actually jealous of me for going to school, among other things (see “My Post-Doctoral Life” post from May ’08). I was burned out, a sad person to be around for most of ’97 and a good portion of ’98. All while I was an underemployed adjunct professor at Duquesne and working part-time at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. I’m not sure how Angelia put up with me, because it was hard for me to put up with me.

So, how did I pull out of my burnout? Time after the doctorate, away from Carnegie Mellon (I didn’t set foot on the campus for nearly two years after I cleaned out my cubicle in July ’97), for starters. Having people in my life who needed me to be me at my best, like Angelia and my Duquesne students, for instance, helped.

But the need to find full-time work and the realization that staying in Pittsburgh to wait for Trotter to be run

Spool of piano wire, with 247 ft-lbs of torque (enough to kill), January 16, 2012. (http://http://www.monumentalelevatorsupply.com).

over by a PA-Transit bus for a potential job opening was also a great motivator. I realized that despite everything, I’d gained more than I lost in earning my doctorate, and that I may yet find my better self again by putting those roiling emotions in a box in my mind’s attic.

I’ve felt burnout since. In a family intervention from a decade ago, in moving on from New Voices, even in my current context as consultant and professor. At least I’m more aware when I’m feeling that way, and am able to cope with those emotions with reminders of what and whom I have in my life that remains true and good.

Regis and Donald Earl

12 Thursday Jan 2012

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Regis & Kathie Lee cover, cropped, People Magazine, September 30, 1991. (http://people.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because picture is cropped and of low resolution.

In a conversation I had with my mother about sixteen years ago, she said, “I always thought that all your friends were weird.” This after having broken up with a girlfriend a few weeks before, my first serious relationship in three years. Thanks, Mom! Of course, a month later, I began dating my wife of nearly twelve years (and yes, my mother thinks that Angelia’s weird, too!).

But she did have a point, albeit a small one. Some nerve, since I’m her son, after all! I had accepted this reality by my second semester at the University of Pittsburgh. This after a semester of attempting to be cool, then to not be cool, then to just close myself off out of picking my old Crush #2 scab.

I began my second semester in January ’88, attempting to meet people more like myself, which often meant meeting people a good five or ten years older than me, students comfortable in their own weirdness. The first friend I made this way was Regis. He was a working-class Western Pennsylvanian through and through, with that guttural Pittsburgh-ese accent. Regis said “jag-off” for “jack-off,” “ruff” for “roof,” “yinz” for “you all” or “y’all,” and “dahntahn” for “downtown.”

Regis had been unemployed for nearly a year, laid-off by Westinghouse, where for the previous five years he guarded a boiler room in one of their plants. He was about five-foot-six, constantly scruffy and disheveled, and sometimes looked like he was a step or two away from insanity. Kind of like a Pitt student’s version of Rasputin.

Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), screen shot -- closest approximation to Regis, circa 1988 -- January 12, 2012. (http://examiner.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws due to low resolution and limited use for blog post.

But Regis was a quick study and absolutely enjoyed going to college, as he was a deeply critical thinker. Heck, he was the smartest person I knew during my Pitt and Carnegie Mellon years! As a result, we hit it off right away in our discussion sections on Friday mornings in Western Civilization II. Me and Regis would often gang up on the rest of the class in the discussion of all things Western European-related, from the French Revolution  to the connections between the European slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, and European imperialism. It was wonderful not being the only oddball in class for a change.

What made us friends, though, had more to do with the fact that Regis didn’t allow himself to be blinded by my attempts to hide the real truth behind my weirdness. He saw through my coping strategies to mask the battering I’d taken from poverty, abuse and Humanities in Mount Vernon. Regis was there for me my sophomore year at Pitt in a way that any true friend would be.

After my bout with homelessness — which I hadn’t told Regis about — I was broke from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. Despite my pride and my mother’s constant mantra of not asking for “handouts,” I first asked Regis for help in November ’88. This after he noticed that we weren’t even hanging out at the Roy Rogers in the Cathedral of Learning anymore.

“To be honest, I’ve only had $205 to my name since September,” I said.

“How’ve you been making it?,” Regis asked.

“Spaghetti one week, pork neck bones and rice the next, tuna fish after that. I’m now down to peanut butter sandwiches,” I said.

“What’s ‘pork neck bones’?” Regis asked, with this incredulous look on his face.

After explaining the intricacies of my diet and poor people’s cooking — especially since this was the first time I’d eaten any pork in seven and a half years — Regis finally said

“I don’t have much, but I can at least bring you some bread and a potata. We don’t want you out here starvin’,” having patted me on my right shoulder as our conversation ended.

Sure enough, later that week, Regis actually gave me some bread and a small sack of potatoes. It would’ve been enough to make me cry, but I was too hungry and tired to do much more than say a weak “Thank you.” That, and make the most of four days’ worth of Russet potatoes.

Regis was in my circle on other matters that semester. We talked, mostly about his Heidegger course, a scary existential philosophy course for anyone to take. I heard so much from Regis about Heidegger’s Being and Time that I felt like I was in the course. Whenever the subject came up, he was always like, “So you got a hot date tonight, right?” No excuse was good enough for him, whether it was lack of money or lack of confidence.

I stayed in touch with Regis for years after that semester and year. We took a Greek History course together in the fall of ’89. I began introducing him to my other weird and not-so-weird friends. He introduced me to working-class White Pittsburgh, for better and for worse. We stayed in touch during the summers I was back in Mount Vernon, through our master’s degrees and my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon.

The last time I saw Regis was in May ’96, just as my fight over my dissertation with Joe Trotter (see my “Running Interference” post from April ’11) was in high gear. Despite two degrees — both in Philosophy — and a professorial disposition, Regis hadn’t secured regular work and was still living at home in East Pittsburgh with his parents. I encouraged him to get a doctorate. But sensing how unhappy I was with my own process, Regis said, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

I wonder how Regis is doing today. Well, I should just look him up. After all, we’re both weird Pitt grads!

The 4.0 Of It All

03 Saturday Dec 2011

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Larry Fitzgerald pulling away from Steelers Defense, Super Bowl XLIII, February 1, 2009. (http://zimbio.com).

This time twenty years, I was a week or so away from turning in a 4.0 first semester of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. It wasn’t exactly first and foremost on my mind at the time. I was just trying to get through the semester, and I was beginning to run out of gas. Between my independent study course with Larry Glasco and my graduate semester in pre-1877 US history, not to mention my third-semester Swahili course and History of Black Pittsburgh class, I’d been too swamped to pay attention to my grades. It was a sure sign that I was no longer in the mindset of a Humanities student, a grinder concerned only with A’s. It was also a sign of how much the gatekeepers in Pitt’s history department had pissed me off.

Black Image in the White Mind (1987), George M. Fredrickson, December 3, 2011. (http://tower.com).

I know for an absolute certainty what I was doing by the end of the first week in December ’91. I was putting together what would become a forty-five page master’s paper comparing the intercultural and multicultural education movements in US history for Larry, while also finalizing my master’s readings paper on African American self-perceptions during an after slavery. It was a counter to George Fredrickson’s book The Black Image in the White Mind (1987). I was also in the midst of doing interviews for a paper on civil rights activists in Pittsburgh and the collaboration (or lack thereof) between Black and White activists in the 1960s. Swahili, really, was easier, as all I had left was to convince my Tanzanian teacher Rashidi that I was proficient in conversational Swahili.

Luckily, I’d already been in a zone since the beginning of November, so none of what I now had left to work on was a last-minute deal. I knocked off all of these tasks and more a full week before the end of the semester. For some odd reason, I was completely confident that I’d done well. I just didn’t know that I’d earned straight-As for only the second time in ten years, or in four semesters.

But that was only about a quarter of what was important at the time. In addition to my actual grades, I’d knocked off two graduate-level seminars that semester (counting my independent studies course), and in the process, knocked off my two master’s papers for the degree. In the middle of the semester, I took and passed my language requirement for my master’s, taking a written proficiency exam in Swahili — despite some initial push-back from Larry to take it in Spanish.

I also used a loophole in the University of Pittsburgh handbook to allow I graduate seminar I took my junior year to be counted toward my master’s degree a year and a half later. Once again, I had to go over the head of our LSD-affected graduate advisor, Joe White and the department chair to the dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Pitt. I cited the exact code in the handbook that allowed me to count as many as nine credits from my undergraduate courses toward my master’s degree, provided that these were graduate-level courses to begin with. And, they approved the use of my Comparative Slavery course as credit to this degree as well.

Having done all of that, having survived an asthmatic cough — my first sign that I had asthma, really — that had lasted more than a third of the semester, having shaken off all of my doubters in the department. I realized by the beginning of December that with two more graduate seminars and a graduate course in another field, that I could my master’s done by the end of April. That minor epiphany made my head swim for a few minutes, just before I dove back into my intercultural education research paper.

A week or so later, I talked with my mother about what I knew was about to happen and about what could happen by the end of two semesters of graduate school. She said, “Well you showed them! You know, you never liked to be told you can’t do something.” I knew this was true. But as I said in response, “But that wasn’t and can’t be the main reason I continue to do this,” I knew that so much more motivated me than the professors who doubted me or getting straight-As.

The point of all of this was so that I could find a purpose for my life and all of the skills and talent I’d been blessed with. This great first semester was merely the start of the journey, not the end.

Fans of Delusion

25 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Redskins Country Stop Sign display, October 25, 2011. (http://www.amazon.com).

In the past couple of years, in my down time between teaching and occasional consulting, I sometimes listen to ESPN 980 Washington, DC. I get a perverse pleasure out of it, especially this time of the year. With football season on, there’s nothing better than hearing Washington Redskins (hereafter known in this blog as Deadskins) fans whine and complain and kvetch after a loss. It’s not just because I became a New York Giants fan when I was a teenager. Nor is it because I’m also a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. No, there’s something different about these Deadskins fans, something that might be related to the personality of this area.

To those who don’t read my blog regularly, I’ve only been a DC/Maryland resident consistently since August ’99 (I did live in DC briefly in ’95 while doing my doctoral thesis research). I grew up in Mount Vernon, New York — the greater NYC metropolitan area, not upstate, just in case — for the first seventeen years and eight months of my life. I went to school and lived and taught in Pittsburgh for twelve other years. Not to mention spent the equivalent of five weeks in the Bay Area, three weeks in Atlanta, and two weeks apiece in Chicago and Boston. From a sports perspective, none of these areas and cities have fans as delusional as Deadskins fans, at least, not on a game-by-game or week-to-week basis.

The best way to show the difference is to take the same scenario and apply it to each city or area in which I’ve lived. The hometown team has just lost a game, in the ugliest possible way. Tune into a sports talk show or read the headlines for each team in their respective cities/areas, and this is what you’d read or see:

After a Giants loss:

“They suck! They suck! Did you see what Eli did with that throw! I’m tired of these guys screwin’ up! I want Coughlin’s head on a f–ing pike!”

That would go on for a day, maybe two, and if it’s really bad, maybe for three or four days. Then eventually, the Giants fan base settles down to, “What do we have to do to win this week?”

After a Steelers loss:

“My God, man, what happened out there today? Maybe we’re gettin’ too old, maybe Ben’s still playin’ hurt. You know, maybe this just ain’t our year.”

This would go on for a couple of days. Then, like the little engine building up momentum, the Stiller’s talk would turn to, “What do we have to do to win this week?”

After a Deadskins loss:

And this goes on all week long, every week they lose, and through every off-season. Until talk show hosts like the great former Georgetown coach John Thompson literally cuts callers off due to their “high levels of ignorance.”

It’s not as if the other places I’ve lived and the teams I’ve rooted for haven’t seen any hardship. Heck, the Steelers went through a twelve-year decline between their fourth Super Bowl win in ’80 and the hiring of Bill Cowher in January ’92, the last five seasons I witnessed first-hand. Not a single fan jumped off a bridge because of a loss, or took a rocket up to the moon over a victory. Maybe the realism that Pittsburgh as a city had to live with, including the loss of their industrial base for jobs, had something to do with their realism around the Steelers.

As a Giants fan, I appreciated their realism, and it helped make me a Stillers fan, too. Coming from an area where my team had one their first Super Bowl in ’87, only three years removed from a 3-12-1 season in ’83, I thought that some Johnny-Come-Lately types expected too much in a strike/scab-shortened season. But, even with that, the cycle of Jackie Gleason-esque fits of rage, followed by calm rationalism, were a reflection of the New York City I knew in the ’80s, sometimes ugly, but usually manageable. Even in troubled times.

This cycle also made the Giants fans of the ’80s more psychologically stable than the average Deadskins fan, then and now. Yes, it’s a reflection of an area of the nation that is also out of touch, as the worst effects of the Great Recession aren’t equally felt. As the expectations of Deadskins fans are as realistic as it was to believe that Mayor Vincent Gray could move DC government in the same way as Adrian Fenty, only without the ruffled feathers.

This form of delusion, though, otherwise known as bipolar disorder, where the highs are euphoric and lows can make you suicidal, may be catching on. For it shows our expectations of the economy and our politics.

Standing at the Crossroads

28 Sunday Aug 2011

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Cast Away movie (2000) screen shot, August 27, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because it is of low resolution and is in no way being used to reproduce the original film.

It’s funny how things in our lives happen in cycles. Sometimes it’s because we haven’t heeded the wisdom we’ve accumulated in our lives to keep us from following that same bad habits, ones that lead to serious problems for much of our lives. Relationships with men and women, addictions and other vices, behaviors that lead to indecision. That last one has been a big one for me to overcome in my life, and it still has the power to keep me for achieving all that I know I can do in life.

It has led to several crossroads in my life. They usually occur in August or December. August, because of the twenty-two years I spent as a student (not to mention fourteen off and on as a professor). And December, because of Christmas, Jesus and my birthday. But Augusts, especially the last five days in August, tend to stand out as times of contemplation and revelation. August ’91 was the start of grad school, while August ’93 made me rethink how to approach grad school. August ’97 left me with bitterness about being unemployed, while August ’99 gave me a new appreciation for having a job, any job.

But, aside from now, no August was more revealing about my character than the one in ’88. About two weeks before I needed to go back to Pittsburgh for my sophomore year, I went to search for Jimme. I was still steamed with him for not getting me the money I needed to secure a dorm room for the upcoming school year. I hardly swung by to see him that summer, too busy taking care of my siblings and recovering from my second roughest year in the decade, one of four months of unemployment. So on the next to last Friday before I needed to get back, I bummed ten dollars from Mom and took the Metro-North down from Pelham to the city. I got off, took the shuttle over to Times Square and the 2 to 72nd before walking over the Levi brothers’ office on West 64th. Jimme wasn’t there, but Glen was. “He’s over at my brother’s on East 59th,” he said. I’d forgotten that Bruce Levi had his own cleaners and business on the East Side.

I walked the dozen or so blocks there. And there Jimme was. I caught him just as he was getting paid for the week. “Bo’ whatcha doin’ up here?,” he said with complete disbelief. We talked for just a few minutes, with me mentioning more than once how I needed money to secure some sort of apartment at school. “Donal’, I done messed up too much money dis summer,” Jimme said. Apparently my father had spent most of Summer ’88 going through one of his drinking binges. The Levi’s had bailed him out several times, as his landlord Mrs. Smalls had toyed with the idea of evicting him. Jimme gave me $100 on the spot, and promised to get me more money before I left. When I went to see him at work the following week, he’d given me $300 more.

In rapid succession, I packed up my stuff in the five-suitcase set Mom had bought me the year before. Two suitcases, two duffel bags, and a garment bag, all of which she’d ordered from a catalog for a measly eighty bucks. I went down to a travel agency that was down the street from the Pelham Metro-North station and C-Town and found a cheap one-way ticket on USAir for $35. I couldn’t buy a good steak dinner in midtown Manhattan for $35! I got myself mentally ready for finding an apartment, ideally a one-bedroom.

By that last Sunday in August, everything was ready, and I had everything I needed. I played songs with my siblings for almost two hours before I left. I gave them my Michael Jackson tapes and my radio cassette player, taking my beat-up Walkman with me. We all hugged and cried, much more so than we had the year before. Part of me really didn’t want to leave, and part of me knew that I wouldn’t be whole again if I didn’t.

I had no idea how tough the next five days would be, between that Sunday evening, August 28 and that Friday, September 2. I was homeless for five days, and within three days of heading back to New York and Mount Vernon when I finally found a one-room death-trap in a row house in which to live.

Fork in the road, August 27, 2011. (Source/http://optimumsportsperformance.com).

I was within three days of becoming a college dropout because I didn’t trust anybody. I was so close to losing something I’d dedicated seven years of my life to achieving because I had spent the previous year indecisive about whether what I wanted out of life was more important than helping out my mother and my younger siblings at 616. It made me think. What meaning could I draw from putting up with all the put-downs and disapprovals of classmates, teachers and families if things hadn’t worked out? The answer would’ve been, none at all.

Now, as then, I face a crossroads in many areas of my life. One where I have to decide, which part of me is most important in achieving my dreams, fulfilling my calling, providing for my son and family, possibly even in maintaining a marriage? Whatever decisions I do make, I need to stand firmly in them, to be decisive, to see them through. That formula has guided me for twenty-three years. And it has yet to let me down.

The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style

06 Saturday Aug 2011

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Me as Naruto, the ultimate hollerer, Noah's 7th birthday, July 30, 2010. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

This weekend should be of significance to me. Actually it should be of more significance than anything else I’ve done professionally in the fifteen years since. For this was the weekend that I decided I was “Dr. Collins,” three and a half months before actually becoming Dr. Collins.

I was in the middle of a tumultuous time, caught between Joe Trotter and five years of graduate school, the last three of which had been at Carnegie Mellon. I had just finished revising my first draft of my dissertation, adding thirty pages to an already hefty 475-page manuscript. Me and Trotter hadn’t been getting along for four months, and after two months with my first draft, I’d received a response in mid-July that was disheartening.

Most of my dissertation, examining how multiculturalism was lived intellectually, educationally and culturally in Black Washington, DC, received no comment whatsoever. The chapters on the development of

Trotter comments, back of page 43 of first dissertation draft, July 15, 1996. Pic taken August 6, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

the Black community in DC, particularly in the period immediately before the 1930-1960 period, had received lots of snarky comments. Like “I told you to change this already,” or “This is the third time I commented on this section,” or “Make these suggested revisions on…already,” handwritten in pencil, big, bold and rushed, as if he wanted to stab me in the neck with the pencil. Comments on writing, evidence, to sharpen analysis of my multiculturalism argument, I expected. What I, naive little me, didn’t expect was a series of comments about data and information that, quite frankly, was irrelevant.

After talking with a couple of professors who weren’t on my dissertation committee — including one whom himself had been Trotter’s advisor back in the ’70s — I finally figured out what had been eating at the man ever since I began handing him chapters. It wasn’t as if Trotter’s comments were transparent in what he wanted me to revise. He wanted me to put together a proletarianization argument for DC. Bottom line was, he was pissed with me because I had written that the Great Migration period (1910-1930) of Blacks leaving the rural South for the industrial, urban North had little effect on DC, a truly Southern city at the time.

I was incensed when I finally figured out why Trotter had been giving me a hard time since last fall and especially since April. It made me think that maybe earning a doctorate in history — especially with him as the head of my committee, along with Dan Resnick and an increasingly distant Bruce Anthony Jones — wasn’t worth it. I thought that if I had to go through another year of this, that I’d drop out of the program.

But I’d only do that after giving the revisions one more shot. I addressed every — and I mean every — comment I had from Trotter by email or written out across a page, and then documented every change in a six-page memo of my revisions. I even went so far as to rhetorically fudge the Great Migration period data, just to see how Trotter would respond. On page 100 of my dissertation, I wrote, “For Washington, a slight acceleration in black migration occurred between 1915 and 1930.” That was an obfuscation, for Blacks migration didn’t “accelerate” until the 1930s, after a twenty-year period of limited migration that only added 20,000 to a Black population of more than a 100,000. Trotter actually praised this revision.

I made a deal with myself to quit after another year if this revision didn’t work out. After receiving a response that only required four minor revisions, Trotter made an attempt to remove the one professor I did have in my corner from my committee in Bruce Jones, using Jones’ recent acceptance of a position at the University of Missouri as an excuse. From that weekend in August ’96 until the week before Thanksgiving, everything about my doctorate became a battle with Trotter.

In a way, I guess I was lucky it did work out. But now, as I did then, I wonder if it was really worth it, to fight as hard as I did for that degree. Would I be a better writer, a better educator, if I had dropped out of the program, gone back to school, and become a high school history or social studies teacher? At least my employment status would’ve been much more stable between ’96 and ’99 if I had, and I’d have an additional career option now.

PhD Graduation - CMU Diploma, May 21, 1997. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

Even now, thinking about what happened a decade and a half ago makes me clench my teeth, not with anger, but more with a sense of dread and latent rage. What I and at least two other male students went through (as I’d learn later on) was patently unfair. Still, I realize that while I’ve long since forgiven Trotter for his misdeeds, I can’t help but think that professionally, he aged me in my last year in graduate school. The sense of security I felt about my professional future back then was gone, and I don’t think I’ve felt that certain, that youthful, since.

I do know this. That that youthful, if somewhat naive, twenty-six year-old still resides in me. But with the mind of a forty-one year-old man, I can use both wisdom and experience to say that I wouldn’t go through that again. I’d either would’ve gone to law school or a school of education, maybe even with a focus on ed foundations and ed policy. As it is, between Boy @ The Window and my recent articles, that’s really what I’m most intellectually passionate about these days anyway.

I may be Dr. Collins or  Professor Collins, maybe for the rest of my life. But really, I’d be happiest as Donald Earl Collins, the author, educator and troublemaker I believe with all my heart I am and I will always be.

A Note From This Writer: Prelude To Tuesday’s Post

27 Monday Jun 2011

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I’ve talked about some of the issues I had while working for a couple of people in my times working for Presidential Classroom and AED (soon-to-be defunct Academy for Educational Development), specifically around the sense of bigotry and arrogance I managed to put up with (see my June ’09 post “What We’ll Do for $$$”). Of all of the posts I’ve done about Mount Vernon, New York, the Humanities Program, Pittsburgh, Joe Trotter, my idiot ex-stepfather, and Hebrew-Israelites, few sparked as much negative response as the one I did about two of my former supervisors, especially the one I worked for at AED.

I lost a Facebook friend over the June ’09 post because she didn’t like that I had identified the man in question as suffering from bipolar disorder. Mind you, this person had made his condition public knowledge in February ’04, and the stories I’ve discussed regarding this man were of issues that had arisen at a time in which I suspected — but didn’t know with one hundred percent certainty — that he was afflicted with some sort of mental illness.

Having a mental illness, by the way, doesn’t fully exonerate anyone from their actions, especially when they are well aware of that illness and yet refuse treatment for such. I should know. I worked for Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in Mount Vernon and White Plains, New York and Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic in Pittsburgh between 1989 and 1992. While I usually didn’t work directly with patients, I did enough work with some to recognize symptoms and witnessed patients who refused to take their medication. Plus, there are levels of severity with all mental illnesses, as people can function fairly well in society without many noticing their symptoms. My anecdotal experience is that this is definitely — but not usually — true of those suffering from bipolar disorder.

For those whom I worked with in one way or another during my days with the New Voices Fellowship Program, please know that this blog and tomorrow’s post serves a much larger role than me simply telling a story that shows another side to a man who many of you may simply see as nice. Really, this post is for so many other people who may work with a person, boss or mentor whom may well be mismanaging them, running them into the ground, even attempting to ruin their career, mental illness or not. But if I lose your friendship or respect as a result, then so be it.