RealMental

So, you know when you’ve been thinking about, working on and planning an event for months and months and maybe even over a year and then you have that event happen and it goes really great but then you find yourself getting kind of down and depressed but you aren’t sure why since there is nothing wrong? Ya. That. That is where I am right now. We’re a heartbeat away from staring at the ceiling for a week and not showering.

I’m crying at commercials and being moody at odd times. I’m excited to see the kids, but then when we’re together I can’t seem to really join in the conversation in the same way I usually do. When I go to sleep I spend hours running through ways I’m going to organize the linen closet or making sure I know where the large flashlights are in case the power goes out because we might have a huge earthquake. And then I cry because I feel so lonely until I finally fall asleep.

Oh, a big HELLO! to 1998 and September 2007 Leah. I can totally see you right there out of the corner of my eye. I know that if things continue as they are, I’ll be welcoming you to sit right down on the couch next to me and handcuffing our wrists together. Sorry, and don’t take this the wrong way – but, no! Go away! I don’t want to be friends again.

This was me last week.  I am really struggling here.  As I have said before, I am not sure people know what to say to me anymore.  Either the people I see day-to-day or my regular blog readers.  So I am re-posting  something from last week, with some changes.  I hope no one minds.

Love,

JenB

———–>

I can’t answer in one word.  Let us try a few:  cautious, scared, worried, i can wear a size 14 jeans from the gap.  I am actually getting anxious writing this post.  I have been avoiding writing this post.  I have been avoiding: seeing the doctor, getting my blood work done, checking my sugar levels, eating as prescribed, working out as much as I should be, doing anything right really.  I have been: eating sweets, not eating enough protein, sleeping a lot, changing my (going off of Effexor) psychiatric medications, hemming my workout pants so I don’t trip on them.

I have been doing good thing in fits and starts.  Protein shake here, no white carbs there, seeing my trainer twice a week, but not doing even remotely enough cardio.  We b ought the Wii fit, for fun mostly, I thought it would energize me to do more serious workouts at the gym and some yoga at the very least.  I had no idea the Wii fit <strong>WEIGHS</strong> YOU.  I have not weighed myself or been weighed since March when I saw the orthopedic surgeon about my knee.  Then it became scarier and scarier and one day I would be convinced I had lost a few pounds over the past month and then I would be certain I was almost back to my heaviest (impossible according to what size of clothing I am wearing).  It is now become my great white whale, which is funny really, i mean you know FUNNY.  Whale = fat, okay, I am over explaining a lame joke.

I am worried this is it, I will either stay where I am, or I will slowly gain it back and be what I was before.  Which I cannot even define other than “fatter”.

I was always worried that when the goals of the weight loss surgery started turning into how I looked and buying new clothes and having people say I look good or I have lost weight or GOOD FOR YOU! We were afraid you were going to be the fat one forever.  I am plateauing or gaining, or fuck if I know, right?  My mom and dad “how is the weight loss thing, you know surgery and diabetes and everything going”.  I am defensive.  “What do you mean?  Do I look fat?  Does it look like I have gained weight?  WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?” Articulating everything in my own head that I wish they wouldn’t ask me about ever. That I wish I could just update people without having to answer to anyone or ever talk about it really.  I want to be the person who got to a reasonable weight after 11-12 month, stay at that weight and then be able to advise and muse about how it was to be so heavy and so reasonable and ok with my weight now.

So many obstacles in my way.  The hugest one is me, lots of parts of me.  The eating disorder, always lurking. Someone, (doctors, books, dietitians, my MIND, the interwebs, the world, THE MAN) is telling me what I should be eating, I almost automatically say FUCK YOU, I will have this donut, bowl of chips, ice cream bar.  Bingeing is decidedly smaller amount, but bingeing when you stomach is wee and you know you shouldn’t but you WANT to HAVE to, is still bingeing.  It is still a fuck you to the rules.  I am 13, 14, 18, 25, all over again.  I had a similar reaction when I found out I was diabetic.  Rebellion via diet.  I am so cool.  I wish I could just pierce my nose, or bungee jump.  Instead I retreat inside myself and eat in secret, hiding it from everyone, pretty much successfully, all the time.  Am I self sabotaging, my therapist asks?  I don’t know.  I am afraid of finally losing the weight?  Maybe, I don’t know.  Is it a control issues?  Fuck yes, I can control what I eat and I can’t control what I eat or don’t eat all a the same time.  I am the mobius strip of food control. Yes, I feel expectations from family and friends.  I do not feel understood because I do not understand myself.

I feel like this will be another thing I will not complete, I will fail at.  I have trouble starting things and even more trouble completing them.  I don’t think I know how to be successful, at anything.

I know the small steps my therapist, husband, friend, tell me I should start at.  Get my blood work done, make sure I am not anemic or my blood sugars aren’t totally fucked, or my liver enzymes are elevated or other things that could go wrong.  Step two would be to actually make a doctor’s appointment, well, the doctor would call mewith my lab results, I feel sure there would be something to discuss there.  Once I go to the doctor, they will weigh me.  Weigh me.  Weigh me.  My worth a 3 digit number.  My success, my progress, who I have been since having the surgery will be those numbers on the scale.  I want to talk myself out of that melodramatic bullshit, it sounds so juvenile, so junior school, so first true love breakup story.

I am so scared I have already fucked this up to a place where I cannot return.  So scared.  Terrified.  My bed is so less scary. My sleep, my books, my solitude.

I fear that no one wants to read my blog anymore.  I am not scared of losing traffic, well, I guess I am afraid of losing readers because I need them.  Right now, I need them.  I decided to cross post a version of a post I had on my “regular” blog post because I don’t think people know what to comment or say to me anymore.  I feel like a car accident, where people crane there heads to see, but don’t stop to help.  I hope this is ok

——-> snip

I am kind of anti-social.  I know, those who have met me are calling bullshit, but really I am.  It certainly became more so when I left my office job where there were lots of people.  Worse after baby (when I left said office), worse as time wore on during the horrible winter when I had a newborn, more and more, retreating into the interwebs, which hasn’t been a bad thing.  Bipolar diagnosis, depression, hypomania, sleeping more, hiding from peoples.  Or at least hiding from people I know.

I manage to come out to BlogHer, and visit people, sometimes not all that successfully as I believe I have fucked up a couple of relationships there too.  Perhaps better I stay in this house, choosing a new bed (we have no bed), deciding to put up curtains (to make the bedroom darker), finally putting some fucking pictures on the wall.  I also really need to transplant those hostas before the snow.

I dunno, this is all to tell you that going off of Effexor and on to Cymbalta prompted a little hypomania episode to be followed by a most excellent depressive one, which I am enjoying right now.  Hypomania sounds all fun to some people, and in some literature.  It isn’t.  There are brief moments of chatty cathy and HAPPY but then irritability, impatience, anxiety, then, finally dull depression.  Hopefully for not too long.  I don’t know if the new drug will quell some of the anxiety and sit on the depression a bit, but fuck this gets old.  You know?  Since I have been 18, 20 years of medication changes, disorder changes, diagnosis changes, constantly altering.  Occasionally feeling really optimistic about new drug(s), then let down and hopeless I will ever feel anything other than THIS.  Ever be anyone other than THIS.  Ever be anyone who doesn’t talk about THIS or THAT.  Tedious, for me and you and friends and family.  Where my spouse is afraid to take a small trip and leave me alone, it breaks my heart.  Sure this is crap for me, but I want to hold my tongue more, especially amongst family and friends I encounter frequently.  I feel like you all like me no matter what.  Perhaps YOU ALL are nuts too.  :-)

Credit card bills are coming in from the hypomania, even though I insisted to my shrink I shop ALL the time, not just when I AM! SO! UP! -ish.  Right now all I can think of it going to bed.  Nursing my head and my recently buggered knee (again), something else wrong.  Icing my knee and drinking diet pepsi for my brain?  Trying to avoid graze-binge, trying to avoid being such a problem child, now adult.  But avoiding.  Phone calls, emails, you know.  The cat judges me in more silence than I judge myself.  Even when he puked on the rug an hour ago, it wasn’t because he thinks I am crazy.

Motherfucking hell I thought in my head when I left my Doctor’s office. My thyroid levels are worse, not better.

He doubles the dosage, then I come back in two months to repeat the process of getting blood work, followed up a week later with another appointment with him to check the levels again. When I left his office, I was feeling very low, maybe even depressed.

There are so many disturbing eruptions happening in my life that I can barely piece myself together to be present for my son. Can I just tell you that these issues are not of my own making?

See, I have my shit together. I have scraped and clawed my way into life, I overcame and rose above. Then I fucking got married. Do I sound resentful? You bet, I am very fucking resentful.

The side effects of dealing with grown ups that have no idea how to be a mature and independent adult. A person with a grandchild, still being spoon fed by her mommy and her third husband, a person with such severe mental illness I fear she can never recover from all the damage she’s created. A person that has severely damaged her very own child with her undiagnosed mental illness.

The effexor, armour thyroid, hormone creams, and the supplements that stare at me each morning as I go from bottle to bottle taking the amount prescribed and wonder if this is any kind of life for a person to live. It really isn’t any kind of life for me to live, or you for that matter.

I often wonder how long I will be able to function like this, knowing that things are not improving and the burdens becoming much too heavy to bare. I suited up for my life and showed up, I can support myself, I am a survivor that doesn’t need bleed other people dry like a fucking vampire.

I struggle with reaching out to others based on the severity of my personal conditions. No one really wants to hear it after five or eight years of hearing it. In fact, I’m beyond hearing about it, or living it.

Similar to when a person dies, people are very helpful for the first few months, but soon after they stop calling as much and god forbid if you shed a tear. They want to just get over it, stop wallowing in the past. I too, want to just get over it.

They don’t know what else to say, they cannot be shouted at or cursed.

Something inside of me is screaming very loudly, it’s like a trapped animal in a cage suffering innumerable pain and discomforts. Part of me would like to try and figure out what is being said, so that I can respond in kind to the violent screaming. Eventually, trying to figure it out becomes much too hard and I try and distract myself with activities that I know I must perform in order to put that whole one foot in front of the other.

This is what I keep doing, one foot in front of the other. Just like the big snow monster in that old Christmas movie.

**After re-reading this, I very much wanted to delete the post, to pretend like it never happened.  I struggled with removing it, lest you think bad of me.  Embarrassed with my immature ramblings in the middle of an attack of my ego.  (Or, as my therapist would say, “lack of ego”.)

Instead, I’ll leave it here and tell you what bothers me most, “See, I have my shit together.” Not that I expected anyone to believe me, but this is the crap that I try to tell myself when in the middle of an attack.

Then I remembered one of the reasons that Real Mental exists, to allow me a safe writing place.  My hope is that I do not offend, nor to have a person take this personally.  I struggle with how much to reveal sometimes, I question myself, I do the whole second guessing game, and generally make myself sick over it when that isn’t why I wanted to be a part of this to begin with.

Don’t let my anger, (or is it passion?) scare you, we all have the right to say and write “ugly” things, if only to use it as a tool to get to what is really underneath it all.  It’s just another layer.  Not one I am proud of but one that must be acknowledged in order to move on.

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.

I have to be honest with you: times are tough.

I have not known what to write over the last while, because I have been in alternating cycles of depression and anxiety that have pretty much crippled my creativity and ability to perform even simple tasks. I have been here before but not to this extent in a few years, and, to be honest, I am both shocked and not in the least surprised to be here again.

I am shocked, because I have been able to push through some truly trying times over the past few years with little more than my strong will to survive and the occasional use of pharmaceuticals from different doctors at as many different walk-in clinics when I found myself falling into old patterns of paranoia and circular thinking. I am not the kind of person who finds it at all easy to ask for help, and I have done my best to avoid it and won.

Won what, though? I’ve won more of the same with ever increasing regularity, which is also why I am not in the least surprised. I look back at the last ten years of my life, and I see a person who has never been able to stop struggling. I have never found truly stable ground. I have been able to hang on, push through, manage a regular working life to some extent, be more or less functional, but I have never had an entire week in which I did not have to talk myself out of bed or force myself into social situations just to get out of the house.

I have become used to a barely functional existence. It has become my norm. I have actually convinced myself that I am doing well despite the amount of time I spend curled up in a chair paralyzed against constructive action. It is so wrong that my barometer for measuring my psychological wellness is based on whether or not I have joined the shuffling herd of people from the local psych ward who yell I am the Easter Bunny! at me when I go to buy toothpaste.

I have spent the last week-and-a-half basically immobile but for when I get up to refill my coffee mug or go to the bathroom. Bathing happens only when absolutely necessary and eating only when my hands start shaking. Part of this is due to the fact that my medication was upped last week, and so I have not only had to deal with my original depression and anxiety but also a powerful round of nervous jitters, an electrified feeling that numbs my fingertips, insomnia, nausea, headaches, and excessive sweating.

If anything, I am learning the great reaches of the Palinode‘s patience. He has been nothing but supportive, and it is because of him that I have been able to do as well as I have.

Tomorrow afternoon, I have an appointment with a family doctor who will refer me to a psychiatrist. I have not taken the steps toward psychiatric help since fifteen years ago when three different psychiatrists diagnosed me with three different psychological conditions and fed me as many drugs that did more to complicate than ease my problems.

Making this appointment was fucking hard to do. When I walked into the clinic three days ago to make the appointment, I could barely force my voice above a whisper.

What doctor would you like to see? the receptionist asked.

Dr. P, I choked out.

What? she asked.

Dr. P. I want to see Dr. P, I repeated, my voice barely carrying over the counter.

I am crossing my fingers that my experience with psychiatry all those years ago was just a bad run, because I have to stop spending so much of my day in bed, and soon. When you spend twelve to sixteen hours a day in bed, you end up having to launder your bedding a lot more frequently, and I really hate doing laundry.

(Originally published at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

Liz Spikol posted a very awesome video about depression advice over at her blog yesterday. It makes light of that oh-too-familiar advice that we get from well-meaning people who have no clue what it’s like to be depressed.

If only laughter really were the best medicine. For now, I’m sticking with my Celexa.

I’ve been told to “snap out of it”, to turn up some music and dance around my living room, and to quit taking things so seriously by people who couldn’t understand why I was debilitatingly depressed or anxious.

They meant well, but they had no idea what they were dealing with because they have never experienced it. Their advice only served to make me feel like more of a failure because I was unable to control something they thought was so easy to solve. It made the gulf between me and what was “normal” even wider.

What’s the worst, most ignorant, or most insulting advice you’ve ever gotten from someone in regards to your mental illness?