A Hall of Unknown Books
“Well Mr. Bozenka Poksinska,” said the librarian who was looking at my passport which was required to open a new library account. I had used the passport to travel to Lithuania where I was conducting a study for my psychology dissertation. My goal in collecting data was straightforward and almost every day had a very strict itinerary, well I did give myself time to have lunch and enough downtime away from the notes I was making.?
My plan was to interview 39 psychiatrists who had already given approval to be interviewed as well as asking permission to gain some opinions of the general public. I was very ethically minded, in fact I believed myself to be one of the first transgender people to visit the country from the United States. The scheduled interviews took place in the following cities: Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaip?da, ?iauliai, Druskininkai and the very small village of Bir?tonas. The reason I had chosen to study this particular country was because it was rumored to be an extremely conservative psychiatric country. My understanding was not very highly considered by the psychiatrist which is why I had to collect call over 450 offices and institutions before my study to interview 39 psychiatrists in Lithuania was approved, it helped my efforts very much that there was a convention going on at the same time.?
Amongst the doctors at the convention the majority of the population at the Kaunas Medical School convocation center were bachelor degree students. When gossip spread that there was a doctorate student conducting a study in Lithuania news about my opinions from research articles I published quickly spread. I was considered by the seriously scientifically educated leadership to be incorrect. Well, when it was my turn to talk about my research in the United States, from Atlanta Georgia, I was bombarded with questions about why I thought recovering from psychosis was possible people without the use of neuroleptics in people with schizophrenia. They disliked my opinion that taking medication should be a choice, however, from their perspective since tax payers were caring for these unemployed people in institutions or receiving a morsel of public assistance the patients should have no choice (which made me wonder as someone who has taken antipsychotics himself, what kind of effect they thought neuroleptics had on psychosis or if in some malevolent manner sedating patients with psychosis was the conservative way of controlling them…?
When I visited Bir?tonas I was very alarmed that even though Lithuania was now part of the European Union, Dr Bunevicius had never taken down the photo of Lenin from the wall. Well, that was my main reason for visiting Lithuania and my dissertation commented on how most of the people from the public I received informed consent to interview in the extremely conservative psychiatric country had not heard of the term ‘neurodiversity’ and had very hurtful things to say about the people locked in the cramped and unsanitary institutions; which I personally wrote down, “this narrow minded outlook on the phenomenon of ‘hearing voices’ (as witnessed in the esoteric language of people who were once led by a despotic dictator in my qualitative data collection, which filled several cassettes I used to record all of the conversations) was the same mentality that fascist leadership used to control the behavior of the working man. Which could be a residual effect from tyranny but is especially humorously ironic that these people who demanded freedom would be so inhumane to people with psychosis when as I planned to point out that hearing voices was a natural psychological daily event… and I began to title my dissertation “freedom to have a narrow minded point of view” but not even the university of Atlanta Georgia would approve that though the faculty were supportive of using Lithuania’s very small population of people who recover from psychosis via the use of neuroleptics to show that people with schizophrenia are not violent though they can be dangerous because of the extreme lack of therapeutic interventions that are available worldwide to help people, especially those just leaving their teenage years, with schizophrenia to develop a more mindful awareness which I had plans to design a whole manual that would teach professionals how to help people with paranoid or disorganized schizophrenia.?
But my dissertation failed and I never earned my doctorate. The committee chairs said that my behavior in Lithuania was unacceptable and although my dissertation brought up many valuable points I would not be awarded my doctorate because of the amount of administrative complaints the department received during and after my study was conducted. Moreover, they said my quantitative skills lacked an ability to validate anything that I mentioned in my qualitative study. I did not understand that part but I stared directly into the eyes of each of those committee chair memebers as I left Atlanta in such frustration that I went back to Lithuania and my head almost exploded on the airplane trip across the Atlantic.?
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“Well Mr. Bozenka Poksinska,” said the librarian as he handed me my new library card. The main reason I went back to Lithuania was because of the library I found in Panev??ys which had an English book entire hallway with authors I had never heard of. I remember finding a book I thought sounded so amazing but as I recall when I sat down with my coffee that was allowed with a lid, I just starting shaking my head and screeching in a muttered way while pulling my hair until the librarian who knew I was trans even though my license said Miss he called me Mister with a smile because that’s how I introduced myself. I cannot emphasize the amount of emotional feelings, there were so many but a lot of anger but I blamed myself because of the ethnolinguistic manner in which I was writing my dissertation was deemed inappropriate and did not conform to “the rules of conduct” in a packet I received weeks later they had somehow found out my new apartment address in Lithuania and forced me to sign that I understood why my dissertation was rejected and my advisory position at the university permanently revoked due to the “provocative and inappropriate display of propriety witnesses by several of the tenured faculty of professors.”?
The librarians name was Algimantas and he sat next to me and held my hand after I had covered my mouth in an angst of social anxiety over the other library patrons glaring at me as I sulked and thought about jumping off the Vytautas the Great Bridge. Except Algimantas warm hand went from holding mine to wrapped around my shoulder and he asked me if I wanted to go to get a loaf of bread and walk beside the lake and feed the ducks. His manager flicked his hands as if shooing us away which was a nice gesture though he did so with a grimace above his double chin and two buttoned coat.?
I drove across the Vytautas the Great Bridge every time I went to the library where I found books that I was certain did not exist in university libraries in the United States. I learned about ideas of human interaction I’d never thought about and read excerpts from books that had been hidden during Lenin’s tyranny whence books not conforming with political compliance were burned. I got a job as a therapist, as I was still licensed and got approval to transfer my license to Lithuania after a few weeks that I spent with Algimantas who asked me if I would move out of the tenement I was living in and move in with him in a small villa where he made bread out of fresh flour and we ate it with olive oil and a lot of salted herring from the small bussiness who I gradually established relationships with people who I met there and began a new chapter of self discovery.