RealMental

As my handle states, I’m a lawyer. Even worse, I’m a litigator– I go to court a lot, file lawsuits, get high on the charge of arguing my case before a judge or a jury. I handle a blend of straightforward and more complex cases, and it’s the complicated ones that I really love. It’s how I get to show my smarts, prove my abilities, and feel recognized, acknowledged for my talents. I aspire to be a well-known, scary smart litigator on the cover of SuperLawyers and reported in the Top Verdicts and Settlements report every year. I want to be queen of my corner of the legal world.Actually, that’s not true. Or more accurately, I should say that this whole paragraph should have been written in the past tense, except for the “I’m a lawyer” part. And maybe not even that. Because I am realizing that the way I chose my online handle, BipolarLawyerCook, has more meaning in the order of the words than I could have thought.

See, Bipolar comes first. It’s taken me a while to realize this, despite the fact that I type my online handle nearly every day. Let me repeat that. Bipolar comes first. It doesn’t mean that I walk around with a big scarlet B attached to my coat. What it does mean is that I need to take my bipolar into consideration when I am making decisions about what will keep me healthy, and therefore happy. If I ignore my hard-acquired self-knowledge about my triggers, my mental knee-jerk habits, if I fail to avoid people, places, and situations that back me into a corner where I curl up into a little ball, and just give up, then all I am is bipolar, and worse, a crazy bipolar. If I remember, and adapt, then there is plenty of room for any other descriptors I want to tag on after bipolar– so long as the terms can all coexist with bipolar, and take turns as need be.

When I was first diagnosed, eons ago in 2005, I was relieved– finally, an explanation, and one that did not implicate some moral weakness on my part. I started taking my meds, went religiously to therapy, worked on my triggers, was a model patient. But not really– because I made the mistake of believing that I would now be able to do all the things I’d wanted to, but couldn’t. Despite knowing better, I assumed that the meds and the therapy would cure me, and that I could do whatever I set my now-stable mind to.

Not so– the meds control, don’t cure. If I overtax myself, then all my crazy predispositions come roaring back. But more importantly, and fortunately without quite the same variety of mental ups and downs, I am finally coming to realize that litigation as a practice is mostly insane. Whether or not you’re officially crazy, the pace, the hours, the adversarial climate and lack of civility are all enough to drive the sanest person nuts. And I’m realizing that it does drive everyone crazy, eventually. Maybe you become a screamer, or a drunk, or you cheat on your spouse, or your kids hate you because you were never home, or your colleagues and opponents will never give you a break because you never give them one– there are a thousand different ways to fail as a person, if not so obviously as a litigator.

I recently took some time off, since I needed to switch mood stabilizers, was exhausted and depressed, and was therefore on the brink of messing something up again at work. The time off has been a revelation in more than one way. First, I’ve had even more ideas to write, and took the leap to start pitching ideas for freelance assignments. Second, I realized that the charge that I get from the ritualized combat of litigation comes with a price, and that I was ignoring the law of mental gravity: what comes up must come down. Add to that the slow dawning acceptance that my energy reserves are shallow, and I’ve come to accept that my flame burns bright, but burns out quickly. I need to find work that is more sustainable, less full press– and to do that, I need to give up my Queen Litigator dreams. This became less difficult when I had my third realization, while lunching with a coworker, who was stressed beyond belief. I didn’t want to go back– and not just to that office. Worries about the future aside, I was happy.

I was sharing this with my therapist, and she asked me who I was proving myself to with my SuperLawyer fantasy. When I realized that I was trying to get approval from those who will never give it, it because so much easier to step to the side, and understand that my dreams of worldly success would not make me happy, even if I had the mental resources to achieve them. I also realized that setting aside the fantasy isn’t failure, no matter what other litigators might think.

Having realized this, it becomes easier to think about walking away from the practice of litigation, or to at least think in a more clear-eyed manner about what will make me happy, and how I can best sustain that happiness. In compiling my list of things that make me happy, I’ve come up with: cooking, taking pictures, being with friends, writing for writing’s sake, having quiet time to myself, blogging for sharing’s sake, having quiet time with my husband, reading everything in sight, learning new things, and helping other people learn new things. I’m looking forward to adding more things to that list– and maybe more and different things to my handle.

Republished from BipolarLawyerCook.

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?

I was talking to my therapist about various things during our last session, and one of them was how much better I feel for having started writing again.  She knows that I blog and that I keep my journal.  I’m not sure if she reads my personal blog or this one– I suppose telling her about them keeps me honest.  I was also showing her a poetry series that I was working on, since some of it had to do with other things we were talking about.  She handed my journal back to me and said something simple but perspective-altering– “what a relief to recover something you used to do for pleasure.”

When I think of how many pink cloth diaries and wire-bound notebooks and scratch pads I used to fill with bad poetry, stories, rantings to myself, and every other musing, prosaic and poetic when I was an adolescent and teen… all I can say is I did it because I enjoyed it.  It gave me relief.  I wasn’t sharing what I wrote (and it was before the internet, anyway) or expecting criticism– I just wrote for my Self.  And I just . . . stopped, lost that part of myself with my first really bad depression in college.  I didn’t recover my writing in any consistent fashion until after my diagnosis in 2005.

I’ve always let peter out things I really enjoyed when I entered a bad depression.  As depression’s lead blanket would descend, causing me to lose my joy in life, and as my insecurities would foster a deeper depression, I would become convinced I didn’t deserve happiness, and would withdraw from life.  I would withdraw from, or even sabotage friendships.  I would stay in my dark bedroom all day.  I would let the phone ring and ring and ring.  And I would let the thoughts circle around, in ever-tightening spirals in my mind, until it was impossible to break out of the vortex until my brain chemistry righted itself.  But now, I know more about the whys and hows of my depression, and am slowly getting better about seeing the black cloud on the horizon.  I know now that if I allow myself to back away from all the things I enjoy, then it’ll be worse than if I just grit my teeth and at least go through the motions. The activity itself is therapeutic.  So now, I resolve to do the things I used to do for pleasure, whether I feel like it or not.  I think that “practice makes perfect” has especial meaning when depression is keeping you pinned to your bed.

Write every day, for the release, for getting the circling thoughts out of my head.  Get out in the sunshine every day, because the secret to bipolars is that we are all part plant and part cat, and need sunshine to stay sane.  Meditate every day and do yoga three times a week, so I can let go of some of the circling thoughts that don’t really require writing out.  Call a far-away friend once a week, and ask them about what’s going on with them.  Have lunch or dinner with a friend at least once, preferably twice a week, because I have good friends, who care, who make me laugh, who deserve my attention.  And try not to forget the things I like to do for fun, because the only thing better than the relief of recovering that joy is never really having lost it.

By JB

One year ago today, my entire universe fell apart. I reaped the seeds I had sown. I had the unfortunate task of knowing that the falling apart was my fault. I had backed myself into a corner. I had almost ruined everything.

One year ago today, Joey took away the engagement ring, the beautiful one he had designed himself. The one that fit me perfectly, the one that was better than any one I could have built myself. The one with the emeralds for both of our birthdays.

One year ago today, I was presented with a few choices. I could give up. I could start over. I could try to fix the things that were broken. I chose the latter.

January was cold last year, cold in so many ways. I spent a lot of time on walks outside. I chased Joey down sidewalks after he rightfully turned his back on me. I cried almost every day. I started to put my life back together. We started to put our life back together.

I can still remember all of the small gestures of love, the small assurances that let me know he still cared. One cold day in January, I walked into his dorm with a cold nose. Instinctively, he pressed his warm cheek up against it. I knew he cared so much about me. That’s the time I often pinpoint that I knew we could get through this.

In March, after many appointments with therapists, testing psychologists, and a psychiatrist, I got the medical help I needed. The afternoon I got tested, the first thing I did was sit in my car, turning circles in the parking lot. The first thing I said to him on the phone was, “I’m bipolar, Joey.” Then, “We can never adopt babies from China.”

I don’t want to be bipolar. I never wanted to be bipolar. But I don’t have a choice. Regardless of my feelings, I am bipolar. Treated or not, I have a mental illness. I am mentally ill.

But I am also so lucky. The other night, fairly tipsy, Joey looked at me and said, “It’s been a good year.” I pressed my face up to his.

“It has been a good year, baby.” I said. “It has.”

When I tell people about this past year, when I tell them about breaking an engagement, about losing so many friends [including a best friend], when I tell them about finding out I was bipolar, they look at me with pity. What a bad year, they think or say. I am constantly reassuring people.

This was not a bad year. This was a great year. This was a beautiful year. This was the year that my mind got un-cracked. This is the year that I fell in love, over and over and over again, with a patient, loving, kind boy. This is the year that I fell in love, over and over and over again, knowing that the person I am in love with is the person I want to spend my life with, the person who is perfect for me. The boy of my dreams. This is the first year that I’ve experienced a lucid clarity of mind, with thoughts unclouded.

This is the first year in my entire life that I’ve had to fight for things. The first year that it didn’t just come easy. The first year that everything good came, but only after an equally good fight.

This has been an annus miribilis, my year of wonders that cradled me as it brought me home.

Originally posted here.

So apparently having Dr. Phil barge into your hospitalization is a bad idea.

Having Dr. Phil anywhere in the world where women can hear him? Bad idea. Put him somewhere distant and cavernous.

Having him personally up in your grill? Even worse.

Having him discuss your case with the media? What the fuck is that? HIPPA, dude!

So I wrote about my cousin’s issues here.

Last night I get a phone call from her older sister and those rumours flying about her doing sexual favours for money have escalated.

We’re terrified, of course.  I feel like my Aunt and Uncle should know this stuff but older sister is afraid – she is trying to protect her parents.  Meanwhile the troubled cousin is likely going to end up pregnant, with an STD or worse.

My husband says I should tell her parents.  That he would want to know.  Hell, I would want to know.

I know my Uncle.  He will be very upset that a) his daughter is involved in this sort of situation (obviously the two of them are in denial and will not investigate her actions any further than letting her do whatever she wants) and b) very hurt that oldest daughter told me but not him.

My Aunt is a mess, crying herself to sleep every night.  Troubled cousin goes to see an expensive psychologist tomorrow, her father is taking her.  I think she needs to be tested for drugs and STD’s, but what do I know?

I wish I could do more but we are a family that is very full of pride, and “what happens in these four walls, stays in these four walls.”

It’s very frustrating to be on the outside and the inside all at once, handcuffed by fear and worry.

I don’t have the answer to this question, but it’s one that everyone faces at one point or another in their relationships with the toxic people in their lives. I’ve been contemplating it on a number of fronts– toxic friends, toxic employment, toxic family, but it’s the last that’s the hardest, at least for me. The crazier my mother gets, the more I question what relationship I can safely have with her.

“Family” is a loaded, loaded word. The family to whom you are born may be less than ideal, and you haven’t got a choice in the cards that nature deals you in the long game of family– genetics, personalities, economic circumstances, and psychological pathologies. With friends and employment, there is always an element of choice, even if it’s a selection between a rock and a hard place. But in a family, the lack of choice is constraining. I, at least, feel like I have to try to make things work. The social belief that we owe our families our lifelong involvement and devotion, repaying the debts of our infancy and childhood to our elders is one that deserves examining.

As someone coming from an essentially middle-class background in a western civilization, I’m not equipped to opine on other cultures’ notion of a lifelong debt to family, nor am I even sure about whether that’s the best way to characterize it. But in our culture, I do believe there’s a breaking point. There are circumstances that are so horrific that we can all agree that someone has the “right,” if not in fact the self-obligation, to cut themselves off from their toxic family. But when do the circumstances suffice in our own lives? And when deciding if your family (or certain family members) are too toxic to continue to be borne, is it “fair” to make your decision based on your own reaction to their behavior, compared with the “objective” assessment of their toxic behavior?

It’s a question I’ve struggled with for years. I’ve been in therapy off and on, and at different points in my life, different behaviors have been wounding. As I get older, I’ve come to peace with the fact that it simply isn’t personal, and that the behavior is due to the mental illness and personality disorder from which she suffers. Too, I’ve mellowed as I’ve aged, and gotten a sense of tolerance if not humor about some of the craziness. But even with all that work, some of it is just too much– it hurts, every single time, and nothing I say or do to be self-protective, including standing up for myself, will change the behavior. But it doesn’t just only hurt– the stress she creates by failing/refusing/being incapable of getting appropriate medication, psychiatric treatment, and therapy pushes me down toward my depression end on the spectrum. First anger, then indignation, then self-pity, then sobbing self-pity, then apathy and wishful thinking and ignoring the problem, pushing it off onto my brother and aunt. At the same time, who better than I to help monitor her moods, get her the help she needs? I’ve already learned that she will never, never, never, change anything about her own life– her narcissism and martyr complex will see to that. But does my “responsibility” to her as a daughter to try to make her elderly stage of life livable obviate my need to take care of myself, to live my own life, to stay healthy for the husband I chose, who doesn’t engage in behaviors that literally drive me nuts?

Distancing has worked for me in the past (I don’t think she’s noticed), and more is in order. I also have decided that “plain talk” of actions and consequences is in order, whether or not she’s capable of understanding or acting on such, because she does have the capacity of being a lucid and functional person. Babying her accomplishes nothing, and is destructive to my own sanity. But the breaking point? I haven’t decided if I’ve reached that yet.