RealMental

In the first apartment building that the Palinode and I lived in after we were married, there were many adventures. The building manager was of excellent character, most of the other tenants seemed nice enough, and although the rent was low, the building was gorgeously maintained, but it seemed to be cursed with a series of misfortunes that eventually pushed us to seek our home-making elsewhere.

There was the man who took off everything but his tightie-whities in the building’s entrance and tried to molest me in this weirdly romantic way when I set off for work one morning. There was the accidental flooding of our bathroom by an upstairs neighbour which resulted in part of our bathroom ceiling being pulled down, the tub being chipped out of the stone floor, and our inability to bathe at home properly for two weeks. There was the night that I pulled a young woman into our apartment after she’d spent a couple of minutes yelling for her life and banging on doors because the tenant she was visiting had threatened to forcibly restrain and abuse her. Then, there was that rash of fires that had us repeatedly expelled from our apartments in the wee morning hours. The alarms happened so often that we eventually gave up on panic and instead took to deserting the situation altogether and heading out for coffee, where I would inevitably remember that I left our birds to die again and had, instead, saved my favourite sweater.

The one incident that would not leave me, though, happened early on a Sunday morning while I sipped coffee at the kitchen table. It was a cool spring morning, and I liked to look out at the darkness of the wet bark against the greening grass. Two people were chatting outside, one on the lawn and one on the sidewalk, and I had just begun to think that an early morning walk might be nice when I saw that the men were having less of a chat and more of a negotiation, one that was being guided by the point of a large knife in the hand of the man on the sidewalk.

I remember thinking, “Seriously? Now someone’s going to get knifed on our front lawn on a Sunday morning? Fuck me.”

Then, I opened the window, because I’m a looky-loo who likes to hear what people in potentially deadly situations are talking about. In hindsight, calling the cops might have been a better reaction, but bizarre situations often inspire bizarre responses, and some part of my brain was not willing to accept that this was really happening right in front of me.

“I want the money,” came out of Knife Boy’s mouth.

“I don’t have it. I have a baby on the way,” said Lawn Man.

“Go get it,” Knife Boy said. “Now.” He made a small jabbing motion with the blade.

“I don’t do coke anymore. I’m going to be a father,” Lawn Man said.

“I don’t care. Just get me the money!”

“The mother of my child is sleeping inside. Can’t we just forget it?”

“DO I HAVE TO CALL THE COPS?!” I yelled out my window when I saw that pleas for human decency weren’t going to have much of an effect on Knife Boy.

Both of their heads swivelled around to figure out which window my voice was came from. I ducked my head away from the screen.

That last piece I contributed to their conversation surprised me as much as it did them, but I guess I felt for the ex-cokehead, baby-daddy-to-be who was trying to go straight even at the end of a pointed knife. Police intervention wouldn’t save the kid from getting knifed in the future by the next goon in line, but it sure could land his butt into a tidy jail cell, depending on how things went down, so I gave them the option to break it up. I’m nice like that.

“I’ll be back,” Knife Boy muttered as he turned and shuffled away down the sidewalk.

With the knife put away, they both turned back into near-children who looked like they should be wearing warmer coats, and it was then that it struck me that I was nearly witness to a stabbing on my front lawn. I went into a mild shock that gathered ice around my bones. I couldn’t get warm, and I would never feel safe on my front step again.

I was thinking about this incident this morning after reading Heather’s post that mentioned drug dealers in her old neighbourhood, and while I mulled over what made me react the way I did when faced with a potentially life-threatening situation, I realized something about my life: I walk around like there’s a guy with a knife on my lawn ALL THE TIME.

The memory of this incident has become an overly detailed metaphor for a fear that I live with every day. There is a wolf at my door, barbarians at my gates, monsters under my bed, and I keep every aspect of myself reigned in like children I’m trying to defend against an angry father. I was bullied in elementary school, I have been bullied at work, there are a couple of incidents in which I was bullied within my own family, and I think I have been unwittingly living under the assumption (yes, that does make an ass out of the ump and tion) that the next stab to my heart is just around every corner. If I do this, go here, feel that, I feel as though I am putting my own well-being into danger, because that’s what experience has taught me, or, rather, that is what I have thought my experience was teaching me. I am beginning to think, though, that these lessons from experience have suffered from poor interpretation. I’ve made the stories too simple. I’ve distilled out the parts that speak to my own power, strength, and wisdom and allowed the people who caused the hurt to be larger than life. The people who caused me to doubt myself and my abilities and my worthiness are all still standing around on my lawn brandishing knives.

It makes me wonder why I haven’t threatened to call the cops yet.

I have to be honest with you: times are tough.

I have not known what to write over the last while, because I have been in alternating cycles of depression and anxiety that have pretty much crippled my creativity and ability to perform even simple tasks. I have been here before but not to this extent in a few years, and, to be honest, I am both shocked and not in the least surprised to be here again.

I am shocked, because I have been able to push through some truly trying times over the past few years with little more than my strong will to survive and the occasional use of pharmaceuticals from different doctors at as many different walk-in clinics when I found myself falling into old patterns of paranoia and circular thinking. I am not the kind of person who finds it at all easy to ask for help, and I have done my best to avoid it and won.

Won what, though? I’ve won more of the same with ever increasing regularity, which is also why I am not in the least surprised. I look back at the last ten years of my life, and I see a person who has never been able to stop struggling. I have never found truly stable ground. I have been able to hang on, push through, manage a regular working life to some extent, be more or less functional, but I have never had an entire week in which I did not have to talk myself out of bed or force myself into social situations just to get out of the house.

I have become used to a barely functional existence. It has become my norm. I have actually convinced myself that I am doing well despite the amount of time I spend curled up in a chair paralyzed against constructive action. It is so wrong that my barometer for measuring my psychological wellness is based on whether or not I have joined the shuffling herd of people from the local psych ward who yell I am the Easter Bunny! at me when I go to buy toothpaste.

I have spent the last week-and-a-half basically immobile but for when I get up to refill my coffee mug or go to the bathroom. Bathing happens only when absolutely necessary and eating only when my hands start shaking. Part of this is due to the fact that my medication was upped last week, and so I have not only had to deal with my original depression and anxiety but also a powerful round of nervous jitters, an electrified feeling that numbs my fingertips, insomnia, nausea, headaches, and excessive sweating.

If anything, I am learning the great reaches of the Palinode‘s patience. He has been nothing but supportive, and it is because of him that I have been able to do as well as I have.

Tomorrow afternoon, I have an appointment with a family doctor who will refer me to a psychiatrist. I have not taken the steps toward psychiatric help since fifteen years ago when three different psychiatrists diagnosed me with three different psychological conditions and fed me as many drugs that did more to complicate than ease my problems.

Making this appointment was fucking hard to do. When I walked into the clinic three days ago to make the appointment, I could barely force my voice above a whisper.

What doctor would you like to see? the receptionist asked.

Dr. P, I choked out.

What? she asked.

Dr. P. I want to see Dr. P, I repeated, my voice barely carrying over the counter.

I am crossing my fingers that my experience with psychiatry all those years ago was just a bad run, because I have to stop spending so much of my day in bed, and soon. When you spend twelve to sixteen hours a day in bed, you end up having to launder your bedding a lot more frequently, and I really hate doing laundry.

(Originally published at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

Today is a day in which Bitch uncoils herself from my within my chest, swells up through my throat, and declares Feck off, all of yous!

I am doing my best to remain calm, but I am caught up in my annual early spring irritation, which begins right after the first sign of thaw and the disappointing re-freeze that follows it. I want out: out of the office, out of my apartment, out of the city, out of every last thing that places and schedules me into a pattern. I am fifteen (in spirit) and fed up with The Man. Let’s go smoke a carton of cigarettes and steal your dad’s gin.

People keep coming up and talking to me, because I am normally a very nice person, but I can tell that I am being a bit off-putting today. I can feel my aggression rising, and suddenly my voice is too forceful, too loud, and I am saying black every time they say white. Could I be any more the three-year old who has been denied candy? You are talking to me, and can’t you see that my brain is twisted wire wool right now? If you don’t leave RIGHT NOW, all this shit’s gonna start on fire!

I have my ups and downs throughout the year, but I find that the biggest complicating factor is my seasonal anxiety and depression during the winter and spring. A subtle change in the weather and the sunlight, and I can be thrown into a deep depressive fog or be thrust up into happy busy-ness. I can never be sure which it will be. Today, I have been pushed out on a third precipice, for example: Bitch.

I have a plan, though, to take care of myself at the end of the day. I am going to wash all the bedding, take it straight from the dryer, pile it all on top of myself, and drink chocolate milk from a straw. I will be like Jabba the Hut dressed in orange chenille. And then I will breathe in and breathe out and remember that this is just today.

Sometimes it is a blessing to be a fairly rapid cycler.

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

I have written about this before, but I cannot emphasize it enough. February is a difficult month. It is already the 21st, but I am not feeling hopeful yet that I will dig myself out of my wallow for a little while yet, because January was not so hot, either, and March is not always so forthcoming with the relief.

You will have to excuse me if I sound like I am complaining. I am.

At this time of year, I do my best to move ahead with things. I go to work, I see friends, and I eat food, but my heart is not in it. My mind is usually wanders off to bed or a hot bath or anything else that accomplishes nothing but offers the possiblity of taking my mind away from its everything-is-futile default setting.

I worry that my medication is not working, even though I know that it is; it is just struggling against February’s oppression. I worry that no one loves me, or even likes me, because I am obviously irritating and selfish and boring. I worry that I am far uglier than I think, and that any physical confidence I have is baseless. I worry that I have an as-yet-to-be-diagnosed terminal disease. I worry that my pets will turn on me. I worry that the toaster will electrocute me. I worry that all my written words are worthless.

Just yesterday, I was setting the dye in a Guatemalan bedspread with vinegar and salt in the washing machine. I stuck my finger in the little hole that the lid triggers to start the machine so that I could watch the agitation. I was there for twenty minutes before I noticed that I had not moved or thought in all that time. My brain wants to run far afield of reality right now, even if all it does is watch the back-and-forth swish of water in the drum.

This will subside. The sun will shine more often, the cold will give way to warmth, and I will break out my spring clothing and regain my faith in moving forward through life. I know this. It will happen.

But (a word that hangs covertly behind every good thought) I must first work my way through to that day when spring and summer lift me out of winter. Until then, I will continue to use my full spectrum lamp, take comforting baths, and let knitting carry me into the limbo of nothought.

Before I go, let me ask you: how do you deal with seasonal depression? I have been figuring that one out for thirty-five winters, but it could not hurt to try what you’ve got.

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

I spent half the night crisscrossing the line between sleep and wakefulness as I was plagued by stupid dreams with stupid plot lines.

Actually, the irritating dream thing started not last night but the night before when I dreamt that I was holding a friend’s baby. It had an abnormally small head covered in dark hair with pinhole eyes and one gargantuan tooth jutting out of its lower jaw. It started nuzzle at my breast, and I said No, little guy, that won’t do, and then he latched on through my shirt anyway and bit my nipple really hard with that abomination of a tooth of his. I spent the rest of that dream annoyed and embarrassed about the wet circle of baby spit on my shirt over my left nipple.

I will give you a short synopsis of last night’s dream’s adventures in a list, because this bitch just goes on and on:
• I visited a friend in another city, and she threw this huge, obnoxious party the first night I was there.
• Her mother built me a remarkable free-standing tower out of potato chips much like a house of cards, and then it collapsed, and I had to spend a bunch of time cleaning the mess of crumbs out of the carpet.
I woke up alone in the morning, looking around at a dingy living room, and I said I feel like I’m in a Harold Pinter play, and no one’s excited to see me. I have no idea what that means. I have never even read any Pinter.
• A man told me that he could help me to makeover my image, and then he proceeded to tell me that although I have young face, my neck looks ten years older.
• Someone put on an outdoor breakfast potluck buffet in honour of my visit, but I hate eating outside, did not know anyone, and was too hung over to enjoy it.
• I went back to my friend’s house to clean up, but the main floor had been cleared of all its contents. I looked out the back door, and some friends had loaded all the furniture, ornaments, and whatnot, including my clothing, into the back of a truck. They were going to take it all away and clean it as a surprise. When I freaked out about my clothing, they laughed at how uptight I was and drove away, but I knew that the expensive items I had brought along would be destroyed. Jerks.

Last night’s dreams completely confounded me until That Girl figured out what was going on. Apparently, each time something annoying or fucked up happened, it was because someone was trying to be nice or helpful to me. That Girl said, It sounds like you really need to hermit yourself away for awhile. No freaking kidding.

I have really enjoyed the things I have gone out of the apartment to do with people lately, but I find every excursion exhausting. The February Crazy is upon me.

What is the February Crazy, you ask? Well, it is a lovely period of time that occurs annually each February. Its symptoms vary but may include any or all of the following:
• Irritability. Did you say something to me? Because that would be wrong. Are you standing anywhere in my vicinity without obvious purpose? Because that would be wrong, too. Have you walked by me a hundred times rather than turning whatever you are doing into one trip? Because that would be very, very wrong. Did you ask me how I am doing? Seething, thank you.
• Strong urges to run away and join the circus. These urges may also be experienced as desires to become a hippie or ride the rails or do a stint in a nunnery. It is best to avoid these urges by crawling under a blanket and drinking an entire bottle of wine.
• Feelings of guilt. In this case, another symptom, irritability, can often be used to overcome the sense that one has fallen terribly short of others’ expectations, as irritability is usually quite strong during the February Crazy.
• Sudden weeping. When irritability cannot overcome feelings of guilt, sudden emotional outbursts are common. Do not be alarmed. Enjoy wine liberally and hide in a warm bath.
• Vivid dreams that are emotionally upsetting. See above.
• Actions contradict emotions. An individual suffering from the February Crazy may make broad statements about the futility of life and the need to hermit and then will be seen out in public yucking it up. In public, treat an individual with the February Crazy with a gentle hand lest they fall to irritability or weeping. They do not know why they are out in the world, either, and are likely to be easily confused.

Tonight, I am choosing a blanket and a bottle of beer to curl up with while I watch hours of “Law & Order” to divert my attention away from the fact that my system is still trying to deal with the loaf of garlic bread I ate on Sunday. Yes, I said LOAF. The February Crazy also has some slightly less common symptoms, such as the overconsumption of underbaked, white flour products slathered in cheap margarine and garlic powder.

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

People often confuse boredom with depression.

We are overstimulated to excess; by that, I do not mean merely that we are too stimulated, but that we are too overstimulated. There are televisions and computers and radios in the morning, often accompanied by traffic and children and alarm clocks, microwaves that beep, drive-thru coffee shops and gas stations. We meet an onslaught of people and things in the world that demand our attention often before the sun has even risen.

This bores us. Our minds need to wander a little. They need to remember our pasts, imagine things, look ahead, concentrate on problems, but they are squeezed down the narrow funnel of schedules and maintenance. There is so much to do simply to maintain the pattern of our lives that most of our energy becomes devoted to that pattern. We are bored, because we spend so much of our time performing the equivalent of pushing punch cards into slots.

I am often guilty of mistaking the structure for my life. I can trip along in this blindness for days, weeks, and months until I stub my toe on something that moves me, like Utah Phillips telling stories or the right string of poetic phrases, and then it is as though I remember myself. The structure – meetings, my morning muffin, the city bus trips, grocery shopping, feeding the cats – becomes just that: a construct. Then, I feel flailing and hurt, because if I am not these things, what am I? I am a vulnerable thing. I am a small thing. I am a turtle without a shell.

In those soft moments between the hard particulars, I want to run like hell, light out of whatever place I am in as though my hair is on fire. I imagine that I will be a land-loving hippie with sticks in my hair. Or I will be an outsider artist on a llama farm. Or I will become an ascetic poet who still drinks whiskey. I will take up guitar. I will make art films. I will publish books. I will take thousands of photographs. I will build furniture. I will collect clockwork toys and open a museum.

But then it is time to catch the bus again, and I head home to make supper, watch television, bring the clothes up from the dryer, and ready the alarm clock for another day.

(The entry is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmone Or Not, Here I Come.)

See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Three and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Four for the full story.

**************

For the first time in my life, I had someone to talk to about what was going on in my head. My history was littered with failed attempts at reaching out, which made Dr. Ragu’s intense attention all the more unbelievable.

For instance, when I was in grade ten, I joined a group called Peer Counseling that met over the lunch hour once a week. I had this idea that it was going to be some kind of support group, which I wanted, because I was fighting strong suicidal feelings at the time, but when I showed up to the first meeting, I was greeted by a circle of smiley-faced eleventh- and twelfth-graders dressed in expensive clothing and seated with their hands folded on top of their desks.

I’m sorry, I said. I think I have the wrong room.

Are you looking for Peer Counselling? the guidance counselor leading the group asked.

Yes.

Then you’re in the right place, she said.

I thought to myself, I doubt that very much, and took a seat near the door.

As it turned out, Peer Counseling was not a support group that was intended to help its own members; it was a support group that was intended to reach out to students in apparent need outside the group. We were all supposed to be well-adjusted good samaritans who kept lonely students from offing themselves in out-of-the-way bathrooms.

I am not kidding. The guidance counselor, to whom I will refer as Mrs. Lester, took a few minutes during our third meeting to give us all a heads up about a loner who was often found eating her sandwiches alone in the bathroom just outside the theatre. One girl shot up her hand.

Do you think she’s depressed? she asked.

Yes, I do, said Mrs. Lester.

She must be suicidal, another girl said. I totally would be suicidal if I ate my lunch in a bathroom. What should we do?

I think it would be nice if you all could make an effort to bump into her and let her know that she’s not alone, Mrs. Lester said.

I could just imagine it. Ten members of Peer Counselling were going to drop on this girl like Christian fundamentalists on a possible new convert, filled with the spirit of charity for the psychologically downtrodden. I was a bit of a loner myself, so I felt bad for her that Mrs. Lester had sicced a bunch of rosy-faced do-gooders on her in what might have been her only calm place in that whole high school. These people irritated the hell out of me, and I rarely even had to speak to them directly let alone be cornered by them in a dingy bathroom where no one could hear me scream.

A few meetings later, Mrs. Lester showed us a film that contained interviews with suicidal teenagers. She turned off the lights and started up the clattery film projector. As soon as an ancient, green, metal film projector made an appearance, you knew that you were going to be treated to a scratched 1960s educational movie with stilted line delivery. We spent the next half-hour watching teenagers who were now our parents’ age telling us how hopeless they felt.

Mrs. Lester asked us what we had learned from the film.

I think that you would have to be crazy to feel like that, one person said.

I agree, said another. No sane person would ever think that way.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I had contemplated suicide off and on for six years already, and the other peer counselors’ reactions to the film seemed cruel to me. I finally figured out what I hated so much about all of them: they saw themselves as benevolent, psychologically superior, leaders of the lost. All I ever really saw them do was brag about how they had bothered to wave hello or say something nice to someone who looked sad, and Mrs. Lester did nothing to dispel their belief that other people were sad because either they did not smile enough or they were completely mad.

You’re all full of shit, I said under my breath. My hands and legs were trembling. I never spoke out loud in formal situations.

What was that? asked Mrs. Lester.

You are all full of shit, I said more loudly and stood up. I swivelled around and propelled myself toward the door. I was unsteady on my feet from all the adrenaline my glands were spitting out, and I was not sure that I could make it out of the room if I waited any longer.

Why do you say that? asked Mrs. Lester, ever calm.

Suicidal thoughts can happen to anyone, Mrs. Lester, and you should tell them that. I made it through the door and pulled it closed behind me. There was no sound from the other side. I felt like a freak. I was pretty sure that I was a freak.

A few days later, I was called down to Mrs. Lester’s office. She told me that she was worried about me. You would think that I would have seen that as an opportunity to share how afraid of my own brain I was, but I knew that I could not talk to her. I was less than impressed with her Peer Counseling group.

Can you tell me what’s going on with you? she asked.

It’s hard to talk about, I said, trying to buy myself a little time until I found a decent diversion. Then, I hit upon it. I think I might be a lesbian. Lesbianism: a surefire way to add tension to a conversation in the mid-1980s in a largely uninhabited agricultural province.

What? Are you sure? How do you know? She almost always spoke in questions, and they were almost always stupid. Do you want to talk about it?

Nope. Not really, I said as I gathered up my books. I’ll come back if I need anything. She told me to make another appointment with her on my way out, but I didn’t. I was gender-confused and bi-curious at the time, but I did not know enough about lesbianism to keep up my end of a fake counselling session.

That last meeting with Mrs. Lester following my outburst signalled the end of my Peer Counselling career. I decided never to go back. I was relieved, but I also realized that I had completely screwed up any opportunity it had afforded me to be honest about what I was going through. I had joined the group because I had a need to fill, only I did not tell anyone why I was there, including the guidance counsellor. Of course, I later discovered that they were all a bunch of nimrods, but before I found that out I had ample opportunity to tell someone, anyone, what I was going through and that I needed help.

I guess I was too used to keeping mum. I had managed to stay quiet about being suicidal for six years, so I wasn’t exactly itching to spill the beans. I just wanted to stop feeling so alone with it, and the other members of the Peer Counselling group only managed to compound my sense of isolation with their utter lack of comprehension.

Some days, I wish I could take that fifteen-year-old Schmutzie and drag her to a therapist already.

Oh, but wait! I did! Only she was twenty when I took her to see her first psychiatrist. I mean, I was twenty when I took myself to see my first psychiatrist, Dr. Ragu. It is a good thing that fifteen-year-old Schmutzie did not know that it would be another five years before she sought help in any sort of effective manner, because things got really hinky after that, and she did not need any more stress than she already had.

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