Adrienne M. Jenness, MLIS
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Poet’s statement: I was diagnosed as bipolar when I was 27. I am now in my sixties and, thanks to good therapists and my own efforts, I have been stable for many years. I know what it is like to be mentally ill and then recover to the point that, if I didn’t tell people, they would never know. I think I have an unusual perspective to share. “Alternate Reality” and “The Magic Age” are pieces of my story.
| Alternate reality For the Duck LadyI could have been a bag lady, one of those women looking much older than they are pushing a shopping cart containing their lives, sleeping on the streets, one eye open half a brain awake ready to flee at a moment’s notice.I’ve carried the labels “bipolar” or “schizophrenic” or “mentally ill” or “crazy” or “nuts” like heavy textbooks in a backpack. I’m still working towards my degree.Bad relationships? Like some country song, I’ve had a few. Bad marriages? Been there too.There has also been my jack-in-the-box child popping up unexpectedly filling me with joy.I’ve had many therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, with their sympathetic words with their well-meaning pills that played my nervous system like a screeching violin as they tried to help me be invisible, to blend into this world.They did their job. I did mine. I’ve dealt with dreams and nightmares looked childhood memories in the eye mourned my dead and wept for other losses while learning to divine truth from hallucinations. I am grateful; But instead. . . when I can snatch a Further evidence of being crazy? Or |
Photography by Threthny |
Photography by DraconianRain |
The magic age
The year I turned 27 Not the casual “My life is so crazy right now,” The kind of insanity where you The kind where you need to be drugged My daughter believes I am no longer afraid. |
ADRIENNE M. JENNESS, MLIS, has a bachelor’s degree in English literature and natural sciences from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MLIS from Drexel University. She has been a librarian for the Free Library of Philadelphia and more recently a medical librarian at Drexel University. She has been writing poetry for almost three years and been published in Apiary and Forward.
Highlighted in Frontispiece Winter 2013 – Volume 5, Issue 1
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