RealMental

In geography class, we learned that a plateau is a geologic formation, with a flat top and often, sheer or highly-angled slopes supporting it.  It’s easy to recognize when you’re looking at pictures, or approaching one on a hike through the desert.

In psychiatry’s life class, I learned that it’s what they call it when you’ve reached your maximum efficacy on the dosage you’re taking, and it’s time to go up.  The problem is that psychiatric plateaus are not obvious.  You know the lift from the desert of depression to the top, the stable flat line you can walk for a while, not tripping and stumbling as on your climb to the top.  You don’t realize you’ve reached the end, until you start sliding down the psychiatric plateau’s more gently sloped sides, until you’re halfway down, and then you have to stop yourself, skidding on the rocks and dirt, before flipping yourself over, and climb your way back up, sometimes on hands and knees.

I’ve been climbing my way back to the top, hands and knees scratched and bloody, head pounding and breath shaky from the screeching halt I’ve pulled myself to, and the flat top is once again in sight.  But I’m tired of sliding, and each time I slide I berate myself for not learning, yet, my internal geography, for not knowing the edges of my equilibrium, my flat surfaces, and for not knowing that the plateau doesn’t go on forever in my head, as it does not in nature.  Those mental plateaus, they surprise you, in a way the physical ones don’t.

I called her right after I got out of the meeting. I should have called her two weeks ago, but this is a game I play with myself over and over. Before I got to the meeting, I was a jangle of nerves spilling the coffee on my pants and just a few minutes later, the water tumbled over too.

Why do I always have to carry along liquids everywhere I go? Especially liquids that I know do not fit into the cup holders in the car.

Most likely, the same reason that I forget to take medications and make stupid mistakes that I regret two seconds after making them. I told him tonight as I was getting ready for the meeting that all of these “ailments” I am having are directly related to my center not being centered.

Basically, the things that “get to me” are things that are not going to change. It is up to me to accept these things for what they are.

Still, I manage to find ways to pay penance for my being a mere human that fucks up.

Speaking with her on the phone, she suggested that I try and keep the focus on myself. I shoot back pretty quickly, “but I think that is why I’m loony now”. I fear I’ve been focusing on myself entirely too much. She’s quiet and patient with me. She sees no reason to argue this point, knowing that I will come around when I am ready to come around.

Towards the end of the call she tells me that I sound much better than I did at the beginning of the call.

Her voice is always so calm, so loving, and her words have a way of pulling me back into reality. She asks me, “what have you done for yourself lately?”

I think to myself, “I don’t deserve to do anything nice for me”. I make mistakes, I say stupid things. She isn’t buying it. She’s not taking the “please beat me” bait. She never takes that bait.

I want so much for someone to just tell me how incredibly stupid and thoughtless I am. I tell her that if she won’t do it, I’ll call someone who can. This is meant as a joke, but reminds me of all the times I wanted to be punished for making a mistake and I had folks I could call that were more than happy to tear me down. And I did it all on auto-pilot.

That doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t worked for a very long time, but old habits die hard. The knee-jerk reaction is to seek it out.

It finally dawns on me what I’ve been doing. Creating situations to disrupt my life in such a manner to make me “pay” for my bad behavior. I can know this all day long, and you can even remind me of it but it won’t guarantee my immunity from it.

There is a permanent path in my brain for a few things. When things get crazy, run. When feelings start to rise up, run. If anything uncomfortable, or not nice comes up I am supposed to run.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak I can’t run anymore. It’s like my running legs have been sawed off at the knees. My mind wants to, but my body cannot comply.

I was able to accept what she was giving me, even though it boils down to the truth of me not being able to run. I growled at her for doing such a thing to me. She didn’t do it at all, she was just the voice of reason during a mental breakdown. It is why I have asked her to help me along this journey.

I usually refer to this part of the process as “stop, drop, and roll”.

Reaching our for help pertains to the stop. Releasing what is no longer serving me is the drop. Lastly, the roll part is giving myself a break and moving on. Hopefully that moving on part won’t be as hard as I have a tendency to think it is.

I’ve been having allergic reactions to lithium and abilify recently, the abilify added after I had to quit lithium, cold turkey. The abilify was even worse, and made me feel really crazy for the first time ever– manic, mixed, unable to concentrate, on the verge of rage. Even my worst depressions never left me doubting myself so much. Fortunately, yet again, my great doctors spotted what was going on at an early stage, and now I am off both drugs and going through withdrawal. The withdrawal’s been more of the same, just only slightly less severe each day, and slightly better after each nap, each liter of water, each massage, as the poisons slowly leach there way out.

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Mornings are better/a mostly full night’s sleep/or at least two or three chunks of several hours at a time.
When the antsiness is replaced by weird dreams if you’re lucky/bad ones if the ativan and tylenol and benadryl name brand saviors fall behind the poisons.

With your nocturnal naps under the belt of your bathrobe and some light reading from three to five a.m./and a good liter of water to wash down more name brand saviors/I can mostly function well/well/except I have to pee constantly/pace like a tiger in the zoo/clench dystonic jaw and neck and shoulders and hands into claws of rage and rictus of anxiety/I feel like an animal/in a bad way./To talk wildly/drum fingers constantly/shift and squirm in my seat like a kindergartener/to want to run around the table until it’s time to take an early lunch and walk around the building eight times/more pills/more water.

All day stretching your poor sore stiff self as poisons leach through your pores your pee your sweat/I swear I smell like salt all day/all muscles poisoned, protesting, screaming for relief, especially when you are so distracted you miss the next dose signaled by that cell phone alarm you forgot to answer.

Sitting still is bad enough/talking to someone is worse/keeping in the hypomanic bursts of speech/words burbling like water over stony brooks at icemelt’s bursting./It’s worse after lunch because six hours is really all you’ve got before the name brand saviors cease to be so effective and you need a three hour nap interrupted by a ten minute pee and more nap to feel human again and keep your thoughts from running together like hot caramel overflowing the pot, sticking to everything burning hard to peel away taking forever to cool.

Touch your tightened jaw/your knotted neck/use the sensory trick of touch to tame the tensioned parts momentarily/petting/stroking/pressing/smoothing/soreness frantic when will this stop when will I feel better/maybe I should take just half of the dog that mauled me? to ease it?/but you know that will slow it down, stop it, reverse it, increase it, make it longer harder even worse/unimaginable, unendurable.

You know it can be worse/you know you’re not that bad/you’re home, not at hospital/and while you’re hyped stressed bummed exhausted hurting talking and oh it’s all too much at once/but still you see the light at the end of the tunnel/can say, with reason, that mornings are better/tomorrow will be better than today/and you hope pray wish cry weep for tomorrow to come sooner/soonest for those who don’t know can’t know/deny/relapse/refuse to see/to feel/to believe each morning can be a little better.

Mornings are better, at least for me.

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There was a thought-provoking article in the NYT about the “Mad Pride” movement— about proclaiming our craziness publicly, about being examples of adaptation and function despite it all. Like any movement, any blanket platform, there are lots of threads, some of which are more provocative of thought and agreement and disagreement than others. I’ll try to assemble some thoughts on it next week.

I’ve set out to write something for a few days, unable to string anything together that wasn’t angry, resentful and mean. I finally came to just writing about the facts based on my perception, and that would suffice for the message I wish to convey and the need to speak my truth.

I have toiled over writing here too much about my personal life because I do not wish to cause anyone in my personal life unintended harm, even if I do not particularly like the person.

First, some background information.

Our daughter has been living with her birth mother for her 8^th grade school year, and it’s far away. From the beginning of this arrangement, she told us she missed us, and that she wanted to come home.

The outside people involved in our complicated situation told all of us that this would occur. In fact, her therapist, our therapist advised against it her going, based on the situation. Our daughter’s therapist has been in touch with her birth mother.

The agreement between the adult parties and our daughter would be that this was a temporary arrangement based on how our daughter felt about everything.

When you arranged something like this, you have to rely on faith and trusting other adults to always do what is in the best interest of the child.

It reminds me of that analogy of not trusting a snake. If it bites you once, it will bite you again and blame you for trusting them.

Right before our daughter came home for Christmas for her break, we were served with legal documents stating that her mother wanted to go back to court so that she could get full custody and child support.

My husband has primary custody that does not exclude rights of his ex-wife. Her claim is that she wanted full custody so that she could handle any medical/school/other records that came about. The current custody agreement allows her rights.

In fact, she was able to get our daughter on psyche meds and a psyche evaluation without any approval by my husband. This was a breach of the custody agreement, as she was to discuss this with him before the act, and not send a typed note after the fact.

She would later tell my husband that we weren’t supposed to have gotten the custody papers until after our daughter flew back after the holiday.

During this visit, our daughter expressed her very strong desire to come back home. It was not a surprise to us due to the fact that we’d been a family unit for eight years. We are whom she grew up with; she has friends and family here, lastly a baby brother that misses her a lot.

My husband and I met with our lawyer during the visit to find out what we should do, or if we should even be concerned. One suggestion that came about was that since we did have primary custody, we could just keep her here and send for her things later.

In fact, this is what our daughter said that she wanted to do if her mom was going to try and keep her. None of us felt very good about this option and as you can imagine a tough situation.

She spoke to her mother on the phone while here and told her she was not flying back. Her mother got angry with her, and accused us of trying to manipulate her into this.

I must point out that throughout all of the roller coaster drama we’ve had with this situation for over 8 years, my husband has always held firm to being fair, honest and never trying to do anything sneaky. In fact, it has been suggested that we might try and get a “snake” for a lawyer, but my husband is opposed to that.

The Christmas situation got cleared up (or so we thought) when our daughter’s mother promised her daughter and us that she would drop the case. We both told the mother that we had no issue with paying her child support while our daughter was living with her.

She never paid us any child support while we had our daughter, never supported her financially in any way. My husband is a stand up kind of person and didn’t feel it was necessary.

Our daughter’s mother has been unable to retain steady employment for the past 18 years; I can only assume that she is asking for child support to supplement her income. I know how this sounds and I am not trying to be petty, it is what I honestly believe based on her actions over the years.

Our daughter ended up flying back to her mother’s home and we thought all was well. We were to find out later by mail that it wasn’t ok, and her mother would continue with the custody suit. She has not put forth any efforts to communicate with us other than email and written letters.

Typically, when any type of psyche evaluation is done with a minor, all parties involved are to be communicated with including the parents she’s been with for the past eight years as opposed to only living with her mother for four months.

To leave my husband and I out of this evaluation would cause one to wonder if someone was trying to build up a case in order to gain full custody. In addition to this, she communicated false information into the psyche evaluation about my husband and myself.

On advisement, my husband wrote a letter to the person who performed the evaluation in order to correct the errors in the document.

Our daughter is in active therapy and she likes her therapist. After this therapist advised our daughter’s mother to drop the lawsuit and the pressuring our daughter on “where she wants to live,” the mother told my husband that she would be dropping it again until the summer.

She did not drop it. In fact, we’ve been in contact now with our daughter’s therapist and it appears much lying has occurred and false scenarios described in reference to our situation to the therapist.0

Our lawyer called us last week about 11am stating that we have a hearing in court right now, today. The ex flew down here to appear in court for the initial hearing. The last we’d heard from the ex was that she was dropping it again on the suggestion of our daughter’s therapist.

My husband rushed down to the court room and a temporary judgment is presented. His ex will gain temporary custody of our daughter in addition to us having to pay about 15% of his gross income a month in child support, to include back pay for the 6 months that our daughter has been there.

Hearing that kind of news, is a little like feeling your stomach being ripped out of your body through the route of your nose. Suddenly, you weigh 9000 pounds and you are filled with brick.

I called our daughter at school that day to find out if she had any idea what was going on, as well if she was ok with her mother having full custody.

She said she was NOT ok with it and her therapist recently advised her to tell her mother the truth and our daughter did this in front of the therapist.

Lucky for our daughter, there was a witness. In addition, her mother has been blocking communication between her Dad and I to our daughter. This actually began many months ago. Prior to that, our daughter could not go into a private room to speak with us it had to all be done in the company of others.

It was a very difficult decision to allow our daughter to go and live with her mother for the 8^th grade. We had been discussing this for at least three years. It was extremely painful and gut wrenching for all of us and suffice to say our summer last year was painful.

We were honoring our daughter’s request to see what it would be like to live with her mother on her own terms since she was older.

I trust that it’s been a big a good experience for our daughter to live with her mother. We were willing to accept that we could possibly lose her, as long as she was happy and peaceful. She loves her mother, but is very angry with her over this situation. Our daughter wants the freedom of choice, not to be forced by law.

The future is uncertain right now, yet my husband and I have been here before, and we are a united front. We will acclimate with the outcome whatever it will be, even if it is not the one we would choose.

The big picture is there are only a few more years before our daughter will be a legal adult and hopefully all this insanity will be behind us.

As I told my daughter when I last spoke with her, we will go to bat as far as we can even if that means we will have to live in a dumpster.

Dear Mom:

Brother and I owe you an apology– we have been indulging in a months-long fantasy that you’ve been OK, ever since you left here in November. We should have known that two breaks in two months was too much, and come out to visit earlier. But we’ve been hoping and wishing that you’d be compliant, and take your meds, and go to your shrink, and behave like a rational adult. Why we engaged in this mutual delusion, when you never took responsibility before you were diagnosed, I don’t know. But I’m sorry we let you slide for so long.

Instead, when you stopped answering your phone this week and disconnected the answering machine “because God told you to,” I had a sense of dread that This Was It. And then I got the call from Shrink that you’d missed a second appointment in a row. When Aunt got over there to check on you at Brother’s request, it wasn’t pretty. You answered the door stark naked. The toilet had overflowed, and there was a more than dubious puddle out into the hallway and into your bedroom. The management company had to tear it up.

To be fair to us, even after we discovered that your mania had allowed you to lie about med compliance in a calm and even tone, there were long periods where you seemed really lucid. You had normal conversations, recalled things from past calls, had no trouble recalling words or nouns, and didn’t drift off, mid-sentence. Your intelligence masked how far off the deep end you were—it was only seeing you in person that would allow the observer to see all the things you’d thrown away, and read all the stacks of gibberish God had told you to write.

When Brother got there, he was able to observe those things. He was also able to see how suggestible you were. We’re both worried for what this means to your bank account. And you refused to go for inpatient treatment. Well, your shrink doesn’t want you back as a patient, so if Brother can’t find you a new one next week with the help of the county social services agency I’ll be calling, we may be committing you anyway.

You see, we need you stable enough so that you don’t act up on the plane ride home. Because you can’t stay out there anymore. You can’t be trusted to take your medications or attend your appointments, and we can’t fly out to the West Coast to frog march you into every appointment. Once we get you qualified for Disability, there’ll be a supplement to your income, too, and hopefully we can get you into a nice Assisted Living facility where you can take some of your stuff.

We’re not looking forward to the fight in getting you home. We’re hoping that physically watching you take your meds every day for two weeks will get you stabilized enough that you won’t fight about it. But if we have to have you declared incompetent over your objections, so be it. It might almost be better if you stayed as you are, docile and agreeable, while we pack your things, change all your financial papers, and deal with your current landlord.

If you do regain some lucidity, I know you’re going to think we’re just trying to take over your life, but that’s the furthest thing from the truth. See, I can’t speak for Brother, but I really want very little to do with you. I want you to be happy and safe—I don’t hate you—but I don’t want you in my life, really, except at the outskirts. Bringing you back means weekly visits and caretaking and tolerance of your narcissistic bullshit, when all the while I really want to slap you for being so selfish.

At the same time, Brother and I are happy for you, if not us, inasmuch as your separation from reality seems to have stabilized at a happy point. You’re not paranoid or angry or violent, and you know who and where you are. While a nice scary psychotic break would have at least landed you in the hospital, giving us some leeway in getting them to keep you longer to try out a better medication regimen, I don’t wish you the scary visions and voices that would have required.

We don’t know what’s going to happen—we’ve been worried you were undermedicated anyway, and on the wrong mood stabilizer to boot, so we’re hoping we can get you something back to normal. But it’s been a while now that you’ve been fluctuating in this narrow band of crazy, and that does real damage to your brain, even though you didn’t believe me when I tried to talk to you about the need to take your meds, back when this whole thing started. So, if you remain the precocious and delusional three year old that you are right now, well, it could be worse.

You may never read this letter. Even if you do, your bipolar and your narcissism may prevent you from appreciating the best intentions that Brother and I have in setting you up someplace where you can have some independence, and yet still be taken care of. Despite all your faults, despite all the damage you did, you did instill in us a sense of responsibility, of caring for those not capable. I’m sorry, too, that I can’t end this letter by saying that I forgive you. I don’t, and I may not be able to. But I won’t hold it against you, either, and that’s to your credit, no matter everything else.

Sometimes, I think our partners have the patience of saints. Is it just me, or do we Real Mental types tend to find the most supportive, understanding, kind partners, ever? From what I’ve read on others’ blogs, it’s not just me. Our mates, they are pretty awesome. I’m so very happy I finally found someone who understands me and accepts me for who I am.

Here’s an example:

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that my jaw is currently wired shut because of a recent jaw surgery. Because of this, I’ve had to find alternate ways of taking my meds. The Celexa can be crushed and sucked back with some juice, but the Wellbutrin is a slow-release tablet and can’t be crushed. It has to be swallowed whole, which is a bit of a problem when your jaw is wired shut.

While I was in the hospital following the surgery, I devised a clever way to take my pill. I pushed it along my top gums until it reached the very back of my mouth, and then I finessed it into the small crack behind my back molars. I poked and prodded and sucked at it until it popped through the other side. To help it along, I also doused the thing in juice from a syringe.

I was pretty proud of myself, and my surgeon was most impressed. I just knew that I had to find a way to take it, because there was no way in hell I was missing a single pill. It had taken me so long to get to a place where my meds were in the proper balance and I felt like a human being again. I couldn’t take the chance of jeopardizing that.

Late last week, I noticed that my mouth tasted funny. Bitter like crushed pills. All day. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe one of the fragments of Celexa had caught in my wires and left a lingering taste? I put it out of my head. Then, on Saturday, Superstar and I were out and I noticed something caught behind one of my back molars. I coaxed it with my tongue until it came free and lolled it around my mouth, trying to figure out what it was.

It dawned on me that it was the casing for one of the Wellbutrin tablets. Instead of slow-releasing in my stomach, it had done so in my mouth. I wasn’t sure how long it had been there. I didn’t think much of it and swallowed the casing.

On Sunday, we went out to the movie Juno. At the end, I cried my head off. Not just cried. Bawled. Lost it. I mean, I controlled myself in the movie theatre pretty well, but if there had been no one else around, I would have had a big sob fest for a few hours, at least. It was a good movie, and every woman I know has cried at the end, but my reaction surprised me. I passed it off as mid-30s ticking biological clock hormones, and Superstar and I went for coffee.

For some reason, I decided this was a good time to talk about the future of our relationship (since minutes after seeing the movie, I decided I wanted to pop out babies, and soon – huh?) and we end up getting into this big, emotional discussion where I sobbed my head off almost the entire time and said ridiculous things like “I don’t respect you.” Yes, it was over a specific issue that is a bone of contention for us, but I have no idea why I said that. I certainly didn’t mean it. I will never be able to erase the memory of the hurt look on his face after I said those words. It aches just to think about it.

We got through the discussion and I managed to convince him that I had said the wrong words and he misunderstood me. We made peace and left the coffee shop. As we were walking out, I became aware of all the people around us and wondered if I had made a spectacle. Then, we went home and lay in bed while I cried for a few more hours about nothing in particular, and he stroked my back and tried to make me feel better.

The thing is, I’m usually not a drama queen. I certainly don’t cry in public, and Superstar and I rarely argue or have upsetting discussions. But this day, he got a big dose of The Crazy. And then some.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized the emotional rollercoaster was a result of the wonky dosage of Wellbutrin from the stuck pill. It was then that I resolved never to go off my meds. I don’t want to know what it feels like to be that out of control and out of touch again.

And as for Superstar, I thank my lucky stars that I found him. I’m not sure I could be so patient if the tables were turned.

I have been on medication for two years. I have tried drugs at other points in my life, but never stuck to them, or became addicted to them. Ativan, lorazepam – they are my friends. Too much so. My addictive personality. I can’t use moderation with those “downer” type  meds. So the doctors just don’t give them to me anymore.

I have been on Cipralex/Lexapro 15mg for almost a year. I switched to this medication from Effexor which made me have uncontrollable brain shivers and twitching. I wanted to believe it was helping. I wanted it to help. I don’t think it ever really did. It certainly didn’t stop me from trying to commit suicide. It didn’t stop me from being sad most of the time.

It did, however, keep me from having ten or more panic attacks every day, in every social situation. It did give me the strength to make some incredibly difficult changes in my life. It gave me the backbone to leave a toxic marriage. It helped me to get through the first few months of being single and a single mother.

I could never shake the feeling of fogginess the enveloped my brain. The twitching in bed. The insomnia. The headaches. The aching in my joints. The loss of libido. The loss of desire to read. To write. Trying to grasp at straws by drinking wine. Trying to bring back some semblance of the vibrant artistic, passionate person i used to be.

Over the past few months as i have looked at myself. Really looked at myself. I realized that, for me, the cost to my self-esteem of taking medication and it’s side-effects are too much. That i was ready to try life free from the chains of the big drug companies. To look in to a more holistic way of treating myself. Exercise, herbal remedies, vitamins, sleep, less alcohol. I am more than willing to go back on medication if this doesn’t work. I have to make that deal with myself. For me. For my children.

But, as of this week i am med free. I am in pain from withdrawal. It is tougher than i thought it would be. But i am hopeful. I have hope. That is something wonderful.