She persisted in her hope and her struggle to get out of locked wards and to avoid long term institutionalization. But plagued by tormenting voices and nightmares of rape, she was unable to sleep and again attempted suicide. Medical solutions, including a trial of Clozaril, were sought to control her symptoms. As had been the case throughout all 17 years of her psychiatric treatment, none of these solutions worked to alleviate her pain or helped her to recover.

During this period, she wrote numerous letters to the movie actor Mel Gibson, most of which were never mailed. In these letters she expressed her fantasies about what it would be to have a life like others, with love and sexual relationships and ways of being recognized as someone of value in the world. She wrote her aunt and child, brothers, sister, mother, dad, grandmother J and friends, saving every letter she received in return. She gave free rein to her rage, terror, sadness, despair and torment in unmailed letters and on scraps of paper, envelops, sketch pads and whatever was available. She would print, wirte in cursive and calligraphy, in large and diminutive, precise and scrawling letters, at times as if not one but several authors were at work on a single page. She wrote discourse from others, between others and sometimes between her and others. She saved it all, gave boxes and bags for her mother to store and kept as much as she could on her person.

She continued her artwork, producing numerous and explicitly expressive drawings and paintings, usually of single or multiple figures of women and girls, and portraits of herself and others. She worked with her mother almost daily on the chapters of her childhood story, making notes, calling with additional memories, and editing the completed drafts. She once said to her sister, after reading a particularly humorous part of the chapter on Ridgewood, "I like that book. Makes my life a little brighter than it is now." As her mother located their addresses and phone numbers, she renewed contact with some of the people in her childhood who she had not seen or spoken to for over fifteen years. Their names were added to the countless others she kept over the years on scraps of paper and in address books.