All the Things We Never Knew by Sheila Hamilton

unable to concentrate in college and having extreme difficulty sleeping. He also used drugs and alcohol during his teen years. David inevitably dropped out of college and showed worrisome signs that indicated his mental health was declining. He lost interest in the care of his apartment and his personal hygiene, he reported increased sensitivity to sights and sounds, and he withdrew from family and friends.
    NAMI reports: “Abuse of drugs and alcohol always results in a worse prognosis for a person with mental illness. People who are actively using are less likely to follow through with the treatment plans . . . and more likely to miss appointments, which leads to more psychiatric hospitalizations and other adverse outcomes.”

Chapter Seven
    Months later, I was on deadline at work, puzzling over the perfect combination of words and video for my story. We’d been pulled from a longer-format story about cuts in school funding to cover another gang shooting in north Portland. It was the third time I had been called to a particular intersection of Sumner Street in a month. I wished I had time to extrapolate the bigger picture: what the violence meant in relation to recent gentrification in the area, the job numbers, the divisions set up by the so-called Bloods and Crips, offshoots of gangs that had relocated from California.
    I’d interviewed a couple of the mothers on the street before; harried and overworked, these women barely had time to get a decent meal on the table, let alone worry about a nearby crack house. One of the women had said it best: “I’m a damn rat on a wheel, that’s all. No time to get off. I’ve got to keep running and running so I don’t trip and die.”
    I was from a far more privileged socioeconomic background, yet I wanted to grab her hand and say, “I know, I know how it feels.” As I tried to put the story together, my thoughts drifted away to my own chaotic life: running, always running, a rat on a wheel, scrambling to keep up with ten- to twelve-hour workdays, raising Sophie, trying to find time for paying the bills, buying groceries, cleaning the house.
    I’d weighed the option of leaving enough times to understand why I stayed. I believed Sophie would be better off with David in herlife, and I was too distant from my family to handle single motherhood. We seemed to leapfrog from crisis to crisis: David’s hospitalization for poison oak, my weeklong flu that turned into pneumonia, Sophie’s recurring ear infections. As much as David seemed distant and erratic, at least he was helpful in a crisis.
    And getting a divorce would be a full-time job. I didn’t even have the time to pick up my dry cleaning. We’d have to set up separate households, and David would not make it easy. I had gambled his moods wouldn’t get worse, his investment in his business would pay off, and we’d make it. The truth was, we were living further and further apart.
    â€œSheila,” my producer shouted from across the room, “get your story to editing!” I grumbled to myself about sensationalizing crime, feeling that I was part of the problem.
    The whiteboard had a scribbled outline of the day’s stories and the reporters assigned to them. These days, there were more news shows and less time for research, more rating grabs and less substance. We had two helicopters, not one, because research showed people liked pictures from the air. The investigative unit I had been hired to spearhead had been shelved in favor of more live shots and stories that were less than ninety seconds in length. I loved hosting the longer public affairs program we ran on Sunday afternoons, but the day to day had become grueling, sensationalized. I tried to remember the stories I worked on yesterday—and couldn’t bring any of them to mind.
    My phone rang, the newsroom bustled with other reporters and editors, and producers rushed around with copies of