I'M Still Here

For lack of a better way to present this information, let me give you a list:

---At 18 experienced the onset of severe mental illness while in the Navy at BUD/s training: Panic attacks, mood swings, self-mutilation, depression, suicidal ideation---I hid it as long as I could but, as you can imagine, that wasn't long and I received a medical discharge after 9 months service.

---Back home I sought psychiatric/psychological help; a very complex case I was misdiagnosed and spent time as an inpatient at a psych hospital 5 times (I made a sixth visit after my accident).

---After achieving some stability I was accepted at Atlanta Institute of Music for guitar. I excelled at academic and performance classes but left after being stricken with Agoraphobia (fear of marketplace/public). I had also been cutting and burning myself regularly, as well as hitting myself in the face (these behaviors varied in intensity and frequency from the time I was 18 until around 25 when I went through DBT for Borderline Personality Disorder and was finally taking the right meds.)

---March 13, 2004, around nine o'clock at night, age 21, I was in a high speed car accident. When Paramedics found me I was not breathing and spent 2 days on life support. Broken back and severed spinal cord at T11-T12, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI: 5 years to recover).

---Almost died of life threatening bone infection then of a wound with dead necrotic tissue---

---Writing resume'---- Editor for school paper, H. S. writer for The Greenville News, penned 2 novels and many short stories in mid-twenties, have written poetry since age 27 (32 now) and am showing no signs of stopping or lessening the creation of my ecstatic free verse compositions--- Thanks.