RealMental

I call bullshit.

I call bullshit on people saying, “You’re so brave.” Look, I know it’s a nice thought, and nicely meant, and I should be flattered and all, but the truth is, there’s no bravery involved when you have no other choices.

I simply had to find my way out of depression. Even though I was productive while I was depressed (almost freakishly so), I knew I couldn’t continue at the pace I was running at for too many more years. I’ve never had a backup plan—no parents to swoop in, no partner to stave off the hand-to-mouth scenario.

(Believe me, that’s not a complaint—you can’t buy motivation like that.)

For a not insignificant number of years, I tried to be gentle with myself. I reconciled myself with the obvious conclusion that I was doomed to be a writer-slash-artist. Rather than hide that, I tried to let it grow strong. This was when I was just beginning to get an inkling of how messed up things were; luckily, at the time, I had no inkling of the work that lay ahead. I cried to friends. I cried in therapy. I cried during massages. I cried in the car.

Oh god, all those poor ex-boyfriends.

It was all about Releasing and Getting In Touch With My Feelings.  That sounds trite, but it was what it was. Spade called. Then, after a few years, I realized that, even though I was making incremental progress in my behavioral choices, the pain I was in just wouldn’t budge.

So I manned up.

As hard as it was, I forced myself to shut some parts of my healing process down. I had to move on. I had been trying to wait ‘til everything resolved itself organically, but all of a sudden I knew that would take years longer than I had already spent. I was living with my mother, and that had to stop before I could truly get better. In order for that to stop, I had to get a better job than teaching four-year-olds how to make tiny boats for Thumbelina in the afternoons. In order for that to stop, I had to become a less cryey person in the mornings. In order for that to stop, I had to shut down. What kind of job was I ever going to get that had flexible hours and time off for uncontrollable sobbing?

So I did the corporate dance. And I liked a lot of it—it was social and I liked working hard. It seemed healthy. Made me forget my sadness a lot of the time. I got promoted time and again. But I gave too much, and so I’d burn out and feel like a failure again.

So I became a Pilates instructor. It was social, it was movement-based, it was something I loved doing anyway, and it could happen on my own schedule, around my writing and teaching artist jobs for several non-profits. It took me three years to realize that, while I loved all of those jobs, none of them paid enough, or had regular schedules, or any sort of reliable income.

So I became an Office Manager.

Except this time, instead of straight-up corporate America, I worked at a non-profit. Non-profits organizations are great to the artists who work for them, because they don’t care what you wear and there are no meetings. There’s no paid vacation, but they give you comp time. This was in early 2007, when I was first diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and all those other things I’ve blogged about before. And this was the job that supported me while I opened up all those messy things I had tucked away and worked through them. I had been blogging about them for five years, but I hadn’t actually been working on them with someone.

I was ready.

I was so ready that it actually didn’t take very long to unplug myself from the destructive and misguided thought patterns that were making me depressed. In a way, I was lucky, because my depressive behavior was caused by external events that had happened early and had sent me down the wrong path. It was like I had been working my way through a massive video game for decades, only to reach a dead end.

“Sorry, your princess is in another castle.”

When my therapist said she thought I was out of the woods, I asked if I’d have to stop coming there. I was only paying $7 a session on a sliding scale, and I pictured a long line of unhappy people on the other side of her door. She said, “Oh Hell no! We’re just getting started.”

Turns out it takes a bit of work to be not depressed. It’s like you *thought* you knew how to use a bike, but what you’d been doing all along was hoisting the bike over your head as you waded through water. Sure, it’s technically easier to ride it on pavement, but you still have to learn from scratch. You need the training wheels and the encouragement. So for the next year, once a week, I’d report back as to how things were going, and my therapist helped me calibrate my responses and find my balance.

Now it’s easy peasy.

For those of you who’ve been reading my blog since I moved to New York in late 2008, you know it’s been logistically tough. The biggest challenge was moving three times, each time leaving behind stolen possessions, leaky apartments, or a pantsless roommate. But the counterpoint to that was the good job I found at the start of the recession. And now, after almost a year and a half of uncertainty, it seems I have some slightly more solid options before me. I’m one step closer to maybe someday being a full hire with paid holidays/sick/vacation and health insurance. Maybe even two steps closer, hard to know.

What I’m trying to say, in a thousand words or less, is that if there’s a big difference between carrying a bike through water and learning to ride that bike, there’s an even bigger difference between learning to ride a bike and riding that bike well.

You remember how it feels, right? You’re wobbling along, afraid of every pothole or stick in the road, when all of a sudden you look up and realize that you’ve got this, you know this. You’ve known this all along. It’s easy. Just go headfirst, into the wind. The bumps will work themselves out.

Now that I’m no longer fighting with my bike, I find myself zooming down a wide, flat road on which there are some choices coming up. For the first time ever. Kind of. Yeah.

Now we’ll see if I’m brave.

Hi everyone. A ton of great stuff is happening that I hadn’t planned on, including a job promotion that gets me back to full-time status, and shooting my first short film.

After years of fighting to get to a place where I felt like I was on solid ground, I’m at a place where changes are happening so rapidly and I’m overwhelmed with positive thoughts for the first time in my life. I used to spend so much energy at first getting sucked into depressive thoughts, and then applying the tactics I had learned in therapy to manage those negative thoughts. Now I’m suddenly in a place where I am happy and excited for all sorts of wonderful new things that are coming into my life.

I’m looking forward to reporting in February with a post that spends more time on all this good stuff for which I am so grateful. I wonder how my writing will change from being so happy.

It almost feels like I’m a new person.

In junior high a cool kid appeared as a transfer.  She was amazing and had been living in Canada.  She was originally from New England like me but wow, Canada.  She played hockey on the boy’s team and she liked awesome stuff that I liked and awesome stuff that I wanted to like.  And she helped me figure out how to convince my mother to let me get a giant streak of magenta dyed into my hair by a very odd man in a very odd hair salon in “the city.”  I rocked.  Just like that I rocked and was awesome and felt it.  It was like the cool just came out with every breath but mostly with each toss of my ash blonde and MAGENTA hair.  That silly streak opened me up and helped the inside heal when all my secret ways of trying had failed.  I am forever grateful to my cool girl friend that showed me how easy it could be to just be.  And that you can play on the same side as the boys sometimes.

In the years between then and now I have had red, auburn, blonde-blonde, just highlighted, streaks, caramel, brown, cherry coke, bad decision black, natural and most recently- my happy fun hair.  I have mentioned my happy fun hair before which will only go to prove my long winded point.  Last spring I realized I was getting too old for my brain and maybe even for my body and went on a spree of random actions.  I got an iPod with bejillion accessories.  I got a ton of new clothes after losing 25 pounds.  And I got a great hair cut followed by 6 appointments to get the right hair color.  It was a deep, deep, rich red with undertones of cherry and mahogany.  At the crown I had medium sized chunky highlights in a golden blonde tone that I could make disappear with a trick of the brush.  It doesn’t sound right but it kicked ass.

This was before the economic dive of the country and the cutbacks at my husband’s non-profit job.  I spent a lot of money on vanity and fear of aging.

But when I walked around, when I picked my son up from pre-school- I stood so tall.  I was taking back my youth on the outside and it was jumpstarting the process on the inside.  I stood out and got to feel like the suburban subversive I believe myself to be.  My hair was a symbol of the old lady me being banished so that I could reconnect to the version of me that is, well, happy fun me.

I got the color redone once and then there was the 10% pay cut, the mandatory furloughs, the loss of retirement benefits etc.  So it faded.  I didn’t have a good enough reason to commit that much money to something as foolish as my hair.  How vain can a person be to spend several hundred dollars (I have a lot of very absorbent hair) on a dye job when their kids need sandals or later on- winter boots?  Then again I was feeling better so my symbol of happy fun me seemed less vital as long as I could sustain the pep on my own- which I could.  For a while.

So now it is much too long and I have mismatched colors throughout.  I have discovered that in my attempt to reconnect to my youth I hid the massive growth of grey hair around my temples and forehead.  The grey, along with the 3 inch roots contrasting against the faded red and blonde, make it look dirty or filled with dandruff of epidemic proportion much of the time.  This is clearly not the look I am searching for.

My foolish hair has become a symbol of enormous proportions again now that I am facing a depression.  Happy fun me (maybe that deserves proper noun status by now?) needs a boost to come out and I think a shock of red hair catching the sun will do it.  I am fixating.  I am embarrassed and feel older and like everyone assumes I am 10 years beyond my calendar years.  That isn’t the compliment it used to be.  It is common in my town to be 42 and have a 5 and almost 4 year-old but I am 32.

When I got my hair done last Spring I took a step away from the boring person who was walking around in a psychiatric contemplative state.  I connected to a new, more vibrant, more vital and present me.  Now that I know I can get to that person and that I have become distant from her, I am desperate to get back there.  The last thing I need in my world right now is distance- let alone from myself.

There is no way to make this happen.  I don’t have a ball to go to where I can hope to have a fairy godmother appear.  From what little I know of guardian angels, they don’t drop cash or Aveda gift cards from on high.  I probably shouldn’t skip eating or medication and even if I did… it would be a while and it might make me nutso beyond the fix of a good colorist.  But you know what- to spill some openness- I have lost 47 pounds in the last year and I am very grateful for that.  I have been better but am now worse.  Right now is hard and me with my happy fun hair and 50 pounds lighter might make the next few months less scary and more bearable.  I might enjoy them.  I would feel pretty and 32 and like I could play hockey on the boy’s team even though I don’t really skate.

Yet again- I want, I want, I want.  It feels so petty and selfish but it is consuming at times.  How did I become the woman who spends this much time concentrating on her hair?  I didn’t even own a blow dryer until I was married.  This happened because I am like so many struggling people, trying really hard to find quick fixes for my problems, my life, my anything.   Kicker is this one, this silly color combination from fancy-schmancy-here-is-your-tea-Aveda, really does bring me up from my down.  And… it works a lot faster than any antidepressant I know.

What color hair do you have?  Do you like it?  Would you change it?  What color or cut or pattern of stripes and dots do you think could make you feel the whiz, pow, pop of life in a new way?

As if I didn’t have enough times in my life when I want to take to my bed and stay there, isolated and cocooned in the dark, my family was blessed with the arrival of a probable case of the H1N1 flu last week.  Both kids had it but had few symptoms, mostly cranky and cooped up.  Me, I was bedridden from Thursday until when I woke up and went to a parent-teacher conference Tuesday morning finally fever free for a long stretch so no longer contagious according to CDC.  Basically five straight days in bed.  Most of those days I had no voice to boot.  Sweet.  I am still sick-ish and definitely bitter about the whole “I got the H1N1 flu” thing but some other things have happened.

I slept quite a bit.  I watched a lot of bad TV- thank god we ignore all the advice about keeping a TV out of the bedroom!  Also the flu gave me a chance to think about some unexpected things.  I had a lot of time to do nothing but stare at the walls and beg the world to inject Morphine into each individual joint but also to think about what I was missing by being in bed.  What was it that was getting neglected?  Who was I ignoring?  How could my kids have this same flu but not be dying like me!!?  How were my kids doing without me?

When I am tucked under covers and feeling miserable is the world just moving along without me, never noticing I’m gone, never stopping to check the gears for a weak cog like me?

I figured out a surprising amount of things while sweating and aching with piggy induced fevers.  As it happens when I am in bed or I imagine, even when I am just hiding from the mailman, I am not missing a lot.  Yes, there are places I could go and people I could see but- meh- whatever it is not really anything new.  Turns out though that other people were missing me.  There are aspects of the world that function better with me in it.  I may not have truly, deep down missed all the playground drop-off and pick-up interactions but when I saw those people I talk to on Tuesday I was happy and excited and they were happy to see me.  They were happy to listen to how much it had sucked to be so sick and how I was still a little shaky.  They had wondered where I was and asked around. They did what I would do if someone I knew went MIA. Huh.

What about my kiddaloos?  They were sick but still running laps around the apartment and making my head hurt.  They were being watchfully cared for by my husband, in whom I have been seeing new subtle tenderness that is much welcomed and was much needed while I was oinking away.   The kids were a little stir-crazy but all in all they were really happy to be playing with Daddy.  When they felt sick they were fine to be comforted by Daddy and when I got REALLY sick they were fine with staying away from me more.  Sure they missed me and wanted to play but they also were okay with just coming in when they could and hanging out in bed to color or watch a show about a baby chicken, robin and duck.  They are okay with whatever version of me is available, sick, or not.  Huh.

And the world- yes it does move along without me just fine.  It rained, it was sunny.  There was soccer practice, the physical therapist stayed open.  Stores didn’t close and god bless them, neither did Starbucks.  Just one latte delivered bedsides at a few key times make a big difference.  It will take the standard mothering equation of # of days sick x 1.5-2 (depending on severity and spread of illness) to get the house and such back in order but it isn’t anything new.  There wasn’t a drastic situation where there were no clothes, dishes, groceries or activities.  Thankfully.  So neglecting the house for a few days (okay close to a week) was/is okay.  Geez- I am sunshine and roses- this must be the fever because I am usually not so sunny but it is sincere and truthful so take it for what it is.  It is all I have got.  This is where I would insert a smiley face emoticon.  But I won’t.

So the moral is that the world keeps going when I am not around but that it doesn’t completely ignore the weakness or absence of this particular cog.  Huh.

I wonder how many times I have taken to my bed simply because  I was sure the world could not keep going- everything was ending.  Or because I felt like the world would keep going and leave me behind- flotsam and jetsam left to float aimlessly and without ownership.  How many times did I hide behind curtains and excuses because I was afraid my kids would notice that I wasn’t able to be “myself” with my friends or family or even the grocery store clerk?  And it took a stupid mutated flu virus to make me realize all this.  Well there was the fever, sweating, chills, cough, aching bones and sleep disruption too.  Oh wait- that was still the flu.  To make it clear- I hate the stupid, stupid flu- especially this one, but the hours in bed may have done a kind of good that I never would have expected.  Just don’t let the psychiatrists know… we could all end up with porcine prescriptions.

Now go wash your paws while you sing the alphabet twice.

Enjoy summer (and beer), originally uploaded by Sator Arepo.

Time for a happy image!