RealMental

We were driving through the mountains in Maine.  Steep forests of pine closing in on the winding roads.  This was a vacation.  This was going to be fun.  This was family time.  Except I couldn’t breathe.

The walls of green trees were clearly unstable and likely to collapse at any point- same as my lungs.  Turns in the road seemed less intentional and more like haphazard attempts to avoid impending doom.  Were we driving too fast?  Was my seat belt working?  Why were my little sisters being so loud and I was the only one who noticed?  How come my mother couldn’t hear me screaming from the passenger seat that I was dying, we were all dying, the mountains were all wrong and everything needed to stop?

She did hear me eventually- once I actually started making noises outside my head.  I cried, hyperventilated, yelled- the whole show.  And we did pull over and stop everything because clearly there was something wrong.  I scared my sisters but hey we look- we’re at a scenic trail stop.  We looked at a brook from a sweet little bridge in the woods and still I had no explanations for my mother’s questions.

I remember walking around a gravel covered area by myself and trying  to focus really hard on the teeny, crushed rocks.  All they did was remind me of the massive effects of calamity.  A boulder crushed into quarter size chunks.  What size would I be when the mountains fell?

Eventually there was no more stalling- nothing else to see, no more trails marked by wooden signs with animal footprints burned into them.  It was time to continue our happy vacation.  It was time to get back in the car and squeeze between the carved out mountains all the way to our lakeside vacation destination.  Happy.  Fun.

I remember other things about that trip and my mother should be pleased to know that some of those things make me smile or laugh or just feel warm.  But mostly I remember that trip as the time I sped through a mile high alley walled with pine needles to poke at me as I held my breathe and salt water spilled from my eyes.  I remember my lungs collapsing and the confusing inability to scream effectively.  It is my first memory of a panic attack and at the time I didn’t even have that name for it.  I must have been 12 or 13 but nobody did anything, nothing was changed except for the new sound of tiptoes around me until a rheumatologist passed me along to a therapist when I was 15.

Here is an odd thing: That place where my mother had to pull over, probably terrified herself, because I was frightening to watch and listen to- the bridge, the stream, the trails and wooden signs are so fresh and real to me even now.  As long as I pretend I can’t see the gravel- I love that spot.  I want to look over the rails at the water tumbling aimlessly over the river rocks, pulling leaves and twigs at will.  I want to follow a trail into the woods just far enough for it to get a little bit too dark and then I want to come back.  That spot- and I have no idea where exactly it is or even how to find it- was the first place I remember finding relief and refuge from that particular type of terror that I now know better than the alphabet.

In spite of its awfulness I sometimes like to think about that day.  Because it was so new and a stranger to all of us the only remedy was stopping the car and absorbing nature for awhile.  20 years later and the remedy is waiting at the pharmacy, is more attack than remedy or takes so much concentration and remembering of action plans and mantras that I can barely remember I am trying.  Have labels and sessions and stays and medicines made things better?

If that was the first time I thought I was facing imminent death- my first panic attack and we will assume it is because I don’t recall any others and I am a memory keeper, how many have I white-knuckled my way through in those 20 years since?  What would I do if I had all those minutes back?  I’m not sure I would even want them back.  Would they still be filled with panic or somehow fresh and clean, ready for newness and light?

When is time lost better off gone and when is it appropriate to mourn its absence?  I am very glad that I am too tired for math today or I would have some heavy accounting ahead.  And well, that just seems foolish to spend minutes counting up the minutes you have already lost, even if I do find it tempting to have my own badge of courage style panic tally.  Which would then lead to receiving the “Anxiety and Panic Gold Master Level” iron-on badge.

The mentally ill club isn’t the Girl Scouts but it would be so much nicer if we got to wear sashes.

Please welcome Miriam, the latest writer to join us at RealMental.org. We are proud to have her here and know you will appreciate her candor and story. Welcome, Miriam!

I have sat struggling to come up with the perfect beginning to my first post here and as it turns out I can’t find it.  Should I provide a resume of crazy so you know I’m legit?  Lists of ridiculous occurrences from the last week that have made me want to leave town?  A full fledged essay regarding my thoughts on the state of mental health as it relates directly to my particular brand of nonsense?  So I am taking the easy way and doing the whole fourth grade composition version of a deus ex machina:  “…and then they woke up…and then they woke up again!”  Except that I am using it as a beginning.  So… then I woke up and I was here.

I’m happy to be posting here, to be writing each one of these words- but it comes with a requirement for a new set of rules.  I have to decide who knows what about me except the “who” is anybody with internet access.  I have managed to be crazy for 17 years (if we are to mark the “start” as when I was first directed towards doctors and pharmacists) without any one person knowing the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I don’t think I am alone in that, especially among those of us who “struggle” and “cope” and are just plain batty.  Compartmentalizing is a skill that I didn’t think I had until I started to think about what I would write here.  I have compartmentalized my whole life.  Now I am choosing to let some stuff fly into the ether and hope that it is the right stuff.  Maybe what I am saying is that I am not yet as bold and strong as some of the great writers here who manage to be clear and concise, clever and unflinchingly upfront.  I have read blogs faithfully and watched through the paragraphs when someone’s words have led to fallout and then the writer gets back up.  I want to be as strong.  I haven’t found my rules for writing here yet and even though this paragraph started with “I’m happy” I should also mention that I am scared to bits.

Deep breath, hold your nose, close your eyes and jump in.

One of the worst parts about spending the majority of your life as a “sick” or “crazy” person is that you always have to wonder if you are actively sick or crazy, about to be sick or crazy, almost past sick or crazy, or not sick or crazy at the time.  I say sick because that has always been the easiest way to explain absences from school, jobs or social events.  In basic conversation I usually just say crazy.  I don’t mean either term in a derogatory manner it is just easier on the brain to lump some things together and to laugh at some things.  It is how I have managed to breathe, even if it’s hyperventilating, for most of my life.  It is kind of like search and rescue missions.  They break the area into grids because if they just looked at the whole 100 square miles it would seem impossible to have hope.  If I can laugh at something, make light of the very serious than I am roping off an area in my head.  I don’t think I would find much levity if I were to look at the whole thing laid out.  But that makes my paragraph end very darkly so I will also say that labeling what happens in my head or with me is empowering in a way.  Too many different diagnoses over 17 years wear a person down.  So I hereby diagnose myself as crazy.  I do not expect it to go away entirely but with treatment I believe there is room for growth.  Ta da.  There you go freaky-too-old-for-long-hair therapist lady from high school!  And breathe.

I don’t know exactly where I am right now on the crazy/sick continuum.  I know that I have had a very difficult summer but that in many ways I’ve done well getting through it.  The people I sometimes pay to keep good track of me tend to agree and I trust them.  But then there are the non-players.  The sideliners.  The people who are stuck to me by law or magnetic force and watch me all the time.  It is awful when those are the people who provide you with the most telling evidence of your mental state.  It is a galaxy of stars more awful when that sideliner is your child.  Example:

I am helping my son and daughter clean their room.  They are 5 ½ and 3 ½ respectively.  It is 4:00PM and I am pretty pleased with the way my day has gone.  It’s been the kind of day that for the most part, my therapist would be pleased with and compliment me on for embracing my successes even when they’re small.  I am however still in my pajama shorts and a tank top and we actually haven’t left the house.  But we did a lot and I am doing well.  So I totally missed the whooshing sound of the arrows that were flying by about to pierce my heart.

My emotional sponge of a son asked me “Mommy, why do you wear so little so much?”

Before you start imagining me as a nudist or part-time stripper he meant my summer nightgowns and sleep/stay home clothes.  I started with reasons like there are some days that we don’t have to go anywhere and some that are too hot and then I realized he wasn’t really talking about that.  He had his hands in his lap and was looking only at me with those blue eyes that know too much to belong to someone who is only 5.  I told him that just like he does, some days when I don’t feel well I get to stay in my pajamas until I feel better.  And yes, in retrospect there have been a lot of those this summer.

“Do you mean like when your back or your belly hurts?”

I have chronic pain so he understands that but for sure that wasn’t always the reason.  But how could I say “No, Sweetie, the other kind of sick.  The sick where the bed is coated in super glue and all food tastes the same.  The sick where you wonder if you should be taking more of medicine X or less of medicine Y.  The kind of sick that puts me in a category with war veterans.  Multiple kinds of sick. The kind of sick that I have been for more than half my life and that you have had to watch and suffer the consequences of.  And oh yeah- chances are good that you should stock pile the Wellbutrin and Xanax now because the gene pool is deep.”

All I could say was that I that I thought things were getting better.  That was last week.  I did get dressed on Saturday but not Sunday.  I don’t know if he noticed.

Was I lying about things getting better?  Why am I wearing my pajamas?  Is a heat wave reason enough because last month it was the rain that meant we weren’t going out.  There is validity but I am starting to think that I am hiding behind half-truths.

“So how come you wear pajamas SO much of the time, like SO many days?”

Nuh uh. Can I respond with that?  He’s five so maybe that would be okay. My little boy who loves learning about everything and anything and can read anything you put in front of him seems to be half way to a therapist’s license- he is asking all the right questions.  Suddenly I am flooded and tingling and desperate for the phone to ring or a pipe to burst.  I would even take spontaneous nose bleeds or maybe an intruder.  There are people you can call for that.

“Well, I’m not entirely sure all the time but I am going to try to make that change.  I’ll try to make it better.  I love you.  I’m sorry.  I love you.”

I crawl under the bed with the pretense of looking for a lost library book.  I look for a long time even after grabbing it with my left hand.

I am keenly aware that my son knows crazy when he sees it no matter where it is on the continuum.  And that is my fault.  That is my fault.  I cannot help it or go back and change it but it is still my fault.  I would like to wake up now.