RealMental

Yesterday, I attended a meeting. I like these meetings, because this group is populated with such intelligent, friendly women. This kind of space is rare for me, and I am glad to be a part of their organization. With this in mind, you would think I would have been able to pay attention, but I could not.

My mind wandered away and thought about cedillas. You read that right. I thought about the little, diacritical cedilla, that small hook often found dangling under a C: ç. And then, I thought about the tilde that often appears over Ns (ñ) in Spanish words and how it beats the apostrophe hands down, because rather than only having the capacity to replace missing letters within a word, such as in couldn’t, the tilde can behave as a character in its own right and replace an entire word, such as in dictionary entries to replace the headword when it is repeated within the entry. And then, there is that delightful hat of a circumflex, which sometimes, though not always, indicates a missing letter in a word that was once there and is no longer, such as in the French hôtel, which used to be hostel. Hey, it says, there was another letter here once, but I’m not going to tell you what it was or why it left. I kind of miss it. Poor little gaffer. He has to point out the holes that no one can see.

I thought about all that and completely forgot that I was in a boardroom filled with a bunch of people with whom I was supposed to be actively making financial decisions. This happens to me a lot lately. It is as though my brain’s ability to actively focus its concentration has had a stroke.

You think I am lying, because how would I get from one end of an entry to another if I could not focus my energy? I am slowly learning tricks to remain at least somewhat productive. The main tactic I use is to have several things up in the air at once. I will write a sentence, knit for ten minutes, scoop the cats’ litter boxes, hash out five or seven more sentences, read some websites, watch a bit of “Law & Order”, have a good run at a paragraph or two, make tea, read a magazine, write some closing lines, talk to the Palinode, edit the entry, knit some rows, and then post the entry.

What used to take me an hour is now spread out over a whole day or two, and by the time I am done, I am rarely confident that I have made much sense. Thankfully, I usually do make sense, but it can take me several hours before I am able go back and see the entry in a linear fashion.

This recent way of experiencing the world has put my confidence on shaky ground. I am not always sure what I mean when I talk or write, which makes me wonder what it is I believe. Why am I here doing this talking and this writing? When I am out of the house, I wonder why I am out, and when I am at home, I wonder why I am not out.

My brain has ceased to be where I am, and it is making me feel like little more than a reactionary sponge, an anxious baby.

But I am suspicious of even that interpretation of how I feel.

Part of me is hopeful that I am really on simmer like a large pot of stew, bubbling away for hours and days until everything gels together in just the right configuration of flavour and consistency. I would like to think that something is happening just outside my line of sight, and that in a week or two weeks or a month I will find myself scribbling out poetry and prose and taking photographs with the storehouse of creativity that has been silently cultivating itself inside my chest.

Right now, though, I worry that this is all I have, that the medication I am taking is also taking me, that we are snakes eating each others’ tails.

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

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.

Well, so far I have. Thirteen days.

It’s been difficult because cigarettes and crazy people are made for each other. Smoking feels good when you’re manic because it’s calming. It feels good when you’re depressed because it’s stimulating.  It fills the reward centers of your brain with dopamine–something you don’t have a whole lot of if you’re crazy. You don’t need a prescription for cigarettes, even with the taxes they’re way cheaper than Ambien, and you get twenty little friends in a convenient flip-top box unless only the soft packs are left.

When I was inpatient I discovered that despite the variety in the ward–we were men and women, we were old and young, we were different races and religions, we had different conditions and symptoms–we all liked smoking. Several of us skipped “fresh-air break” because it’s not worth standing on a cement porch watching traffic for fifteen minutes if you don’t get to smoke. Instead we lined up at the nurses’ station for nicotine gum after our dinner trays.  My mom slipped me some extra on a visit, and I cultivated a distribution network.

Now gum is all I have. I chew it furiously at regular intervals. It makes me hyper and gives me gas, and even twelve days in I’m still coughing like a slot jockey at Binion’s Horseshoe. But chewing gum is actually a pleasant vehicle for drugs; it sure tastes better than Prozac.

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 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

When I got off meds in 2003 I was pretty sure I’d never get back on. It seemed like some kind of accomplishment and I didn’t want to ‘go back.’ My family celebrated. I told people with pride that I’d been able to stop taking them.

Fast forward through hypo-thyroidism, miscarriages, drastic life changes and a few manic episodes and I just left the office of a very nice psychiatrist with my bag bulging with samples.

I alternate feeling responsible to feeling like a failure. And I’m not all together comfortable with taking Paliperidone. My psychiatrist suspects my mood shifts might be tied to Bipolar. I’ve suspected it as well. But taking an anti-psychotic med scares me because of all the side effects so if you’ve taken it, please comment with the good and the bad. I would have been much more comfortable with Effexor and Welbutrin again. I know them well.

But, I have to admit that they wouldn’t touch the weirdness I have going on right now. The intense anger and frustration. The crying and sobbing bouts and not showering or being able to even make a phone call. The feeling like everyone in the world hates me and I have no friends. The knowing for sure that I should get a divorce. The inability to sleep at night and then sleeping until noon for the next week. And then deciding that I love my husband more than anything and I’d never want to be without him, not even for five minutes oh-god-let’s-not-be-apart-at-all-today. And then my mind racing and starting a kazzillion new projects because DUDE I CAN DO ANYTHING. And today I’m going to sell my van. Let’s go right now! And then today I’m never going to sell my van. What a stupid idea! Let’s move! Let’s never move! I mean, c’mon already.

I look forward to having some kind of middle ground. But, I’m scared of this Invega. I mean, muscle spasms? Possible involuntary twitches? More weight gain? It’s so hard to take this leap into the unknown.

By Dad Gone Mad

I’ve been reticent to post anything on this site, but that’s nothing new. Reticence is the soundtrack of my life.

“Be careful, Danny. Better safe than sorry. Better to make a joke out of everything than to risk getting hurt by exposing something raw or real or controversial. Stay funny. Funny is safe. Safe is good.”

Safe can kiss my skinny Jewish ass.

I lived safely for 37 years. Never took risks. Never pushed it. Never let myself be exposed to anything brash or unconventional. Never really EARNED anything. Worked in a cubicle. Always wore an undershirt. Was content with my reliable paycheck and good benefits even though the job was empty and boring and spirit-crushing.

Here’s what that lifestyle got me (in chronological order): Zoloft, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Zoloft again, Prozac (for two days), Zoloft again and Wellbutrin.

Quite a prize, no?

I once wrote this about myself:

“I had done my best to hide my depression from view. I was embarrassed by it and scared of dropping several notches in the eyes of those who do not understand. But the incessant game of hide-and-seek becomes exhausting and stressful, and it only serves to fuel the self-doubt. Whenever I told people that I have this disease, I would watch as they wondered what it means. Perhaps I’m a threat or untrustworthy or liable to do something they’d rather not have their children see because they wouldn’t be able to explain it away with a roll of their eyes. I’ve wondered those same things myself.”

When I read that back now, I’m appalled by how pitiful it sounds. Fortunately, it’s not me anymore. I murdered safe. Killed its accomplice, fear, too. The murder weapon was the revelation that there is a difference between safe and responsible. There is a difference between risk and endangerment. I had no idea.

We’re big Dave Mathews Band fans at our house, and I’ve chosen one of their songs as my personal anthem. I like it because it challenges me. It teases me for having been who I was. And it reminds me to keep going.

If you close your eyes,
Cause the house is on fire.
And think you couldn’t move,
Until the fire dies.
The things you never did,
Oh, cause you might die trying,
Cause you might die trying.
You’d be as good as dead,
Cause you might die trying,
Cause you might die trying.

Well, Dave, I tried, and I didn’t die.

In fact, I feel very much alive