RealMental

Yesterday, I attended a meeting. I like these meetings, because this group is populated with such intelligent, friendly women. This kind of space is rare for me, and I am glad to be a part of their organization. With this in mind, you would think I would have been able to pay attention, but I could not.

My mind wandered away and thought about cedillas. You read that right. I thought about the little, diacritical cedilla, that small hook often found dangling under a C: ç. And then, I thought about the tilde that often appears over Ns (ñ) in Spanish words and how it beats the apostrophe hands down, because rather than only having the capacity to replace missing letters within a word, such as in couldn’t, the tilde can behave as a character in its own right and replace an entire word, such as in dictionary entries to replace the headword when it is repeated within the entry. And then, there is that delightful hat of a circumflex, which sometimes, though not always, indicates a missing letter in a word that was once there and is no longer, such as in the French hôtel, which used to be hostel. Hey, it says, there was another letter here once, but I’m not going to tell you what it was or why it left. I kind of miss it. Poor little gaffer. He has to point out the holes that no one can see.

I thought about all that and completely forgot that I was in a boardroom filled with a bunch of people with whom I was supposed to be actively making financial decisions. This happens to me a lot lately. It is as though my brain’s ability to actively focus its concentration has had a stroke.

You think I am lying, because how would I get from one end of an entry to another if I could not focus my energy? I am slowly learning tricks to remain at least somewhat productive. The main tactic I use is to have several things up in the air at once. I will write a sentence, knit for ten minutes, scoop the cats’ litter boxes, hash out five or seven more sentences, read some websites, watch a bit of “Law & Order”, have a good run at a paragraph or two, make tea, read a magazine, write some closing lines, talk to the Palinode, edit the entry, knit some rows, and then post the entry.

What used to take me an hour is now spread out over a whole day or two, and by the time I am done, I am rarely confident that I have made much sense. Thankfully, I usually do make sense, but it can take me several hours before I am able go back and see the entry in a linear fashion.

This recent way of experiencing the world has put my confidence on shaky ground. I am not always sure what I mean when I talk or write, which makes me wonder what it is I believe. Why am I here doing this talking and this writing? When I am out of the house, I wonder why I am out, and when I am at home, I wonder why I am not out.

My brain has ceased to be where I am, and it is making me feel like little more than a reactionary sponge, an anxious baby.

But I am suspicious of even that interpretation of how I feel.

Part of me is hopeful that I am really on simmer like a large pot of stew, bubbling away for hours and days until everything gels together in just the right configuration of flavour and consistency. I would like to think that something is happening just outside my line of sight, and that in a week or two weeks or a month I will find myself scribbling out poetry and prose and taking photographs with the storehouse of creativity that has been silently cultivating itself inside my chest.

Right now, though, I worry that this is all I have, that the medication I am taking is also taking me, that we are snakes eating each others’ tails.

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

There was a time in my life when it felt like things were constantly being revealed to me.

I remember being fourteen. I borrowed cassette tapes from the library, stuff like Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure, because I did not have a lot of money, my parents would have been all The Psychedelic Furs who?, and the radio never played the less commercial stuff, so I couldn’t tape it. The library’s cassette tapes cases were so covered in scratches that the liners looked cloudy through them, and the silver song titles lettered on the tapes themselves were worn away at the center from having been inserted and removed from so many tape players by so many sweaty, teenaged fingers. I sometimes rubbed the blank spot where song titles had been and imagined who else had listened to this tape holed away in the isolation of suburban bedrooms. I missed them without knowing them.

The cases and tapes may have shown wear, but the liner notes were always in pristine condition. Before the advent of the internet, these inserts were sometimes the only connections we had to the artists who made those tapes aside from a rare video played on Much Music. I would unfold the liner, which, depending on the amount of information inside, could be over a foot long, anticipating the new words, ideas, style of thinking, aesthetic, politics. Something new, something potentially life-altering was literally unfolding in front of me, and I was mesmerized by the tiny lyrics I squinted over.

It was the same with the books on transcendental meditation I borrowed, the pornographic novels I found stashed in the back of a desk, the French television station late at night that was always more bizarre and risqué than any English station, the over-sized books in the visual arts section of the big library downtown. These things offered themselves up to me, revealed their interiors to me slowly, explaining themselves as we went along together. I was young enough for the world to appear to be birthing itself alongside me; we were both as wet and new as the other. My witnessing of new material was my witness of its creation.

I do not feel that now. Or rather, I do, but rarely, and the sensation of awakening revelation has fast feet.

I am acclimating myself to Fall. Over the last few years, the beginning of my winter sadness starts a little earlier than the year before. This year, it could not even save itself for September, and I feel like I am losing myself too early. I want to grab on to myself and keep me here a little longer, but there is nothing here to grab on to, and I have become overwhelmed with the idea that the world is little else but a subtraction machine. It vacuums out people and dreams and joy. It winds new things down until they are old. We, life and I, are not walking hand in hand witnessing creation; I am trudging in its wake, watching pieces of my life turn into detritus and get pulled into the undercurrent.

Since my hysterectomy, I have been having a much more difficult time than usual accepting my body as a thing that I have much to do with. It betrayed me, and now when I look at it, I see something old and tired. It is ugly. It is the friend you so admired once who suddenly shrugged you off, and it has complicated matters. My annual retreat into paranoia, anxiety, and depression is happening earlier, more heavily, and with much less hope at the edges. It is solid. I want to lie in bed until next June.

I want that sensation of awakening revelation, of being at the heart of my life’s creation, to be more fully present. I am angry that my psychology has rhythms that work to prevent that. I am angry that my image of my body has been tarnished by cancer. I am angry that my chemistry makes me tired and sad, and that the loss of my uterus has made me tired and sad, and that these things together make me even more tired and sad, and that every day just feels like another subtraction.

I know that this view of all humanity as being slowly deflating balloons is incorrect. It is unnecessary. It is stereotyping, but I think that sometimes I blanket the whole world with my sense of being in order to justify it. We are ALL like this; this is the way things ARE; I do not have to blame myself for my position, because this is how it IS. At the same time, I know I am wrong, because I do have the ability to be at creation’s root each time I write, take photographs, and create art. It is just a terribly difficult think to fix my eye on at a time when all seems lost.

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

I do not have the slightest clue how those of you with children out there manage. I have two rambunctious male cats, and one of them finds himself locked up in a cat carrier at least once a week so that I can keep my hands from choking his fuzzy, little neck. Unlike your average housecat, a child can outgrow a cat carrier within the first year, and after that, when they gain the power of spoken word, you are kind of screwed, because if they breathe one word about life in a cat kennel from that cute face of theirs, and the neighbours would have child protective service busting down your door.

So, I am quite happy that my cats cannot talk and that my neighbour is too allergic to go near them.

The other day, in the midst of this ongoing contagion I caught whilst working in the cubicle farm, I lay in bed, examining myself both physically and psychologically for as many flaws as I could mentally hold in a list at one time, because this is what the common cold does to me. It liberates all my self-loathing that I can normally quash down and lets it run amok. Thankfully, colds also make me stupid, so my list kept losing its stability at about point number five; otherwise, I could have driven myself into a truly messy unraveling. I chose to stick with the four or five things I could remember that were truly and awfully wrong with me (one of which was the ugliness of my belly button, I kid you not) and quietly lamented my fate as a has-been who never was.

And then, a pair of hind cat paws viciously interrupted my eeyore-ing. They dug into my still hysterectomy-tender belly flesh as they propelled the attached cat onto a second cat further down the bed, which was followed by thumping and galumphing and yowled pleas for mercy as the two of them tore through every room in the apartment, ripping out chunks of each other’s fur as they went. Of course, my bed happened to be the focal point of said circuit. My yowled pleas for mercy each time they hurled themselves across and at me while I cowered under the blankets were obviously incorrectly pronounced, because neither of them appeared to recognize my plight. Cats don’t give a whit for human tears or whimpers.

Normally, I can laugh at their behaviour, but that day I was too sensitive for it. Every crease in the sheets, every book out of place, each hair on my head: it was all too much with me, and the extra feline chaos was driving me mad. I abruptly sat up and pinned the larger cat to the bed with a flat palm. The smaller one stopped on the floor and stared up at me in surprise.

Cats, I said, my voice wet with new tears, I cannot handle this today. I love you. You are beautiful. But, I am crazy. I am lying here and going crazy. I”M CRAZY. Do you hear me? I am terrible and ugly and not very nice, and I can’t leave the house, because I can’t handle seeing everything out there today. So, be still, just for a little while. Please. Be still, and maybe cuddle me a bit or something, because I don’t want to have to kill you or lock you up. None of us wants that. I know that you don’t want that.

I sniffed. They stared at me with big, round eyes. Even their walnut-sized brains grasped the gravity of the situation. I could tell by the way they stayed put and bobbed their noses around to better sniff my derangement in the air.

I probably even smell crazy to you, right now. And I am LOSING IT. Do you hear me? LOSING IT. Oh, gawd, I need to lie down and for you to be quiet, quiet, quiet. Do you think you can do that? If the universe is not an entirely cruel place, and if you are a part of this universe, then you will know to stop what you are doing. Because I love you. And killing you is too crazy. Oh, I love you cats. I would never kill you. Really.

I lifted the palm I was using to flatten the larger cat, and he gave me a wary look. He did not get up. The smaller cat continued to stare. I realized that I was in the middle of a scene not entirely unlike one I remembered from the movie “Overboard” with Goldie Hahn and Kurt Russell, in which Hahn’s character, Joanna, loses her mind and goes catatonic while three boys masquerading as her sons try to throw grapes into her mouth to get her to eat, except that my boys are both under fifteen pounds, cannot speak, and do not even have opposable thumbs. If they did, lord help me.

Which memory, by the by, brings me back in a roundabout way to my original thought: I applaude those of you with children for having the fortitude not to completely lose your shit on a regular basis, because this person right here, this one typing these words, stoops to shameless speechifying in front of two cats when faced with little more than the common cold and a mild depression. When you find yourself being stared at like you are gonzo by two not-so-intelligent housepets, you know it is time to either get over that cold or alter your medication.

(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.

Throughout my life, I have dealt with lesser and greater levels of depression and anxiety. I remember sitting on my bed and feeling a general, aimless sadness as young as the age of two. I was suicidal at nine. At fifteen, the voice of a young male resided in my head for several months. In my early twenties, my issues escalated to such a point that I finally found myself a psychiatrist and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. A second opinion pegged me as manic depressive, and a third as schizoid affective, all within a two-year period. I have been on and off several different medications in an effort to deal with emotions and delusions that are occasionally more extreme since my early twenties than they had ever been before that point.

I suffered intolerable side effects with each drug I was prescribed, and so from August 2001 until January 2007 I tried to live mainly medication free aside from a trial flirtation with St. John’s Wort. The sad fact about St. John’s Wort, according to my research, is that not only was I supposed to stay away from old cheeses, red wine, beer, yeast, and strangely enough, pickled herring, but it lowers the effectiveness of the birth control pill and increased my skin’s sensitivity sunlight. Old cheeses, red wine, and beer are three major comestibles that make my life worth living. I would never kick a wedge of blue cheese out of bed for drinking beer.

After living for five-and-a-half years without prescription medication, I found myself completely bottoming out last winter. During the day, I cried at work, thought that everyone I knew was talking behind my back, often believed I was too ugly to socialize publicly, and lost my ability to concentrate on tasks for any length of time. At night, I lay awake unable to stop my brain from running through all the ways in which I had failed myself and others during the day. Sleeping usually meant three hours of catnapping and trying to swallow the bone that seemed to be stuck in my throat. As is common when my depression and anxiety get the better of me, I lived in constant pain and had to take large doses of pain medications just to keep from weeping.

It was not until I spent a week at home sick because I spiked a fever every time I thought about leaving the house that I was willing to accept that I needed to try medication again. When your partner suggests that extended work leave combined with a hospital stay might be the answer, it is time. I made an emergency appointment with my doctor, and after talking with her about the length of my symptoms (since 1975) and family history (largely undiagnosed but obvious), she prescribed Celexa for my condition. It took me a lot of courage to fill that prescription and take that first pill, because I had visions of dry mouth, suicidal urges, and electrical zaps dancing in my head from previous medications, but I took a deep breath, threw the little white pill into the back of my throat, and swallowed.

So far, it is one of the best things I ever did for myself. I am generally happier, more creative, and more relaxed. I say generally, because this psychological lift has been tempered by my recent bout with cervical cancer, which has thrown in a whole world of complication, but that’s how life rolls. Before this medication, I could not have said that.

I am still skeptical of prescription medication’s actual usefulness in a lot of cases, but I am far less anti-pharmaceutical than I used to be. Any time that I have missed a dose or two and am treated to another taste of how I used to feel every moment of every day, I wish that my medication could take human form. Neither it nor I are perfect, but if it didn’t smell like paint thinner, I would lick it all over and ask it to go steady.