Shea. Buckle up.
It was Nov 22, 2025. Shea was out of her fucking mind. She was already ranting as she got in the car.
The police keep putting her in the mental hospital (as she related it). Why? Because she walks outside her apartment in bare feet to touch grass. Then interfering neighbors call the police. The police put her in a mental hospital. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she gets beaten up at these hospitals by the orderlies and other inmates.
This particular stint at the mental hospital was for a few days. When she was released and went home she found her grandmother had broken into her apartment. Grandma then began force feeding her drugs and wouldn’t let Shea sleep or eat. So Shea had to escape, and here we are in an Uber heading for the airport.
In reality: The grandmother was obviously trying to keep her on some kind of psychiatric drug to bring her back to sanity. It wasn’t working.
Shea was batshit crazy. Shea had been repeatedly diagnosed by the mental hospital as bipolar schizophrenic, but she claimed it’s really PTSD. What is the trauma? Shea claimed she had PTSD from the trauma of not being taught her menstrual cycle properly. Sure, that’s a thing that happens in the non-fiction real world, right?
Her grandmother also has PTSD. What is her grandmothers trauma? Her grandmother was PTSD from growing up in Jamaica. Or something — none of it made a lot of sense.
Many psychiatric issues have genetic components. Shea and her grandma are both obviously dominant in every gene.
By the way, Shea’s uncle just died (her grandmother’s son). Stage four pancreatic cancer.
Shea used the word “terrorize” over and over again. She was being terrorized by the police, she was being terrorized by her grandmother, she was being terrorized by her neighbors. Shea said no one in her family believes what she’s saying about her grandmother even though they all know the Grandma is nuts. After all, the grandmother and grandfather both came over to America from Jamaica by pretending to fall in love and marrying Americans and then quickly divorcing them. Currently the grandparents are separated, but they still live together.
Our Uber trip came about because Shea managed to escape the apartment, climbing out a side window while the grandmother thought she was asleep. Shea hasn’t worked for two years and has no money. But she was able to sneak a phone call to her mother. Her mother booked my Uber and a plane ticket to New York to be with her mother. Shea did leave me a $20 tip, which was very generous with her mothers money.
The grandmother will wake up and her granddaughter who she (correctly) thinks is insane has fled the scene, and of course the grandma is also grieving because remember her son has just died…
What do you do with a passenger like this? Make conversation while wondering how much further it is to the airport and ruminating about the power of delusion. If this story doesn’t make sense, it’s because Shea is an unreliable narrator who can’t keep a coherent thought together through two sentences.
I hope Shea is okay.