RealMental

The past few months have been difficult for me: Mike’s stroke, financial problems, DJ’s death, sickness (Hello SWINE FLU). My anxiety, always a problem, became crippling. I couldn’t face social situations. The smallest tasks became overwhelming and I withdrew from Mike and the kids. More than anything, I wanted to crawl into myself and hide. It was physical too. I started eating more and moving less. Always tired, my entire body ached. My arthritis was also hurting more and I finally broke down and went to the doctor at the beginning of November. While I was there, he suggested I change the meds I take for depression. For the past few years I’ve been doing fairly well taking Zoloft. I still struggle with my emotions from time to time, but it helps. He told me that Cymbalta would do the same thing but that it would also help with my pain and fatigue. I hate taking pills, so it sounded good. At the same time, he gave me two prescriptions for pain relievers/muscle relaxers.

Sure enough, after a week of Cymbalta I felt a lot better physically but mentally I was much worse. I wasn’t sad or even ‘depressed’. It is hard to explain, but something was very wrong. Have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head? You try and try not to think about it but every time you turn around you’re humming the tune or singing the words. The next few weeks went something like that, but instead of songs I would think about hurting myself. They weren’t suicidal thoughts; I didn’t want to kill myself. Washing dishes, I would imagine breaking a glass and cutting myself. Every time I shut the van door I would have to force myself to move my hand out of the way so that I wouldn’t accidently smash it on purpose. If I walked under a tree I would think about a branch breaking and falling on me. It was terrifying. For the most part, I was able to ignore the urges, but not always. Once I was cutting my toenails and kept feeling compelled to take off more and more of the nail until I had torn my entire nail off. I was looking at my bloody toe and I knew that it should hurt but I didn’t feel anything but relief.

I should have asked for help, but I didn’t want to seem crazy. Normal people don’t do things like that. I did talk to a couple of people about the drug but they didn’t mention any side effects like I was experiencing so I thought that it must be in my head.

Last Friday, Mike and I got in a huge fight. We have our little disagreements, but we very rarely argue. Something inside of me broke and I started crying hysterically. I insisted that Mike leave the house because I couldn’t even look at him. I knew I was in trouble. My first reaction was to take one of the other pills the doctor had prescribed. I’d had trouble with it before because it put me to sleep right away. I figured that it would calm me down and I could take a nap before the kids came home. Mike was supposed to be back soon and he could take care of things until I was back to myself.

The bottle said to take one pill three times a day. My brain was running around in circles. I should just take three pills once, right? The worst that could happen was that I would sleep all day and wake up feeling groggy. I took three and waited and cried and waited and cried. Nothing happened. My brain was still racing. What if I took three more? I’d get sick probably, but at least I would go to sleep. I took three more and waited and cried and waited and cried. Nothing happened. I took a shower, with my clothes on, and fell asleep. The water in my face woke me up and I remember thinking that the water had washed away the medicine. I should take some more…

I don’t remember anything after that, but my sister said that the bottle was empty. I woke up in the ICU and stayed there for two days. After that I spent four days in a locked psych ward at the hospital. No tv. No radio. No clock. Just lots and lots of time. They changed my meds and listened to me cry. Then they listened to me cry some more. Then they listened to me talk. And then they let me go home. I feel a million times better now, but ???? Now I feel like I am officially branded: MENTALLY ILL. It seems worse somehow than just getting some meds from the family doctor. Now it’s Major Depression with a side of Invasive Thoughts.

By KristyK

By Muriel Lipke

Part One

Shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 2004 I received a phone call from an uncle on my biological father’s side of the family telling me that my paternal grandfather had died. I remember sitting at my desk and asking my uncle if he had called to tell me anything else. When he said “no” I hung up the phone without even saying goodbye. I didn’t feel sad, I didn’t cry – why would I? My grandfather, along with my father sexually abused me from the age of four until the age of thirteen. I hadn’t even seen the man since I was 18, when I confronted them both as part of my therapy, demanding that they admit what they had done to me as a child.

For that matter, I hadn’t seen father-dearest since I was 23 when he told me that I was an “ungrateful child” whom he regretted was ever born. That was around about the time that I was in the middle of my first and only divorce – having married a man a few years previous who was just as abusive as my father was. I think that my father liked my ex-husband better than me because he saw himself in him. I know I saw father-dearest in my ex and that horrified and frightened me so much that I could barely move. Getting out of that marriage was the first step in many that I took for myself in order to get well.

Or, at least be better than I was.

Deciding to not have contact with the people who abused me and/or facilitated that abuse was the second.

So father-dearest got banned.

My boyfriend of several years was laying on our bed reading a book when I got the news of the old man’s passing. As I put the phone down in its cradle he asked me, “What was that about?”

“My grandfather died,” I said with no emotion in my voice what-so-ever, “You know – the one – who did those things… he died.”

“Good riddance,” he said, “Are you okay?”

My boyfriend was (is) a social worker and he’d been maintaining since he had met me that he thought I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to my abuse as a child. I probably was, in addition to suffering from the clinical depression and anxiety that I knew about already, but I was stubbornly resisting going back into therapy. I thought that my work there was done after several years of weekly therapy (five years previous) and a drug regimen. I considered my “issues” compartmentalized and put away where they appropriately belonged and wanted to get on with the business of living my life without having the stigma of mental illness – situational or genetic – tacked onto me.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I said.

That night I had to take a sleeping pill for the first time in a year so I could fall asleep. I am and was a restless sleeper. That night my inability to fall asleep was particularly bad. But, after an Xanex I eventually drifted off.

I dreamed that I was back in the house my Mother and I had lived in before she divorced father-dearest. I was five when we moved out of that house, so it’s rather remarkable to me that I remembered it in such detail in my dream. It seemed to be my birthday. I was my actual chronological age in the dream – 30 – but, I was dressed in a frilly party dress that I remember from a photo of my fourth birthday party. There was a party going on behind me, my friends and family were all there, celebrating. However when I turned around, towards the front of the house, I got tunnel vision and saw that my grandfather and father-dearest were sitting together on a plaid sofa in front of a bay window. I could see through the window that it was snowing outside. I turned to go back into the party and saw that the area behind me where all these protectors – my Mom, my brothers, my uncles, my maternal grandparents, my boyfriend (who shouldn’t have been in a dream where I was four, as I’d only known him for a few years) – had disappeared. The room had turned cold and grey and it seemed as if the walls were crumbling down.

I tried to wake myself up, saying over and over again that it was just a dream, to no avail. Then like by black magic, something grabbed me around my waist and pulled me towards that plaid couch, until I was standing right in front of father-dearest and my paternal grandfather. Father-dearest stood up and looked down at me with his eyes filled with anger and hate – it was a scary look – sadly, not one I was unaccustomed to. He pushed me onto my knees in front of my grandfather, keeping his hand on my shoulder so I couldn’t get up. My paternal grandfather looked at me, then leaned forward to hiss at me in his whiskey and liverwurst scented breath, “You’ll never escape me!”

I tried to scream, I couldn’t – I tried to get away, I couldn’t – I begged him to let me be, he wouldn’t. Then father-dearest forced my head down onto the couch and sat down on top of me. I was suffocating and screaming and crying and begging for my Mom to wake me up…

The next thing I knew my boyfriend was shaking me awake, but it wasn’t as if I had left the dream, only that he was there with me. I was terrified and it took me several minutes to recognize that we were not in my old house, but my new apartment in San Francisco. I still wasn’t convinced that father-dearest and my grandfather weren’t waiting around the corner to hurt me – I made my boyfriend get up and search the apartment, armed with my tennis racket. I followed close behind him and once we’d cleared all the rooms I allowed him to put me back to bed and feed me another sedative. Though I made him promise that he’d stay awake until I fell asleep to protect me.

I was completely irrational. Because I was sick, I was always sick, I just didn’t want to admit it — because, let’s face it, who wants to be mentally ill? My own mental illness was mild in comparison to my brothers – he was a full blown voice hearing and hallucination seeing schizophrenic – and where I could recognize his illness and advocate for him with doctors and lawyers and the general public, I could not admit my own disease or advocate for myself.

The next morning my boyfriend told me that I had woken him up because I had punched the wall next to our bed and was screaming at the top of my lungs. I had no memory of that what-so-ever, although my right hand was bruised and swollen. It was then that he put his foot down and told me that if I wouldn’t go get help for myself that he couldn’t continue to be in a relationship with me.

Given that my boyfriend was (and is) the love of my life, that was a powerful motivator and about a week later I went to San Francisco Mental Health Access where I was hooked up with a therapist and a psychiatrist and put back onto the medications that I had worked so hard to wean myself off (under the care of a different doctor) years previously.

Part 2 & 3 coming soon!

In response to Miriam’s post In the Interest of Full Disclosure.

Wren says –

“Am I self sabotaging, my therapist asks? I don’t know. I am afraid of finally losing the weight? Maybe, I don’t know. Is it a control issues? Fuck yes, I can control what I eat and I can’t control what I eat or don’t eat all a the same time. I am the mobius strip of food control. Yes, I feel expectations from family and friends. I do not feel understood because I do not understand myself.”

I just wanted you to know that your words in that particular passage really resonated with somebody…with me. In fact, if you changed “losing the weight” to “gaining the weight” I could pass it off as something I had written.

I wish I had words of advice or encouragement to give you other than the ones I do, but I just know sometimes I like to be reminded that I am so NOT alone.

You are so NOT alone.

You are also not any one thing by which your disorders may attempt to define you. You are a composite of a million bits and pieces and chunks of very valuable personhood; thoughts and ideas and dreams and fears and memories and impressions and talents and expressions.

You are you, housed by a physical body that does nothing more important than serve as a carrier for your energy; a physical body we have all learned to judge, part and parcel, for no particular rational reason.

We belittle ourselves every time we let our opinions (or others’) of our bodies represent the entirety of our beings, every time we let our exterior determine whether or not our interior is of any value. We belittle our potential; more importantly, we belittle our here and now.

That being said, taking care of that body – and treating it with love and respect- is the only way to fully allow our full beings to be celebrated and to thrive. Abusing the body, with food, with negligence, withholding medication, severs ourselves from, well, ourselves.

Until the disconnect from repeated abuse becomes so severe that we live in our brains and cease to feel in our skin. All that is left is the endless blur of judgment, a barrage of impulses, a capricious whirr of exercises in restraint/denial and complete and utter lack of control.

But you can do this. We all can. And when you can’t – reach out. Ask it, say it, shout it, cry it, write it… someone will hear you.

Because you are so not alone.

From guest writer Bipoar Notes

Today was rough.

A friend pointed out yesterday that my hands have started shaking. I looked at them and saw a tremor. Don’t know what that’s about, but today I started to feel agitated and a little angry.

Right now I am tense, a little upset, somewhat frightened by it. The fear creeps in; will it happen again? I have been doing so well; can’t it just stay this way?

The ephemeral stability. Never quite within my grasp, never able to be locked in, or protected, like a candle with glass around it.

No, my candle is open to the air, and the air is always gusty, at best — a gale force most of the time.

I am sometimes surprised I have been able to sustain romantic relationships. But then, none of them have lasted.

So often I feel like I am tricking the person in the beginning: “Here I am, I’m such a great package, so much to offer”, and then the truth comes out. “I am a nightmare”. “My life is a hellish vortex and you’ll be drawn into it”.

I try to warn them, but how do you warn someone about something they have no way of comprehending? “This will be like what it feels like to be submerged in icy water until you almost — but not quite — die; Instead you’ll have to endure this pain for as long as you are here on earth.”

How can they understand that, or prepare themselves for what is to follow in the weeks, months, years ahead?

I really feel sorry for them. I also feel guilty about what I put them through. I mostly only care about the one I have now, but I have some guilt about the other ones, the ones who were drawn in and couldn’t take it.

Sometimes I was very angry, though. “I can’t get out, how can you just leave me here and save yourself??”

I mean, when someone loves you, how can they leave you in that hell? It’s like, “Ok, well, there’s only one life jacket, and it’s my size; I have got to get out of this icy water.”

And I am angry; “I can’t get out. How can you save yourself knowing I will drown in this?”

But I also understand them. It is hell. The pain is unbearable. Wouldn’t I end it if it were at all humanly possible?

What is it like to love me? So often I have nothing to offer except anguish and despair. So often I feel empty, with nothing to give, as if someone opened the drain, and all the water ran out.

The rest of me, the beautiful me, the talented me, the unique and wonderful me – it’s not able to shine forth. My light — the unique and totally Julia light – is being obscured by this horrible illness.

It’s as if the rest of me is trapped inside, struggling to keep my head above this frigid water, a prisoner below the ice.

Guest post by Jennifer

“It’s been a long trip with little days in it, and no new places” ~Anne Sexton

It started when I thought I had been molested and blocked out the memories. This made sense when I read books on the subject, and talked to a therapist or two. It made so much sense, I had things I thought were “repressed memories” and I became completely sure that they were real. It made so much sense, I destroyed some familial relationships that have never been repaired completely since.

The first time I hallucinated, I thought there was a bat flying around my bedroom. Another night, a giant frog was on me.

The CIA didn’t start to follow me until a few years later. I thought I was followed by the mafia, the Masons, the CIA, the FBA, the NSA, and Satanic cults, and became convinced I had a connection to all these groups.

I saw the same color, everywhere I looked, some days. I’d see red-white-and-blue on everything from someone’s clothing to the paint on a wall. Everything. And I didn’t know I was hallucinating at all.

I heard the voices first as if they were from people behind a wall. I thought I was overhearing people in another apartment or room. Then I heard people tell me how I was going to die. All the time, every day, people were telling me I was going to die. They were telling me how horrible I was, how much they hated me, that I was worthless, and that I should be dead.

I came to believe on alternating days that I was Anne Frank, Jesus, and L. Ron Hubbard. During one hospital trip, there were three of us who believed we were God. “Hi, I’m God,” one said to me. And I thought, “What?? She is obviously confused,” as I was Jesus that day.

I thought Anderson Cooper was my husband and that we were part of the “Illuminati”, I thought that he talked to me directly when he spoke on TV. I heard him. I watched him. Everything was directed directly at me. I thought the same thing about Ani Difranco’s music. It gave me messages.

One time I went to New York City because song lyrics and voices told me to. I didn’t know anyone there. When I got there, the world was ending. People were being shipped off in trains to concentration camps because the Holocaust was still occurring. I took a bottle of pills in a hotel room and cut my leg open with a piece of glass, trying to get the implant out – you know, the one the CIA put there. I woke up in some hospital in New Jersey. They wanted to send me to the state hospital. My family saved me from that fate.

I’m better now. I work part time. I live alone, with my cat, and I have lived in the same spot for three years, which is a rare thing for me. I take my meds, every day, without fail. I get injections of an antipsychotic every other week, without fail.

But I still hear voices. You wouldn’t know it if you met me. You can’t always see psychosis.

By guest writer Laurie

So. I’ve been in a good mood for months. Months. Happy shiny months of months.

I went to BlogHer. I came home. I started writing again. I went to the beach, for a fabulous week. I came home. People like me in a good mood. I like me in a good mood.

And then I crashed. It kind of started at the end of vacation, the weird way I get when things are just a little off, the frequency starts humming just a little too loud and nothing helps. I’m owning it here because I don’t know what else to do with it anymore, honestly, but also because I figure if I can go back to making this a daily practice when nothing else is happening with any consistency, at least that’s something.

And what I do when this happens is I isolate. I go back to my literal and figurative basement. I do not want to talk about it. I want to sit and not talk. I don’t want to tell anyone what really goes on in here, because really? It’s not interesting and it’s not engaging and time is limited for even interesting and engaging things.

Maybe not writing about things keeps them buried. Maybe that was the purpose of keeping myself on lockdown for a year. Or it’s like a conference hangover, you know, you’re surrounded by all of this positive reinforcement and “you can do it”, it’s all Amway and Mary Kay but it’s not, it’s the epically cooler versions of those. And you start to think – I’m doing it again, writing in the “you” speak when really I mean me, I hate when I do that – I start to think of all the things I want and need and maybe should do to bring some order to these proceedings.

I knew things were building up. Old patterns started repeating (Addicts to any kind of behavior or substance will likely recognize this statement.) When I start listening to August and Everything After on repeat and the “I should never have left Ohio” mental tape starts playing I know I’m screwed, which, as true as it may be, and lord knows I have so much love in my heart for Dayton, it’s not useful thinking because it didn’t happen, and I needed to get out of that place when I did because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have left and I’d be divorced with 2.5 children and driving around Centerville drinking wine out of a sippy cup, no question. (But property values? Could totally own my own house to be drunk in.) August 9 was my tenth anniversary back in Maryland. Maybe I can blame it on that.

Everything started triggering tears again, and I hadn’t been doing that shit for MONTHS. It’s not like I set out to do it on purpose, it just happens and I get so ANGRY when I feel it happening again, because it just doesn’t seem fair that it happens when I’m just cruising along minding my own business and trying to do good things and really when I’m in that place I am super. Even I can cop to that at this point. In any event I’m the opposite of sitting there going, “Oh, thanks, this has been great, could I please have a MOTHERFUCKING MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL END OF SUMMER SALE???? THANKS DUDE! GOT IT COVERED THANKS.”And as always happens, something stupid triggered it.

Saturday I went to see Julie and Julia, which I didn’t really hate although I thought I would, and it plunged me into a ridiculous horrible pit of depression because I don’t have my own kitchen (I’m not kidding. This is huge right now for some reason. It’s like I want to make pot roast every night or start a cupcake of the week club. I. Am. Insane.) This is also no one’s fault but mine. These are life choices writ large. And also my blog sucks and no one loves me as much as that little man loved Julia Child even though she talked like that all damn day and I didn’t come up with the idea to cook 365 days of recipes that I stole from someone in order to get a book and then a movie deal and everything just sucks it sucks it sucks, are you going to eat that meatball? No? Thanks. And perhaps more wine?

I had an embarrassing episode immediately following the movie based on the confluence of these factors and my entire weekend tanked, miserably. See how fast that happens? I am a phenom with the overanalysis and the crazy.

Speaking of wine and meatballs, I’ve also been off the regular exercise routine that had been going so well and really went down the drain between BlogHer and the beach, because you know what? I was TIRED. I did a few crazy long walks on the beach which probably helped keep me stable for the amount of beer I drank while I was there and I think I may have needed a break from the almost daily literal beating I was taking at the gym. It’s just so easy to spiral out of control if I let it go even for a little while. Even a week is too long. It also turns out that workouts are essential to my mental wellbeing, and without them, I end up here again, where I do not want to be. And it’s really easy to go down in a hole about this particular issue, especially when once I’ve broken the workout cycle it’s SO hard to get back in the groove. All the head games start again and these games are complex and difficult to win.

ISSUES, I have issues. I’m trying honesty around here. It may or may not be working.

And yet. And yet. I am trying. I’m thinking of the lists of things to be thankful for, which makes me stabby more than it helps sometimes, because I kind of like my gratitude to be natural and not forced, but maybe I need to get over myself where that’s concerned too. I am trying to be forgiving and understand why people intrude upon your personal physical and psychic space with weird comments and invasive behavior, why they won’t pick up on social cues to behave just a little bit differently, please stay behind the yellow line until your number is called, that sort of thing. I am trying not to say mean things to my students. I am trying not to purposefully seek out things that will upset me.

I haven’t been very much fun to be around for the past two weeks, and I don’t like it either. Knowing that action cures anxiety, I have assignments for myself, the life management shit I hate, and I’m trying very hard to take an action every day. I know what to do, the ass-kicking I need to give myself to avoid the bad places. The long-term goal list needs to be revisited. And as for the short-term, I’m going to try to go back to kickboxing, because if there’s anything I need right now it’s aggressive physical activity. Listening to a lot of pissed off screamy music is helping too. And I need to communicate even when I don’t feel like it with people I know are good influences, because at times like this I’m editing myself before I open my mouth or type a word and that’s part of the problem.

And it turns out that due to the muscle deterioration that quickly occurs when one stops working out in a concentrated fashion for almost a month, I’ve lost two more pounds. So you know, there’s that.

Previously posted here.

My leg is touching the door and I can feel the vibrations of the music through my knee cap. I’m not thinking. I’m just feeling the bass line and mouthing the words. My mouth opens and closes with the words but no sound comes out. I don’t think I know this song. If I was the passenger in the car to the left, I would think I was singing. But if I was the passenger in the car to the left, I wouldn’t be me. I would be him. I think about this for awhile, forgetting to mouth along to the song, my jaw slightly slack.

What if I was him? That guy to the left? I wouldn’t be me. Or I would be both. I would have his feelings. Or they would be the same as the ones I have now, just his. Or they would be different. And I would look over and see me and wonder about the lady driving in the big black van and hope she had at least one other person in the car to make that beast worth while. And I would know that she wasn’t really singing because I didn’t really sing, either. Orange would be slightly different, but how, I couldn’t say. I would like the air slightly warmer in the cab of the car while driving, but my wife would want it cooler and I’d wear gloves to keep my hands warm, even in the summer. I’d hate the birds that shit on the car under the palm tree. I’d love orange suckers and I’d do ceramics on the weekend as a hobby to calm my nerves. Or are they my nerves. Or mine. I don’t know.

My shoe is near the speaker and I can feel the vibrations of the music climbing up my leg. I turn the bass up and look up to notice the sign that says the name of street I know, but isn’t on my route home. I’m confused for a moment and then I realize I passed my exit about twenty minutes back.

I wonder where I’m going.

I’m driving as if I don’t care that I’m not headed in the right direction. I just passed an exit where I could have turned around. And another one. And another. I’m not changing lanes to get to the right. I’m just going forward at a steady 73 miles per hour. Maybe I don’t care. But I don’t know where I’m going.

I’m out of water. My mouth is dry. I have a headache. I get off the freeway and get back on, heading west.

My hands are on the steering wheel and the vibrations are coursing through my fingers and into my wrists. The music is too loud and I turn it down. Then off. The car on my right is driving right in my blind spot. When I speed up, he speeds up. When I slow down, He slows down. I punch the gas and hit over 80, moving away from the irritation. The road is bumpy on this stretch and the van bobs up and down violently for a few seconds. The Santa Annas are blowing hard against the windshield and I can hear the whistle it makes as it leaks through the seams around the doors. It’s high pitched and screaming. All it would take is my not handling the wind very well. Just a tiny mistake going around the right bend of the hills. The tire would hit a pothole and explode. The van would flip over and over, jumping over the guardrail and into the middle of oncoming traffic. I could even take off my seat belt first. I look at myself in the rear view mirror. And then I look away. My foot comes off the gas pedal a little and I slow down to 68 and hit cruise control.

The wind whistling through the doors grows deeper and less insistent. It sounds more like a hum and less like a shriek. I take a few slow breaths and turn the music back on, but softly. I click forward through the songs until I find something mellow.

I’m close to home now. And I think I’m glad. The thoughts and feelings I’ve been avoiding come rushing at me. I’m a horrible person. I’m so unworthy of love. The world would be a better place without me. My kids deserve a better mom. Joe would have a better life without me. I imagine saying that out loud to Joe and I can hear his voice in my head. I would say, ‘I’m too broken. It’s never going to get better. How many times can I say I’m sorry before I get on your nerves? Once a day? Twice? I should just leave.’ and he would say, ‘Only say sorry if you commit a sin of commission or omission against me. You haven’t. You don’t need to be sorry. Your existence is not a sin. I love you. I hope you don’t leave. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ And then I’m crying but I don’t know if it’s happening now or yesterday when he said it for real.

The car is stopped and parked in front of the house. I’m home. Home. The thrumming I feel isn’t music. It’s my thoughts and I’m trying to get them under control before I walk in the house. I’m numbing out my mind, creating a buffer around my body and settling in the center where it’s calm and one tiny bit of what I hope is reality comforts me as I gather my things and head up the walkway.

Your existence is not a sin. I love you.

Originally published here.