RealMental

Migraines?  Excedrin alone will sometimes work, but I’ve got other pills in my arsenal if I need them.  Arthritis bugging me?  Allergies? Same thing.  There’s almost a pill for each everyday physical ill, or something that works in a matter of days.  Non-medicinal remedies too– more water, less sugar, more walking, less gluten.  The lag time between applying the cure and the end of what ails me is short, and the resolution is tangible.  Hour by hour, I can feel myself getting better– and if it’s not a cure, then at least there are palliatives that can be repeatedly applied to assuage the feelings of not-rightness.

Not so with mood.  Taking your meds, getting enough sleep, watching my carb intake, trying to get out in the sun and to move around some more only help so much.  Positive self-talk, journaling, talk therapy, too.  The distance between what I know and what I feel?  Sometimes it’s a short reach across a small crack, and I can grab hold, strongly, to join the brain and the heart for days, weeks, months.  Other times, that crack is a chasm, miles wide and deeper than imagining, and there’s nothing to be done but hunker down with my darkened heart, and hope that in the meantime, the brain on the other side of the chasm will kick in and figure out how to bridge the crossing.  Right now, the gap is narrowing, something my brain side knows and something my heart side hopes, and my heart side is reaching out, but my heart and my brain are still fingertips away, swiping at each other– I know it’s close, but any contact now is tentative, fleeting, too weak to get me across without making a lunge that I know, from experience, may not get me across.  There’s no quick fix– just a waiting game.

It’s funny, how we can talk ourselves into how MUCH we want something, and do too good a job of it… so that the attainment of it can be anticlimactic. “Is this all there is to it? Isn’t there more? Why isn’t there fanfare?” At least, that’s what I’ve been thinking, going back to work. Why yes, I did want a friggin’ parade, apparently, though sane coworkers and interesting work ought to be enough. So it took me a few days to figure out I was unnecessarily bummed, and feeling sorry for myself because I was being let alone to just do my work– like they let everyone just do their work. It’ll take some getting used to. I’m used to working someplace dysfunctional where I was needed by folks without anyone else to turn to. It was ego-gratifying even as the dysfunction drove me nuts. Guess I will have to learn again the joys of a job well-done, and a workload that doesn’t have me waking up in the middle of the night– something that should be exciting and energy-boosting, not a feeling of being let down. This savior complex has got to go– because you know what? It gets exhausting every day, and I knew that before I stopped working there. But old habits are hard to break. I’ve got to work harder at working easier.

I was reading M.F.K. Fisher’s Last House and was touched by her essay titled “My grown-up ears.” The story was about being receptive to things we once were not, and how it’s a relief. I had a number of thoughts about the essay, on the particular points that she was making, but I won’t recite them here, other than to say that the thrust of the article was not to be too hard on yourself, or guilty for not being ready for something; just be happy when you are, and relieved and attentive to the things you can now appreciate.

It made an impression on me– one that came to the surface when I was reading this post by She She about her relationship with her mother. She talked about that one moment, when something happens, literally momentarily, that changes everything. For her, it was a realization about her mom, that allowed her to relate to her in a different way. She was wondering– was this what it meant to be grown up? And I felt momentarily sorry for myself, because I’m not there yet in my relationships with some of the people in my life. But then I remembered how sanguine Fisher was about her “grown-up ears.” She didn’t
tell herself off for not being ready to hear some piece of music, appreciate some writer’s work, find the flow in a piece of prose or the melody in a bit of lyric. She just let go of the not getting it, and embraced looking forward to getting it, as it came.

Would that I could be so graceful, in letting go to resistance, or of recognizing resistance has disappeared, in time to embrace something, someone, with a grown-up heart. I know I would tell a friend that they can’t force themselves into feeling something. It just has to develop. I would tell a friend that knowing and accepting are different things, and that knowing won’t necessarily speed up the accepting– and that pushing it, or feeling guilty about the slowness of your heart’s adaptation might even hurt, causing your not-yet-ready hard to dig in a little, hold on a little more tightly to angers and resentments it’s not yet ready to relinquish.

While I might not have a heart that’s ready to give up all of its childish resentments, I can at least know and try to accept that someday I might be able to– and take solace in the fact that I have given up some. Instead of nagging myself into an acceptance I’m not yet feeling, I can just look forward to someday, feeling that moment, when I find my grown-up heart.

In personal injury, aka “tort” law, there is such a thing as an “eggshell plaintiff.” (In most places, maybe not all.) What this means, in a nutshell, is that if someone gets hurt and it’s your fault, you don’t get to knock down your damages because your particular plaintiff is more prone to injury than the “normal person.” It could be that they suffer from a preexisting condition that makes them more prone to injury, or less quick to heal. They could be more likely to suffer emotional injury than the “average” person. It doesn’t matter– you “take the plaintiff as you find them.”

I was thinking about this the other day as I was lamenting, internally, my emotional energy levels. I am in many ways an outgoing person, but when my energy is gone, boy, is it ever gone. And when it’s gone? I need to play the hermit for a bit– to recover from the “normal” whirl of social interactions that wouldn’t bother other people. I try not to beat myself up too much about it, but my cabin fever often sets in long before my stamina has returned to a point where I feel up to the demands of society, much less friends who can fairly lay claim to more of my emotional energy, to a right to be given to, than the normal day-to-day interactions. Which is a problem, when your work is also intensely social and interactive.

Having recently gone back to work full time, I’m trying to remind myself to walk on eggshells around my eggshell self. I am not a steel-girdered lawyer. Most of the time, I do ok. But if I am not careful to conserve my shell, someone could whack into me and make me spill all over, spoilt, and hard to put back together again. Living my life as Humpty Dumpty? Not what I would have chosen. But if I keep my surrounding carapace in mind, and stay off walls I should know better than to scale in the first place? Perhaps I have finally learned some skills to keep me from falling to extra-ordinary harm, harder to recover from, slower to return from, less likely to fully heal. If I could come work at being more hard-boiled, and not scrambled or bedeviled, then that’d be nice.

The last time I did it consciously was in college, after a week in school where all my friendships seemed to fall apart, after a poorly-done hookup/getting together with someone who was a dear friend– and then an even more poorly-managed “umm, wait” on my part. I was exhausted from thinking about it, and couldn’t stop. So I went away for the weekend, to visit a friend spending her junior year elsewhere. We went out and painted the town red, and on the way home, I filled the gutter with all my shame and sorrow, in a purge that felt like a tidal wave.

My forehead was numb cold hot tingling all the way back to her dorm, as the cab slid around corners in defiance of natural laws. We were at the bottom of her hill, not far, when I said, “stop.” Just that, but the cabbie did. I slid off the leather bench seat, and somehow did it butt-first, landing right on the curb. And I sat there and vomited, one heave after another, until all the emotion came out, was purged, and was carried away by the water, by gravity, by time.

I don’t like that there is something in me that is sometimes so unable to handle a situation that I have to get drunk in order to literally spill my guts about it. I would rather spew words, knowing the history of alcohol in our family. But sometimes? It’s necessary, the only release valve I have that is less destructive than the alternatives.

My usually Better Half and I had a problem recently, one that came up suddenly (at least to me) and which infuriated and wounded me. I was boiling over, and didn’t know what to do. I was too angry to say anything constructive, too wounded to hear anything that might make sense. I talked to a friend or two about it, and it did clear a little perspective for me, but I was still circling, feeling like both a bleeding swimmer and the sharks surrounding her.

So I got wasted, slowly, methodically, at a small gathering at a friends’ house– friends who I knew wouldn’t mind. He was there– he was driving. And unlike other times when he’s said hey, maybe you should slow down a little, he didn’t this time, for which I’m glad. Because I needed not the drunkenness, but the release from it that came on the ride home. Without spewing my guts on the highway, on my shirt sleeve, on the side of my car? I don’t know how I would have been able to respond to the situation.

When I wrote this, it was less than twelve hours after disgorging that anger and confusion, that humiliation and almost-hate.  (I have a disproportionate, awful temper at the best of times.) I am still a little angry, and still a little sad, but they’re of manageable proportions, and we’ll be fine. But I don’t know if I could have said that and felt that I meant it unless I’d gone and drunk a bottle and a half of red wine, just so I could throw it back up, four hours later. The physical purge acted as an emotional memory dump, and I’ve never been so glad to lose a set of feelings. At least since the last time, thirteen years ago. May it be at least that long before I need to again.

I hate taking pills. I am sick of it. Sick of being sick. Coming off this most recent toxic/allergic/withdrawal bout, I am even more tired that usual of the being tired of it all, the exhausting vigilance Belinda so eloquently described. The clatter of particular pills into the containers changes; the raucous reminder I’m sick, and will continue to be, doesn’t. B vitamin, multivitamin, Omega 3. Lamictal, minocycline. Who knows what anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-inflammatory, anti-anti-anti will be added to the mix? Sometimes my regimen has included so many pills that these little rounds overflowed, and the plain old, boring M-F strip came out of hiding for the lunchtime doses.

Small wonder I forget to take my pills some days, even though I am usually a pretty med-compliant patient. If one little thing disrupts my ritual of morning preparation– wake up late, skip the shower until later, then the pill-taking is shot. I had an alarm on my cell phone for the mid-day pills, back when I was taking them, which I’ve now disabled. Maybe I need to set one for after my weekday wake-up alarm– a “hey, idiot, did you take your pills before you leave the house?” alarm. Because the one in the middle of the day won’t do me any good if the pills are at home, and sure as sh*t, I’ll forget to take them by the time I get home, even when they’re sitting there in plain view on the bathroom shelf, in their rattly, musical lucite rainbow stack. I bought it in those pretty colors so I wouldn’t mind the medical boring reality of it all so much– as if I could make pill-taking HAPPY. Hah. But it does come with extra lids, so I can unscrew one, pop it into my bag for taking after fasting blood draws– or more likely, forget until my alarm goes off. I could take them at lunch, setting my alarm to do so, and carrying my rattling stack in my bag, my very own rhythm section, but I don’t want my maracas reminding me I’m sick every step of my day, and I know I will forget to unscrew and recap just one section every single day. I want to take my pills at home, and spend the rest of the day trying to be functional, to work around, to get over, to move beyond the “did I remember” that I ask myself at least a dozen times a day.

The problem with alarms? You have to live by them, yield the flexibility, the freedwom of ignoring them, or precipitate a real alarm. There’s no sleeping late on weekends, if that means I can’t remember to take my damned pills two days in a row, and then end up a weepy angry mess on Monday morning. The other problem with alarms? You have to remember to turn them back on after you disable them, in time, or learn to tolerate them when they are unnecessary. “Yes, yes,” you say, as you shut that damned buzzer off, “it’s OK right now, thanks for asking.” I could note a little “meds” on my handwritten calendar. I could update my symptoms and mood calendar. (Don’t even get me started on procratinating on refilling the damned pill minder on the same day every week, so that I can be confident Red Means Monday… or Sunday?) Hell, I could start a little gold and silver pectoral or clutch and scratch a tick mark in it every day, wearing my medication memorialization as adornment. (Hmm. Are there any jewelry makers in the house?)

But the best I feel like I can do right now is fill my rainbow maracas every week and leave it on the table, a constant reminder, in the hope I’ll be caught by color as I walk by. That I’ll someday cease to resent the ritual, the attempts to render it habitual, so I don’t think about it, don’t resent it, don’t forget it. Don’t sit for a moment, every single day from May 13, 2005 on out, looking at the palm of my hand, and ruing the ritual, despite the welcome surcease of death-defying heights and bottomless lows.

I’ve been having allergic reactions to lithium and abilify recently, the abilify added after I had to quit lithium, cold turkey. The abilify was even worse, and made me feel really crazy for the first time ever– manic, mixed, unable to concentrate, on the verge of rage. Even my worst depressions never left me doubting myself so much. Fortunately, yet again, my great doctors spotted what was going on at an early stage, and now I am off both drugs and going through withdrawal. The withdrawal’s been more of the same, just only slightly less severe each day, and slightly better after each nap, each liter of water, each massage, as the poisons slowly leach there way out.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Mornings are better/a mostly full night’s sleep/or at least two or three chunks of several hours at a time.
When the antsiness is replaced by weird dreams if you’re lucky/bad ones if the ativan and tylenol and benadryl name brand saviors fall behind the poisons.

With your nocturnal naps under the belt of your bathrobe and some light reading from three to five a.m./and a good liter of water to wash down more name brand saviors/I can mostly function well/well/except I have to pee constantly/pace like a tiger in the zoo/clench dystonic jaw and neck and shoulders and hands into claws of rage and rictus of anxiety/I feel like an animal/in a bad way./To talk wildly/drum fingers constantly/shift and squirm in my seat like a kindergartener/to want to run around the table until it’s time to take an early lunch and walk around the building eight times/more pills/more water.

All day stretching your poor sore stiff self as poisons leach through your pores your pee your sweat/I swear I smell like salt all day/all muscles poisoned, protesting, screaming for relief, especially when you are so distracted you miss the next dose signaled by that cell phone alarm you forgot to answer.

Sitting still is bad enough/talking to someone is worse/keeping in the hypomanic bursts of speech/words burbling like water over stony brooks at icemelt’s bursting./It’s worse after lunch because six hours is really all you’ve got before the name brand saviors cease to be so effective and you need a three hour nap interrupted by a ten minute pee and more nap to feel human again and keep your thoughts from running together like hot caramel overflowing the pot, sticking to everything burning hard to peel away taking forever to cool.

Touch your tightened jaw/your knotted neck/use the sensory trick of touch to tame the tensioned parts momentarily/petting/stroking/pressing/smoothing/soreness frantic when will this stop when will I feel better/maybe I should take just half of the dog that mauled me? to ease it?/but you know that will slow it down, stop it, reverse it, increase it, make it longer harder even worse/unimaginable, unendurable.

You know it can be worse/you know you’re not that bad/you’re home, not at hospital/and while you’re hyped stressed bummed exhausted hurting talking and oh it’s all too much at once/but still you see the light at the end of the tunnel/can say, with reason, that mornings are better/tomorrow will be better than today/and you hope pray wish cry weep for tomorrow to come sooner/soonest for those who don’t know can’t know/deny/relapse/refuse to see/to feel/to believe each morning can be a little better.

Mornings are better, at least for me.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

There was a thought-provoking article in the NYT about the “Mad Pride” movement— about proclaiming our craziness publicly, about being examples of adaptation and function despite it all. Like any movement, any blanket platform, there are lots of threads, some of which are more provocative of thought and agreement and disagreement than others. I’ll try to assemble some thoughts on it next week.