"It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is as true of men as of dogs."
The Quiet Room
A room in mental institutions to which patients are sent, dragged, or carried when staff considers them violent, self-injurious, or simply annoying. The room may contain a bare floor or a mattress. The patient may be stripped, tied down with restraints, drugged, or left on his own. He may stay there from hours to days. There is generally a small observation window through which staff or patients can view the inmate. Also known as the seclusion or isolation room. It is solitary confinement. Although America has laws in place to restrict the use of such rooms on the whims of staff, they range from difficult to impossible to enforce.
I have spent some time in such a place. I consider it a form of punishment. In my case, torture. With no sense of time, delusional, unsure if anyone would return to release me, I thought I had been left to die. I found myself there due to mostly being a nuisance. Unable to sleep, agitated, I could not remain in my room and would wander. I was a bother to overburdened staff, so, they would put me in the Quiet Room.
I believe that it is used often to “break down” patients.
In my opinion, it is a destructive method of control.
Try it sometime. How would you react?
Posted Novemberr 14th, 2009
As it stands now, I’m intending to write, with use of photography and other mediums, an unconventional memoir, based mostly on true events, some within the mind, using the written word in many forms.
All help and encouragement and advice is appreciated.
These are notes, but the “working title” is not that of my website, notes... I think someday, I should write a story, book... just on those experiences of bipolar/manic depression and the hopitalizations and other events surrounding these “episodes.”
So, the website is best described as Notes From The Quiet Room, and hopefully, will result in complete stories of differing parts of my life.
E-mail:
Age:
43
Address:
1580 7th St. Apt. A
Boulder, Colorado
80302
720-366-4951
Family:
Pockets, my 13 year old pet beagle.
Parents; Both deceased...
Donald; Director of Art Education for public schools.
Artist in many forms
Dorothy; Social Services, working with troubled adolescents and families. Potter and Ceramics
Sisters;
Jayce Winiarski 52; Teachers Assitant for developmentally disabled.
Loren Brigham 50; disabled.
Brothers;
Evan Brigham 48; Director of physical education, International School of Tunisia.
Jonathan Brigham 46; Red Cross in Aceh Indonesia, architecture and building.
How long have you lived in Boulder?
26 years. At the age of seventeen, I came to Boulder in 1983 to attend the University of Colorado.
Education:
BA in English Literature, Creative Writing.
Post grad work in Elementary Education.
Professional background:
Artist; Photographer, writer and activist
I've been lifelong political and social "activist."
As a member of my building council, I exposed an illegal painting company run out of a BHP site.
I exposed fraud at our Public Access Station.
I volunteered for moveon.org in the 2004 and 2008.
I'm a constant "participant" at Council meetings.
I was born backwards. The doctor swiftly turned me around and I slid in safely. I’d like to think I came into this world Pete Rose style. I’d like to head into the grave the same way. Meanwhile, I try to rise to the challenges I create or those that just appear before me. I was a wild child, a voracious reader, who walked barefoot in the woods; Lincoln Woods State Park, Lincoln, R.I.. I often wandered from campsite to campsite searching for marshmellows. Throughout my life, I have been a wanderer and searcher. I find my fellow humans most interesting.
For meaning, I kick the can of my mind, play ball with my thoughts and memories, my imagination, my dreams, even my delusions. It is not always fun and games or pure delight. The roots run deep. My grandfather Rubin committed suicide without even leaving a note for his wife and two little girls. I, on the other hand, have no such thoughts but wish to write many “notes” in hopes of finding meaning, reason and purpose. I imagine that I was born from the seed of strangely formed trees, strong and healthy but unusually twisted in form. If you carve deep inside the grain you’re bound to find distinct and unconventional lines. I’d like to get to the root of those lines.
My family life was unusual and most of us have had to overcome many obstacles. My mother, a sister, and myself have been diagnosed with a “condition” called bipolar manic/depression. My two brothers are dyslexic. Despite the odds (I have lived the life of a gambler) we have all been able to survive and even flourish with these difficulties. Money has not been mine or my families criteria for “success.” For me, the artistic and creative process has been the best path towards self- fulfillment. I have attempted to understand myself and the world around me through the use of video production, photography and writing.
My parents, both being artists(painting and pottery), instilled in their children a belief in themselves, a sense of independence and a pride in our individual uniqueness. We never had much but they gave us the gift to be open and honest, even if that meant we were perceived as “strange” or “weird” outside the confines of our woodsy home. And for me, “What a long strange trip it has been!” But I’ll save those memories for my stories, poems and songs. Like Robert Creeley, “I’m wanting to tell a story, like hells simple invention, or some neat recovery.” I’d like to break down the fences, be open-minded and vulnerable, so that all the possibilities and potentialities of writing might come forth. I am setting no traps. I am thinking of you; the professors and students, hoping we can meet eye to eye, mouth to mouth, word to word. I wish to take off all our masks, wipe away the layers of dust and make a fresh start towards our dreams. My dream is to, through creative means, express my view of the world and my or mans place within it. Rinpoche said, “that you see the phenomenal world as a process, stages, as a view, from our own state of mind.”
Oftentimes, I struggle with my state of mind. I am compelled to describe those moments upon which my present and future depends. I feel I am fooling with my mind by doing so because I have always returned to that place where no answers are found. More questions just come cropping up. Ah, the probing mind! Experiences, images, memories, with only built up meanings. It is all made up! I will try to make my life and my stories interesting. There are many moments with many meanings and each one seems most important at the time. Each one has turned my life around and around, another bend, another twist, sometimes extreme. But no matter how I may have felt or am feeling or what I have thought or am thinking I go on breathing. My wish is that I live to tell a good story before I come down to no breath, nothing.
I know this life is my chance to sense and make sense of it all and so I continue to search for all the experiences that I have endured, desired or elevated me in hopes of finding reason, meaning. Why? I end up in the same body/mind. Is it my ego that keeps me going? or is it the satisfaction that occurs when I am transformed by the creative process? I am addicted to the stimulus that surrounds me and the stimulants within; my perceptions, my personal experiences. I have lived an adventurous life for a young man and been through “unique” experiences in the real world and in the mind. H.Rugg says, “Every creative act… involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception… an openmindedness that verges on naïve credulity.”
To be honest, the rest of it would be icing on the cake. It is time for me to come out of self-imposed exile and expose my writing to my peers and well-founded writers so that I may know if I can really write with meaning and beauty. Arthur Koestler wrote that “the artist, stirred by some specific aspect of one world, reacting with… his senses, habits… imagination, emotional attitudes… is impelled to extricate, to draw out from.. qualities… that called forth his response, and to reincorporate them in a form of their own… in the process of which the… art comes into being.” I have a sense, a nagging feeling, that I must try to write, write often and write well. Otherwise, I will perish never knowing what I might have been missing.
Can anyone put the finger on the cause for suffering and joy? I have reached the low and high end of both to the point that I thought there was no end to either. Outside those extremes, I come to realize all good and bad “things” pass. I am willing to chance it. I put my faith in you to let me try.
