RealMental

You know, I ain’t right. And I don’t really know where first to turn to try and find out why not. All I know for sure is that the last several years (let’s review: Got married, new husband went into full-blown manic episodes, no one knew what was going on, but he was disappearing for days on end, engaging in substance abuse, and emptying our bank account. Then I got pregnant, and Husband went floridly manic again, got hospitalized against his will, was released to rehab, got ninny psychiatrist who totally mismanaged his treatment for bipolar disorder, stayed a month in a rehab facility then moved into an apartment, because I could not have him come home just then. Later, he moved back home, we had our beautiful daughter, and before you could say “relapse,” he disappeared when she was just 4 days old. Manic episodes continued until spring when he finally went off the deep end and wound up forcibly hospitalized again, this time landing in a GOOD psychiatric facility and securing a GOOD doctor who prescribed a GOOD treatment and had him participate in a GOOD outpatient rehab program, the result of which has been sobriety and relative stability with NO manic episodes since May of 2004) have been hard, emotionally, and then the last three years (let’s review: My father suddenly and tragically died, ripping a hole out of my very heart and changing the fabric of WHO I AM, I miraculously got pregnant for the second time, and then seven weeks later lost that precious baby to a miscarriage…grief compounded by grief) have been…tragic, desperate, and then this past year since the hysterectomy has just been bizarre. I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety, grief over the definitive end of my childbearing potential, which seem to come and go whimsically, and catch me off-guard. I took one anti-depressant after another over these years, and suffered side effects galore without ever really feeling significantly better. Anti-anxiety meds (read: benzos) helped me through some tough spots, and then I’d go several months without any before needing them again.

The only sure thing is that my moods and anxiety/panic attacks always corresponded with something going on externally. You know, like lying awake at 4:00 AM wondering where my husband was, or lying awake sobbing for my lost child, or lying awake crying into my pillow because I NEED MY DADDY BACK. In other words, if things were going okay, I was fine. But somewhere along the line, especially since Dad died, something had gone KABLOOEY with the coping mechanisms that had served me for the first 35 years of my life. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this, that some external event(s) could occur that could trigger a weakness, a malfunction, in my brain.

One day this spring, while I was discussing this with a wonderful friend–a friend who just happens to have been, for the last few years, a MUCH better friend to me than I’ve been to her, or to anyone else–who happens to be a doctor of pharmacy, not to mention having much personal experience with clinical depression and the meds that go along with it. I listed to her all the anti-depressants I’d tried, told her how none of them had worked, and asked her, “What (meaning what drug) can I try next?” She looked at me, and after just a moment’s consideration, said, “You know, Belinda, even though you’re depressed, you may not have an actual chemical imbalance. I mean, you’ve been through some pretty horrible, awful stuff, just year after year recently, and you have every right to feel despondent without it meaning that your brain is all wonky…like mine.” And then she laughed. And I saw a light. And I loved her like she was part of me, because she got it. And then she told me the hard part.

She said, “Sometimes, you can’t even live life ‘one day at a time.’ Sometimes, you have to live it in 30-minute increments. You can do almost anything for half an hour, no matter how badly you don’t want to. So on days when I just want to stay in bed with the blinds drawn, I make a deal with myself to go out to the barn and groom one horse. By the time that’s done, I might look over at YOUR horse” (she’s been keeping Misha for me for way longer than I meant for her to) “and decide that his mane needs detangling, so I brush Misha’s mane. Then I might want to clip his bridle path, and before you know it, I’ve spent half the day out in the sunshine, DOING something, instead of wallowing.”

Just when I had decided that Kerri was the most brilliant, insightful woman on the face of the planet, she confessed to having developed this coping mechanism after hearing a version of it in the film, “About A Boy.” She said, “Yep. 10 years of therapy and I finally learn something useful from a Hugh Grant monologue in a movie. Not the book–the MOVIE.”

She IS brilliant, my friend, and she’s definitely onto something. I can’t help but think that, since no AD has helped me feel better–not really–that whatever is wrong with my brain, it’s not something that an AD can “fix.” I’ve been off the most recent AD, Wellbutrin, since early March, with no noticeable effect at all. I don’t feel better, I don’t feel worse. Just the same. The anxiety symptoms have abated (I’m not having falling-down panic-attacks in Wal-Mart any more), but are still present to some degree, in proportion to what’s going on in my life. Every once in a while, I suddenly get HOT all over, start sweating from head to toe, my nose runs like a faucet, my heart pounds, and I just need to be HOME.

Something is particularly difficult about mornings, about just getting out the door. Once I’m out, I’m pretty good for a few hours, but my calm seems to have a shelf-life, and I need to get back home in the afternoon. I like to plan things pretty far in advance, but I have trouble committing to things in advance. Anti-anxiety meds help. I’m not wild about how they make me feel, i.e. slightly dopey, but I do use them when I need them.

And then there’s the hormone angle, which I don’t even know for sure how to approach. Something has GOT to be going on there, since the weirdness has escalated by, um, a bunch, since my hysterectomy last fall. When I first came out of surgery, on estrogen deprivation, I literally felt, for the first and only time in my life, that I had lost my mind. It’s like nothing I can describe–the misery, despair, agony, anxiety–the certainty that it’s never going to be better, ever. After a couple of weeks, I was able to start estrogen replacement therapy, and it was like a miracle…at least to a point. It made the extreme crazy go away, but like I said at the beginning of this post, I still ain’t quite right. But then, I’ve never had the dosage checked or adjusted, so there’s a thought…

And I can’t help but think that a large part of what keeps me “down” and anxious is the disarray of my lifestyle–I keep Bella clean, fed, loved, dressed well, entertained, cared for…and that’s almost (but not quite) the limit of my motivation…and THAT is my motivation for this effort. I don’t know yet if it will work, but I know that to have peace and calm, I must first have order. I need it, Bella needs it, Alex needs it. And I need to provide it. I’m on my way, I hope…the house is still a mess, but I’ve done certain chores more regularly this week, and my family has had a hot, homemade, nutritious meal on the table every night this week, with NO takeout. That’s got to be a start. And Alex, bless his ever-loving-heart, cleaned the living room today, which lifted my mood unbelievably.

I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been through, or is going through anything similar, especially from the hysterectomy angle. Or not. Just whatever. Can you just have bad things happen to you and suffer a shift in actual brain function? (Yes, these are questions for my shrink, but my next appointment’s a couple weeks off. Humor me.)

Adapted and significantly augmented from a nearly simultaneous post at www.ninjapoodles.com

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.

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 Michelle

Sitting in the coffee shop, talking over a shared low-fat blueberry muffin, she says, “You’d never know it by looking at me but I used to be thin.”

She shifts in her chair in the way that those who are almost painfully uncomfortable in their own skin do. She never looks directly at you the entire time she tells her story.

When she was very young she was a gymnast and a dancer but she was never good at either. She always felt as if her body was something she wore rather than something she was; it felt uncomfortable and unnatural and clumsy. She was always moving it this way and that, twisting and bending, leaping and flipping but it was as if she was working a marionette from the inside.

When she was about ten-years-old her mom started to comment on her figure and telling her that she needed to lose ten pounds. She had never thought of herself as fat but she immediately began to look at herself in a completely different way. No wonder she felt the way she did in her body. It was too much. So she started to diet and from that moment on she was perpetually trying to lose those ten pounds. She says she remembers always being fat but when she looks back at pictures she sees a perfectly healthy and normal girl until years later.

By sixth grade she learned to purge. By Junior High she’d mastered that and included restricting, chewing and spitting, and diet pills. It was the beginning a lifetime struggle with her weight because all those tricks she used to try to make herself thin just seemed to backfire and she would end up gaining weight. Then she’d starve it back off again and be thinner for awhile before gaining everything back and more. The highlight, she says, was a few years after college when she sat on a therapist’s couch and was told that if she weighed any less she would be hospitalized.

“Were you afraid?” You ask.

“I was thrilled.” She says. It meant that she was on her way to being thin. She said she pushed the therapist to say more because she wanted to hear the actual word “anorexia” applied to her. Instead of leaving that day concerned that maybe she was taking things too far, she left feeling like she’d really accomplished something because surely nobody would refer to a fat girl as anorexic.

You’re afraid to ask her if she wishes she could go back there again because you already know what the answer is.

Originally posted here.

By Saviabella

My father died twenty years ago today. The date usually passes without notice, but my mother and I had a funny conversation the other day in which he was mentioned (which is rare, as we never talk about him), and it got me thinking. I started thinking about the characteristics that I share with him, which is also rare, because I have always defined myself negatively against him.

What happens to your identity when half of your genetic material comes from someone who you watched drink himself to death for the first ten years of your life? When the majority of what you remember is yelling, physical violence, and just feeling terrified to do anything that would wake the beast?

I’ve spent a lot of my life being angry at him. Angry at the way he treated my mother. Angry that he loved my brother more than me because he was “the boy.” Angry that he continued to drink and smoke even when the doctors told him that he would die if he didn’t quit. Angry that I had to watch him hemorrhage and waste away in a hospital bed for ten days. Angry that he left us to struggle in poverty after he was gone.

Then, a few years ago, I started feeling sorry for him. I wondered what made him the way he was. Was he severely depressed and self-medicating? Did living in a foreign culture and speaking a language that wasn’t his make him feel alienated and alone? What makes someone so miserable that he would drink himself to death at the age of 38? I don’t know. But it makes me feel sad for him. And for me. Because I never really had a father.

God, I think this is only the second time that I’ve cried while writing an entry. Give me a minute.

So, yes, it makes me sad. And there are times in my life that I feel the loss more than others. Like when I graduated from high school and university. I wanted him to be there. I wanted him to be proud that I was the first person in my entire family to get a degree, against all the odds. After everything, I still long for his approval and love.

This loss leaves a big hole that never goes away. It affects my relationships with men, it affects my ability to sip more than one glass of wine in a night, and it even affects my life choices. At one point, I dedicated a huge chunk of my life, almost obsessively, to an organization that he had supported when he was alive. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was doing it because it made me feel close to him, and because I knew he would be proud.

If it affects me that much, then I can’t just focus on his negatives. I can’t be living my life to please someone who was nothing more than an abusive alcoholic. So, I have to think about the things he left me that are good.

I kind of look like him. We have the same Roman nose and full lips, and big almond-shaped eyes. We also have the same hands, with long fingers and strong nails that can grow as long as we want them.

He was incredibly smart and could pick up foreign languages easily. Even though English wasn’t his first language, he spoke it perfectly, without a trace of an accent. French, too.

He was a charismatic public speaker and loved to be in front of a crowd.

He wanted a better life, so he left his home country, family and friends to move to a foreign country. He followed his dream here.

He loved old Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Clint Eastwood movies. We used to watch them together. Some people told him he kind of looked like Elvis.

He had a love for authentic Italian food and taught my mother how to make it all – fettuccine, lasagna, chicken parmesan – you name it, from scratch. She then taught me.

He was incredibly attractive and women used to hit on him all the time. As far as I know, he never took them up on it.

In the end, he realized everything my mother had gone through for him. When he was in the hospital dying, he said to her with tears in his eyes, “You know that song, ‘Stand by your man’? You really did that.” She’s carried that with her ever since.

Rest in peace, Babbo. I’ll have you know that I successfully convinced mom not to make the homemade fettuccine and meatballs with condensed tomato soup. (Apparently, the folks at the care home like it just fine like that. Um, hello? We’re not care home residents: we’re Italian!) She claimed not to remember how to make tomato sauce. I taught her again – just the way you would have. It turned out really nice. I think you would have been proud.

Originally posted on September 27, 2006 at Saviabella

I’ve decided that my 30th birthday present to myself is going to be a tattoo. To some, it seems like an odd choice because I waited until I’m 30 to do it – not in my early 20s when everyone else was getting them done (though, technically, I’m getting it two days before my birthday. That way, I can say that I did it back in my ‘wild and crazy’ 20s. Not like I was wild and crazy in my 20s, but it’s a good thing to say, I think.)

I’ve just been feeling the urge to mark this occasion – to mark myself to commemorate all that I’ve been through in the past 30 years. The urge is very strong. I guess you can’t help but look back on the past when you hit a milestone such as this.

I once went to a therapist during a stressful time in my life. She asked for my life story and I gave it to her. At the end, she looked at me with wide eyes and said, “You have how many degrees and you work where??”

Apparently, people who have lived through the kind of childhood and adolescence that I did don’t usually make it to where I have in life. They end up with drug problems; they end up on the streets. They don’t get university degrees and good jobs.

“You’re the resilient child,” she said. “They write textbooks about people like you.”

Of course, you can’t live through that kind of a life and end up entirely unscathed. All my scars are on the inside.

I remember when I was 14 and everything that happened in my childhood started sinking in. I suddenly had labels for all that had happened: sexual abuse, physical abuse, alcoholism, dysfunctional family. The pain at that was so intense that I didn’t know what to do with it. I was this peppy overachiever on the outside but no one knew what was going on inside. I remember wanting to cut myself so that I could feel some pain on the outside to distract myself from the pain on the inside. I remember doing just that – scarring up my wrists just so that I could feel something and know that the pain was real.

But this marking – this 30-year-old urge to mark is different. I want something that I can look down on and say, “I made it. And I’m going to keep making it.”

Republished from Saviabella, September 2005.

Republished from A Woman Scorned, July 2007.

Bittersweet.

That’s the taste in my mouth as I realize the long-term effect of personal transparency.

In my first ministry I saw the sins of omission and lies nearly collapse an entire church. I thought that the only thing that can bring you down is the secrets you keep. When I left there and came to my current employer, I vowed to speak the truth and be as transparent as one can be.

So I have practiced my beliefs and never hid anything about my mental illness from my employer, co-workers, family and friends. Throughout my entire life I have battled depression. My first serious episode was when I was 9. My last serious episode was over 10 years ago. Of course, there have been smaller episodes throughout my life, but they are managed by counseling, medication and occasionally taking a mental health day. I make no secret of it and often joke about it. Sometimes, when I am overly emotional, I know that my depression has contributed to me being emotional, angry, loud or hurt. The only thing I can do is apologize and try to compensate or minimize the impact. I thought I had earned the respect of my co-workers, family and friends by the way I manage my illness.

I was wrong. I recently discovered that the opposite is true. Some of these people have judged me based on the abnormal behaviors observed and discounted the normal behaviors completely boxing me in to a ‘crazy lady’ status. This isn’t totally surprising but it is disappointing.

Did you know that until 1994, employers were allowed to ask about treatment for mental illness on an job application but not about other physical illnesses? Until 1999, the California insurance companies weren’t required to cover the expenses for mental illness because they weren’t considered physiological illnesses. Now we all know better, right? Although the cause of mental illness can come from a variety of sources (biological, psychological, or environmental), the treatment is often pharmaceutical in combination with therapy.

People with mental illnesses have made significant and profound contributions to our world; a few of the well known are: *Paula Abdul, John Quincy Adams, Lionel Aldridge, Buzz Aldrin, Drew Barrymore, Kim Basinger, Justine Bateman, Ned Beatty, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Ludwig von Beethoven, Steve Blass, Robert Boorstin, Art Buchwald, .. (100’s more in the C through U headings) .. Jean-Claude Van Damme, Vincent van Gogh, Ben Vereen, Queen Victoria, Kurt Vonnegut, Mike Wallace, Damon Wayans, Ricky Williams, Robin Williams, Tennessee Williams, Brian Wilson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Tammy Wynette, Boris Yeltzin and Robert Young.

Now that I know that some discounted me because of my illness, it makes me question the value of transparency. Should I have kept it secret so that it couldn’t be held against me? Is my reputation and contribution worthless because of my transparency?

And knowing I am being judged: Will it only be after my death that my contributions will be appreciated or respected (no, I am not assuming that I of the caliber of those on the list above)? Do I succumb to the devil in the disease that says, “They will never trust you. They will never believe you are capable. They will always discount you because of your mental illness”?

The answer is ..and pardon my choice of words.. no f**king way! I am a child of God. Unique and wonderfully made. My life has purpose and meaning with or without your approval. By being transparent I have lived out my values and honestly, have no regrets for it.

One thing will change – those who wish to continue to box me in know this: it is not acceptable. I may not be Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill or Robin Williams (and neither are you), but I am a contributing member of society (just like you).

For those of you feeling like you might be one of “those” people in my life – you probably aren’t. The ones who are “those” people won’t have their eyes opened by this rant. Thanks for listening.

Wendy Johnson
San Diego, CA

Republished from A Woman Scorned, July 2007.