Project Maelstrom: A Recovery from Schizoaffective Disorder: A

By Dinuka Mapa

Through the overhead windows of my derelict spacecraft, I peered at the Maelstrom subsisting near me in deep space. For 15 years I had been drifting towards the event-horizon. I risked depleting my Fuel Cells. I risked exhausting my Life-Support systems. My Scientific Instruments were giving unreliable readings. I had damaged my High-Gain Antenn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Mesa East
• Release date: Sep 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780646867687

Book preview

Through the overhead windows of my derelict spacecraft, I peered at the Maelstrom subsisting near me in deep space. For 15 years I had been drifting towards the event-horizon. I risked depleting my Fuel Cells. I risked exhausting my Life-Support systems. My Scientific Instruments were giving unreliable readings. I had damaged my High-Gain Antennae. My Propulsion Sub-Systems were edging towards catastrophic failure. To make sense of this all, let me describe the situation in real-life. I was diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder in 2007. I had drifted from studying Aerospace Engineering at Monash University on scholarship to being a university dropout, clinically depressed and psychotic, having multiple psych ward admissions, unemployed, dependent on my parents, dosed up on psychiatric medications, socially isolated and ostracized from my friends, an ECT patient, and being financially reliant on the Disability Support Pension (DSP). But the Maelstrom was not in fact Mental Illness. There was another cause of the Maelstrom that I was trying desperately to identify. ‘Project Maelstrom’ is effectively a book about how I tried to escape from a Black Hole.

I

Happiness is like one of those palaces on an enchanted island, its gates guarded by dragons. One must fight to gain it.

– Edmond Dantès

My goal is not to wake up at 40 with the bitter realization that I’ve wasted my life on a job I hated because I was forced to decide on a career in my teens.

– Daria Morgendorffer

We tell you over and over again that you’re wonderful and you just don’t get it. What’s wrong with you?

– Helen Morgendorffer

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

1

MHS

When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a starfighter pilot. Let me try to paint a picture of my childhood. I had two droids: R1-J6 and R-9P0. R1-J6 was an astromech and R-9P0 was a protocol. They were put to work in the ‘moister-farm’; this is the term I use to describe the Restaurant that my family owned. This lower-middle class dry and desolate desert world was effectively Terra Australis (Australia). By R1-J6 I mean mum. And by R-9P0 I mean dad. Mum was short, a little plump, resourceful, and always emotionally repairing things. Dad was tall, prone to incessant worry and anxiety; plus had a golden vanity. R-9P0 would get animated about many things, but mostly the conditions on Terra Australis which the family had migrated to in 1991. He would sometimes whack R1-J6 on the dome. But this I mean that my mum and dad frequently argued. Just like Luke, in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), who becomes caught in a somber moment of reflection whilst taking in the binary sunset [00], I pondered my own fate in universe, and also felt my dreams of escaping the lower-middle class to a better life quashed by negative circumstance.

Why do I call my parents droids? Well, because in my mind they had been programmed by the culture that they grew up in. R-9P0 (Dad) was adamant to push me up the social ladder. R1-J6 (Mum) felt the need to project onto me the idea of marrying a nice, homely Sinhalese girl. Both of them were certain that I could achieve this through the tools of a grand Education. And eons before I had even finished grade 2 of primary school it had become their ambitious project that I get admitted into Melbourne High School, or MHS. ‘Gedera’ was the name of my parent’s Sri Lankan restaurant located in East Caulfield, just near the railway station and the precincts of the Monash University campus. The name meant ‘home’ in Sinhalese and was selected by my parents to describe the authentic, homestyle nature of the cuisine they dished up. I had a room at the back with a desk and a bed. The room doubled as a storage room. By storage room, I mean it was also where they kept the bags of onions, drums of cooking oil, buckets of salt and containers of ghee. The ochre, worn out carpet was splattered with stains, and the windows were reinforced with metal security bars. Apart from my desk there was a bed and a small TV. This was to be the cell that spiraled me into madness. But more on that later.

In 2001 I was in year 8 at Salesian College in Chadstone. My first two years of high school had been positive in that I was fitting in, reaping good marks and doing a bunch of extra-curricular activities. But this all changed one afternoon after school. I remember sitting in the back of the restaurant, munching on some Red Rooster, when R-9P0, smiling exuberantly; which was rare; waltzed in with an envelope. I fiddled with it, noticing that it had been addressed to me, but was already opened. Inside it contained a letter of congratulations for being accepted into Melbourne High School. On my first day at MHS I distinctly remember getting off the train at South Yarra and walking up the wrong direction up the platform. When I did eventually find my way to the ‘Castle on the Hill,’ I huddled with everyone else at the front doors. Four years later in November 2005, after completing my VCE, it was through the same doors that I exited. But what exactly do I remember of my time there? I remember going on the AIRTC camps in year 9. I remember doing a film study of Looking for Alibrandi (2000) in year 9 English and ruminating on how Josephine’s crush John Barton commits suicide under the weight of the academic expectation placed on him by society and his father [01]. I remember vomiting in the toilets out of anxiety just before my very first exam. I remember walking past the homeless man outside St Yarra station who was always playing the ukulele every morning before school. I remember the assemblies with the distinguished guests and all the singing. I remember feeling quite jaded and jealous at all the honors bestowed upon fellow students in the form on academic awards and school colors. I remember playing Tetris on my TI-83 calculator. I remember getting detention for failing a Japanese SAC one time. I remember my Units 3/4 Media final-assessment multimedia project being accepted into VCE Top Designs. I remember getting 98.00 for my ENTER Score at the end of it all.

But mostly. I remember wanting to be a pilot. In year 12 I even applied for a pilot scholarship granted by the company Mobile. I got to the final interview stage; I even had a test flight in a light commercial Cessna with an instructor as part of the application process. It was my first time at the hands of a real aircraft, and I even managed to land it at one of the runway strips at Moorabbin Airport via the instructions of the instructor. VCE was a pressure cooker. Everyone told me that was good thing. It would sharpen my focus, they said. But what no one recognized the very real emotional cost of being put under intense pressure to study under the backdrop of a dysfunctional family life. I was very much troubled inside, and in 2010, in circumstance that I will detail at a later point, I tried to kill myself by swallowing 80 Seroquel tablets. I woke in a hospital ICU. The thing that hurt the most was overhearing R-9P0, completely deny to a doctor that he had placed any pressure on me. And as R1-J6 sat by my ICU bed working away at repairing by feeding me a packet of Pad Thai she had brought from my favorite restaurant in an effort to cheer me up. I felt like singing the school motto ‘Honor the Work’ [02]. How much I hated that stupid song. Sitting in the ICU I felt like it was all a very twisted joke. In this book I aim to describe my recovery or ascension from the dark pit, or cave of ignorance I had been born a prisoner; one that pertained the idea of receiving an education simply for the purposes of ladder climbing, and attaining honor, rank and fame.

2

MHS Juno

3

MHS: Castle on the Hill

4

Sophists

I will now describe three of the tutors I was assigned during high school through my parents:

Sophist No. 1: Christina (Calabariidae)

For a long time, on every gloomy Monday after school, I would peer despondently through the back window of my parent’s restaurant. There, parked in the dirt parkway would be a bluish-purple Barina; the scanty carriage of my very first sophist. Her name was Christina, but I shall use the pseudonym Calabariidae. She was my English tutor and cerebral groomer. I had been seeing her since grade 3, right through to VCE. It had been my migrant parents that had arranged this. They had left respectable, good paying jobs in Ceylon for kitchen aprons. In doing this they had committed themselves to the goal of ascertaining for me a bona fide education. Why, however, had they hired this greying, unattractive, cigarette-reeking Greek lady to teach me still baffles me. And so, this sophist and I would sit down at my desk in the restaurant storeroom, amid the bags of onions and buckets of ghee, and we would launch upon the dire and serious task of ‘educating’ me. And every selected theme or book we studied became the platform on which salient notions such as class-systems and scarcity were built on. And at times it even became necessary for her to teach me to label my parents as lower-middle class. This became the ‘diamond-bullet’ to which I began to view everything.

I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. – Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (1979)

Sophist No. 2: Dave

It was in year 10 that I met Sophist No. 2, a tall, dark-skinned, lanky, pot-bellied, blazer wearing South African man who my parents felt I needed get through my pre-VCE taster-subject of General Mathematics. His most favorite thing to do was to snatch my report card off me and flick through it. He would provide a nonchalant, observational comment on each subject, like how I didn’t score straight A’s in Science, or that he was surprised that I scored an A+ in my history exam, etc. And despite being paid quite generously by my poor parents, I would notice that he wouldn’t actually do that much. He would sit there passively as I did my homework, thinking it fine to fiddle his thumbs. And after a few sessions the fee of $45 was deemed insufficient for his esteemed services. He then also required as a token, a fresh rice packet from the restaurant kitchen as additional tutelage, ‘Tell your parents that we have finished and that I require my rice packet,’ he would say. And he had a peculiar way of talking and accentuate, of putting sentences together, because I think he believed it made him sound more educated. It was imperative that I distinguish him as educated. And when I told him I was not taking any Units 1/2 in year 10 like all the other, more contentious, shrewd students, he would approach this with a degree of pointedness and disparagement, ‘Why aren’t you doing one?’ By the end of year 10, with even my parents acknowledging that he wasn’t actually doing shit, and my results, whilst not bad, were in no shape improving. We decided to relieve him of duty by simply not contacting him to reengage for year 11. And I was pretty sure his ego didn’t like this one bit because Mum told me how she had bumped into him somewhere and he just sharply backtracked and walked off without saying anything. This was my experience with Sophist No. 2.

Sophist No. 3: Jack

Having dismissed Sophist No. 2, my parents wanted to find me a new Maths tutor, especially now that I was in year 11 and doing Units 1/2 in Methods, and also the other maths subject that led to Specialist Maths. Some of my friends had been going to a popular group tuition class called ‘Jacks’. It was hosted by a short, self-appointed genius named ‘Jack’. Jack was Asian. He used his converted garage in the suburbs of Springvale as a classroom. For him I think the pseudonym of Jackarse is appropriate. On my first day R-9P0 was insistent on talking face-to-face with this man, and Jack, looking me up and down, dispensed to him some words of reassurance. And so for year 11 and a portion of year 12 I went to Jackarse for Methods and Specialist tuition. He also provided to other students tuition in Chemistry, Biology and Physics. I don’t think Jackarse ever took me very seriously. He always ignored me whenever I put up my hand to answer any of his questions. The unusual thing for me about his classes was that they were co-ed, and having never really talked to a girl, having since year 7 gone to all-boys school, I felt a little shy and out of my element in Jackarse’s garage.  And girls would pick up on this. Some would, quite immaturely, issue me to do things for them, and they observed my meek, unquestioning subservience. This one time I sat next to a girl and built up a conversation. This was enough of Jackarse to suddenly take notice of me, for in the next class he, having intel that this particular girl had a boyfriend, jokingly asked her in front of everyone if she was cheating. I remember feeling really embarrassed and red. The thing about his classes was that no one really went there to learn or be tutored. It was just one big opportunity to socialize. Even Jackarse would spend a great deal of time talking about irrelevant things like his divorce, or how to treat girls right. For this dosage of wisdom, he would stand at the door at the end of the class and collect everyone’s tuition fees, in cash. Although he only charged $20 cash per session, since there were so many of us, it was obvious he was making a grubby killing. It was only later when I was in Uni that someone told me his whole operation had been put on hold as the ATO had started investigating him for tax fraud. That was my experience with Sophist No. 3.

5

Kara

6

The English Oral

In 2002 during YR-9 at MHS:

I was surveying the crystal blue sky through the windows of the battered MHS portable building, trying to abandon my memories of the previous night. R-9PO had gone berserk and chucked a disgruntled customer out of the restaurant after they had complained about finding a hair in their food. R1-J6 (mum) had tried to calm R-9PO down in the kitchen but he ended up smashing a ceramic plate in front of her. Mrs. Brian, my year 9 English teacher, waltz around the classroom handing out blank strips of paper. I want everyone to write down a topic for an impromptu oral exercise we are going to be doing today, she instructed. Bruckard was the first student called up and talked about school uniforms removing individuality. Nguyen talked about how performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in sport. Ma talked about sexual orientation being determined at birth. Darren got his own topic and gave a riveting speech on bukharan pears growing on endangered trees in Kyrgyzstan. We got through a number of students. And then I was called up. Dinuka, your topic is Elmo from Sesame Street appearing on the Rove Live talk-show last night. Mrs. Brian gave me a smile and added, I know that is a very specific topic. I’ll let you pick another one if you like. Firstly, did you watch Rove Live last night? I nodded. This was 2002 Australia and it was a trend to watch Rove Live. Amidst the noise of R-9PO smashing plates I had dispiritedly sat in front of my TV to see Elmo wear a tuxedo, beatbox the alphabet and talk about the other characters on Sesame Street. Up on stage in front of the class I tried to open my mouth to speak but nothing came out. I… was all I could manage. I couldn’t remember a thing. My mind went completely blank. All I could feel was an ocean of sorrow. Elmo… Everyone was giving me funny looks. Miss. Brian asked me to sit back down after two minutes. The student I sat next to, Didi turned to me and stabbed, You’re a liar, you didn’t watch it. I stared back at him helplessly. This had been the foundation stone of my subsequent breakdown.

7

The English SAC

In 2004 during YR-11 at MHS:

In year 11 I failed an English SAC. I remember my teacher Ms. Basu getting me to come outside of the N-building classroom we were in to speak to her privately. Ms Basu was irritated. Mum had been making calls to the school’s English department. It had been a week since I received my ‘F’ mark. What’s all this nonsense about you not sleeping and eating? Ms. Basu vexed. A knot was forming in my stomach. Your mum tells me you spend most of your time after school doing practice English SACs? My mind flashed back to the memory of me sitting there in the classroom a week back not being able to focus on the newspaper editorial piece that I had to analyze. I would read over the article but fail to process anything. Little did it register at the time that the earliest cracks my mental health were appearing; I was feeling fatigued by the acute pressures of VCE at MHS, the cultural and academic expectations of being Sri Lankan, and the augmented dysfunction of R1-J6 and R-9P0 always arguing. About 15 min nearing the end of the SAC I realized that all I had written on my paper were disjointed half-sentences, most of them hastily scribbled out. I got Ms. Basu to float over to my table. Ms. Basu, I… I feel like nothing I’ve written makes any sense. Can you take a look? She smiled and said melodically, I can’t be offering you advice, this is a SAC.

And so, at the end of the double-period I shakily handed in my paper, caught a train back to the restaurant and locked myself in the bathroom. After I got my ‘F’ graded paper back I showed it to Christina, my English Tutor. Her initial response was disbelief, followed by silent and terse reprimand.  Back to my private chat with Ms. Basu a week later: I read your SAC, it was absolutely garbled, nonsensical and incoherent. Mrs. Basu averred. And in class just now you were trying to make me correct the practice SACs you completed at home. Do you seriously believe I have time for that? I felt a raw surge of just how disconnected I was at MHS. Why do you expect me to give you special sympathy, treatment or consideration? She continued, I don’t know what exactly you are dealing with, but do I look like a psychologist to you? I was struggling to put into words the reality that I felt trudging towards a mental break down.

Do you recall what I said last week after giving out the SAC result? You have two options. I can give you an ‘S’ mark for your final Year 11 VCE English grade, or you can do a re-sit. I told her I wanted to re-sit. And so, she gave me a time to meet her after school at the school’s R (rotunda) building to do the re-sit. I remember waiting for Ms. Basu outside the rotunda room with a few other students. The rest of them hadn’t failed; they had just been absent/away during the SAC. You… you failed an English SAC? said one of them, Seriously, how did you manage that?? From