(Republished from Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

There were good days just recently, I swear. Until three days ago, there was a whole string of good days. I was getting my medication schedule back on track; I was looking forward to return to a life that was cancer-free; normal was around the corner. I could feel it.

The above is a half-truthed (mostly) lie.

This is how I look back after a few bad days, because when in the midst of bad, it is easy to reinterpret previous situations as better. If I am honest, though, the entire week before these three bad days was not so good, either.

There are little lies I allow in order to sell myself on the notion that I have barometer with which to gauge normal. Usually the lie takes this form: how I am feeling and thinking now is not this so-called normal, but that time then when I was doing and saying those normal things? I was normal then.

Until recent years, I had not realized how obsessed I am with this concept of normalcy. Having felt greater and lesser degrees of depression and anxiety since the age of two, I have never had this sense of normal I talk about, and yet I look outward and try to staple it down where I think it must be. I tell myself that normal was that time when I was fourteen and my cousin and I went swimming with a couple of boys we had met; normal was when I learned how to knit at the church girls’ club; normal was grieving the deaths of the Palinode‘s and my first pets. Normal is what, on the surface, other people seem to be and do. I have been envious for years.

I know that normal is an ideal I have created out of the barrage of messages about what it is to be someone born female, white, and middle class. I should be a very specific kind of attractive, have a university degree, and two children. I should want a car and a yard. I should suffer mild lapses of happiness, but only because I am privileged enough to lament how hard it is to afford a larger house or a second car or a chin lift.

Even I can see that when I describe normal, I am describing a world of paper dolls with interchangeable, tabbed accessories. It is a much less normal and more a stiff version of the new 1950s suburbia. The normal to which I tend to refer, in my efforts to describe certain spans of my life as such, has evolved into a more or less static state with little emotional fluctuation. Normal is a cardboard cut-out diorama.

And suddenly, upon writing that last sentence, I cock my head to the side and press my lips together with the realization that the perception of normal I have been carrying with me is not even something I desire. I would want it if I did not mind feeling like bland, animated oatmeal, but thankfully, that is not the case.

(This realization, by the way, happens several times a year. That is the nature of realizations. They spark up from your consciousness and snuff out as soon as the next shiny thing happens by.)

This is by no means a justification for the my life’s dramatic downward swings, no. What this realization does is show that the normal I perceive is not an achievable state to which I aspire but my dream of a state of emotional lack. When the chain of varying degrees of bad days string further and further out behind me, the idea of being bland yet animated oatmeal for a while starts to look pretty good.

As I grow older, though, I am less and less driven to reinterpret past events as normal or not normal, especially now that I see it as a gauge by which I measure a generalized, suburban mediocrity and not a unique individual’s experience of the world. It is safe to pinpoint moments when I was not on the brink as proofs of my relative stability. The difficulty lies in letting go of the dream of a life for myself that does not involve my whole complicated, depressed, anxious, paranoid, insomniac history. This life I have doesn’t fit there; it is too large and loud and bold.

Perhaps, losing normal will stretch me forward from the present rather than backward into a past that already gave up.

Republished from Leahpeah, January 26th, 2006.

I’ve accumulated some questions from readers in my inbox and now, armed with a small Dr. Pepper and Feist playing in the headphones, I will attempt to answer them in a way that is readable.

Do you ever “miss” the other personalities? Or, because they are all a part of you now, do you not long for them? I was thinking that in many ways Claire had been your best friend – someone to always bounce ideas off of and such – do you miss having that?

Before I became integrated, it was a heavy topic of conversation, the ‘what happens to everyone if we become just one’ question. And some of my personalities had a great fear of getting left behind and one in particular thought that if we did integrate, we would be defenseless against ‘all the bad guys.’ It takes a lot of faith in your therapist to make that leap because you don’t have any real idea of what it feels like to live life as a ‘mono mind.’ Post-integration, I realized that there is no way to explain what it feels like to be a whole person just like it’s not possible to explain what it feels like to be split to someone that is not. Read more »

This story is re-tooled from a post on my personal blog, and illustrates the importance of finding the right therapist. Unfortunately, sometimes that requires some trial-and-error. You’ll have to excuse the overuse of CAPITAL LETTERS in this post–it was right before my hysterectomy, and aside from the emotional/mental turmoil in our lives at that time, I was hormonal, in pain, and frightened to death about what was to come. Just setting the context.

Today, Alex and I saw our new “potential” therapist, for about the third time. And we frightened the living wampus out of him. I kid you NOT. He is not our new “potential” therapist any more, though he is not yet aware of that.

We have been with a psychologist that we both like VERY much for over three years. He’s local, accessible, “gets” us, KNOWS OUR RIDICULOUSLY INTENSIVE “HISTORY”– much of which you would not believe in a million years even if I decided to tell every bit of it to you, which I most certainly ain’t gonna–and most importantly of all, we always leave his office feeling better, like a weight’s been lifted off our shoulders, than we did when we went in. He’s not an M.D., but he is a doctor, and he practices the type of therapy that is said to be most effective with bipolar patients (those who, like Alex, are stable enough for therapy to be helpful–never ask me how much therapy money we tossed down the proverbial rat-hole without FIRST achieving chemical stability–ever), and he seems to keep up with peer-reviewed studies and texts that are current in the profession. He sees us both as a couple and individually, depending on whatever that session’s circumstances seem to dictate, and he’s quite intuitive as to what issue most needs attention at any given time, and then getting to the meat of it, and helping us work it out. Read more »

fading, you are

I saw dead people. And they suck.

I have never been to an open casket funeral. That was the thing that first broke off a piece of my heart today and smashed it on the floor.

I went alone to the funeral, after at least an hour of outfit changes, which was strangely important to me. What would he want me to wear? I can’t wear a retro dress with modern shoes. That would offend his thiftshop sensibilities. In the end i chose the perfect outfit. One that he would have been proud of.

Today was such a profound, life-changing day for me i don’t think i can put it in words. But i need to try.

It is different going to a funeral for someone who killed themselves. Different for me.

There was lots of talk in eulogies of people being happy that he had ended his torment, that he had found a cure for the buzzing in his head. I listened to these people, breaking down in tears, grown men reduced to empty hearted vessels before their friend laying lifeless in a coffin. I cried so many tears. Tears for Jeremy, tears for my friends and the pain he had caused them, tears for myself – knowing that at so many points in time it could have been me up there in that wooden box. Tears of anger. I wanted to stand up and yell that it was not okay. He had not found a way to end his pain. He had ended his life. His pain is gone, but so are the fourty years of happiness he could have had in between. The children, the nieces, the friends, the unknown.

And there we all were. Insignificant. Sad and crying. It doesn’t matter if it was 200 or 2,000 people. It is a tragedy. A life lost. A life he let go. And it makes me mad. It makes me jealous.

I have wanted to let go. Many times. And the fact that he did makes me not just sad, but envious. He didn’t fight the fight.

He didn’t tell everybody that it was possible. Beauty. In the midst of sadness. He let go of okay.

If he let’s go, if we all let go. What is left. There is no beauty. There is no beauty without pain. No joy without sadness. No love without loss.

And here i am.  My heart torn out and smashed on the ground in the most beautiful church on vancouver island just at that moment when i thought life could get better.

I saw dead people.

By Dad Gone Mad

Tonight I saw a man wandering aimlessly through a busy intersection. He was wearing filthy gray sweatpants and a weathered t-shirt, no shoes, and the thousand-mile stare of someone in severe psychological and emotional peril. He had nowhere to go, no idea where he was going and presumably no one to go to.

There was a time, not long ago, when I would have scowled at such a pathetic character, sneering him off as a nuisance impeding the flow of traffic and getting in the way of my very, very important life. I had no time for compassion; I would have forgotten him by the time I’d reached the next intersection and never thought of him again. But that’s no longer the case.

Almost six years ago, the advertising agency for which I worked succumbed to the dot-bomb. I had an infant son, a mortgage and suddenly a very fragile belief in myself. I spent the better part of 2000 trying to find gainful employment again, but to no avail. Eventually, the stress and pressure swallowed me up and I was diagnosed with clinical depression. There is no greater blow to one’s ego, no faster ride to the bottom than the moment someone tells you you have a mental health problem and hands you a prescription for Zoloft.

I remember the fear. I had no idea what depression meant. I assumed I was a pussy, that I was somehow deficient or unprepared. I was mortified, and I held my diagnosis close to my vest. I didn’t need the judgmental people I knew holding this against me, believing (as I did) that depression was merely a window into a deeper, more compromising imperfection in my brain or my character or my ability to function in the real world. Would the pitfalls and disappointments of everyday life present challenges I was no longer fit to confront? Would I freak out? Could people see it on my face?

There were times during my depression when I genuinely feared that I would spend the rest of my days in a psych ward (although I have never seen the inside of one and according to virtually every analysis I heard, my case was mild). I feared that I wouldn’t be able to watch my child grow up. I feared that my wife would be relegated to raising our child by herself. And I feared that I would end up like the man I saw hobbling through the intersection tonight — alone, adrift, oblivious. Those feelings and nightmares were worse than any physical symptom.

But I was fortunate. I had health insurance. I had a home. I had money to pay for the drugs I needed. I had a child who gave me reason to persevere through the sadness and lethargy and the lowest lows I have ever known. I had a wife who gracefully juggled the very ominous trifecta of raising an infant son, bringing-in money to pay the bills and nursing me back to quote-health-unquote. I don’t know how she did it and I have never found the words to adequately articulate my gratitude to her for that. I don’t know that I ever will.

I ultimately found my way back to normal (whatever that means), got a job and started rebuilding myself brick by brick. Then at about this time last year, it happened again. And again I found the same motivations to chug through the exhausting task of recovery — my wife and my children and, to a certain extent, the weak-bladdered dog who inspires me to go to work each day so I can afford to replace the shag carpet she stains with her caustic piss.

Tonight, not two hours after I saw the man in the intersection, I saw my wife holding our baby daughter in her arms, singing her a lullaby. I watched my daughter’s eyes grow heavy as she fought sleep. It was the kind of moment that affirms one’s decision to persevere through the hard times. It was the kind of moment that erases from memory the dirty diapers and the vomit that looks and smells like blueberry yogurt and watching the same Barney video so many times that you find yourself humming “Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, Please Shine Down On Me” to yourself in the shower.

Still, I believe there is not such a drastic difference between the man in the intersection and the man at this keyboard. A lucky break here and there perhaps.

I wake up in the morning and before I even open my eyes, there it is. That weight laced with desperation. That sinking feeling that tells me nothing is ever going to get better and I might as well just give up now. Give up at what, I’m not really sure. Not that it matters.

I contemplate actually opening my eyes. But what is the point of that? Why would I want to see things better? Smarter just to lay here and try my best not to listen. And definitely not see, think. Anything. Maybe I can go back to sleep. It’s only 5:15am. Plenty of time to sink back in.

My brain does not cooperate. My own worst enemy. Why? Trying to not think ends up worse than thinking. Pushing away the thoughts that at first sneak around behind and then try to cover my head, soon begin simply jabbing at my gut and my thighs. Prodding sharply. I give in and acknowledge them. And then they cover me up.

Nothing will ever get any better. In fact, it’s already getting worse. It doesn’t matter what I could ever try to do. Ever. All the projects I get excited about and then plan. All the projects that I hope will somehow make a difference in someone’s life. They amount to nothing. Nothing. And no one cares. And why should they? I mean, really? Who am I to try and do anything, anyway? I’m just one more person in the world that thinks farther than they can actually reach. But realizes it too late to save themselves the public embarrassment. Read more »

I wake up in the morning and before I even open my eyes, there it is: a weight resting squarely on my chest. I cautiously feel around my thoughts to see what this weight is before jumping to conclusions. It’s possible that I just had a bad dream.

Oh, right. I’m just not quite awake yet. Sometimes when I first wake up, I have left over thoughts flying around in my mind. And some of them could be left over from years and years ago. They are just shadows, tiny endings of experiences that hurt me or things that made me very sad. But they aren’t happening right now and that is what I need to focus on.

I imagine a light. Yellow and white but not too bright. It’s warm and healthy. It’s healing. It starts in my chest and expands until it fills my body.

Some of the remaindered and leftover thoughts try to stick around. They pop up and tell me, ‘You are such a failure’ and ‘Nothing you do matters’ and ‘Nothing will ever get any better.’ Some of them go far, far back and are more like, ‘No one cares about you so you better concentrate on surviving’ and ‘People want to hurt you and take advantage of you’ and ‘Everyone is a liar.’ But as soon as the thoughts come up, I look at them, evaluate them and see if they are true or not. They aren’t. What a relief. And I send them on their way.

I know that if I think too much about what I have to do today, it will feel too hard. I’ll start feeling overwhelmed and probably not get out of bed. Once I allow myself to go down that downward spiral, it’s very hard to climb back up and could take me days. The best defense is a good offense. Some days I do better than others. Read more »