Rachel 'Kat' Jackson

Interviewer : Tell me what your piece is about, what are the viewers going to see?

Kathryne (Kat) : My piece is really about my story and it’s really kind of before and after, it’s while I’m sitting there with one of my old therapists, Becky Schofield, well I guess actually it’s Becky Anderson now because she got married, but um we’re sitting there and she really gives of view of what I was like. While I first entered the program and while I was like going through the program and now years later, just kind of how I’ve managed to go from a point where I was just not even a will to live to going to a point survival to a point where I’m just living and thriving off of everything I’m doing.

So the piece begins a poem you wrote and um I’m wondering what the inspiration of that poem was. And, what is the core meaning.

In the beginning of my piece I start out with a poem and I really just, I was inspired to write this poem because I had a friend who was, I just wanted so desperately to let her know who I really was and what I was going through at the time because I was so in so much mental stress and I was afraid that no body would accept me so really the key line of this poem is what would you do, and I just I wanted to ask her and just everybody else I knew, what would you do if you really knew what was going on? Would you really hate me or what would happen if I told the truth of what’s really going on within me.

So then how does that relate to your video piece and what are the core issues of your video piece?

My poem really relates to my video piece and the core issues of my video piece as just now I have a chance, now I’m able to trust that really I am okay and no matter what I’ve been through, or what I will go through it’s okay to communicate 100% honestly what’s going on, and so I started out with ya know the questions, what would you do if I told you the truth, well now I am telling you the truth, I’m stepping out, I’m trusting you and it’s not an easy step, but I’m willing to share with the world what my life’s really been like and what so many others are going through.

So why did you decide to choose to do your piece in this way?

I chose to do my piece with a manner of my talking with my old therapist in just kinda before after view just to show that it is possible, it’s possible to go to a point where people don’t think your gonna live to see ya know above the age fif ya know well 25 and ya know people just really have no hope for you and just start from there and just go to the point where the possibilities are endless and there’s hope, you can get through anything.

So um, explain a little bit more in depth who’s in your piece, people that are important to your piece.

In my piece, there’s a lot of people in it, there’s but the main two people in it are myself and my therapist, Becky Schofield, or Becky Anderson as she is now, um and we’re just really talking as friends now, but um she was really the therapist that made the biggest difference, she ya know I mean, when I left the treatment center, Alpine Academy with Utah Youth Village, I was really just at a point then where as as bad as most people are when they would get in there, where I was just barely surviving, but when I got in I was more like slowly dying because of how emotionally distraught I was. And, she gave me the she taught me to have the will to survive. That everything you go through, ya know life is hard, life is really hard and no matter what throws at you if you have a will you can survive and you can keep going.

What about having your little sister in there what’s the importance of having your little sister?

Also in my piece I have my little sister and a few of my friends and stuff, with my little sister it was really symbolic for me at times when I was playing with my sister and stuff because it was kinda my embracing my childhood because as a child I had a really hard childhood with a lot of abuse and just a lot of dealing with really strong emotions and hallucinations that no child should have to go through, and when I’m playing with my sister, my sister is a lot like me and it’s just a way of me nurturing my inner child and just a symbolic of that and also just I have a great love for my family and so it also is showing ya know the importance of family in my life.

So um, do you want to add anything more about um, cuz I have a question to tell me briefly about your history with mental illness, and some of the major challenges of mental illness.

With my history with mental illness it really started when I was just a young child with ya know little things where it started to manifest itself, where I really tried to manipulate my siblings to get whatever I wanted and I usually realize source of power over people and as it progressed it got to a point where ya know I started having hallucinations, I started dealing with extreme emotions and when I was 8 years old I started trying to kill myself because I was so emotionally distraught and there was abuse in my life that I didn’t know how to speak out, how to say, “really I need help” I didn’t know how to speak, ya know, I didn’t know how to ask for help and so I was really just felt helpless, and so I started ya know at the time I was not old enough I did not have the knowledge on how to kill my self and so I mean I would try to kill myself by taking 3 Tylenol which I now know wouldn’t do anything, but the intent was there and I mean I wouldn’t be able to number the amount of times I’ve tried to kill myself, and ya know just now it’s just looking back at everything I’ve been through it’s almost as it’s a different person completely because I’ve, well it is a different person because I’ve changed who I am, ya know I no longer look in the mirror and say “I’m Bi-Polar, or I’m a cutter” I look in the mirror and say, “I’m me,” I’m me, I’m learning I’m growing, and every day I just do the best I can, and I’m proud of myself and I’ m proud of who I am.

Then bouncing off of that, what was the core thing that helped you to turn around, what do you think that was that finally helped you?

For me there was really two core things that helped me to turn around, ya know one of them was where I discovered that where there’s a will there’s a way, if your decide that I am willing to stick through this no matter what gets thrown at me, well then it’s possible, noth, ya know if you put your will into it you can just keep going and keep going and it’s amazing how far you can go once you invoke your will, and then the other major thing was actually just ya know spiritual, ya know when I really just started embracing my relationship with God and Christ and everything and just who I was just with having a relationship there and that there was more out there than just me and that there was hope for healing and everything else. That just really was a shift in who I was.

And isn’t that also given in the song that plays at the end of the piece?

At the end of my piece I have a song playing, which is actually a song that was written by one of my friends Eddie B. but, it talks about how ya know no medications, nothing was able to get me to a point where I was really feeling like I was able to live and really what for me what did it was I prayed, I called out, I called out to god and said “Help,” and once I had the faith to get down and just really cry out I was just really delivered from all the pain I was in and I was just, I was given a second chance at life, as not just a life of surviving, but real true life, true living of being able to run around and just have fun, fun in itself was a new word for me, cuz I didn’t know how to have fun and just being secure.

So what message would you want to give to other youth that may be suffering or even on the brink of contemplating suicide?

The strongest message I would like to give to anybody who is really struggling with mental illness or contemplating suicide is don’t give up, what ever you do. Because, suicide is giving up. I mean you may, I mean somebody who told me that 5 years ago, I’d say no it’s not, it’s looking for an answer, it’s looking for a solution. It is not a solution, it’s giving up, it’s stop trying, there are so many things out there to try that you could, you could spend 80 years trying to find a solution for your mental illness, and you, maybe you’ll find it 80 years down the road, ya know, but don’t give up, there’s a solution out there and just ya know don’t be afraid to explore possibilities, don’t be afraid to ya know go into churches look for help there, don’t be afraid to go into therapy, there’s nothing wrong with going to therapy, there’s nothing wrong with medications. Ya know a lot of people are telling me that because what really did it for me was a spiritual experience, and I’ve been off medications for almost 2 years now, that ya know they’d say Oh, well I should go off medications and I’ll do it, I’m not at all advocating that, I’m saying ya know, if God heals you, yes you can go off your medications at that point, but don’t go off your medications before it happens saying that God will heal me, it doesn’t work that way.

I know that there’s no real answer, but I’d like your opinion, the suicide rate especially for males between the ages of 14 and 24 in Utah, Nationally and here is Utah, why do you think that’s so and what do we need to do for these kids to help them?

I really feel that the suicide rate is really so so high is because there’s a sense of helplessness and nonacceptance of who you are, we’re not taught to embrace different roles as men and women, and everybody just really looks down on themselves for their role, like you’ve got, ya know you’ve got women wishing to be men, you’ve got men wishing to be women and everybody just gets all mixed up and confused about who they are and people aren’t taught how to be individuals and how to just embrace where they’re at, ya know everybody’s always told, look for the future, look for the future, or ya know your just a kid for so long, you have fun, but they’re not taught how to do that cuz they’re saying, ya know your only a kid for so long, well then they start getting afraid, oh no it will be over in 2 minutes, and by saying that your only it for so, a kid for so long. They stop being a kid and they start pushing forward to that future that they know is right around the corner, and so just learning to embrace where you’re at and just learn that it’s okay, it’s okay to be in the crossroads, it’s not comfortable, it’s not meant to be comfortable, but it’s okay and you’ll get through it.

So you’re also talking about pressure?

Ya, Ya, I fell that there’s a lot of pressure that pushes people these days that you always have to be better and ya know that’s a major part of the suicide rate cuz nobody feels okay. I mean, for me that’s what I was looking for my whole life, I didn’t even want somebody to tell me that I was great or excellent, cuz I didn’t believe, all I’d been looking for my whole life is some one to come up to me and say, Kat, you’re okay, ya know instead of just trying to fix everything and everyone around and just make everything so that other people could be happy and everything else, just to hear that I’m okay is actually the biggest compliment I can get now days.

What are some of the ways that helped you cope, you talked about your spiritual relationship with god, but what are some of the physical ways referring to your poetry, are there other things? Talk about that a little more please.

For me I had a lot of coping skills, and when I say coping skills I say survival skills, they’re what kept me going day to day when I felt like there was nothing to keep me going whatsoever, and what I’d do is I’d find ways to put the facts down on paper ya know or just to make it really something that I could tangibly hold so that well the emotions ya know they’re a lot of people look at them and say well they’re not real, you can change them ladlalala, they don’t get validated and so I would write a poem that expressed what I was going through and then I could show people the poem because the poem was real, even if people wouldn’t validate my emotions, or I would draw pictures, or I’d just, I’d pull up my instruments, I would just play for hours and ya know it’s just finding some sort of outlet, some sort of way to express the emotion instead of holding it in all the time, um I didn’t know how to express the emotion verbally I had a really bad social skills, but being able to make it something real really helped me because I couldn’t validate my emotions myself and so what I had the poem, the poem was real and so I put the emotions into something real.

So why is it important now for you to do this project? Why did you decide to do the project and speak out?

I really decided to speak out and to take my part in this project because I want people, well I want people to know that there’s hope and there’s so many people out there that are suffering and ya know they may be diagnosed they may be not diagnosed they may be in denial or not, but what, the point is, we all have bad days, we all go through major major struggles to one degree or another and I don’t want to say that ya know my life’s any worse than your life, or your life’s worse than mine, what matters is that my life’s hard for me, your life’s hard for you, and we can get through it and just to really just really hang on there because ya know sometimes your on a roller coaster going up and down all over the place, but other times there will be that peace and if you learn to embrace the roller coaster and stop being so terrified of it it can actually be fun.

So where to now, what are your plans going to be for the future?

For me my plans for the future are just well, I have dreams I have lots of dreams in many different areas, ya know I love my job where I’m at right now and I just work really hard there and ya know I dream of moving up in the management there and possibly just going forward with that, because I mean it’s like a family and it’s just, it’s where I belong and it’s nice to have somewhere to belong, or I also see myself ya know volunteering or working in the mental health field and just helping others in ya know that I’ve had so many people come together to help me and pull me through it, ya know and then I’ve always just kind of wanted to own a bowling center, so if that happens I would be ecstatic, because ya know it’s just so much fun I love bowling and everything, so that would be really cool.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Yeah, the café. Um, the setting for the interview where I’m with my old therapist is a coffee shop that is actually my high school that I was going to up at cottonwood and this café really for the first time of my life I felt like I was a success, really because I know I made a difference, because without me and my friend this café would have died, it would have died when our teacher passed away who was really a mentor to us, and we didn’t want to see it go, so we decided, we’ll take it on, we’ll be the management and we hired employees and we were taking inventory and just I learned so much about life there and it became such an important part of who I am and I just, I learned I learned so much about life and embracing it and just moving forward day to day by waking up and just going in there and opening my coffee shop and just learning to help others and everything else and it became a goal to see how much money we could make each week and it also became a service because there was a lot more time put into it than reimbursement would ever come out of it.