About Pamela Spiro Wagner
Wagner is an award-winning poet, author and artist who wrote WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS, poems about her life with the mental illness, schizophrenia, and co-author, with her sister, a psychiatrist, of DIVIDED MINDS: Twin SIsters and their Journey through Schizophrenia, a memoir, which was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and won the NAMI Outstanding Literature Award in 2006. Her work has been published in Tikkun, Midwest Poetry Review, and the New York TImes Sunday Magazine as well as the Hartford Courant and the LA Weekly, among other places. She also won an international poetry competition sponsored by the BBC in 2001/2.
Her art was on display in Connecticut area libraries in 2011 and 2012.
PPS: Case in point, after the comments I left here, I just now condensed my sentiment down and posted the following tweet:
I’d rather be CrAzY than heartless and cold! Better a broken brain and a broken heart, than an ignorant brain and no heart. #StoptheStigma
…By the way, on Twitter a “hashtag” (meaning the pound or number # sign) immediately followed by words with no spaces and nothing but letters or numbers – this creates a link that you can click on, to see what, if anything, others on Twitter are posting with that particular hashtag and string of words. It can get interesting.
PS: Regarding mean bullying people who verbally attack and/or rudely ignore or otherwise try to make us feel ashamed for being psychiatrically labeled: I would rather be crazy, than heartless and cold. It is far better to have a broken brain and a broken heart, than to have an ignorant brain, and no heart.
Hi Pam! You’re welcome for the tweet. To answer your concerns about twitter, it isn’t difficult to get going there, not nearly as hard as learning how to blog, in my opinion. I, too, tend to be longwinded… I love it that I now have you as a friend, and you are able to match me for windiness, wow – how rare that is! So yes, the 140 character limit on tweets is sometimes a frustration to me. But it is also good training, as you said, if one wants to learn to be a bit more succinct. Sometimes I even have fun with the challenge of trying to condense a tweet down so it will fit, and still be coherent and get my point across. There are times when that simply cannot be done, but not as often as I would have imagined.
Because of the extreme limit on posts – it had to be man who put that restriction in there! – to me, it is not nearly as time-consuming as other forms of social media. I went on twitter almost 1 year ago, shortly after I deleted my facebook account. I was getting flamed on FB by a few family of origin people who think they know me but they truly do not, as I have not even been around them for the most part of the past 45 years. Some of them (nieces) were not even born when I moved away. Oh well. It’s a long sad story…. sad to me, anyway. I had hoped that through the miracle of the internet and FB, that I could get to know my family at long last, and they to know me. But they have heard too many stories about me, the black sheep family scapegoat, that are simply not true. It’s the old Mental Illness Stigma, you know? Yes, you do know…. and it’s ignorant, rude, and painful as heck.
I personally believe that these hateful relatives are in fact so terribly afraid of the implication of them possibly having a personal genetic defectiveness, by virtue of the fact that they have a daughter/sister/aunt with a mental illness label, that to “prove” how different from me they are and thus, how utterly sane they are in comparison to me, they treat me like I’m a contagious leper, or worse. So, well, who needs it. None of them are on twitter, as far as I know, and even if they were, it would be very difficult for anyone to cyber-bully me in fleeting tweets of 140 characters or less, hahaha! Twitter satisfies my desire for an online social connection, without the potential to be abused like I was on FB. And I was seriously abused there. I still have the mean posts saved; someday I may publish them on my blog.
I’m having a hard time writing this, the nearly-deaf hubby is blasting Christmas music. Sigh. So glad Christmas is almost over! Too many sad poignant wistful memories for me this time of year.
XOXOXO.
Lady Q/Lynda/Rachel/Rebecca Rochelle…. geez I’m glad I don’t have MPD/DID, how would anyone keep up?
Thanks, Rachel/Lynda! I wonder if I should get on Twitter…I have never done so, and don’t want to get too involved in more time consuming social things. BUt on the other hand, I cannot do certain sites without it. Is it confusing or complicated? I am rather longwinded so to truncate my talking to little soundbites would be difficult. Good training though I expect…Thanks for the tweet in any event.
Very sweet! Your artwork makes me happy. I’m posting this on my twitter.