RealMental

we’ve just moved to a new city, my boyfriend and i that is and i’m at home tonight on my own because i got my period and i dont feel like socialising with new people on the first day of bleeding from the vagina each month (these same people invited us out last month too… they must think i hate them). at least, thats the most obvious “disease you can see” answer to why i’m at home alone on a saturday night. the other reasons, well they’re the ones you cant see. they are despression, anxiety, insomnia and suicidal thoughts.

i’m really really struggling with myself at the moment. i know i’m in a downward spiral and that its possible i will get worse before i get better but i dont know how much worse or how long or if “getting better” will mean getting medication. i’m totally horrified that i could need full medical treatment for this but i’ve given friends that same advice and its worked wonders for them. i dont know why i’m so against it. maybe i do just like feeling like this. but i dont.

tonight before my boyfriend left to go to drinks with people (i cant call them friends. i dont know them. are they his friends. i dont know. could they be my friends. i dont have friends. i have some people that have always been my friends but i suck at making new ones and i suck even more at keeping in touch with the ones i have.) he hugged me and tickled me. i dont know why. i’m not ticklish but sometimes when he does it i giggle because it does kinda tickles and its fun. but tonight i cried. i started sobbing. sobbing and laughing. then more sobbing. big fat tears that i couldnt stop. this happens more often than i care to admit. i cry. i cry a lot.

when i go see my acupuncturist she asks me a lot of questions about my body and how i feel. then she asks me about my mind, my emotions, my general wellbeing. and i tell her. i tell her how many days i felt good. how many days i felt crap. i dont tell her about the days that i think about stepping in front of a bus. or the ones where i wish i didnt have to get off the tram. that if i just sit there all day instead the day will pass and i can either go home or just keep going somewhere else. i dont know where else. i dont know if the acupuncture will help. i know that seeing someone every week no matter what its for will. an appointment to keep. something i cant cancel.

a few weeks ago i told my boyfriend that i used to cut myself, the soles of my feet, hidden. i think we were looking at post secrets?? it was a passing comment, we didnt discuss it. i dont think i’ve told anyone before. i stopped doing it about 7 years ago. i used to keep a blade beside the bed. i would cut and cut and cut, slicing layers of skin off till they started to bleed. or until just before they would bleed but it would still hurt. when i was 22/23 we moved, i threw away the blade and everytime another one would be purchased by someone in the house i’d throw it away. i couldnt have them in my house. i still cant.

it was last year that i started thinking about busses and trains… stepping in front of them more specifically. waiting on the platform, toes at the yellow line. at the back carriage end of the platform, where the trains are still going reasonably fast. on platforms where trains dont stop, they just speed past. busses on corners, at lights when they’re turning, coming up the hill, keeping speed up to make it around without getting the red light. here… i dont get the train and the trams go slowly enough that i dont think the same about them. but i still see a bus once in a while and remind myself to step back, not forward.

i’ve started not sleeping again. at first i put it down to my boyfriend keeping me awake but its not that. i can sleep beside him even at his loudest. i just dont. i lay there. i make a fuss when we go to bed, play stupid games, beg him to have sex, anything so we stay up that little bit longer. then i lay there. i get up sometimes and play xbox or read. sometimes i go have another shower. i try and stay off the internet because i know that makes it worse. i can sit here all night and wait till the sun to come up then i’ll go to bed. thats what i used to do. back when 2 hours sleep was all i got each night. i’m trying for 6 hours at the moment. i’m getting 5. on the weekends i get 12. sometimes 14. then a nap. i could spend all weekend asleep and i’d still be tired on monday morning.

i didnt leave the house today. i didnt speak to anyone other than my boyfriend. i havent spoken to anyone since tuesday, maybe wednesday. i dont answer my phone, i dont even look at it, its on silent now. i havent gotten phone credit so i’m not listening to voicemail. i leave the house 15 minutes before work and i’m back here 15 minutes after. i sometimes think of coming home for lunch but instead i go to a cafe thats so busy no one sees anyone else and there are big tables that i can sit alone with the paper and my headphones in.

i think i will leave the house tomorrow. for a little while at least. and i will talk to people. i will seem normal. i will interact. i will function. i will be thankful that my boyfriend knows me and what is going on inside my head much of the time. that he loves me. that my close friends will do all they can. but i know i need to do something. that this cant go on. i need to get help. i need to sort this out. to find ways to make it stop because whatever i’ve been doing for the last 30 years… its not working as well anymore. the cracks are starting to show. plates are falling, i cant keep on spinning these sticks on my own.

Originally written May. 20th, 2007 at 12:42 AM

By Kay

Last night I admitted that things aren’t better now that I’m back at school.

They’re supposed to be. Now that my parents aren’t lurking outside, waiting to attack me about my laziness and my messiness and my poverty, I shouldn’t have to hide in my bed all day.

Now that that boy isn’t dominating my thoughts and making me deal with the fact that he left me, I should be free to have control over my mind again.
This whole depression thing was supposed to be four months of hell, but it had a finish line. On September first I moved out of my parent’s house, back to my school six hours away from everything that happened this summer, and it was supposed to be over!

But it isn’t. I still don’t have the energy to get up in the morning believing that I have the power to change the world. I still feel trapped if I can’t escape back to my room after a few hours of sociable contact with my friends. I still can’t see myself as someone with any worth, or potential, or notability, or any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

And on top of that, I’ve been arguing with my person lately, which I hate doing. She thinks that the reason the pills aren’t working yet is because I’m not in the right mindset. She tells me I need to believe that they’ll work. I do believe that, because I’ve had them work for me before. I had them work for me when I believed that they wouldn’t work. So maybe it’s the pessimistic view that I can’t feel better that actually results in me feeling better.

She also says that I need to take some responsibility for my mental health, and to actually make the effort to get out of bed in the morning, live my day to day life as normally as possible, and not wallow in self pity while lying about in bed. And while I know that she’s right, I just can’t find the words to explain that when I’m horizontal and I’ve once again convinced myself that everything I do is pointless drivel that will lead to nothing, becoming vertical and productive is damn near impossible. Since getting out of bed is the logical thing to do when I wake up, how do I explain something as irrational as not getting up? Trying to explain this to everyone at school is even more . Right now I’m supposed to be feeling great. I’m supposed to be ecstatic that I’m back at school. I’m supposed to be fine. But I’m not. Everything is still so hard.

Originally posted here.

It’s no secret that Bipolar Disorder is genetic. It was a “surprise” that I was the first person in our family to be diagnosed as bipolar, though. I’ve long felt inadequate, intellectually, compared with my parents the Ph.D.s, but I was the one who was proactive enough about her dysfunction to make thrashing overtures toward diagnosis and treatment. Since my diagnosis and miraculous recovery of the person I’ve suspected I could be all along, I’ve been trying to nudge both my parents along toward getting themselves checked out, with little success. But I’m convinced they’re both bipolar, given what I now know, and I’ve been trying to get them to see the light.

My mom’s resistance ended dramatically, with her psychotic (but happy! oh, so happy!) episode this spring, after which she was hospitalized and diagnosed as Bipolar, and her crippling depression (lasting my whole life) at last yielded to a combination of antipsychotic and mood stabilizers. Amazing– but not really. When your depression’s affected you for so long, no anti-depressant makes a dent, and you used to have pretenatural spurts of productivity when you were in grad school (did I mention bipolar often most obviously manifests itself in the late teens and early twenties?), why wouldn’t you believe your daughter when she tells you that maybe you should see a shrink to reevaluate your depression, given your daughter’s diagnosis and resounding response? But all’s well that ends well, and now her meds seem to put her in to a receptive frame of mind, and she seems to be doing her homework, reading up and meeting with her care team regularly.

My dad’s been more stubborn. Granted, he was functional in his dysfunction for much longer than my mom was– it took him until I was 12 before his alcoholism cost him not just his job for a few weeks but also his driver’s license. At that point, he took sobriety seriously, and made up his mind to stop the self-medication he’d been indulging in since he was in graduate school (that whole teens & twenties thing again). After he became sober, his moods didn’t change minute to minute, but he was still bouncing between talkative, charming, funny, and reticent, snappy, shy, disinterested, apathetic, inactive. He wasn’t able to find a shrink he liked in the immediate aftermath of the arrest, and made do with the talk therapy at AA. And then the blood pressure meds came along. (Blood pressure meds are sometimes used in combination with antipsychotics to assist/speed the effect of an antipsychotic when someone’s in an acute episode.) He’s on a serious dose of the bp meds, and they dial down what he calls “the jiggies,” but they also make him very slow in the morning. And in the meantime, he’s still sad. And lonely. He seems resolved to believe he’s just a naturally melancholy person with too much distemper to successfully live with someone else, but I see someone whose long and deep depressive episodes aren’t being appropriately managed, and who could be a lot happier.

After having such amazing relief of my own misery, I want the same for them. I know I inherited it from them, but nobody wants to acknowledge they’re “mentally ill,” even though the failure to acknowledge it can be so disastrous. Even with the proof in front of them of the success of appropriate medication and talk therapy, though, they continued to be stubborn. My mom would always say, when I was being hyper, or in a raging, nasty, irritable mood on the downturn, “you’re just like your father.” And my dad would always say, when I’d burst into tears at the littlest thing, “you’re just like your mother.” Um, yeah. But I’m like you, too– that’s the point. Too bad you’re too blind to see it.

Republished from BipolarLawyerCook.

I guess there’s a rainy season in Florida, or something, but since I’m new here, I’m clueless. People I talk to are so non-committal about the phenomena of Florida that I never know what is to be expected as just regular old normal and what is actually extraordinary. To me, the volume of rain that we’ve had this week is abnormal. I’ve experienced the natural world’s rainfall before, I’m not from the Sahara, but St. Augustine’s weather is just weird. Pouring, driving, wind-gusted rain sheets. For days. And me on my bicycle.

When it rains, I’d rather be in bed. Isn’t it common folk wisdom that the best place to be in a rainstorm is in bed listening to the raindrops hit the roof? I buy into that, whether it’s just my quirk or whether people actually believe that about the weather. It’s so comforting to know that though the wind blows water outside, inside you’re cozy and safe.

I crave cozy and safe. And maybe that’s what bed is to me, cozy and safe. In bed, I nestle into my flamingo covered sheets and snuggle with my pink stuffed animal mouse, praying for the pillow’s promise.

Although I love to get into bed, the only time I feel really restful and surrendered is in the morning. Each day, when the alarm goes off, I can’t believe that the world is calling me from my cocoon. Again.

Getting into bed, I feel the desire to rest, the urge to lull into oblivion, but the actual falling off the cliff to sleep evades me. “Almost,” I try to capture that sinking into dream, but subliminal urge for wakefulness pulls me back up. “Damn the surface.” “Almost” again, clutching mousie tight, “why did I open my eyes this time?”

When I talk to doctors, I say, “The sleep medicine makes me tired and groggy, but I need something to push me over the edge. I just lay there, but I can’t get over that edge.”

Free-falling off the cliff into my nest, like a stuntman launching into a safety airbag, that’s what I want. A dropping off. Isn’t that an expression too? “Dropping off to sleep”? A push, a nudge, no safety harness, no tether, pull me til the bottom opens and spills me out into dreams.

At night, when the medicine takes control, I sleep, but don’t feel like I’m resting. I feel like a drugged, immobilized zombie, which is what I essentially am. By morning, my body is on its own crash course into true slumber. In the morning, the drugs are gone and my silken dreams weave the net I crash into on my own. Pushed over the cliff and rescued by myself, not drugs.

And then the pain of the alarm.

Given over to my own sleep, I’ll stay in bed almost indefinitely, relishing my true chance at peacefulness. Given over to the demands of work, the alarm intrudes and reminds me that I can’t be on the clock in bed. It hurts. It physically hurts when the alarm calls me and says: “Sure, you just felt the holistic dream-hole, but I’m here to remind you sleep’s a bitch that you don’t own.”

I borrow sleep. I steal sleep. I medicate myself into sleep but never really feel sleep. Is that addiction? Feeding the fire becomes more important than feeling the heat? Sleep is my shameful secret, and all my loved ones try hard to stage interventions. “If you don’t nap, you’ll sleep better at night.” “If you go to bed and wake up at the same time every day it will become an easier routine.” And my psychiatrist: “You really need to quit the benzos.”

Sleep. Such a gentle promise, but such a slap to the face. Give me angelic rest, push me over the edge til I fly away, and I’ll know true beauty.

In the meantime, Florida’s east coast monsoon on the roof of my office says, “Wouldn’t you rather be in bed?”

Christine

By She She

Before I had kids, I always thought I wanted girls. Only girls. I wanted to raise up a tribe of Amazon warrior princesses, little centered beings, preternaturally strong and wise. What did I know from boys? I might as well have Dalmatian dogs, for all I knew about boys.

Man, was I wrong. It was girls I didn’t know.

I spent the first year and a half of your life in a postpartum depressive fog, which is only now just clearing for good. On most days, the sun shines and I can see through whatever fog is left. I don’t remember much of your infancy, but I do remember clearly a particular day when you were about 9 months old. That day, one of your caregivers described you as a strong-willed baby who was going to be a strong-willed woman. I froze in fear. All along, I had thought you might be a sweet, serious girl – like your sweet, serious older brother. Horrified, I thought, “I don’t know this child at all.” I panicked. How could I have not seen this? You’re so full of life. If there’s a race to run or a hurdle to jump over, you’re there in full force. When I imagine you in my mind now, I see a blur of happy motion. But then, in the postpartum haze of unhappiness I didn’t see you at all. How could I have let this go on so long? I thought I was just stressed out, over-tired, a typical new mother. But, no, this was much worse. Much, much worse. This kind woman’s comment about you shook me so that I sought help for my depression right away. Thank god I did.

Sigh. Big, heavy, sad sigh. I wish I had been more present for you then. You deserved a mother who adored you from the get-go.

But now I’m better, getting better every day. This year I had to fill out one of those never-ending forms for pre-school where they ask you questions like, “How would you describe your child?” This was the first year I didn’t parrot what others said about you. This year, I filled all of the lines provided without hesitation. When I finally lifted pen from paper, I thought, “Wow. That was easy.” That’s progress.

You’re such a strong girl, strong in so many ways. And, as it is with almost everything, your strength is a double-edged sword. You can be obstinate and willful, more sass than sense. You don’t always do what I ask when I ask. In a word, non-compliant.

In my family, this was a cardinal sin for girls. In my family, the boys were stars, and the girls were supposed to be compliant. I wasn’t compliant, and neither was my sister. (This trait must carried on the x chromosome.) Because non-compliance was so unacceptable, I felt like I was broken, damaged goods. I came to this realization recently, and it scared the hell out of me. This is what I had been thinking about you! I thought it’s only a matter of time before something happens to bring out the inherent brokenness in you.

Nora, sometimes I feel like you deserve another mother, a mother who isn’t so driven by her childhood demons. A sunny, supportive, light-hearted mother, or a true Amazon warrior queen who can pass on her wisdom and strength to you. But, honey, your mama is just trying to figure it all out without doing too much damage along the way. And sometimes I can’t get out of my own way enough to even see who you are.

But let me tell you something I know now, Nora. There isn’t a damn thing wrong with you. You’re not predestined to have a difficult life because you’re a head-strong girl. Being strong-willed is your gift, not your curse. You’re not broken already. It’s mama’s lens that’s a little broken, a little cracked. Sometimes it prevents me from seeing you exactly as you are. But everyday, I’m polishing and polishing. I want more than anything in the world to be able to see you clearly, to be able to see my strong, bright, healthy, loving, glorious, funny, non-compliant daughter.

This old Hammerstein song just popped into my head.

Getting to know you.
Getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you.
Getting to hope you like me.

Actually, Nora, it’s not so important that you like me. It would be nice if we were one of those mother-daughter teams who like to do things together – go to the movies, have lunch, take walks – but I think we may need to walk across some coals before we get to the other side. We’re both head-strong and impatient, and I see some butting heads in our future. I pray to the god who still lives in my agnostic heart that when we finally do get to the other side, we’re both still standing, holding hands, facing the future together.

But for now I have a bigger wish. I want you to know I like you. I want you to feel it in every molecule in your body. I never want you to doubt that you are wanted and loved, exactly as you are, exactly as you came to us. There’s nothing about you that needs fixing. And your mama’s got your back.

Last Sunday in church, the minister said that even though we all make mistakes, inside we’re perfect. You leaned against me and asked, “Am I perfect, Mama?”

Yes, Nora, you are perfect.

Just as you are.

Originally posted here.

As a little girl, I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world. I watched her closely so I would be able to mimic her moves and gestures. The way she swept her long golden brown hair back away from her face was beauty, at the very heart of beauty.

She was gorgeous, smart, always had the funniest thing to say. She was the very definition of everything I thought to be rebellious and cool. I thought she was so cool that when I watched her stick a needle in her arm, I wanted to try it too.

Soon, she needed saving. I tried to save her in every way I could. I felt useless when I couldn’t save her from herself or cocaine. Towards the end of that run, I waited for that late night phone call telling me she was found dead. She escaped the clutches of death over and over some how.

She found recovery, I gave it some thought. I took her to meetings after I’d just smoked up myself. The people were all so friendly and cool. I followed her into recovery. We shared that together and for a while, it was grand.

She’s the woman that lights up the room when she walks in. She has minions. She had minions. We were all so eager to do her bidding.

She started using again. She lost her home. She was hiding from me. She would say mean things to me in order to push me away. I wouldn’t budge. After all, I knew that trick myself.

I stayed sober, although life kept rolling and even sober life is painful (sometimes, I thought worse without the crutch of drugs and alcohol). I got into therapy. I was still trying to save her. Save her from herself.

She got sober again but it didn’t last. She quit her job, relinquished the job of parenting her child to her former husband. She had no idea where she would find the money to pay her bills, for a roof over her head.

She cannot get out of bed. She doesn’t have a job. She wants to die everyday. She isn’t a mother in the sense of the word that breaks her heart every day. She doesn’t know why. She’s locked in a vicious cycle of hatred and anger all directed at herself.

I cannot save her. For the first time in my life, I understand this. I have to back away, create space as my therapist says. Saving people has always been a hobby of mine. I am finding out that I am really trying to save myself.

As for her, I told her that she is sick and needs some medical help. I told her I will look into getting her some help where she lives. Then, I will drive there and take her to the place to get some help. That is all I can do. I cannot give her any money or rush in and save the day as I like to do.

I hope it works. I don’t want to lose her. I love her. She’s my sister.

There was a time in my life when it felt like things were constantly being revealed to me.

I remember being fourteen. I borrowed cassette tapes from the library, stuff like Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure, because I did not have a lot of money, my parents would have been all The Psychedelic Furs who?, and the radio never played the less commercial stuff, so I couldn’t tape it. The library’s cassette tapes cases were so covered in scratches that the liners looked cloudy through them, and the silver song titles lettered on the tapes themselves were worn away at the center from having been inserted and removed from so many tape players by so many sweaty, teenaged fingers. I sometimes rubbed the blank spot where song titles had been and imagined who else had listened to this tape holed away in the isolation of suburban bedrooms. I missed them without knowing them.

The cases and tapes may have shown wear, but the liner notes were always in pristine condition. Before the advent of the internet, these inserts were sometimes the only connections we had to the artists who made those tapes aside from a rare video played on Much Music. I would unfold the liner, which, depending on the amount of information inside, could be over a foot long, anticipating the new words, ideas, style of thinking, aesthetic, politics. Something new, something potentially life-altering was literally unfolding in front of me, and I was mesmerized by the tiny lyrics I squinted over.

It was the same with the books on transcendental meditation I borrowed, the pornographic novels I found stashed in the back of a desk, the French television station late at night that was always more bizarre and risqué than any English station, the over-sized books in the visual arts section of the big library downtown. These things offered themselves up to me, revealed their interiors to me slowly, explaining themselves as we went along together. I was young enough for the world to appear to be birthing itself alongside me; we were both as wet and new as the other. My witnessing of new material was my witness of its creation.

I do not feel that now. Or rather, I do, but rarely, and the sensation of awakening revelation has fast feet.

I am acclimating myself to Fall. Over the last few years, the beginning of my winter sadness starts a little earlier than the year before. This year, it could not even save itself for September, and I feel like I am losing myself too early. I want to grab on to myself and keep me here a little longer, but there is nothing here to grab on to, and I have become overwhelmed with the idea that the world is little else but a subtraction machine. It vacuums out people and dreams and joy. It winds new things down until they are old. We, life and I, are not walking hand in hand witnessing creation; I am trudging in its wake, watching pieces of my life turn into detritus and get pulled into the undercurrent.

Since my hysterectomy, I have been having a much more difficult time than usual accepting my body as a thing that I have much to do with. It betrayed me, and now when I look at it, I see something old and tired. It is ugly. It is the friend you so admired once who suddenly shrugged you off, and it has complicated matters. My annual retreat into paranoia, anxiety, and depression is happening earlier, more heavily, and with much less hope at the edges. It is solid. I want to lie in bed until next June.

I want that sensation of awakening revelation, of being at the heart of my life’s creation, to be more fully present. I am angry that my psychology has rhythms that work to prevent that. I am angry that my image of my body has been tarnished by cancer. I am angry that my chemistry makes me tired and sad, and that the loss of my uterus has made me tired and sad, and that these things together make me even more tired and sad, and that every day just feels like another subtraction.

I know that this view of all humanity as being slowly deflating balloons is incorrect. It is unnecessary. It is stereotyping, but I think that sometimes I blanket the whole world with my sense of being in order to justify it. We are ALL like this; this is the way things ARE; I do not have to blame myself for my position, because this is how it IS. At the same time, I know I am wrong, because I do have the ability to be at creation’s root each time I write, take photographs, and create art. It is just a terribly difficult think to fix my eye on at a time when all seems lost.

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