RealMental

I’m on my way up. And there are signs—if I look for them, listen to them, use all my senses to detect them—if I don’t, then it’s the lurch in the stomach on the down curve of the rollercoaster that’s often the first sign.

If I’m really paying attention, then I hear it when my assistant says “Aren’t you Miss Polly Productive” when I leave him an enormous pile of dictation tapes, written motion and discovery work, and all the other legal detritus. If I look at my time sheet, I can see that I’ve billed a week’s worth of work in three days, though there’s no need to—I’m just blowing through everything, double time. It’s good work, too. Productive, concise, and necessary. The air’s clearer, the brain’s faster, and I feel more creative—am more creative. I write really well, and a lot, because I sure as hell only need about three hours of sleep.

If I miss that sign, then the next one is this. I’m still Polly Productive—except I’m now Misanthrope Polly Productive. I hate everyone—they’re all out to get in my way, talk with their whiny, annoying voices, bother me with inconsequentials. Every Little Thing They Do Is Enraging. I have road rage. I hate every cashier in every store everywhere who doesn’t blow through the things on the belt with superhuman speed. My critical voice snarks on each person’s shoes, haircuts, grocery selections, each one more worthy of hate than the last. My family and my husband bug the crap out of me, and I can’t understand Why Won’t They Leave Me Alone. There’s no objective perspective on why I’m so irritated.

The physical sensations start as I’m just about to crest from Misanthropic Polly Productive to Downward Spiraling Deirdre Depressed. The strange crown-like feeling on my forehead. That pushing sensation under my sternum. And the sweat. This is weird—but after three or four of these post-diagnosis, post medication episodes, I’ve realized something. When I’m in a high mixed state, and just about to start the long, long slide to the bottom? I sweat. Profusely. And it smells strongly. And my feet stink to high heaven.

Yes, that’s more about me than you want to know, really. But it’s a sensory sign—one that’s so weird that I notice it, even as I’m in the process of that catatonic withdrawal into my head, when the extreme productivity, the crazy irritability, slide by. Crazy has a smell for me, a clear, last-ditch signal. I might not be able to follow my mind all the time, but I can follow my nose. I wouldn’t have noticed it, maybe, if I hadn’t been serious about writing EVERYTHING down in my symptom notebook, but after talking it over with my shrink when I had my lithium toxicity episode, she said… tell me more about the sweating thing. Would I recognize that as a physical sign, even if I’m ignoring the emotional and mental ones? Turns out, I can.

Animals can smell fear. I suppose it’s not as weird as it could be that crazy has a smell that can wake up my animal brain, can trigger that self-preservation instinct that crazy makes it so easy to otherwise ignore. That smell says hey, put the brakes on this thing, slow this roller coaster car down– right now. I should be looking and listening and feeling for signs—but I’ll take the smell if that’s what it takes.

Some memories are like early fall’s leaves. Red, coral, gold. Yellow dappled with green. Round, smooth- edged birch leaves, almost lemony-yellow. Jagged-edged, tough golden beech leaves, veined and oblong. The classic, red/gold/orange sugar maples, the kind of fall leaf children draw when asked to draw the Platonic Fall Leaf. Blood red, delicate Japanese maple leaves, straight out of a Hiroshige woodcut print. Red oak leaves, the more delicate, branch-like arms of the leaves a deep, almost maroon red in some lights. These leaves, on and off the tree, are cause for rejoicing—they’re ready to be picked over, collected, set into pleasing arrangements of happy colors and thoughts of when they provided you shade in the heat of summer, green-shielded you from rain in early spring and during late August’s thunderstorms, dappled you with warm sunlight in the breeze as you lay underneath, admiring the view. There are as many memories as there are early fall leaves, each one distinct, and colorful, and welcome. The whish-whish-whish as you walk through the leaves piled along memory lane, admiring the ones on the ground and the ones overhead yet to fall is a sensory experience, almost an overload, with the colors, the cool air, the warm smell, almost like baking.

They’re pretty, on the tree and on the ground. We like to admire them where they fall—they’re pleasing to the eye, a reminder of how as time marches on, there are some things you can count on, like colorful leaves in the fall, and memories of how they were when they were younger

The leaves of late fall are a different matter. Dried, leathery white oak leaves, bloated indistinct shapes like a brutalist artist might draw—those leaves are dull brown and tough. The other leaves, other types, are now dried up, their colors faded, their supple texture lost. These memories are no longer malleable. They are what they are, and you’re stuck with them. They must be cleaned up, or the things underneath them will rot, fail to grow, fail to thrive. It’s only after you’ve cleaned them off, scratched the surface underneath, that new, better memories can be made. These dried up old leaves smell almost like urine as they become sodden and wet with November’s cold rains. They bog down, hold in dirt and detritus, unpleasant flotsam and jetsam of the past and the present intermingling with their breath stealing layers, their weight. Leaves and memories are ephemeral, we like to think—they shouldn’t be so heavy, so permanent. We should be able to rake them up handily, and throw them away. But who hasn’t been surprised, shocked, even, by how heavy a seemingly simple bag of wet leaves can be? If you overload it, don’t clean up carefully, assessing the weight of the memories as you clean them up, measure them out into their proper receptacles, then the bag, the bough, the bin breaks, and all the work that we’ve tried to do to clean up spills back on the pavement. The sodden, malodorous memories spill all over our shoes, into the edges between our pants and our socks, all over the area we’ve just cleaned.

There’s no magic leaf blower, no all encompassing rake that will haul these old leaves away with a single, cleansing pass. There’s no old leaf killer chemical to make them dissolve in an instant. Instead, we have to rake each individual leaf with our small, handheld rakes, combing carefully to make sure we get them all, and put them into piles that we can then gather into their proper final receptacles. There’s nothing for it. Each individual leaf has to be dealt with on its own terms. Sometimes they’ll gather with others under the gentle pressure of the rake. Others will yield to more forceful scraping, gathering with the other stubborn, ground clinging leaves once more attention is brought to bear upon them. Some, though, will require us to stoop over, inspect the individual leaf from the ground, pick it up with our bare hands before we can be rid of it.

Putting our now-raked leaves in piles isn’t enough, though. We need to protect the piles, deal with them as we work, rather than leave them alone, trusting as we move on to another pile that the last one will stay organized. There’s no guarantee. Some person with no regard for all the work we’ve just done will come along and jump right into the pile while our backs are turned, scattering all our hard work and leaving us to clean up after them, because we let them in by not keeping an eye on the pile, or cleaning it up before they could come along and do damage.

Predictable, inconvenient, boundary-ignoring, work-disrespecting, pile-jumping people aren’t the only thing to worry about. Random strong gusts of wind, out of nowhere, unpredictable, uncontrollable, are always an option—maelstroms of unexpected force coming in, snatching the leaves out of their piles and scattering them, whirling them into a cyclone that blinds us, obscures our view of what’s in front of us and the work that needs to be done in the future. The swirling, scattering leaves in great masses make it impossible to move forward, to do more work raking leaves until the wind has passed again. And when it does, the leaves are scattered all over again, leaving us to look on in dismay at the scene now before us, once things calm down again. All that hard work, scattered, and now we have to start over again, though our hands are sore from the rake handle, our backs and the backs of our thighs tired from leaning over to stuff armfuls of leaves into receptacles, our hands and feet muddy from digging up the stubborn, smelly wet bits.

It’s harder to rake up leaves that second, or third, or nth time, if we don’t learn our lesson about taking the time to dispose of each pile of leaves as we go.

It sounds like one of those 1950 and 1960s era filmstrips we thirty and forty somethings like to mock, the irony of those pitifully naïve exhortations of the wonders of science now apparent– global warming, polluted oceans and seafood, tainted freshwater and food supplies, obesity, etc. The list is endless. But modern medicine, despite the very real ills of the healthcare and drug approval and testing systems, can, in fact, promote better living through chemistry. Antibiotics. Synthetic insulin. Blood products. Organ replacements. Sterile plastic and stainless steel instruments. Antidepressants. A wonder of products of chemistry, to address, if not cure, what ails you.

I know, full well, that chemistry doesn’t always effect a cure. And I took high school and college chemistry. I know, intellectually, that in order for a chemical reaction to come out the way it’s supposed to, you have to set up your experiment carefully. Maintain the controls. Measure your ingredients carefully. And keep an eye, at all times, on how the experiment is doing, once you’ve set it in motion. There’s a reason why the good professors make you take careful lab notes every step of the way. Even today, if you set me in front of a lab bench, with instructions of ingredients, order of steps, and possible things to watch out for, I’d watch every step, take careful notes, be meticulous in observing this external reaction, from start to finish. If something went wrong along the way, I feel pretty secure that I’d see it early on, and seek help to stop things from boiling over, or evaporating, or exploding, or turning into a rock hard lump so melted to the crucible that I’d have to throw everything out. I’d know that if not watched carefully, the whole process will be spoiled, and I would have to start over again.

And yet knowing that, I still fall prey to ignoring the process when it comes to myself. Moving the experiment from the lab bench, where I can see it, objectively, to my brain, doesn’t translate the way it ought to. I don’t have the right frame of mind. I still want it to be a miracle cure—not an ongoing experiment that if carefully watched, may succeed at maintaining its slow, nurturing boil for a while. But I still need to watch it. These compounds and chemicals run out of steam, and new inputs, like changes in diet, stress, sleep, the amount of sunlight, the seasons, all affect the reaction. If I stop keeping my lab notebook, meticulously, then I can miss the early stages of a downhill reaction, and don’t recognize it until it’s too spoilt to step in and fix it, salvage the reaction, achieve the same result after some tinkering with more or less of the initial ingredients. I let the Bunsen burner of stress burn too hot, don’t take that extra ativan when I stop sleeping so well, don’t call my doctor after the third night of anxiety dreams, because I’m not following the proper chemistry protocol.

The chemical reactions are only as good as the chemist watching them. It’s time to go back to school.

It’s a physical pushing sensation inside your brain. From the very back of your head—the urgency to do something, FAST. Blow through thirty crossword puzzles in an hour. Read the same three books over and over, almost able to read it by memory aloud, you’ve memorized the words by now. Read every single thing on the internet that’s shiny and caught your eye while you’re procrastinating at work. The object of the focus doesn’t really matter. You’re in hyper-focused mode, trained, like a runaway train, your brain is pushing that hard, on the thing at the end of your focus.

That push is so hard, and so narrow, trained on whatever the current, manic obsession is, that everything outside that focus is meaningless noise. Things you like to do, like blog, or write, or take photos, or cook, or go for walks, or laugh with your husband over whatever silly thing you’ve bantered between you—no longer important. Social interactions with friends, family, and spouse are irritating, infuriating interruptions. Don’t they know that you HAVE to finish whatever it is that you’re doing? Or keep doing whatever you’re doing, in perpetual emotion, because if you stop? Well, you’re not sure what will happen if you stop (except that you’ll have to face life again, but you push that thought aside quickly each time it arises, stomp it like a cockroach, in fact), but you know it will be bad.

It’s not just in your head—it’s an overall physical feeling. Your eyes are strained hard on whatever you’re doing. Staring things into submission, until they lull you into a calm state, as long as you can keep up with your latest obsession. There’s a hollow place under your sternum—it’s not like hunger, but it’s close. It’s a need to fill yourself with your obsession—to keep the other, less comfortable thoughts at bay. It’s a push– keep going forward. Not in the right direction, you’ll realize later, but at least you need to keep moving.

Sometimes it’s euphoric, and your perceptions of the pesky interruptions of life are of amused tolerance. “If only they knew how important it is, what I’m doing,” you think. Other times (like this last time) it’s more mixed. If people don’t stop interrupting you, you’ll scream in rage. “Don’t they know that you’ll die/ cry/ never get to sleep/ fall apart if they keep interrupting you?” is the thought that occurs when you’re trying so hard to put them off, so they leave you alone with your focus.

Of course, at the time, it all makes perfect sense. It’s only later that you shake your head at yourself, disgusted all over again that you missed the warning signs. You feel sorry for yourself, maybe even lonely, or abandoned, that someone didn’t see through your lying protestations that you were fine, to grab you roughly by the shoulders and shake you, frog march you to your psychiatrist. Later, you know that they were trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, to let you take care of yourself, since most of the time you’re fine, independent, perceptive, funny and lucid. Everyone is entitled to low periods, even the crazies. It’s just a steeper slope down for you from “low” to “seriously messed up and getting worse every day.” It only takes a little push to go falling, head over heels, ass over teakettle. You end up dented at the bottom, wondering if you can push out the damaged areas and work the same way again. If you can push through it again, back to normal. Where push is evened out by the pull of your usual interests, outside of your head. And where you can ask for help, ask someone outside your head to give you a push—in the right direction.

I should note that while this is written in the present tense, the description of the sensation is several weeks past, now.

In geography class, we learned that a plateau is a geologic formation, with a flat top and often, sheer or highly-angled slopes supporting it.  It’s easy to recognize when you’re looking at pictures, or approaching one on a hike through the desert.

In psychiatry’s life class, I learned that it’s what they call it when you’ve reached your maximum efficacy on the dosage you’re taking, and it’s time to go up.  The problem is that psychiatric plateaus are not obvious.  You know the lift from the desert of depression to the top, the stable flat line you can walk for a while, not tripping and stumbling as on your climb to the top.  You don’t realize you’ve reached the end, until you start sliding down the psychiatric plateau’s more gently sloped sides, until you’re halfway down, and then you have to stop yourself, skidding on the rocks and dirt, before flipping yourself over, and climb your way back up, sometimes on hands and knees.

I’ve been climbing my way back to the top, hands and knees scratched and bloody, head pounding and breath shaky from the screeching halt I’ve pulled myself to, and the flat top is once again in sight.  But I’m tired of sliding, and each time I slide I berate myself for not learning, yet, my internal geography, for not knowing the edges of my equilibrium, my flat surfaces, and for not knowing that the plateau doesn’t go on forever in my head, as it does not in nature.  Those mental plateaus, they surprise you, in a way the physical ones don’t.

The art historians call it a Dutch Heaven, for its prevalence in the land and seascapes of the old Dutch and Flemish master painters. You’ve seen it, even if you didn’t know what it was called. Those tall, puffy clouds in a deep, blue sky, flattened and slightly grey at the bottom, teased, white, and cottony at the top– the kind of cloud that can dissipate into wisps in a completely sunny sky, or roll into thunderheads letting loose torrents in a moment’s notice. The sun shines through or on top of those clouds, and the depth of the blue sky is heightened by the contrast of the sun and the grey and silver and white clouds, the beauty of the sun more poignant for the threat of rain.

Even well medicated, the threat of mercurial moods shines through. The introspection that is necessary to maintaining a healthy balance, of not letting the natural mood cycles extend beyond “merely” moody and happy, can cause me to call into question whether the sunshine is actually about to turn into parching desert sun, or whether the rainclouds are presaging a hurricane.

Sometimes, though, a mood is just a mood, and a partly cloudy, partly sunny sky is just a Dutch Heaven. Mine, too.

I’ve been musing on how the adult child thing can rear its head in good times as well as bad– particularly the feeling inadequate thing. I had the extreme blessing of being able to go to BlogHer08 this weekend. All around, I met women whose blogs I’d admired from afar, and others whose blogs I’d not yet encountered. I got to meet bloggy friends, and I met people who’d read my site. All around, everyone was being affirming, interested, curious about one anothers’ experiences, motivations, and writing.

Having some of that positive stuff directed at me ended up being really hard to handle, even as I was meeting people who I wanted to meet, to hug, to praise. I have no problem praising others. I want to, it feels important, it’s a part of what I’d like to see the world become– affirming, supportive, other-centered. But getting praise? Being the object of interest? That’s another story.

My adult-childness developed not in the scenario of overt abuse, neglect, etcetera– really, I know, it could have been so much worse. But even as the adult child of “merely” divorced parents who were preoccupied with their own (admittedly real) shit, the fact remains that I was forced to step forward to care for myself, to try to care for my brother. Whether or not I succeeded is beside the point– the fact is, I was made to try. I was never told, “this is something you shouldn’t have to take on.” Rather, it was a relief to them, that I was able to take care of myself.

Suffice it to say that having grown up not receiving praise for extraordinary efforts, having had success expected of me as a matter of course, and having no attention paid me should I fall short of whatever their mark happened to be, being on the receiving end of positive attention is . . . anxiety-inducing. It skews my perception of what’s ordinary, where the expectations lie. I keep thinking, “it’s not hard,” or “if they really knew,” or worse yet, “what’s the catch?” Except, of course, this is BlogHer. They do really know, it is hard sometimes, and there is no catch– these women bare their own wounds, and by their support and praise clean and bind those wounds I voluntarily bare for exploration. And yet, I still find it hard to believe– as much as I put my content out there for catharsis and on the off chance that it might be helpful to someone else, spare them the misery I’ve felt, I nonetheless doubt I have something important to say.

It got to the point where I had a little bit of a meltdown Saturday night, and had to get out, go have dinner with my husband while I didn’t really talk. (He’s very patient with my semi-catatonic states like that.) There was so much to take in, and overwhelming is still overwhelming, even if the stuff you’re being overwhelmed with is good. I missed most of the closing party because I just needed to be quiet and have no more input for a bit– which makes me sad, because there were lots of “old” and “new” friends I wanted to talk to. But I couldn’t do it, without a time out to put my game face on. I did get back in time to catch up with some of the folks I wanted to see– but now I’ve some regrets for others with whom I didn’t get to spend more time. Great– now I’ve got self-inflicted wounds, too.

In high school, I had a friend who was perpetually insecure, who was actually great, fabulous, wonderful. It came to be a joke between us when I would reassure her or praise her about something, that if she couldn’t believe herself, she should at least believe me, because as everyone knew, I was always right. The tag line was, “because I said so.” So that’s my resolution (among other things) coming out of BH: even as I am trying to put my “because I said so” out into the blogoverse, I am going to try to remember that my own stuff is interesting, “because they said so.” Thanks, they.