RealMental

I am a control freak, a perfectionist.  I am sure that some of it is the “nurture” effect of being an ACOA, but that’s not all it.  I am, by nature, a Type A as well, and the need to achieve, to prove, to surmount, to perfect is at the firm core of my personality, like the cookie center of a Twix candy bar. 

The ACOA part of the control freak includes the irrational belief that if things go the way I plan, then everything will be Fine.  But I am not Ganesha, remover of obstacles, equipped with the many arms needed to remove roadblocks and keep all those balls in the air. 

The Type A control freak is a little milder than the adult child—the urge to control comes from self-confidence in my intelligence and skills, coupled with just wanting to win.  Of course, the Type A control freak can be just as dangerous—the insistence on doing it my way is not conducive to cooperative working and family relationships.

And buried beneath all of that it my inner child.  She is all to willing to shed the outer adult skin, ill-fitting, stifling, too hot and too cold all at once.  The inside me wants to cede control, yield responsibility.  I want someone to take care of me.  To take care of it.  To take care of everything, always.  Because I’m 33, and feel 80 sometimes, I’ve been working so hard.  I’m tired of being Right, being Responsible. 

Learning to share control is the hardest.  My Type A is convinced that My Way is Right.  Therefore, everyone else is wrong—why would I do it any way but mine?  My Adult Child is afraid—if I don’t do it, I am pathologically certain that no one else will.  I took up those burdens because no one else was, or could—whatever the reason, the fact remains that I am Eldest, Responsible.  Perhaps I was unconsciously self-appointed at first, but in being reliable, others allowed me to remain responsible, ceded their obligations to keep things going. 

In my friendships and loves, I’ve carried Control on my shoulders—until the sheer weight of it caused me to collapse.  Sprawled on the ground, gasping for emotional breathing room, grasping for a sense of self that had nothing to do with solving other people’s problems all the time, I would disappoint the expectations of miracle work I had encouraged others to believe.  When I let them down, they were, in some ways, right to be angry, disappointed, to never speak to me again.  Some of these friends I’m glad are gone from my life, since now I know they were emotional black holes, never reflecting any light or warmth.  But others I miss dearly, and I regret my failures, whether it sprung from something healthy or not.

I’m slowly, creepingly, glacially, trying to not say yes to everything.  I’m slowly trying to let others volunteer first, and to do it their way.  The world won’t end because I wouldn’t have done it that way.  Often enough, my pride is mere vanity.  I’m painfully learning discernment—what requires my real skills and abilities, and what can be done by others, without harm to anyone.  Most frighteningly, I am trying to listen to my inner child, and hear her when she says “I can’t do this alone,” and ask for help.  But yielding control is at least different from losing control, and since so much of my control comes from wanting to please those I love, yielding, ceding, sharing control, asking for help avoids failing those I love.

The self-control, to not take control, is exhausting, exhilarating, illuminating.  Eliminating the knee-jerk assumption of control?  It will be a long journey.  But after many years, I finally think I have an atlas, and a map light.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.

Is that true?  Do names have meaning, power, or can they be shrugged off?  I’d suggest that it depends on who hears it, and what state the hearer is in.

Crazy as a loon/crazy as a fox/crazy as a shithouse rat/Loony/Gaga/Off her rocker/Off the deep end/around the bend/Batshit/Batty/Bonkers/Bugged out/wacked out/wigged out/Psycho/mental/demented/Drank the Kool-Aid/One can short of a six-pack/Not right in the head.

If the hearer of the name-calling is feeling vulnerable, misunderstood, and worthless?  Those terms have wounding power indeed, and only serve to feed the feelings of worthlessness the sufferer is feeling.  If they’re in a better place, mentally, there’s less harm to be done, because they know that the name-caller has no perspective on what it means to actually be crazy.  But when you’re in the midst of it?  You hear it differently.  That name-calling is shorthand for the following internal monologue:  “You’re crazy, you’re worthless, no one loves you.  No one could love you.  You’re not worthy of it, because your crazy.”  Round and round that thinking goes, until your own brand of crazy breaks out into suicide or violence. “But I didn’t mean it,” “You knew I was kidding,” “you taking things too seriously!”  It doesn’t matter if you say these things.  The harm is already done– the name-caller has jump-started the cycle, the circle, that results in black hole suicide or blood red rage.

I have used these words to refer to myself, and to refer to my mother, especially when she’s aggravating me.  I need to make light of my illness, of her illness, for a moment, because things are sometimes too serious to face them full on.  But I would never use these names to her face, and I never describe her as anything but “mentally ill” or “bipolar” or “having some problems” when I’m in public.  When I’m disclosing my illness for the first time, I talk about it in precise medical terms.  Informal comments that “I’m feeling crazy today” are reserved only for those who have proven their understanding, who get it, who would never call me crazy when I really was.  Because then, unlike other times, the words have power, and hurt, and get me going in a bad spiral, down, down, down.  It feels bottomless inside my own head– why would you try to make it worse once I’ve told you how it is?  When I am in my bad space, I’ll thank you kindly to refer to me and my illness clinically.  And while I can only speak for myself, it’s my feeling that other fellow sufferers feel the same way.

The mentally ill/Depressed/Anxious/Bipolar/Manic-Depressive/Schizophrenic/ Disassociative/ personality disorder/mental trauma/biochemical disorder/ hormonal disorder/Survivor of rape/child abuse/sexual abuse/verbal abuse/war/ civil strife/ Functional/Disabled.

Those who don’t know better must be made to medicalize mental illness and mental trauma– to be forced to use the clinically correct terms in discussing someone’s mental state.  Those terms have meaning, that can be ascertained by looking it up.  By doing a little research.  By taking care.  Clinical terminology can provoke scientific curiousity– “what does that mean?” “how does that work?” and “how do you treat it?” Make the discussion serious again, eliminate the “joking” terms that can wound at the right-wrong time.  Those without the experience of a sufferer or a caregiver must learn, must be forced to confront the truth– that names, deployed at precisely the wrong time, can be sticks and stones.

Dear Mom:

Brother and I owe you an apology– we have been indulging in a months-long fantasy that you’ve been OK, ever since you left here in November. We should have known that two breaks in two months was too much, and come out to visit earlier. But we’ve been hoping and wishing that you’d be compliant, and take your meds, and go to your shrink, and behave like a rational adult. Why we engaged in this mutual delusion, when you never took responsibility before you were diagnosed, I don’t know. But I’m sorry we let you slide for so long.

Instead, when you stopped answering your phone this week and disconnected the answering machine “because God told you to,” I had a sense of dread that This Was It. And then I got the call from Shrink that you’d missed a second appointment in a row. When Aunt got over there to check on you at Brother’s request, it wasn’t pretty. You answered the door stark naked. The toilet had overflowed, and there was a more than dubious puddle out into the hallway and into your bedroom. The management company had to tear it up.

To be fair to us, even after we discovered that your mania had allowed you to lie about med compliance in a calm and even tone, there were long periods where you seemed really lucid. You had normal conversations, recalled things from past calls, had no trouble recalling words or nouns, and didn’t drift off, mid-sentence. Your intelligence masked how far off the deep end you were—it was only seeing you in person that would allow the observer to see all the things you’d thrown away, and read all the stacks of gibberish God had told you to write.

When Brother got there, he was able to observe those things. He was also able to see how suggestible you were. We’re both worried for what this means to your bank account. And you refused to go for inpatient treatment. Well, your shrink doesn’t want you back as a patient, so if Brother can’t find you a new one next week with the help of the county social services agency I’ll be calling, we may be committing you anyway.

You see, we need you stable enough so that you don’t act up on the plane ride home. Because you can’t stay out there anymore. You can’t be trusted to take your medications or attend your appointments, and we can’t fly out to the West Coast to frog march you into every appointment. Once we get you qualified for Disability, there’ll be a supplement to your income, too, and hopefully we can get you into a nice Assisted Living facility where you can take some of your stuff.

We’re not looking forward to the fight in getting you home. We’re hoping that physically watching you take your meds every day for two weeks will get you stabilized enough that you won’t fight about it. But if we have to have you declared incompetent over your objections, so be it. It might almost be better if you stayed as you are, docile and agreeable, while we pack your things, change all your financial papers, and deal with your current landlord.

If you do regain some lucidity, I know you’re going to think we’re just trying to take over your life, but that’s the furthest thing from the truth. See, I can’t speak for Brother, but I really want very little to do with you. I want you to be happy and safe—I don’t hate you—but I don’t want you in my life, really, except at the outskirts. Bringing you back means weekly visits and caretaking and tolerance of your narcissistic bullshit, when all the while I really want to slap you for being so selfish.

At the same time, Brother and I are happy for you, if not us, inasmuch as your separation from reality seems to have stabilized at a happy point. You’re not paranoid or angry or violent, and you know who and where you are. While a nice scary psychotic break would have at least landed you in the hospital, giving us some leeway in getting them to keep you longer to try out a better medication regimen, I don’t wish you the scary visions and voices that would have required.

We don’t know what’s going to happen—we’ve been worried you were undermedicated anyway, and on the wrong mood stabilizer to boot, so we’re hoping we can get you something back to normal. But it’s been a while now that you’ve been fluctuating in this narrow band of crazy, and that does real damage to your brain, even though you didn’t believe me when I tried to talk to you about the need to take your meds, back when this whole thing started. So, if you remain the precocious and delusional three year old that you are right now, well, it could be worse.

You may never read this letter. Even if you do, your bipolar and your narcissism may prevent you from appreciating the best intentions that Brother and I have in setting you up someplace where you can have some independence, and yet still be taken care of. Despite all your faults, despite all the damage you did, you did instill in us a sense of responsibility, of caring for those not capable. I’m sorry, too, that I can’t end this letter by saying that I forgive you. I don’t, and I may not be able to. But I won’t hold it against you, either, and that’s to your credit, no matter everything else.

It scares me that I, the crazy one, seem to understand best what’s going on in my mother’s head.  It also scares me that despite all the harm that she’s caused me over the course of my life, that I am also the most diligent at spanning the 3000 physical miles and 3 million mental and emotional miles in order to check in with her.  How scary that I, the one who hates and loathes her with much of my being, am the one who’s the most responsible.

My aunt, an older sister, has no insight into the mania/paranoia/delusions, and still takes it personally when my mother lashes out at her during an episode.  Almost a year from mom’s first diagnosis, she’s only now beginning to understand that distancing isn’t just necessary, it’s a lifesaver.  Granted, she’s got her own issues going on, and isn’t yet properly medicated and/or in a working therapeutic relationship, but you’d think that a lifetime of sisterhood would lend her better insight, better tolerance, than I.

My younger brother, the summa cum laude biochemistry graduate from an Ivy League school, perfect-scorer on his MCATs, decade-long pharmaceutical reasearcher who’s practically his own controlled experiment in SSRI’s, MAOI’s and tricyclics, tends to treat it all as pathological.  He doesn’t think, or doesn’t want to think, about the problems of underlying personality (narcissistic to the point of delusion) and the way they factor in to the difficulty to date in managing her disease.  He doesn’t yet get how the lack of a proper med combo to control her manic swings isn’t just the mania itself, but is further fed by her narcissistic insistence that she knows best when it comes to discontinuing her antipsychotics– she’s no longer feeling paranoid, and the voices aren’t so loud, so why shouldn’t she, she knows herself best– and so he thinks that it should be enough just to tinker with the meds until she’s on a better mood stabilizer and an antipsychotic that work.

And her psychiatrist, who seems to know what he’s doing, but he only sees her every two months and not usually during her worst manias, because she’s become a clever liar and because she cycles every six weeks?  Well, he just doesn’t see her when she’s bad, when she’s calling in the middle of the night, wanting me to do something from 3000 miles away, when she can’t even write down the phone numbers that I look up for her because she says she can’t find a pen or can’t make her hands form the numbers, or more usually, that “God says I can’t call them, you have to,” or that “God made the phone stop working, except for the speeddial.”  He doesn’t see that.  He also doesn’t see the narcissism at work, erasing the memories of those episodes in the aftermath, so that she says “oh, no” when I remind her what happened and tell her to update her speeddial.

Someone has to put the fear of God into her, and my attempts have failed.  I can’t make her stay on her antipsychotic.  I can’t jolt her from her narcissism, provoke the rock-bottoming that is sometimes necessary to break through that lying self-regard.  But if I can threaten her independence with the assistance of the county mental health social workers, and threaten to lock up her bank accounts against her spendthrift tendencies, make it so that someone out there is checking in on her every two weeks?  That might do it.  The concern of people who she ought to love enough to listen to isn’t doing it.  And frankly, if she never spoke to me again because of it?  I’d be happy, so long as she took her damned meds and went to therapy and did the stuff she’s supposed to do to manage her disease.

The problem is, she’s never acted like a grownup my entire life.  And I’ve been too much of a grownup since I was barely out of toddlerhood.  It doesn’t so much scare me that I, who still struggle with managing my own bipolar, know best what she’s going through.  It scares me that I will have to continue to mother a mother who never mothered her daughter, and that I will always know best, that no one else will step in to fill the gap.  It scares me that I will always be her mother.  I don’t want to be her daughter, or anyone’s daughter.  I don’t want to be her mother, her anything.  I want a chance to find a “just me” that doesn’t require those roles.  I want relief.

I’ve been battling this flu that has struck the Northeast like a tornado.  Knowing that half of my in-laws have it does nothing to alleviate my personal misery, however.  It’s bad.  After seven days of on-again, off-again fever, poor sleep and the inability to keep a thought in my head except what pestilent fever and congestion engender, all the negative thoughts I’ve been sifting through come crashing down all at once, making it harder to breathe than it already was, with that cough nesting in my chest.

I’m trying hard to heed the advice I would give a friend– to continue to take it easy.  To know that people who are even mildly depressed to begin with are more susceptible to illness.  To not try to rush my recovery, because I’m still depressed, and thus more prone to relapse.  To try to set aside the negative thoughts, the self-blame, the feelings of failure and the “sure knowledge” that I will never amount to anything– because I would tell my friend that the darkness of the sickroom is not the time or the place to meditate on such things.  Better to wait until I can examine them in the fresh air and sunshine, where I can get a better look at them, and not be overwhelmed by the stench of self-pity.

I’m going to try to take my own advice, since I know I’m someone to whom my friends turn.  Now if I can do the same…

Snow swirled, wind moaned, skies turned dark,
then lightened, sun shone, snow melted,
water steamed and cast little rainbows,
but moments later, all turned black again.
The cycle turned, three times snowing,
twice sunny, on and off throughout the day.

It was a relief when night fell–
to lose the sight of such extremes,
of sunny, black, sunny again,
exhausting to endure. Just as I’d
gotten used to one, the other’d come
rushing in to supplant it, turn and turn about.

At least in darkness the senses are less
overwhelmed, knowledge more certain.
The windows may rattle, or not–
but at least it’s one consistent view.
The the unlit pink sky, presaging snow,
is not far from simple black.

It’s not that I prefer nighttime, you must
try to understand. It’s that the change
from light to dark in the blink of an eye
is too much too soon to safely take in.
Were it sunny to overcast, or light to dusk—
I could bear it better, but not the extremes.

So when you’re perplexed why I’m
willing to abide an inner dusk,
shading to mental nighttime, please know
it’s not a preference for depression, but
rather the fear of the fall from a greater height.
The slow slide from a lower height is smoother.

Of course I’ve a preference for daylight.  But
I like it in measured doses, eight hours or ten,
a sustained release of happiness when I can
produce, relax, and predict better things to come.
Think about it like a roller coaster.
Once in a while, the speeding descent from

crest to trough is thrilling. But if you had
to ride the rollercoaster all day, you’d agree
the repetition makes you sick, that
you, too, had lost the sense of up from down.
You too would grip tight the safety bars,
close your eyes, and pray for the end, any end.

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.