Climbing the Rock Within

The reader is inside the hazy inquisitive mind of a girl, the youngest of four, and her unnoticeable mild, yet frightening epileptic seizures and heavy meds. She has a well to do egocentric father who denies not only his family’s emotion, but also his own need for a psychiatrist; he tries his way to fame as a photographer and writer. Though having compulsive desires to end her life Rosetta keeps a normal facade. She is intrigued by her brother’s adolescent drug scene till he one time mistreats her; she says nothing, and asks to go away to a Catholic boarding school. There she deliberately stops her medication; no one is called. Confused by college and cotillion parties, she is drawn to an artistic male who unlike herself has to work for a living; they exchange letters. Rosetta hides from him the family befuddlement, her illness; guilt looms.

Her father goes on a trip to photograph France; she helps him and sees his double side: his appreciation of Beauty, his world of Denial. Near the end of college she unburies her fears to a psychiatrist. Once out of school Rosetta feels unworthy of a career, marriage, or motherhood; she goes with a man and his son to live in Hawaii. There she gradually cuts her meds completely, and boards with a welfare mother. One day while babysitting Rosetta has an unconscious seizure; she wakes up with her bike overturned, the baby on the pavement; she realizes it is time to go home to her family. Rosetta asks her father to walk with her on the beach; he is distant. Frustrated, with suicidal thoughts, she fists the stars for help, has a Nervous Breakdown and meets a doctor who, though defiled by the father, does more than save her life.