terry_schiavo jane the most frightening thing about the terry schiavo incident is that there is a piece of her echoed in all of us. and when we stood by watching her story exploited over and over, it was like watching our own pieces, dead inside, with this paralyzing fear that our loved ones would torture us by allowing us to remain in that state for the rest of our lives. i'm sure for most there was a cognitave_dissonance between wanting to rid ourselves of a burden on society and the worry that we, ourselves are even more of a burden, and that someday we'll be discovered and eliminated with the same amount of grotesque betrayal by publicity. or even worse, the fear that we'd be left burdened by those dead pieces inside, doomed to live out our days bearing the crosses of our former selves, walking the path of unrighteousness to nowhere. at the time the debacle was in session, i was in a psychiatric ward in new york city after a nervous breakdown. i spent the first day of spring there, and easter as well. times of rebirth and celebration. the dichotomy of those celebratory days and the idea that i was ridding myself of the evil within, that i was shedding my skin the way leaves fall in autumn, that i felt bare like a tree in winter...it was all manifested in front of me on a television with a blank-eyed vegetable woman, looking like a happy idiot but devoid of soul. perhaps that's it. it was a time when i, too, felt devoid of a soul. and all through my recovery period, even after i was discharged and went to go live with my mother in her cabin in arizona, i drank whole bottles of wine and fucked strangers just to prove to the world and myself that i was not a vegetable. that i could feel, that i was alive. "don't pull the plug on me, world, i beg you. there's some of me left in here." and wondering if there was something in her head repeating the same plea. 091227 what's it to you? who go blather from