RealMental

My house is in a state of deconstruction. Fix It Dude comes over everyday at 7 a.m. (yes, even in the -26 C weather) and wakes me up with the sound of a crowbar against aluminum siding. He rips off pieces of my abode, tossing the metal and wood in an unruly pile on my deck and replacing it with overpriced insulation.

My house was built in 1946, and if you look at the front of it at the moment, you can see all the layers of its existence, from the recently added pink Styrofoam insulation and red tape, to the tacky white and yellow aluminum siding from the 70s, to the even worse teal blue wooden siding underneath that, to the black tar paper beneath it all. It’s a mishmash of 51 years of renovations and I gotta say, it looks like hell.

(And it’s going to look like a construction zone all winter, because we can’t stucco over the hot pink insulation until spring.)

But then I remind myself that this is all necessary. Those layers need to be excavated and ripped down so that I can start fresh and have a home that I’m proud of, not just one that I’m living in. As crappy as it looks now, when we’re done, it will be worth it.

This is how my life feels right now – in absolute disarray. It’s frustrating and exhausting and it seems like there is no end to the difficulties I am facing. I can’t even imagine what my life will look like when this is all over. It’s hard to believe that it will ever be over.

But I keep chipping away at it. Taking the drugs. Going to therapy. Doing the hard work. And hoping that what works for houses works for people, too.

Originally posted at Saviabella on November 27, 2007.

I am learning.

Very slowly, I am learning.

The very thing that I need to see the most has been the very thing that is most clouded. I said to my therapist recently, “why didn’t you just tell me this in the very beginning so I could have been working on it?”

The thing is he probably did.

He probably did, and he wasn’t alone; there have been others that tried to help me to see. The very truth that I seek is shrouded in smoke.

Like a flimsy fish, I grab hold of its slippery body hoping to hold on and it wiggles out and swims back out into the ocean of my dreams.

My psyche is like an ocean liner, which turns slowly. Unlike a speed boat, a turn is fast. Some days I wish for the speed boat, and probably some days I get the speed boat.

Those bigger, meatier issues that slither within the curves of my brain are the ones that are the most reluctant to leave. Perhaps it took more time to build them, making their dismantle more elusive.

Some days I am the speed racer running from here to there, GETTING THINGS DONE. Some days, I am the ocean liner moving slowly and gently through the currents.

On the slow days, that voice in my head likes to remind me that I suck, I am in efficient and do not stack up well with my peers.

That is the mean voice, more than likely the voice of my mother. Every thing that is wrong is her fault right? I jest as I know it is not her fault. The fault is in allowing the voice to continue its rental status in my head, free of charge.

I told you, I am learning.

And today was an ocean liner day.

By coolbeans

I spent several hours today thinking about what to write. I looked for memes. I checked out writing prompts. I considered ripping off Plain Jane by pulling together my own “Go Read It Today” post.

Instead, I checked my archives to send you back to a post from 2006. But this time last year, I wasn’t writing. At least, I wasn’t writing online.

My empty blog archive sent me to my secret hiding spot for the real dirt my brain coughs up. I dug out the paper journal I’d used last year in the middle of an emotional avalanche. I tipped the notebook back and forth between my palms, feeling its weight, wondering if this wasn’t a really stupid idea. Maybe today’s the day to write bad haiku.

Deep breath
crease the spine
dive inside

There wasn’t an entry for today. In fact, there was a gap between the end of October and the end of November. The closest I came was “I haven’t journaled for almost a month.”

Open to Fall
no words for today
just a dead end

I thought that I might share some of that journal someday. I anticipated scanning pages, blurring text, biting my lip and the bullet as I hit “Publish”. But at finding nothing in the heart of the fall last year, I flipped to the beginning and read through to the end. I wonder what I had thought was worth sharing. When I read it now I’m detached, calm, and judgmental. I think it sounds a little too dramatic. A written prayer feels forced, my plea for a different history reads like melodrama, the need to get everything out of my head looks like exaggeration. I decide, “This is too much. It’s so over-the-top. Who would want to read this? It’s grim and dismal and a little ridiculous.”

But that’s what it sounds like when you want to die.

I moped around for a few minutes because I felt stupid for thinking the things I thought. I was angry for things I wrote. I was angrier for words I didn’t write and couldn’t have written because I never said them.

I didn’t stew for long, though. I don’t have to. I’m on the other side of it and I’m not still writing those things because I’m not still feeling those things. A part of me wonders if maybe it really was selfish and self-indulgent. But I remember to forgive myself. Truly, I struggle to envision how it could have been different. I worked hard to stay on top of things. I was doing everything right but I’d been running on empty and had even gotten out to push for a good long while. There’s only one other way I can imagine getting past everything that I blew the whistle on last year. And now, I can’t imagine not being here to write this today.

_______________

1-800-SUICIDE
(1-800-784-2433)

1-800-273-TALK
(1-800-273-8255)

Originally posted here.

I went to a different type of recovery meeting tonight. It is for sober members that are depressed and/or have other types of mental illness.

(The meeting is kept highly confidential lest the others discover us that have to take meds to help with our derelictions other than alcoholism.)

In some (emphasis on some, not all) circles of recovery, it is frowned upon to take antidepressants, or pain medications even for surgery.

If you are unaware of recovery meetings, I ask you not to get the wrong idea about recovery, and the possibility that it is a terrible place in which people tell you how to live your life.

Recovery rooms are very much like real life, they include the general population that many of us avoid. You can find total acceptance and unconditional love in recovery rooms, you can take what you want and leave the rest.

Again, the rooms are inhabited by mere humans. The main object is for you to find a power greater than you are and whatever that power may be; you get to decide exclusively for yourself.

This meeting is a little different from most I attend. In that, you can safely discuss other mental health issues without losing sight of being an alcoholic.

I was impressed with the content of the meeting and the acknowledgement of mental illness being a worse stigma than being an addict/alcoholic. I knew this in my head but it wasn’t in perspective.

It is an alarming suggestion to me that mental illness is in fact, a bigger shortcoming than alcoholism. As if, our derelictions are in competition with one another.

People that are not educated; think that mental illness is something people can just shake off, or that they can just pull themselves up by their boot straps and stop whining already. That certainly sounds easy enough. If it were that easy, I am guessing that no one would ever commit suicide ever again.

Even larger is that mental illness and addictions have haunted humans for centuries. One would think in all of that time and with all of the lives lost, acceptance and education would have had a bigger saturation impact.

People with mental illness desire permission to speak their truth, to be accepted, and loved. We will get better. Once we begin to get better, we can pass it on. Passing it on will help ease the shame of those that will come after us.

By passing it on, someone will realize they do not have to live another day in bondage of shame and sorrow, and seek the help they need. We won’t have to hide in top secret locations or to write anonymously lest we be found out.

Our big secret is simply that we are trying to manage our mental illness with medications and other human support so we can get better.

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

Well, so far I have. Thirteen days.

It’s been difficult because cigarettes and crazy people are made for each other. Smoking feels good when you’re manic because it’s calming. It feels good when you’re depressed because it’s stimulating.  It fills the reward centers of your brain with dopamine–something you don’t have a whole lot of if you’re crazy. You don’t need a prescription for cigarettes, even with the taxes they’re way cheaper than Ambien, and you get twenty little friends in a convenient flip-top box unless only the soft packs are left.

When I was inpatient I discovered that despite the variety in the ward–we were men and women, we were old and young, we were different races and religions, we had different conditions and symptoms–we all liked smoking. Several of us skipped “fresh-air break” because it’s not worth standing on a cement porch watching traffic for fifteen minutes if you don’t get to smoke. Instead we lined up at the nurses’ station for nicotine gum after our dinner trays.  My mom slipped me some extra on a visit, and I cultivated a distribution network.

Now gum is all I have. I chew it furiously at regular intervals. It makes me hyper and gives me gas, and even twelve days in I’m still coughing like a slot jockey at Binion’s Horseshoe. But chewing gum is actually a pleasant vehicle for drugs; it sure tastes better than Prozac.

she asked via email if it was scary for me. i thought, “very much so.” the more i thought about the question, the more i questioned why it is more fearful to write about it, versus just having it float around upstairs.

i realized that it’s easier to not put in writing so i can go on pretending it’s not a big deal. the writing about it puts your brain on code red alert for blowing it’s defense mechanism. defense is a part of the default brain package.

writing about painful experiences puts you back in those painful experiences temporarily. i’ve been carrying it around, for other people. their dirty fucking secrets with me as the safe deposit box. fuckers and bastards.

for years, i downplayed my history (part of that default brain function). in fact, i had a hard time beginning therapy because I didn’t understand why my past mattered now?!

i was a tough broad. if i felt you wronged me or i could not trust you, i would walk away AND blow up that bridge. i did not need anyone or anything. yeah, i was hardcore. or so i thought.

the message i heard was that you deny everything, push it down and you sure as hell do not burden another person with your shit. you put on your emotional quarterback suit and shout, DEFENSE! DEFENSE!

when i first read the beginning series of “a child called it,” i had a hard time believing that any of it could be true. i remember hearing inside of my head that “what i experienced wasn’t nearly as bad as what he went through”.

yeah, i love that theory. it leads to another road paved with defense and denial neither of which serves to heal you.

perspective comes in small bits and pieces. some days i think all this talking and chipping away has been a waste of precious time. i have to remember that the process is slow and it will last my lifetime.

there is no turning back, trying to do so could easily shut the door on all the progress i HAVE made.

besides, there is a little person inside of me that is worthy of the battle. she looks to me for protection.