RealMental

It drives my husband nuts when we’re out driving, and the empty tank warning noise comes on.  “Why do you do that?  It’s so easy to fill it earlier!” he fumes.  The short answer would be that in my brain, it’s not time to fill it yet– it’s not yet necessary.  Our definitions of when refueling needs to to happen are just different.  He’s worried I’ll run out of gas– I think that I’ve managed it fine so far, and that I have some emergency gas in the back anyway.

But now I’m at an emotionally empty point, and I realize that the way I treat my car is the way I’ve been treating myself.  I push myself to the very limit before stopping to refuel– and why?  I’d readily agree my car needs gas to run.  I wouldn’t argue that running out of gas is mightily inconvenient, and potentially dangerous, especially if I run out someplace deserted, or unlit, or in the middle of a snowstorm.  Of course, in the abstract, I think I’d know enough to fuel up before such a trip, but there’s a difference between life and a road trip.  Road trips are usually planned– you have some idea of where you’re going, and how long it will take.  Life?  Not so predictable– you can’t always tell when you’ll run out of gas in the middle of the wilderness.

I haven’t been maintaining myself well. I don’t know when I last did yoga, despite the fact that it contributes mightily to my emotional equanimity, and makes me feel less like a pretzel.  I haven’t been reaching out to friends in hard times, and taking comfort from the love they’re more than willing to give me.  I haven’t been saying no to too much work, because I want to prove myself capable– even though once taken on, I have no one below me to delegate other work to.  I haven’t been telling people when they’ve crossed the line, emotionally or professionally, and have been allowing myself to be walked all over– except when I have a temper tantrum after things have gone too far, and that’s not effective boundary-creation– kind of like shooting the unwanted house guest after leaving the doors and windows open.

I almost found myself stranded in the wilderness at work this month.  It’s a close call, and I don’t know yet what I am going to do next– but I am currently taking some time off to try to recharge.  I mostly have lots of sleeping, reading, and taking baths on the agenda, but I am also planning on doing some yoga and walking, and trying to restore myself mentally and physically.  Hopefully I will find myself in the process, and internalize the lesson of regular refueling.

The problem of mental illness is its invisibility– no wheelchair, no boils, no external signal that proves the existence of the condition.  Like a pain syndrome, or a dormant allergy, mental illness exists to the beholder only to the extent that they are willing to behold it—to believe it exists.  The other part of the problem with mental illness is its very mentalness—meaning that mental illness manifests itself it through words and deeds.  Trying to explain what’s going on in your head, to someone who’s not inside with you, makes no sense– literally.  There’s an underlying assumption that our thoughts and actions are under our control—such that the products of our thoughts, our words, our deeds, are intended.  From the beholder’s end, the crazy person had to have meant what she said, what she did, because why else would she have done it, unless she was trying to be cruel/mean/whatever? 

“Because I am crazy” ends up sounding like a lame excuse, but it’s true–  unless you are inside the crazy person’s head, you can’t understand that there is a lack of control, a lack of connection between what you intended, and what manifests itself externally.  When the crazy person is expressing thoughts, and acting on thoughts and feelings that are what she felt and meant at the moment, but which are based on a misperception of reality—psychosis, delusion, disassociation—how to explain it away when the episode is past, and say “I meant it, but it wasn’t real?”  How to explain that your lies, your accusations, your hurtful behavior, were based on an unreal paranoid perception, or an anger so overwhelming that the whole world is colored red—but again, that it wasn’t real, you didn’t mean it in the sense of intending to hurt, now that the episode is past?  Add into it the denial, the shame, the fear that we feel when we realize it’s happening again,  and we lie about what were are thinking, what we are feeling before the episode really begins, because we know you won’t understand.  It’s easier to pretend like your feelings and thoughts are connected to your words and deeds, and to not try to express, to in fact suppress, the swirl of emotions, the cycling thoughts, than to try to make you explain what you can’t.  Which can only lead to more explanations of words and deeds to untangle when the world is right side up again.  There’s an enormous leap of faith, of trust, that the outside observer is being asked to take—to believe what the crazy person is saying, afterward, even though the crazy person sometimes can’t trust their own mind.

I wish there were a flash animation online to show how increasing and decreasing hormone levels affect the map of the brain—your insight and memory, speech centers, emotions.  Likewise with neurotransmitters, the electrical impulses that misfire when the crazy brain isn’t working properly.  The analogy of serotonin to insulin works a little bit, and I’ve tried likening the misfiring impulses of the brain to a downed, live electrical line—who would go near it?  No one.  But the crazy person can sometimes lack the low blood sugar signals or the caution tape of the downed wire—making the “I can’t explain what you won’t understand” into a problem of “I can’t warn you about what I lack the insight to perceive.”  Therapy can help, but it can take years to identify the warning signals, to become self-vigilant enough to seek help at the critical point.  It’s better if you believe, and you watch with me, and you tell me I’m getting crazy again.  That is, if I am lucky enough not to have ruined our relationship last time.

I am a classic Adult Child. I need to please everybody, and my self-worth is measured by my ability to make everybody happy/calm/sober/sane. Between my alcoholic dad and my depressed nonfunctional mom, I was the adult of the family. I spent a lot of time being quiet, being good, being busy, being helpful growing up, but it didn’t make a dent in my parents’ behavior. All it did was make me wonder why they didn’t love me enough to see how hard I was working to make them happy– which then, of course, made me both more depressed and more determined to be better, smarter, nicer, more. (And really, really, angry. But it took me years to figure that part out.) I tried to take care of my younger brother, and mothered/smothered him right into resentment, which is only now beginning to heal. I tried to take care of my mother, but those attempts bounced off the teflon shield of her narcissism. And I tried to please my dad– though this, in part, was “rewarded,” and kept me coming back for more.

None of this helps me have healthy relationships. I am the best, most caring, most sympathetic friend ever, until you don’t reciprocate in a perceived hour of need, when I, exhausted, heart-hurt, depressed and angry, will lash out at you in a sobbing, choking, waterfall of grief and accusation. I am the ideal employee, until the father-figure mentor falls short of my expectations in some way, at which point I will cease to give a shit and start self-sabotaging. I work myself into the grave, then get exhausted, manic/depressed, and start messing stuff up, all the while lacking perspective because I was trying to be perfect and denying that I was falling short. I’m the best boss– always available to help you sort a situation out, giving credit where credit is due, and being truly constructive with my criticism– until I fall apart and am utterly unavailable to you. And I am a pretty good wife, mothering, cleaning up, nudging along, until I get pissed off at whatever it is that I’m annoyed by, because isn’t it enough that I work, and do the shopping, and do the cooking, and do the family organizing, do I have to do everything? All of these traps are hard to avoid, and keeping out of them is as much work as remembering to take my pills every day. That’s why practicing the fine art of Letting Go has been so crucial to keeping my sanity.

Before I met the Better Half, long before my bipolar II diagnosis, it would be safe to say that I was a Serious Person, well on my way to being a Bitter Bitch. I was a prime candidate for a Sense of Humor Transplant. But the Better Half made me laugh, makes me laugh, helped me rediscover my laugh and my sense of humor. And the joy that he brings me every day allows me to lighten up, to realize that my house doesn’t have to be perfect, to let the dishes sit another day, and to air my grievances in a way that will not win me Battleaxe of the Year. It’s still a struggle– decades of being a Control Freak are not easy to let go, and a little bit of perfectionism is OK. But maintaining the balance? Oof. Letting go of getting it right, and just practicing, even if I never make perfect– that’s what’s needed.

Republished from BipolarLawyerCook.

“If you want something badly enough, you can make it happen.” It’s not true, at least when it comes to memory. There’s always some inconvenient truth-teller, correcting the re-written version of the past that you’ve authored. I’ve wondered often if you’re in denial, or if you really believe it. Are you that insecure? That fragile? That crazy? Re-framing is one thing, but painting over the canvas doesn’t change what’s underneath.

You tell us we are lying, that it was never like we say. You tell us that we are ungrateful. And it’s not true. We are grateful, because despite all the rest, we made it out of childhood as OK as anyone can reasonably expect. And we know that you believed that you loved us. Intent counts for something, even if what it’s always been about is your narcissism and self-absorption, your need to be seen as a “good person”.

But you’re the one who’s lying. You’re lying to yourself because you don’t want to know that you should have done more, tried harder, stopped looking inward and acted to do what you could for us, rather than spent all the years feeling sorry for yourself. And telling us it’s the truth won’t work. And now you’re lying about other things, because you like the mania, and you feel every bit of the self you imagine yourself to be. You’re denying that your behavior is manic, because if you admit that you are, then the feeling of worth isn’t real, and you have to re-paint the canvas again.

I feel sorry for you in some ways, because it must be exhausting, needing to re-write everything to define yourself in your favored purple prose. I feel sorry for you for not being able to admit your mistakes, much less learn from them. But you can’t make me admit that what happened didn’t, and you can’t make me tell you lies that will make you feel better. My canvas is worn in places, scarred in others, but the entire work is there for me to understand, and the total picture teaches me something new every time I look at it.

(Sunday morning, East Coast Time)

As I traded phone calls back and forth with my brother (here), my aunt (there), and my mother (there), I reflected on the fact that this is just too damned hard right now. And, that maybe I precipitated her mania? by not just keeping my damned mouth shut during her visit. By the time I talked to her this past Thursday, she was excitedly complaining to me about the internal inconsistencies in The Golden Compass series, which I’d lent her to read on the plane flight home. Something about how Lyra already knew how to do her hair in the first book, so why was she learning all over again in the second? Hoo-whee.

When I talked to her on Friday night, she was excited to tell me about how she’d finally been able to get out some thoughts about a theology based on the Holy Spirit, and not on God the Father or Christ the Son. From a lecture she gave 30 years ago, back when she was teaching at divinity school. “And I was considered quite one of the more brilliant up-and-coming feminist theologians.” Nah, obsession with the past and inflated ego are not signs of mania.

“Why is it, that whenever I finally have a breakthrough in the creative process, you people think I am crazy?” Well, let’s see, the giggling every minute or so might have tipped me off. And . . . “whenever?” This is only her second manic episode. She was very irritable with me during the three phone calls we had, and was refusing to go to the hospital over the weekend. She was sure she wasn’t manic. “This is different.” Telling her that sure, creativity and happiness are nice, but these were precursors to delusion and confusion, like last time, and that you have to stop it before it starts, or it’s longer and worse, wasn’t getting me anywhere. So the third time I spoke with her, after she told me “I did NOT agree to go tomorrow, I will NOT go anywhere until MONDAY, when the doctor’s office is open again,” I just started sobbing, and begging her to please go to the hospital on Saturday, because I am three thousand miles away, and as angry as I am at her, I want her to be OK, and I just can’t handle her breaking down right now, in the middle of my own issues.

Well, when I put it that way, and appealed to her self-image as a caring mother, it was a different story. She went, the doctor and she and my aunt met, the doctor told her he thought that she was on the verge again, she grumpily accepted the ‘scrip, and then she and my aunt went out for Thai, according to my aunt, who called from the restaurant while Mom was in the bathroom. I’ve got to call her in a few hours to try and convince her to fill the prescription, and take it before she goes to see the shrink tomorrow, so that he can “prove to you that I am fine.”

(Later Sunday afternoon)
Well, that didn’t go well. She told me the doctor gave her the medications “just in case,” got increasingly more agitated, and then hung up on me after telling me that she didn’t understand why we all hate her. She then called my aunt, told her that she hated her for telling me “lies” about what had happened with the doctor, and hung up on her.

I then spoke with the covering psychiatrist, who seems a saint. I told him what’d happened and he agreed with my take, and told me he and the shrink at the hospital yesterday had rx’d Abilify, but we’re at that point where she’s not yet hospitalizable, so there’s not a lot I can do from Boston.

I don’t want to go to California. My brother’s going to try to call her in an hour and see how she’s doing.

(Early Sunday evening)
She’s been calling my aunt, yelling at her, and hanging up. My brother then called her, talked her down, and got her to agree she’s going to see the shrink tomorrow. (I’d told him the covering’d told me they were open tomorrow and she could come in whenever.)

She then called me to tell me she was sorry she’d yelled at me, but that she was still mad at my aunt, and that we were all still wrong. I said, “Good, I hope I am. Give Dr. X my cell number so he can call me and tell me so while you’re there.” “That’s a good idea!” she says.

I don’t want to go to California. I don’t want to look for documents to establish our relationship, so that I can start guardianship or commitment or representative payee proceedings. I want her absence to make my heart grow fonder.

Well, I kicked the puppy. But it wasn’t without provocation– not that it changes how I now feel about the whole thing. Before she arrived, I wondered if I’d be able to tell if she’d ever be able to have an honest conversation with me about how her behavior when I was a kid has affected me, but I’d determined to keep my mouth shut. But I just couldn’t.

Things were actually going pretty well up until after dinner Saturday night. I’d picked her up from my brother’s, and actually felt bad for her because of his reticence around her, and how she seemed starved for conversation. We had a nice day visiting one of her favorite haunts and having lunch, and she was cool with and didn’t pout about the fact that I had to do some work, unexpectedly. We went to the movies, had a good time, and came back to have dinner with a friend of mine who’d wanted to meet her.

It went downhill fast. She immediately started trotting out all her stories of how she was a hot shit thirty years ago, and the conversation inevitably turned to smack talking about my father and how he ruined all her hopes and dreams. I changed the subject several times, but she always tried to yank it right back. I just kept changing the subject. As soon as I left the room, though, she took it upon herself to tell this friend, whom she’d never met before, about how my father used to beat her.

I immediately put an end to the night, and drove the friend home after telling her that she needed to get the fuck over it. When I returned, she was apologetic for saying it to company, but not apologetic for saying it at all.

I’ve been trying to get her to understand that I don’t want to hear about what happened thirty years ago over and over again, and that my focus is on what has changed since then. I tried again to get her to understand that I blame her for not trying, because she felt entitled to blame everyone but herself for her predicament. And I tried to get her to understand that I thought that she needed to take some of the responsibility for her own failures, as well as for how we kids turned out.

It’s like I was speaking a different language, as always. Even worse, she accused me of lying, and then of being revisionist, in terms of how she used to talk about my father in front of us. I may be crazy, bu tI am clear-eyed.  My brother, who won’t ever talk about growing up with me, was good enough to say I was remembering things correctly.  She then started trying to defend herself based on stuff that happened before I was born, without ever listening to me say “I don’t care about that, I care about what you never tried to do to get over it.” Despite repeating that it wasn’t about failure after trying, but about not making the effort in the first place, she continued to harp on the same things that predated my birth, not the changing point/opportunity/watershed that my father’s drunk driving arrest presented for us all.  At a certain point the brick wall I was banging my head against became bloody, so I put an end to that conversation, but not before calling her (and defining) the terms narcissist and  psychopath, and telling her that she has rewritten history for herself because she doesn’t want to face the fact that she didn’t to a damned thing to help herself or us until after I’d left for college, even though she knew she ought.

When I woke up Sunday morning, of course there was a long letter that she’d spent all night writing.  (I once moved out on her after a week of no conversation, just stacks of 3 x 5 cards with accusatory notes at the bottom of the stairs to my room.  Obviously, I was not happy to see this letter.)  Of course, none of it was on point. It was all about things that happened before I was born. None of it dealt with what was the entire focus of the conversation– the time from when I was twelve onward, when Dad’s arrest presented us all with an opportunity to try a different tack, even though starting over isn’t an option. The letter did nothing to help, and just made me feel bloody and broken all over again– you’ve never seen passive aggressive like one of my mother’s letters.

I cried a little, emailed my brother with whom I never speak of these things (his choice, not mine) and asked him if he’d be willing to take her for the afternoon and/or the evening, too, in case I couldn’t stand to have her under my roof any longer. And then, of course, when she woke up, she was moping around and crying and feeling sorry for herself– even though I was the only one who had the ight to be mad.  But, as I said, she’s a narcissist and psychopath.  By the time she’d gotten out of bed, she’d rewritten the entire evening before in her head so that it was an unprovoked attack on her.

My brother was kind enough to confirm that I was not a liar or a revisionist, and my dad actually filled in a few things that confirmed what I’d suspected all along, i.e., that while he was not saint, he did not do the things she said he did, and that she was making things up and rewriting history– but damn, is it hard to learn, much less accept, that the worldview your mother brings to bear has nothing to do with you, or with what’s right, or with what’s true– that her perspective is so limited by her selfishness, her self-centeredness, her complete insecurity and paranoia, that she denies history that’s true, and tries to rewrite her own (and everyone else’s) past. Sorry, Mom. Just telling me I’m wrong doesn’t change things.  And even though you’re living on Planet Mom, everyone else around you knows better.

Having her out of the house let me catch my breath, and grit my teeth to get through the evening “family” birthday party, which my dad wanted to host. But honestly– it’s like I did something wrong, the way she is acting, rather than the other way around. And that’s not just limited. That’s insane– and way crazier than I’ve ever been.  I wish I’d kept my mouth shut when I got back, and just told her I wouldn’t discuss it with her, and let her stew in her own juices– but that probably wouldn’t have worked, either, because she’dve picked, picked, picked at me to forgive her until I exploded anyway.

So, now?  Now I know how limited her reality is.  And now?  Now she’ll have to learn how limited our relationship will be as a result.  Or maybe she won’t.  Since I am never going to discuss anything important or heavy with her again, maybe she’ll think everything is happiness and light.  Or at least she’ll tell herself that it’s true, until she believes it.   And me?  I’ll keep my unlimited grief and anger to myself, and limit my resolution of it to therapy, since I can’t expect it to come from the one source that might have been truly healing.

I’ve decided that if I think about changing my meds and the pain in the ass of titration down on one and up on the other as a science experiment, and keep detailed notes about my responses in the interests of the larger Crazy Community (and those poor, underfunded pharmaceutical companies), then it’s really not such a daunting prospect after all.