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.

See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Three for the full story.

And so, I found myself at twenty years old in a small office with Dr. Ragu, the psychiatrist to whom my medical doctor had referred me. I had no belief whatsoever that he would be able to help me, but nothing else had saved me from my hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, and depression – not alcohol, not marijuana, not LSD, not food – and I was finally willing to pursue the officially accepted avenue afforded to those who do not know where else to turn. He handed me a styrofoam cup filled with water.

Why are you here? he asked.

I have to be. I’m depressed, paranoid, I said.

You don’t have to be. You wanted to come. Why are you here?

I’ve been depressed my whole life, but I can’t deal with it anymore. My voice sounded unconvincing and hollow, but that may have been the cheap office walls.

Is there more than just the depression? he asked.

Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it, I said. I had never spoken openly about it before, and I was not sure that I wanted to start now. I felt like an idiot sitting across from him in that chair. I suddenly did not know why I was there.

But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? The sooner you open up the better.

I guess, I said to my knees, which I noticed my thumbs were massaging compulsively.

Well? Why are you paranoid?

I decided to give in and tell him about the hallucinations. I needed to come clean, and his lilting East Indian accent was comforting.

I hallucinate. The words blew in tumbled breath past my lips.

Dr. Ragu’s eyes lit up as though this were an exciting turn of events, and I could not help but smile at him. His face made the idea of hallucinating seem like fun. It wasn’t, but I liked his enthusiasm. I told him about the six-inch aphids I saw crawling through his spider plants, the snow that fell softly most days despite the fact that it was July, and the bodies in vehicles at night. I still did not believe that psychiatry held any promise for me, but I liked letting my stories out into the air.

For the first time, I was not hidden and locked in a struggle to maintain a veneer of normalcy.

(This is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

By Kay

One of the ideas that scares me the most (and, unfortunately, gets stuck in my head most often), is that there’s nothing wrong with me at all.

The basic premise of this idea is that while I was still lost in the heartbreak and despair of breaking up with my first love, someone suggested to me that I was depressed, and I latched onto the idea. At some level I know that I’m using it both as a convenient excuse to stay in bed as long as I want and as a ploy to get attention, but consciously I have become so wrapped up in this lie that I believe it to be true, and identify and exaggerate possible “symptoms” of depression in order to make the story more convincing. In short, I am a lazy, attention-seeking, manipulative bastard who is using a mental illness as an excuse, and has become so caught up in this out-of-control lie that I don’t even realize it any longer.

Whenever I consider this notion, a voice in my head breaks through and sarcastically congratulates me on taking my unhealthy practices of self-loathing and negative self-talk to a whole new level. But that seed of doubt is planted. And it’s the closest I’ve come to a rational explanation of the irrationality of my emotions.

It makes me feel so crazy to think like this. It makes me feel like I don’t know myself, and that I can’t trust myself. It also undermines what I believe most of the time to be very real trials I’ve been through, and the effort I’ve put into making things better, because how can I be getting better when nothing’s wrong with me? I wish I could shut it out once and for all, end the vicious cycle, but as long as that niggling idea is still somewhere in my mind, the silent arguments over it can’t be closed.

Originally posted here.

See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two for the full story.

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

As I get older, my relationship to the events of my past changes. The chronology seems far less significant than it once did, and I find myself skipping from a story from when I was thirty to a game I played when I was three, connecting them by intuitive rather than direct association. When I tell these stories now about my history with mental illness, I move through the events that describe it in a seemingly haphazard manner, picking up pieces of it from very different times and places and hanging them together in constantly shifting triptychs.

My intent when I began this series was to follow a natural, chronological progression through my initial experiences with psychiatry, but that turned out to be less natural than I thought. It seems more rational to begin with the place at which I arrived, the point of the story, the point at which I began to seek help, and then work my way back to how that point came about.

So, I will tell you about when I was two, which I remember quite well. I can remember being one-and-a-half and wearing itchy plastic diaper pants that scratched my skin, so two is pretty clear. One of my first memories is of my sudden attachment to a pair of white oxford-like shoes with navy stripes on the sides. My mother decided to put them in a neighbour’s garage sale, because I outgrew them, and I was gripped by a terrible anxiety about not being able to have them anymore. They were mine! Mine! And I loved them! I really LOVED them!

My mother explained about how I could not wear them anymore, but I did not care. Those shoes were beautiful. I did not want to be bigger than those shoes. Those shoes should be mine and stay in my closet. I did not care that they no longer fit on my feet. I wanted to be able to touch them whenever I wanted. I still remember how they smelled.

At each stage of life until I was an adult in my twenties, I panicked over leaving an era of myself behind. On my fifth birthday, I cried all day, because I knew that I was leaving being a really little kid behind and that I was going to get old and die. The day I could no longer wear my red nightie, not even as a shirt, made me feel like I had moved into some parallel netherworld I no longer recognized. When I got my first period, my body’s betrayal of my childhood devastated me, and I avoided human touch for months. I felt no joy in the changes that some children embrace.

Of course, those shoes disappeared. I knew that some other kid was going to wear those on their feet, because my mother told me that would happen, and it made me very sad. How could something be mine and then not be mine? The space on the floor of my closet where they used to sit was empty, but I checked it often, hoping I might see them. I sat on my bed and wept. I was grieving.

This sense of grieving became a near constant throughout my childhood. It took me another eight years to put a word to what I was feeling, and at ten years old, I realized that I was depressed. Upon that realization, I began to hatch plans, because even at that young age, I was weary of my condition. I did not know how to express my agony, and I did not know how to ask for help or that help was even available. I only knew that the way I was was not “normal” by any means, and I began to plot my escape. Any number of escapes were possible: physical pain, suicide, running away – under the weight of my grief, any type of relief or way out seemed reasonable.

Escape felt necessary to my very survival, and I began a long road filled with many ineffective attempts at distancing my pain. If anything good can be said about that part of my life, it is that I was certainly goal-oriented and persistent.

… to be continued …

(This entry is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

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.

I am so frustrated and exhausted, I have no idea where to even begin. Remember how I was waiting for the Wellbutrin to kick in? Well, it didn’t. Or rather, it did, with disastrous results.

After two months of being on it and noticing no change in the near-crippling depression I was experiencing, my doctor decided to increase the dose. I didn’t notice the change at first, but looking back, I can see that shortly after the increase, I became more and more anxious. I started isolating myself from my friends, believing that they didn’t want to be around me and that some of them were actively turning people against me. I stopped picking up the phone, going out, writing emails. I felt utterly alone and scared.

And then, the panic attacks started. I thought I had experienced these before, but I’ve never felt anything this extreme. Racing thoughts, a barrage of negativity, shaking hands, heart pounding out of my chest, difficulty breathing, inability to sleep, and the intense fear that I was going to lose control and do something I didn’t want to do.

Once they started, almost anything triggered the anxiety. I went to work last week and had to go home after a few hours because everything set me off. A simple assignment, a notice of a meeting taking place in a few weeks, even getting a new email filled me with panic. I was paralyzed by fear, unable to work or even be in that place.

It’s now a week later and I still can’t shake that feeling.

I can’t get into my doctor until Tuesday, but I know she’ll take me off the Wellbutrin, so I’ve stepped myself down to the regular dose. Since I did that, the attacks have stopped and the anxiety has abated (though I’m sure taking work out of the equation also helped), but the depression is back. I’m not sure what she will put me on next, but I’m beginning to dread it, because as we have seen, my track record with negative drug reactions is less than stellar.

I feel like we’re playing chemistry set with my brain, but I don’t know what else to do because I can’t get an appointment with a psychiatrist for three to six months. So, we put on our white frocks and pull out the test tubes and see what happens when we mix up the next batch of chemicals.

Cross your fingers for me.

We have a stressful situation coming up, and I worry. I’m already seeing signs that I recognize…they could go away as quickly as they came, or they could get worse. I won’t know until it happens. I am on eggshells, unable to figure out the “right” thing to do or say, just trying not to crack the surface I tread. I don’t know how to respond to thought processes that are, to me, foreign. Nothing terrible is happening, indeed, nothing bad is even happening. But I have that ache all over my insides, like the ache you get in your eyes when you’re straining to see in total darkness, the tightwire tension of trying to be perfectly still and silent so that you can hear what might–or might not–be coming up behind you.