RealMental

I wish getting sick only involved physical symptoms.  I would patiently and calmly lie under a blanket, drinking plenty of fluids, until my body healed and I could resume my normal life. 

But that’s not how it works.  Sickness messes with my mind and my soul.  Sickness makes me depressed, anxious, weepy, frustrated, impatient, and prone to tantrums.  I remember how I felt the day before I got sick, just last week.  If I concentrate hard enough I can step into that feeling of centeredness, just for a moment.  I was living in the flow of things, letting stress slide off my shoulders even as it poured forth like an endless river.  I was keeping all the balls in the air, in a breath-taking juggling act filled with faith and grace.

Then I got sick, and it all came tumbling down. 

When I’m sick, I become frantically insecure about canceling plans and obligations.  I’m letting people down – how could I let all these people down?  I become paranoid; everyone thinks I’m faking.  What if Phil, who invited me to his birthday party for the first time this year, never invites me again?  Why bother inviting someone who cancels at the last minute?  What if my aunt, whose dinner party I missed, yells at my mother because she thinks I’m avoiding her?  Then my mother would be hurt and it would be all my fault because I made my aunt angry.

That’s how I think when I’m sick.  And it doesn’t matter that I know, I KNOW it’s stupid and all wrong.  I can’t stop feeling the fear.  These things keep me up at night.

Being sick also messes with my homeostasis.  That nice, comfy groove I got into with my sleep schedule and my balanced mealtimes?  Gone.  Blasted to smithereens, and with it, my equilibrium.  I have to sleep more to heal, but oversleeping always depresses me.

Also, sometimes, like this time, my hormones have been completely knocked for a loop.  Today I am living in the grip of PMS the likes of which I haven’t known for many a month.  I forgot how bad it could be.  I hate this feeling of hating everything, of the answer to everything being “NO!” before I even know what my options are.

I want to bite people, and not in a sexy way.

I don’t want to do anything, but I’m too restless to do nothing.

And I can’t seem to snap out of it.

It’s been on me now for months now. It sits in the middle of my head, buzzing like some sort of damned demented tsetse fly.  I am defeated for no reason whatsoever. I can’t smile, at least not for myself, and my eyes are always heavy.
I know that part of the solution is to move around among the living but every time I try panic sets in and suddenly the lights are too bright, the rooms too small, my breathing too shallow and I can’t find my way back to safety. More often than not, I make the decision to avoid movement.

My loved ones want me to get better. They are sure that there is action I can take to get better. I know that they are right. It scares me that they can see it- I am a world class actress after all.  It must be really bad.

I’ve curled up into myself because I know how to take care of me, to keep from falling over that precipice that looms on all sides of my psyche, craving a misstep. It’s hard to explain how withdrawing helps- it just does.

I think that sometimes depression causes so much pain the sufferer’s only recourse is to anesthetise themselves. I used to do that by using drugs and alcohol. Now I do it by drawing myself up into a ball, so that my insides aren’t exposed.

I am starting therapy again and I know that it will help. There’s no magic pill for this, it is something I have to tread through. That may be the hardest part about living with depression and anxiety. When every fiber in your being is screaming at you to keep quiet, keep still, keep yourself safe- to take those steps towards recovery- I am jumping off of a god damned cliff.

I haven’t been to therapy recently and don’t go again for a couple of weeks. Truthfully, I haven’t thought much about my issues lately. I’m not sleeping well or eating much, but it’s not due to sadness or feeling overwhelmed. I’m excited about life these days and can’t wait to start the next day. I lie in bed, awake, thinking about what I can plow through tomorrow.

I’m not eating as much because I’m not binge eating at all. I’m just extremely busy and excited about life. I find when I’m as busy as I am, I don’t think as much or as hard about things as I normally do. Rather I don’t “feel” as much.

I’m really task oriented these days. Making lists, crossing things off and getting things done. I’m outside more. I’m playing with my kids more, spending time with the husband more. I’m finding myself laughing more too. It’s nice. I’m happy.

So much for the January/February slump so many of us find ourselves in.

I seem to be a magnet for friends and family members going through just that. My phone rings off the hook with complaints from others, the blahs, the “I should do a, b, and c” but I don’t wanna….whine whine whine. I’m guilty of that same whining and procrastinating at times but for some reason I’m motivated as heck to get things done. Maybe because I have so much to do in a day that is fun or exciting now, who knows.

“Make a list,” I say to the whiners.

And make a list they do. Once they start crossing things off, they feel better, I hear a day or two later.

In the morning, over coffee, before I start work, I make two lists: one is a running tally of clients and what I hope to accomplish for them for the day; the other is a list for the house/family and what I hope to get done. Sometimes the tasks are as small as putting away a load of laundry or taking the polish off my toenails. Silly little things maybe but nevertheless they have to get done.

Crossing things off wakes me up, makes me feel like I’ve done something. There used to be days where I’d mindlessly surf the internet, sometimes working, sometimes just reading blogs or whatever, and by 3 or 4 in the afternoon, I’d look down and realize I was still in my pajamas and feel ashamed because I hadn’t done anything.

Now I still spend many days in my pajamas, but going off to shower at noon with a notepad full of crossed off tasks is pretty satisfying.

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 wrote this in part (in comments) on Belinda’s post about Kendra’s Law and wanted to elaborate considerably:

My 15 year old cousin is showing severe signs of Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar. My grandmother’s mother seems to have had it, my mother had it, and now this (female) cousin.

This isn’t teen angst – we all know what that is – it’s clearly, most certainly, 100% Borderline Personality and possibly Bi-polar. BPD isn’t often alone.

She has left home, is living in a drughouse with her 18 year old boyfriend, is violent to the point of knocking my 26 year old female cousin out with a glass mug. She skips school, swears at everyone, yelling, screaming death threats and worse, and at times is docile, shy and sweet.

There are rumors flying through her small town that she has been promiscuous and involved in sexual experimentation with more than one person at a time, been filmed, and possibly took money for favors.

Her parents (my uncle is the brother to my mother) have gotten her an appointment with a psychiatrist at a high financial cost and just tonight, she agreed to go. Here (we aren’t in the states) there are no laws to force anyone of any age into treatment. Even despite my cousin having hurt family members and completely outlining to her sisters how she is going to kill them in their sleep – detail by chilling detail. The only way they could force her into help should she change her mind now is to call the children’s aid authorities and place her in a group home — and obviously that is a mess they don’t want to bring on to the family, reason one being that they would lose her trust and possibly lose her forever.

We tiptoed around her at Christmas, with my grandmother agreeing to send food with her to the boyfriend’s drug house, just to avoid an eruption. Had she said no, we are certain this cousin would have gone crazy for not getting her way.
Everyone in the family is terrified of what she will do if her parents force her to give up the boyfriend and come home. She is a time bomb at all times.

If she hadn’t agreed to see this professional, I really don’t know what my uncle and aunt would have done. I do hope she gets the help she really needs, which will include therapy and drugs, probably for the rest of her life.

Her appointment is in January and all of us are holding our breath, waiting for her to blow up at her parents the next time around and refuse to go. If she does go, this could all go sour anyway – she is an expert liar and we have no idea what will come out of her mouth. Her recollection of angry outbursts are minimal, or she claims to remember nothing. She takes no accountability for any of her actions, she owns no blame for her situation and everything is someone else’s fault. She would rather live in the boyfriend’s drug filled, filthy, dangerous apartment, where his female roommate deals crack cocaine, and have the boyfriend’s roommate (another female) pick on her, use her toothbrush to clean the toilet and be abused in the house she is in, then go home and be without boyfriend. We as a family simply don’t understand this self abuse.

When I reached out to her, I was slapped in the face with “I’m smart and strong. If I need help, I’ll tell you. Stop worrying.”

I’m trying hard to understand how both my mother and my cousin ended up this way — both have been raised in loving homes, free of abuse and full of family time and lots of love. I welcome any insight, advice, whatever.

My next therapy session is mid-January and my focus has shifted to my cousin so I haven’t really thought too much about the re-telling of history I have been doing with the therapist. She did mention EDMR as a therapy we might try for me.

Yesterday I read this amazing post by Chris at Serendipity Mine, called “The Silly Little Girl and Her Magic Closet.”

It’s a brutally raw piece I could relate to, very much. Chris speaks about her being a people pleaser and a peacemaker and how she has always put ‘stuff’ she needs to deal with into a closet, for later. But later never comes…well, until now.

A snippet:

Part of the problem with this was that over the years I took all the ‘stuff’ others did to me and just shoved it in a closet. Better to be a good girl and sit there and shut up and keep everyone happy than to cause waves of upset, hurt or disappointment. I was strong (with a big dose of stubborn) and I could get over it. I expected that with time it would all just magically disappear and make itself better. My own self cleaning magic closet.

The problem is…it never did. The hurt and the pain grew. It festered. It became infected. I started suffering from depression and then social anxiety.

Tomorrow will be my 2nd meeting with my therapist, where we pick up the story of my life at 19, having glossed over my childhood in an hour last time I was there. She wanted the run-down, then we’re going to go back and take our time over things I need to deal with.

My closet is kind of like Chris’ closet, and because I’m very much a Mental Tupperware sort of person, the things in my closet are put into boxes, all the good stuff in the front, when you first open the door, and all the bad things I don’t want to or can’t remember are in ratty old boxes shoved in the back of the closet. It’s very much like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, where the closet just keeps going back and back and back and gets very cold once you reach that other world.

The other thing about this closet is that it’s in it’s own Mental Tupperware too, and when I find little snippets of therapy seeping into my life, I shove it back, like it has it’s time and it’s place and I do not want the two worlds to collide.

Therapy (even in theory) is becoming very much like a sandbox for me, a place to visit, to knock down, to build up and sometimes just to plunge my fingers, heart and soul into but only while I’m there. I’ve played the last 5 minutes of my 1st therapy session over and over in my mind and each time I walk out of the therapy building, I take a deep breath of cold winter air and snap the lid shut. I don’t really acknowledge the hour of telling the doctor the details of my life.

Maybe this sounds confusing, that I’m saying my therapy stays at therapy yet I’ve played it in my head over and over, but just like the abuse, the yelling, the endless reels of absolute shit that I lived through as a child, it’s as though it’s someone else living through therapy for me. Some other little girl’s head was pushed down into her step-father’s lap, some other little girl’s mother told her that she was a selfish little bitch, some other little girl saved her brother from being murdered and some other little girl grew up and sits in that office and tells her story.

I wonder when I will own it. Do those of us who pulled a full disconnect ever own our childhoods again or is it a survival tactic?

For the record Chris, your inner little girl is anything but silly.  I hope you find your way.

When I found out that I was pregnant with Maggie it was like having an out-of-body experience. I’d been told, because of issues with my lady bits, that I’d likely not be able to conceive and so I’d convinced myself that having a child was not in the cards for me. Scott and I had stopped officially trying and were seriously looking into adoption when I took the test and holy shit! I passed!

Two years prior I’d been diagnosed with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder and had started a medication regime that changed my entire life. For the first time I was able to think. Really think. I was able to complete tasks, focus, pay attention, and I acquired an actual working memory. And, after several months, my depression all but disappeared. My fatigue was a non-issue. It was like I’d been possessed by a functional human being. It was awesome.

Of course when I found out that I was pregnant I gladly dropped my ADD medication. Soon thereafter life became very blurry and hazy- once again my own version of “normal”. For the past eleven months I’ve giddily anticipated the day when I could start taking my medication again, and yesterday I finally went to the doctor to get my prescription.

My prescription is sitting in a bag on the floor beside me untouched. In order to get back my happy, I have to stop breast-feeding Maggie.

I just can’t bring myself to take the first pill.