RealMental

Today is a day in which Bitch uncoils herself from my within my chest, swells up through my throat, and declares Feck off, all of yous!

I am doing my best to remain calm, but I am caught up in my annual early spring irritation, which begins right after the first sign of thaw and the disappointing re-freeze that follows it. I want out: out of the office, out of my apartment, out of the city, out of every last thing that places and schedules me into a pattern. I am fifteen (in spirit) and fed up with The Man. Let’s go smoke a carton of cigarettes and steal your dad’s gin.

People keep coming up and talking to me, because I am normally a very nice person, but I can tell that I am being a bit off-putting today. I can feel my aggression rising, and suddenly my voice is too forceful, too loud, and I am saying black every time they say white. Could I be any more the three-year old who has been denied candy? You are talking to me, and can’t you see that my brain is twisted wire wool right now? If you don’t leave RIGHT NOW, all this shit’s gonna start on fire!

I have my ups and downs throughout the year, but I find that the biggest complicating factor is my seasonal anxiety and depression during the winter and spring. A subtle change in the weather and the sunlight, and I can be thrown into a deep depressive fog or be thrust up into happy busy-ness. I can never be sure which it will be. Today, I have been pushed out on a third precipice, for example: Bitch.

I have a plan, though, to take care of myself at the end of the day. I am going to wash all the bedding, take it straight from the dryer, pile it all on top of myself, and drink chocolate milk from a straw. I will be like Jabba the Hut dressed in orange chenille. And then I will breathe in and breathe out and remember that this is just today.

Sometimes it is a blessing to be a fairly rapid cycler.

(This entry is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

It’s been on me now for months now. It sits in the middle of my head, buzzing like some sort of damned demented tsetse fly.  I am defeated for no reason whatsoever. I can’t smile, at least not for myself, and my eyes are always heavy.
I know that part of the solution is to move around among the living but every time I try panic sets in and suddenly the lights are too bright, the rooms too small, my breathing too shallow and I can’t find my way back to safety. More often than not, I make the decision to avoid movement.

My loved ones want me to get better. They are sure that there is action I can take to get better. I know that they are right. It scares me that they can see it- I am a world class actress after all.  It must be really bad.

I’ve curled up into myself because I know how to take care of me, to keep from falling over that precipice that looms on all sides of my psyche, craving a misstep. It’s hard to explain how withdrawing helps- it just does.

I think that sometimes depression causes so much pain the sufferer’s only recourse is to anesthetise themselves. I used to do that by using drugs and alcohol. Now I do it by drawing myself up into a ball, so that my insides aren’t exposed.

I am starting therapy again and I know that it will help. There’s no magic pill for this, it is something I have to tread through. That may be the hardest part about living with depression and anxiety. When every fiber in your being is screaming at you to keep quiet, keep still, keep yourself safe- to take those steps towards recovery- I am jumping off of a god damned cliff.

There is something in my belly, and I finally know what it is. My belly is the storage for very intense emotions, ones that were stuffed far away not to ever be seen, or heard by anyone.

I’ve figured out that when the belly is disrupted in any way, I break out into a serious panic attack. I am certain that it’s been this way for years but I am only now becoming aware of it.

This particular panic attack from the belly region tells me to run very quickly. It begs for a sinkhole to open up on the very ground in which I stand, and to take me away this time. It begs to take me anywhere but here where the pain threatens to swallow me whole.

The lost girl stores her pain in my belly.

If I put on an article of clothing that is too tight, the belly signals the brain to run away as fast as possible because it hurts in there and we must not be reminded of that hurt.

After eating too much of a good meal, the pain signals the brain to crawl into a cave and hide where no one can see us. She is scared; she doesn’t want you to see her. If you see her, it will make it all real and she cannot possibly process everything if it is in fact, real.

My massage therapist, that I used to see on a regular basis told me that I always hold my left side closely, not letting go.

Louise L. Hay writes that problems with the left side of the body “represent receptivity, taking in, feminine energy, women, and the mother.” The stomach “holds nourishment and digests ideas.”

Not only do we store everything in our brains, but also in our bodies. Physical abuse is stored in your body, your body remembers it. This is why I get a certain type of headache around certain people, and why my shoulders lock up in my neck with certain stressful situations.

It is exactly why I used to bite my nails until they bled when I was at her house.

A frightened child who is not letting go of the pain even though it weighs her down is living in my belly. She didn’t have anywhere else to go, and doesn’t know what to do with the pain because it’s all she has.

I am grateful to have finally found her hiding place.

Now, I can invite her to come out so that I can nourish her with the kind and loving energy of a mother who soothes her frightened child.

I spent half the night crisscrossing the line between sleep and wakefulness as I was plagued by stupid dreams with stupid plot lines.

Actually, the irritating dream thing started not last night but the night before when I dreamt that I was holding a friend’s baby. It had an abnormally small head covered in dark hair with pinhole eyes and one gargantuan tooth jutting out of its lower jaw. It started nuzzle at my breast, and I said No, little guy, that won’t do, and then he latched on through my shirt anyway and bit my nipple really hard with that abomination of a tooth of his. I spent the rest of that dream annoyed and embarrassed about the wet circle of baby spit on my shirt over my left nipple.

I will give you a short synopsis of last night’s dream’s adventures in a list, because this bitch just goes on and on:
• I visited a friend in another city, and she threw this huge, obnoxious party the first night I was there.
• Her mother built me a remarkable free-standing tower out of potato chips much like a house of cards, and then it collapsed, and I had to spend a bunch of time cleaning the mess of crumbs out of the carpet.
I woke up alone in the morning, looking around at a dingy living room, and I said I feel like I’m in a Harold Pinter play, and no one’s excited to see me. I have no idea what that means. I have never even read any Pinter.
• A man told me that he could help me to makeover my image, and then he proceeded to tell me that although I have young face, my neck looks ten years older.
• Someone put on an outdoor breakfast potluck buffet in honour of my visit, but I hate eating outside, did not know anyone, and was too hung over to enjoy it.
• I went back to my friend’s house to clean up, but the main floor had been cleared of all its contents. I looked out the back door, and some friends had loaded all the furniture, ornaments, and whatnot, including my clothing, into the back of a truck. They were going to take it all away and clean it as a surprise. When I freaked out about my clothing, they laughed at how uptight I was and drove away, but I knew that the expensive items I had brought along would be destroyed. Jerks.

Last night’s dreams completely confounded me until That Girl figured out what was going on. Apparently, each time something annoying or fucked up happened, it was because someone was trying to be nice or helpful to me. That Girl said, It sounds like you really need to hermit yourself away for awhile. No freaking kidding.

I have really enjoyed the things I have gone out of the apartment to do with people lately, but I find every excursion exhausting. The February Crazy is upon me.

What is the February Crazy, you ask? Well, it is a lovely period of time that occurs annually each February. Its symptoms vary but may include any or all of the following:
• Irritability. Did you say something to me? Because that would be wrong. Are you standing anywhere in my vicinity without obvious purpose? Because that would be wrong, too. Have you walked by me a hundred times rather than turning whatever you are doing into one trip? Because that would be very, very wrong. Did you ask me how I am doing? Seething, thank you.
• Strong urges to run away and join the circus. These urges may also be experienced as desires to become a hippie or ride the rails or do a stint in a nunnery. It is best to avoid these urges by crawling under a blanket and drinking an entire bottle of wine.
• Feelings of guilt. In this case, another symptom, irritability, can often be used to overcome the sense that one has fallen terribly short of others’ expectations, as irritability is usually quite strong during the February Crazy.
• Sudden weeping. When irritability cannot overcome feelings of guilt, sudden emotional outbursts are common. Do not be alarmed. Enjoy wine liberally and hide in a warm bath.
• Vivid dreams that are emotionally upsetting. See above.
• Actions contradict emotions. An individual suffering from the February Crazy may make broad statements about the futility of life and the need to hermit and then will be seen out in public yucking it up. In public, treat an individual with the February Crazy with a gentle hand lest they fall to irritability or weeping. They do not know why they are out in the world, either, and are likely to be easily confused.

Tonight, I am choosing a blanket and a bottle of beer to curl up with while I watch hours of “Law & Order” to divert my attention away from the fact that my system is still trying to deal with the loaf of garlic bread I ate on Sunday. Yes, I said LOAF. The February Crazy also has some slightly less common symptoms, such as the overconsumption of underbaked, white flour products slathered in cheap margarine and garlic powder.

(This entry is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

I’ve been biting my nails again, and my OCD symptoms are bulging out. My old standby is worrying about things catching on fire, although worry is probably an understatement. This fire fear began in early childhood, perhaps the result of the “great soot disaster.”

We were in the process of moving from one apartment to another, making short trips to drop off boxes. One night after a drop off, my Dad put a box on the stove. Not realizing it, he turned the dial on the stove just enough.

Not enough to start an actual fire, just enough to create a situation in which all of our stuff we’d already moved became soaked with black soot. Only a few things were salvageable.

We cleaned for days and weeks after, blowing black soot from our noses. Over the years, I would spot a piece of furniture or other item that held on to our family tragedy with remnants of black soot that would never completely dissolve.

The reason all this fun stuff is coming up, can be blamed on the fact that I am finally DEALING WITH SOME STUFF. As with everything, it’s process. Over the past year or two, I’ve been working on another layer of junk. The changes are just showing themselves.

I got it down intellectually, made progress with behavior modification, putting my money where my mouth is and walking my talk. The next step from there is bringing it down to the emotional level; that dark, ugly, and paralyzing level.

The very unpopular level most people try to avoid. We go to great lengths to avoid the emotional using alcohol, drugs, shopping, food, people, and sex, to hide behind so we don’t have to feel the onset of putrid feelings that threaten to swallow us whole.

Something I had to keep in mind is that this is another part of the process and it will pass once I’ve allowed it to have its air time.

The final step on the process will be to put it back inside where it lives, just a little bit better than how I found it.

I’ve suffered from severe clinical depression with bouts of psychosis since I was 18. In the past 20 years I’ve dealt with it on my own, no meds and no doctors. Recently, about 5 weeks ago, I finally had to go find some help and due to financial reasons I had to go to my county’s MHMR Dept. I’m grateful to them for getting me in so fast without having to wait. I’m taking Paxil, Trazodone, and now Cymbalta as well. Recently they added Abilify to the mix. My case manager and my doctor tell me to be patient, and I’m trying to. Despite having no hope I’m waiting. Waiting for the meds to work. Waiting to come out of this awful black hole I’m in. I feel like I’m waiting for death. I’m being patient, but it’s so very hard when the pain and suffering is so deep. There’s a vivid image I have of me taking a gun and shooting myself. I have it more and more lately. It plays on a loop in my mind, over and over, and I can’t stop it. I can’t control my own thoughts, my own mind, my own self. It’s such a helpless feeling and it scares me beyond words. The thoughts are sometimes loud, not mine, external. Voices telling me to harm myself.

I’m trying to be patient, to hold on, but it’s unbelievably hard and I’m confused and scared. I’m waiting, but the perch I’m on is precarious and I feel like I’m close to falling off of it to my death. If I had a broken bone would I be told to wait, to be patient? Wouldn’t I be given something for pain immediately? Wouldn’t they set my broken bone ASAP? Surely I wouldn’t have to wait weeks and weeks for relief. People I thought were my friend say “why don’t you snap out of it” or “I won’t let anything destroy my happiness”. That sort of lack of understanding and lack of compassion hurts, but hearing things like that isn’t new to me. Lots of people don’t understand clinical depression or mental illness. They haven’t a clue how awful it is. I’m not “letting” it destroy me. I can’t help or stop it, and I can’t just “snap out of it”. I can’t control it right now, I wish I could. I don’t voluntarily feel this way or intentionally put myself through this. People can’t imagine how awful it is unless they’ve experienced it themselves. If I had a broken bone protruding through my bloody skin they could then see how awful it is and how it must hurt. They could see something is desperately wrong. Then they’d understand and then they’d show some compassion. You can’t just snap out of a broken bone. So here I sit with a broken mind, terribly scared, shaking and panicked, sick, waiting, being patient. People with broken bones are lucky.

Signed,
Anonymous

You know how in action movies, when there’s a bomb set to detonate any minute, and they call in the bomb squad, there’s always that tension-heavy scene with the guy defusing the bomb? You know the one I mean. He’s got all these wires, and he has to cut one to de-activate the explosive device, but there always seems to be some doubt as to which wire it is. He hovers his snippers over one, then the other, having a debate with himself: “Is it the red one? No, I think it’s the blue one. No, definitely red.” He looks like he’s on the edge of a heart-attack, and rightfully so, because if he snips the wrong wire, then KABLOOEY.

Well, I feel like a bomb squad guy sometimes. Only I seem to have MUCH less information about the construction of the bomb, and even if I do manage to snip the right wire, it may stop the immediate threat, while merely re-setting the bomb to go off at another time. And here’s the Big Stupid: Sometimes I see the right wire, know what I can do to at least make the clock stop ticking…and I don’t do it. Because it would hurt my pride, or my feelings, in some way. Most usually it would require me to, you know, SHUT UP. And I’m not such an expert at the shutting up.

We’ve recently had a bomb squad incident in our life. Everything’s OK now, crisis averted, no one went off the rails, nothing exploded (well, maybe some small explosions, but nothing nuclear). But while it was going on, it was miserable. We were both miserable. And I couldn’t help, which is frustrating. I could keep from making it worse, but that was about all that was in my power. Part of the reason that I couldn’t help is because I was faced with thought processes that, to me, just did not make any sense. There were questions I couldn’t answer, because I simply could not view them in a rational light. Most frustrating of all, things kept going in circles–there was no logic which could prevail that would lead, in a linear fashion, to a CONCLUSION. For someone like me, this is crazy-hard.

I like to think I learned a little from our recent difficulty, and I hope that I can utilize it in the future. But, MAN, is it ever not easy. I have long known that there are certain “symptoms” of what I think of as “bipolar logic,” and also that there is no use in trying to circumvent that thought process in my husband. It won’t last long, and if I can just SHUT UP and ride it out, and not feed into it or make it worse, it will be over even faster. Have I mentioned how difficult that last part is for me? The shutting up part? Because it is. Particularly suppressing the impulse to say, “You are acting like a CHILD,” which, as you can imagine, really helps things get resolved. /sarcasm.

For me, dealing with a problem goes something like this: See problem. Recognize source of problem. Evaluate whether anything can be done toward solving problem. Take what steps I can to actively accomplish those things, including engaging the assistance of others who might be able to help with problem. Move on. Admittedly, with me, there’s a lot of anxiety and stress wrapped up in this process, but I don’t waste a lot of energy on things I can’t control–I concentrate my anxiety on the things I can do something about.

This is not far from my bipolar husband’s approach to problem-solving, either…eventually. But first, for him, a stressor is a “trigger.” It puts his brain into a fight-or-flight mode that is counter-productive to the problem-solving process. He stalls after that first stage, and gets caught in a loop of arguing with the problem, usually about how unfair it is. He gets combative, first railing against the upsetting thing itself, then eventually at me, because, you know, I’m THERE. I’ve gotten better at not taking this personally, though I won’t lie and say it doesn’t hurt. In my mind, I’m his ally, his supporter, his #1 fan, me and him against the world, but for a little while in his mind, I am “other,” and I am, like everyone and everything, “against” him. I really hate that part.

After this last storm passed (and you know, I should mention here that TREMENDOUS progress has been made by my husband in the last few years, and that things that would have previously sent him into weeks-long tailspins now maybe just partially derail him for a day or two), and Alex was apologizing to me for his misplaced anger and hostility (he doesn’t call me names or abuse me in any way–he just directs some of his anger at the only other person around: me), I took the opportunity to ask him, “When this was going on, and you were going around and around in circles with your thinking, and lashing out about things–like the weather–that no one could control, what would have been a response from me that would have helped in any way?” He didn’t have an answer for me. I asked, because, when a storm in brewing in his brain, there really seems to be no “correct” response that I can make–no matter which wire I snip, something’s gonna get asploded.

I’d like to think that I’ve at least gotten better about not making the explosions BIGGER, which I used to do with no small frequency, pushing buttons that I should have been mature enough not to push, especially since I was supposed to be the “rational” one, whatever that means.

Support groups, online forums, and written resources everywhere are full of advice about how not to escalate irrational behavior, or at least how to remove yourself from the equation. I’m pretty much all set there. I know all the buzzwords and phrases: Detach, Do Not Engage, Take Care of Yourself. That’s all fine and good. But–and here is where I expose my inner co-dependent who never really goes away–when someone I love is in pain, and is suffering due to non-productive anger and frustration…isn’t there something, anything that I can do to alleviate that at the time, instead of just retreating to an emotional storm shelter and waiting it out?

Ironically, these questions have only just begun plaguing me since the “bad times” have become far less frequent, less lengthy, and with less lingering aftereffect. Maybe I’m fooling myself into thinking, since things are so much better, that if I just had a better bomb squad, we could avoid this kind of tension altogether.

Does any of this make any sense at all?