RealMental

Racing thoughts gaining momentum in my head.

Why can’t I just go back to bed?

The swirl of crazy surrounds me.

Like maggots freshly hatched.

How do I make it stop?

How do I harvest the crop?

I am the secret keeper in need of a street sweeper.

To sweep my mind and body of emotion that does not belong to me.

How do I make it stop?

How do I harvest the crop?

A pill you say? Well, screw you. Could you be anymore cliché?

If all it required was a pill, to this day I would be ok.

As for now, the monsters retreated into their hiding places.

I heard their sniveling as they walked away.

When they return, I shall feed them those secrets that I’ve been saving.

Perhaps then, I will be ok.

By jb

One of the most interesting things about meeting new people, and starting new parts of your life, is that you get to see yourself through new eyes. I imagine that some people don’t like it, but I find it intriguing.

My most embarrassing–and perhaps most endearing–quality is that I have a seeming inability to pull shit together. I’m that girl–the one whose backpack falls open on the street, the one who always manages to forget something, the one who stands on the street in the rain while a car drives by, sending a 4 foot spray of water halfway up her torso. My med school friends Jacob and Joe take a good amount of pleasure just in watching my life; they don’t hide their laughter, and–halfway up the lecture hall, dripping wet and late–I find myself laughing too.

On Friday, I was going through my morning ritual of rummaging through papers to find that day’s lecture slides. I couldn’t find my biochem notes, and searched for three or four minutes before I found them crumpled up at the bottom of my backpack. I did my best to flatten them out as Joe and I laughed. “You’re a mess,” he said. “A mess.” And I am.

But I wasn’t always this way. I remember, once, I was walking through my high school hallway with a friend, and she looked at me and said, “You smile, and you look like you have it all figured out.”

And I thought I did. Preparing to go to the college of my choice, dating the
most wonderful boy, making good grades with lots of friends: I did think I had it all figured out. But somewhere along the way, I lost that poise and
perfectionism. I broke my back, I made some Bs, I slept through a Calc 3 test and finally allowed myself to skip a class or two. Sometimes, I thought my mind had cracked, and when I was sad, all I wanted to do was sleep or get better, but when the sadness went away, I thought my life was back on track.

I remember visiting my therapist as a sophomore, in late spring, and wondering why I was there. I was happy, wasn’t I? I had things figured out again, didn’t I? I thought I had come to terms with losing my job, and I thought things would be perfect again.

I can’t pretend that I am much older, or even much wiser, than I was then. But two years up the road, I realized that things didn’t have to be perfect, and that this is my life, and I love it. I don’t mind being a mess–it’s just what I do, and it works for me. As long as I have people laughing with me, I’m fine. It’s when the laughter stops that it gets scary.

Yesterday was the sixth month anniversary of my first dose of Lamictal, the drug I take to control my bipolar disorder. It is the sixth month anniversary, also, of the day I hit my eye on Joey’s bed during a tickle fight and he decided to stop saying “I don’t know” and “Maybe” and take me back as his mess, his bipolar wreck of a girl. The day we started laughing again.

He’s been visiting the last two days, and we have been doing our thing–lying together watching the B-52s on YouTube. Loading the dishwasher while singing to the Village People. Eating too much ice cream. Sleeping in a bed where we thrash around and steal each others’ blanket space, and roll onto each others’ pillows and turn in circles and talk incoherently all night.

Waking up, pulling the covers back to my side, I smiled knowing that this fitful oppositional sleep is the best sleep I get, and it’s the sleep I want for the rest of my life.

Loving him is the best thing I’ve ever done, even if I do it as a mess, even if I fucked it up a million times. We cannot laugh about the past, and I am bipolar, and I will be medicated for the rest of my life, and I surely am a wreck, a shambles, a hilarious mess–but as long as we can keep laughing at the present, I’ll be fine.

Originally published 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.

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.

I can remember screaming that once, long ago. I was just a kid, and had been talked into getting on “The Spider” at a county fair up in north-central rural Arkansas, by some long-forgotten friend. Some of you may know this ride as “The Octopus,” or another name. What it is, is a kind of a jacked-up version of the Tilt-A-Whirl, with long “arms,” and the cars set on an angle. The arms move up and down, individually, from the base of the machine, spinning around the base simultaneously. While this is going on, each individual CAR is also free to spin at will, which it does, at a crazy pace. Good gosh, I was sick after just a few moments. I can vividly recall screaming at the ride operator to PLEASE stop the machine–and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to my 10-year-old brain. They could stop the ride, let me off, and resume the thing for all those fortunate, iron-gutted riders who wished to continue. But the thing was, I needed OFF, and I needed off NOW, before I slung vomit over all and sundry and ruined everybody’s day. I even remember timing my shrieked pleas for mercy so that I was doing the bulk of my screaming precisely as my car swooped down over the ride operator’s head.But that carny was either hard of hearing, uncaring, or just plain MEAN, because he didn’t stop the ride, and I had to, somehow, find within myself the literal intestinal fortitude to tough it out until the ride was over. I still don’t completely understand how, but I did it. And I never, ever, EVER got on an Octopus/Spider/Hellmachine ever again. Although, go figure, I grew up LOVING “The Zipper.” Hardly matters, because ever since my big surgery in the summer of 2000, I can’t even ride the stupid Tilt-A-Whirl any more without getting woozy, and EVERYONE knows that the Tilt-A-Whirl is a BABY ride. Anyway.

My life is feeling a little like that Octopus-ride at the moment. And while I don’t really want to get off and abandon the ride, I’d like to just slow it down a bit, please. Just for a while, so I can catch my breath, and maybe hand off my cotton candy to someone on the ground so it doesn’t wind up spiderwebbed all over me (this is another reference to an ACTUAL childhood carnival experience, when my little sister and myself brilliantly carried cotton-candy onto a Tilt-A-Whirl, with hilariously embarrassing results) in the meantime.

Seriously: I’m not worried about anything superficial, like my metaphorical hair getting messed up–I just don’t want to explode metaphorical stomach contents all over the whole metaphorical world. Wait–the world is real, isn’t it? But you get my meaning. It’s just too much, too fast, too up-and-down, too back-and-forth, and with ENTIRELY too much spinning, one axis mounted upon another, mounted upon yet another…and it seems like some cosmic, metaphorical carny is adding to the base, for yet MORE spinning potential, each and every day, just to see how much I can take. It’s like a NASA stress-test, and I’m the rocket. What, I’m mixing metaphors now? Sue me.

I can’t remember who was with me on the day of that fateful Spider ride, way back when. It can’t have been my sister–she’d have been too short to get on. But whoever it was, whatever young peer, I do remember them more or less talking me through that nightmare ride that seemed it would never end. The way it worked was through distraction, pure and simple. Whoever that wise young friend was (MAN, I wish I could remember, and could thank them), he/she kept my attention focused on his/her voice, and gave me a metaphorical life-preserver to cling to until the vertiginous nightmare was over.

I say all that in the “now” to say this for posterity: Isabella is my life-preserver. It seems that I can’t possibly be tossed about enough that a rousing rendition, complete with hiney-shucking choreography, of “Grey Squirrel, Grey Squirrel, shake your bushy tail…” can’t bring things zooming right back into focus, and still the ground beneath my feet. Her sweet smile, her hugs and kisses, her mere existence is like BEDROCK. I want her to know, when she’s looking back in years hence on these pages, why I did this, wrote these things down. I want her to know that she did this for me, even before she was born. She makes it matter, she makes it right, and she makes me stay on the ride and weather the dizziness.

I guess she made me a “mommyblogger.” Among other things, all of which are vast improvements over anything I was before she came along.

Today’s post was brought to you by the word “metaphorical.”

Originally published at www.ninjapoodles.com

By madam diva

When I was 16 I frantically tore out the pages of my grade 8 diary and burnt them on my back porch. I was terrified that someone had been in my room and had read the gut-wrenching rendition of my rape.

The first time that I ever voiced the words out loud I was well into my twenties.

For many years there was no name to the awful secret I carried with me. Just the heaviness, pulling me down day after day. It was so painful, and I felt so humiliated and ashamed, like I had done something to cause it all.

He was a year older and quite a bit bigger. We had been dating for what seemed like forever to a 13 year old girl, but what was probably closer to 4 or 5 weeks. It was my birthday, he was my first ‘real’ boyfriend, and I was napping in his room after school when it happened.

Many of the details I have tucked away in the back closet in my brain, but the things I do remember where the physical weight of him pressing down on me, the pain, and the overwhelming feeling of fear and helplessness.

Afterwards he told me over and over again that he loved me and that I wanted it, that that’s what good girlfriends do, that now that we’d “done it” it was okay to do it all the time. I dated him for 5 months afterwards because I wanted to be a good girlfriend, and everyday I became more withdrawn and so unlike myself because I believed everything he told me. Every time we “did it” afterwards I felt worse.

I didn’t know about “date rape”, nobody did. I thought that all rape was done by strangers who hijacked you in the park. The after affects were devastating to my development in relationships. I was pretty sure that you had to have sex with someone so they would love you. I never clued in to why guys had no problem fucking me didn’t want to have a real relationship with me – because who would want to establish something real with the girl who’ll give it up on the first date?

I also allowed myself to be pushed around by the guys I was dating. Never to the point of physical abuse, thank God… but I put up with a lot of verbal abuse – and feeling like I was worthless, but sticking it out to be a good girlfriend.

It wasn’t until I started dating B-rad, now my husband, that I realized that I had worth as a person, not just as a sexual plaything. He made me wait. And wait we did. At first I thought he didn’t want me, that I wasn’t good enough, and it was very confusing. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to have sex with me. But he assured me that it would be worth it. We waited until we both knew we were in love. He was the first person who ever ‘made love’ to me. And when you’ve finally been made to feel special and worth something after so many years of feeling like you were insignificant and disposable, it was overwhelming. I almost didn’t know how to handle it. Me being the more ‘experienced’ one, I’d never had experience being in love before. Real love. Not the ‘love’ I was used to getting in exchange for sex.

Being with B-rad saved me from God Knows what kind of future. It was only after dating him that I became comfortable enough to start opening up about my ‘sordid past’. I was so afraid that he’d think I was worthless or that I was dirty in some way. But he was so amazing. You can’t even put into words the relief I found in telling him. Giving my ordeal a name after so many years of nothing helped me to begin to heal.

After the first time telling someone, it got easier and easier. Like the more I spoke, the less power it had over my life. Even as I’m typing this, I can feel a little bit more of it slipping away and being filled up with something more, something better. Hope and Trust.
I doubt that B-rad really knows how he practically saved my life. And someday I’ll tell him. But for now, I’ll just tell you.

Looking back now, I am comforted at how far I’ve come as a woman and how I’ve been able to rebuild the trust in the human race that I thought was utterly destroyed. But I can still remember the release of watching the pages burn. Reading past entries in my own journals has been very rewarding and sometimes a little embarrassing… but growth is a beautiful thing.