Catching up

[Murfreesboro]

Your description of Phoebe's interest in and compassion toward the younger competitors tells me that she really does have ethics and a strong character. I have no doubt that she is determined not to do to them what was done to her.

Sadly, Karl is not currently disciplining himself w/re/to diet and exercise, though he was once a model of dicipline on those scores. He is the one who suffered a psychotic break (twice) in his mid-20s, and he isn't exactly the same person now that he used to be. For one thing, the medications he takes made him gain 100 lbs in the first month. He was getting stretch marks like a pregnant woman and had no idea what they were. I know it was the medication, because he tried to ween himself off it over a period of several months, and the weight started to come off. Neither of us could believe that he needed to take medicine like that forever, but then the break happened again, and he was back in the psych ward. Now fear of returning there rules his life. He used to have normal interests, like sports and music, and dating, but now he mostly reads theology (although just lately he's been reading political philosophy and economics, seriously, like, teaching himself higher level math to follow some of the econ arguments). He left his grocery job at Gordon's a couple of years ago for higher pay and benefits at Walmart, but he got hired for a night shift (10-7), so now he does janitorial work and helps stock the produce when it comes in at night. I'd hoped he might work himself into a different type of position with normal hours, but he says he likes not having to deal with customers, even though, at Gordon's, he appeared to be a customer favorite. They were always giving him things and inviting him to their restaurants while offering him discounts.

He seems to have a very depressed and negative self-image now. He tends to assume that most people don't like him, even though I think that is far from true. He serms to magnify every negative thing that happens to him and completely forget all the good things. Once I made a list of all the encouragement and "attaboys" he'd received over the years, from mentors to teachers to bosses to peers. It was a fairly long list. He looked at it as if all of it were news to him, completely forgotten.

I knew nothing about mental health issues before all this happened to him. In some ways it's not too different from getting hit with cancer out of the blue. You can survive it, but it changes you.