I had started dating my boyfriend Alexander Sandwich in January of 1995. While we were dating, he got a job offer to work in New York City and I advised him to take it. I graduated from the University at Buffalo with a degree in Economics in May of 1996. I moved to Astoria to be with Alexander after I graduated. I applied to a job at Editor & Publisher in Manhattan. I was armed with my portfolio of writing. I had written for the university paper the Spectrum for a couple of years. Derrick Jones must have been impressed because he gave me the job. The position was half editing and half manning the phone lines. There was another young woman—who I shared the position with—who did the same thing. My supervisor told me that doing it that way was cheaper, they didn’t want to hire a full-time receptionist because they would have to pay more for the position.
I also decided to take a writing class. I had a lot on my plate. I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed. I felt like I had to prove myself to myself and to Alexander’s parents who I had recently met. I enjoyed editing for half the day, but I was not so enamored of manning the many phone lines at Editor and Publisher. While I enjoyed the work of editing, when I got to do it, I didn’t enjoy my coworkers. The work environment was very toxic. It was extremely competitive, and people were not nice. There was also a plenty of work to do, and I started working a lot of overtime. Unfortunately, it got to the point where I was working 60 hours per week. But the more and more I worked, the less I seemed to get done. I was a hamster in a wheel. I worked more and more hours, but not didn’t get anywhere.
Then one day in early October, I had my break from reality. I remember I got ready for work, and while I was walking towards the subway station and a bird shat on me. I freaked out. I was terribly upset and was convinced that the bird was evil and out to get me. I walked back home and told Alexander what happened. He suggested that I stay home from work. Which I did. And as I sat in the apartment, I remember thinking, “information should be free.” I also thought that if I read every single book in our apartment, I could change the world for the better. I had visual and olfactory hallucinations. I saw and smelled a carafe full of coffee that wasn’t there.
I had experienced trauma as a child. This affected how I came to view myself and how I interacted with others. It was important to me for people to like me. I even thought to myself that if I do what people want, then they will like me. In junior high and high school, I had a friend that didn’t treat me well and I did whatever she wanted because I was a people pleaser to the core of my being. I also had no boundaries, probably because mine had been violated. As a result of this, I allowed people to take advantage of me.
But I graduated high school, then college and entered the working world. Sometimes, I think to myself, if I hadn’t moved to New York would I have still had the nervous breakdown? But there is no point in thinking about what if. Things do happen to us for a reason. I had yet to encounter Nichiren Buddhism with the Soka Gakkai International-USA. But this did lie in my future.