RealMental

I took this off of my blog, because of some negative feedback.  I figure realmental.org is more comfortable with my crazy.

Still around.  Posts percolating but not all suitable for a blog that as of yet, has not been found by my parents.  My poor niece is not telling anyone as far as I know and I actually feel awful laying the smack down when I have always known that at any moment someone really tenacious(and technically savvy AND related to me) could find me.  I am trying to find a new domain name that fits what feels like a big change.  I just had a nice time with my mom and told her that on Friday, I found myself so depressed, so profoundly sad and hopeless that I just broke down and sobbed. In my car at first and then made it home to cry to hard I threw up and peed my pants!  Goodbye readers who don’t like to much information!

Of course my mom asked why.  Lots and nothing.  I am mentally ill.  I hate saying those words, but it is true.  I see a psychiatrist regularly and for the rest of my life medication will be tweaked and fiddled with and I will likely have lots of ups and hopefully only a handful of major downs.  So, know I don’t know why on Friday, some horribly song on the radio seemed to trigger a drying episode.  That is whole mystery of depression, bi-polar, these things we suffer from, there is no cure and often no sense to it.  Sure, THINGS happen and we, OK I do not react the way people who don’t suffer from major depression react, but often there is it.  On my radio.  I feel out of control.  Like my car will swerve into oncoming traffic, literally and metaphorically.  I feel like I don’t have control over my own mind, my own heart.  My poor heart that is abuse by both me and my illness.  I am not an innocent party here.  I still let things hurt my heart that I shouldn’t give power to.  Things I should LET THE FUCK GO OF ALREADY.  I feel way too old to not have learned the lessons of self protection.  Forgiving myself.  I cling.  That girl in grade 7 send a note to some other girl that i found saying i was annoying and i can see the handwriting and remember how i felt like it was last week.  LET IT GO.  It is like my heart has this gigantic database of things that hurt and I can conjure them up at anytime.  World’s most reliable software! !  I can search by any parameters – age, hurt by;name, gender, date, what shoes I was wearing, where the hurt took place (that one in grade 10 in the cafeteria was a son of a bitch), the overalls with polka dots were perfect for 1985 though.  <a href=”http://lauriewrites.typepad.com/weblog/”>Laurie</a>, my friend, made friendlier by sxsw, told me twice, briefly, stop giving that power.  Laurie, is smart and wicked in a good way, a great writer, beautiful, wonderful, and you want to be her friend.  She listened to all manner of my blathering while we were in Austin and feel grateful for that.  I wish she could live on mu pocket, not as angel (not that she is’;t one), but as a compass.  I don’t know my emotional direction for shit right now.

Ultimately I know I need to find my own way right?.  The medication will always be there, but surely I can learn right?  I can hard wire some things in my heart to protect it from others.  From myself.  First job ion order for me is where the hell is magnetic north? At least for me.

Jen

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.

It has been so long since I have written anything really mental.  My life has been caught with mostly good things.  Good things.  Some travelling, spontaneous purchase of a new house, won a trip to China to go to the Olympics, went to NYC for the first time, stayed with a fabulous hostess and the most terrific time.  I did see a Surgeon who wanted to Surgeonate my knee.  I scheduled and then cancelled.  It didn’t feel right.  All the Good Things were and are overwhelming me.  Change is overwhelming me.  I changed from Paxil for my anxiety, which I didn’t believe was doing anything to Effexor, which I think is doing something, but we are tweaking the dose.  If you read my regular blog, you would also know that I had weight loss surgery in December, just before Christmas.  More change.  Rules.  Rules are meant to be broken and CONTROLLED when people tell you what to eat, even though I am almost 40 years old. How to exacerbate an eating disorder: give someone rigid rules about what to eat and when and how much and then a list of vitamins and activity or your expensive paid for out of pocket operation will be for naught.  I got it done to gain health, and the losing of the weight surprises me a bit.  My clothes fit differently, but I feel the same about myself.  My skin is drooping, sagging, my boobs, oh dear, my boobs. 

I am still on the lamictal for mood stabilization, and the effexor, but still taking a fair amount of klonapin to keep my shit together most days.  Still taking diabetic meds, except have pretty much stopped my injectible insulin altogether.  My sugars were so low after the surgery and I honestly haven’t been monitoring them.  I am 3 months late getting blood work.  Ok, I lie, I am 4 months late.  I am not monitoring my blood glucose levels.  I am shit at self care right now.

I am scattered and paralyzed.  I wish I could add the adderal back into the cocktail of drugs for the ADD.  My memory is sketchy, I miss appointments, I have to write almost everything down.  I am very jumbly and klutzy and trippy and my word aphasia is bad.  It is a good thing I am not working a full-time job right now.  Self imposed deadlines are killing me.  Deadlines like let’s say, packing.  We are moving into the new house on May 15.  I have done nothing.  The spouse has all sorts of boxes, his office is packed.  I just lie in bed or watch tv or flit away time on the computer.  That reminds me I have an eye appointment sometime in May.  As usual I am trying to keep up the ok, functioning façade that only so many people in my life even buy anymore.  Even when I am feeling jitter anxious and tell people so, my affect falls flat and I wonder if they believe me.  I am having a bad day, like a computer reading it. 

I can’t tell hypomanic from feeling less anxious.  Initially the Effexor made me feel a little hypomanic, but I think that has subsided.  Still seeing psychologist and psychiatrist.  The meds are ultimately what is helping me right now.  I don’t even want to talk about coping mechanisms.  They might make me give up my ostrich like behaviour.  Sleeping, shutting doors, television, senseless errands.  I sit here in my home office and the debris is everywhere.  It has been for months.  I don’t even know where to start.  Last week I lost my wallet and became obsessed with finding it.  Looking in the same places over and over and over again.  I felt I could not do anything but take my kid to playschool and back.  I felt lost and annoyed because I knew I has misplaced it IN the house.  My husband found it 5 days later and the relief I felt was disproportionate to the actual event.  I felt freakish.  I feel freakish and crazy.

I have been having little paranoid moments where I keep needing reassurance that people like me and aren’t going to leave me.  Seriously, do you really like me or are you going to change your mind once you find out the mysterious secret thing that is permanently flawed about me that even I am now aware of.  That is why people leave me, or reject me, or ignore me. 

I have been chastising myself for not writing here.  Reneging on commitments that I made.  I hate breaking promises or not following through.  Or not even starting, finishing.  You know, classic ADD.  I do stupid things all because of my mind?  No, I make choices for certain, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. 

How do I differentiate between all the things that are ”wrong” with me? How do I know which symptom is causing what? I get so scared that this is it. This is as good as I am ever going to feel. Anxiety is the number one thing that has plaqued me since I was 12. I am on Paxil to help with that. I know if I go see my Regular doctor she will throw sedatives at me. My psychiatrist is gone for 10 days and has no back up. There seems to be no alternative when you are in crisis except the emergency room and wouldn’t THAT help. A possible 10 hour wait., unless I threaten to hurt myself. Which is not where I am. I am anxious, hypomanic too? I have no idea. IT feels like no combination of all the medication will take care of all the things that hurt so much. I am anxious and sad and scared. Scared because maybe this is it? Maybe no one can help me feel better. No drug, no therapist Why does it feel like it is getting worse and not better as we added the medication? Trial and error right? No one can really know what the perfect or near perfect cocktail will work for me. Perhaps it doesn’t exist? That is possible right? Maybe I just have to be sedated on a high dosage of benzodiazepines forever. Be a lifelong addict in order to not feel horrible so often. I love my child, but it was having my child that changed me. Not post-partum depression, but something propelled me from “just” anxious, depressed, OCD and ADD into bipolar 1. This site is a good one for Bipolar 1, by the way http://www.psycheducation.org/. Good information and links to other resources. There are mood charts on there and the fellow who runs the site seems very empathetic and kind.

I feel calmer now. Talking to people, on the interweb or on the phone seems to ground me when I am a ball of anxious-mania-what-the-hell-ever I am feeling. I will throw some more benzos at myself until I can see my psychiatrist again. I am 37, is this really the journey I will have my whole life?

I was driving home tonight, about 15 minutes ago actually, and it occurred to me that I can’t remember not adding an imaginary caveat to the question; “how are you doing?”. When good friends ask how I am, I usually say “pretty good” or even the daring “okay”, but in my head I am adding things. Like I am ok, but last night I thought about how good it would feel to not exist, or I am fine, but I secretly scratch the back of my legs until they bleed. Sometimes I feel propelled to tell the truth, but I feel that such circumstances are not a time for honesty. I think that most people who suffer from some sort of mental illness get very good at faking normal or ok, or even funny! and nice! and chatty! I guess I should say, that I am pretty good at appearing to be a high functioning, dare I saw somewhat awesome, person.

I wanted to post a quick history here on RealMental, since that is the first-ish thing I want to know about people.

p.s. HUGE shout out to LeahPeah for wrangling this and involving me.

I am 37 now, so the where and when and hows might occasionally be fuzzy, but for now, this is how I got here.

I started with a diagnosed panic disorder at 18, while in university. I had suffered from it since I was 13, not being able to sleep away from home, not being able to go out to do social activities after dark, only watching tv shows that were set somewhere sunny. Seriously. I spent 4 months at an outpatient at the university hospital, 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. Turned out to be very interesting, but not so effective. Ultimately proper medication helped. I ended up going more than halfway across the country to finish school. Not without bumps, but so so so much better. I often felt depressed, but figured those feelings were just me, part of me, who I was. Not good enough, thin enough, smart enough.

I was off of my medication (Nardil, total old skool med), for a few years before I went back on for more general anxiety with panic attacks. Wee! I ended up going back on during a very stressful time in my life, first serious (but good) relationship, I had just met my biological mom (i am adopted), and I was getting married in a year or so, and lets face it, my brain is buggered, so it was time to go back on. My general physician was taking care of my meds, but she ultimately sent me to a psychiatrist to help. I went back on the Nardil and felt better. She also gave me ativan (for emergencies) and a few sleeping pills if I remember. Read more »