RealMental

It turns out I am that patient.  The super irritating, crazy (okay relative term) one who calls her doctor and leaves a billion messages after hours when a four or five sentence message would do.  I just left my doctor THREE messages in a row.  I have to cancel my appointment for tomorrow because my daughter has spiked a fever and new symptoms only a week after recovering from piggy flu.  I had three appointments scheduled for tomorrow because it is the day my mother-in-law takes my daughter all day so I have the entire time my son is at school to get things done.  Now I have to keep my little one home and try to get her seen by her pediatrician.

After being sick (still am… stupid bronchitis) for the last few weeks tomorrow’s appointments have a particularly high importance.  Really- none of them should be missed but I had to pick one to be covered by my husband, one to take the kids with me to and one to skip.  Sadly, therapy, even after missing two weeks already, was the one that got kicked to the curb.  Awesome.  No really, after being cooped up and then tearing around trying to straighten out the kinks in our life leftover from having a sick household, I really wanted to miss the chance to talk to someone by myself who will listen to me and only me and will nod and agree and tell me that things really will be better.  Things really are better.  Who needs that?

So I called my doctor (who I adore) and tried to leave a normal message but ended up sounding like a raging psychopath with a grudge to contend with.  I mean I really sounded angry.  I am angry.  This sucks.  That is my great SAT vocabulary word to describe the situation.  So I left one pissy sounding message trying to explain why I had to cancel.  Then I got cut off.  Not unusual actually- my messages for her tend to be long and foolish but generally on the ridiculous, silly side of the couch, not the Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” side.  So I called back.  In my second message I tried to be more normal and gentle.  I told her what I needed, when to call, that I am not as angry as it seems but okay maybe I am super mad but come on now wouldn’t you be after all look at this isn’t this just my kind of luck isn’t this just my kind of life did I marry Murphy of Murphy’s Law?  Then I got cut off.

Of course I called back.  My two one-sided conversations (that will one day serve as evidence in either a commitment hearing or a dissertation on the devolution of modern language even among writers) simply were not enough.  How could I end on such a dour note?  How I could I let her think that I was the type of person who needs therapy?  Oh shit… Scratch the last one.  There isn’t a “type” of person who needs therapy and the only thing my messages were proving was that I need a verbal editor to follow me at all times.  And of course that I am a mite bit unhappy with the current disruption to my life.

THREE messages.  In a row.  I am fully expecting a call back suggesting that maybe I selected the wrong appointment to miss.

New message:

Hi Dr. Saved-My-Life! It’s Miriam X and I wanted to let you know that X (wee little sweetheart sicky girl) has spiked a new fever so regretfully I have to cancel our appointment.  Please call me when you get a moment so we can talk about prescription issues and scheduling.  Oh and I am totally not raging on the inside, stuffing all this down as far as I can in hopes of getting through another week so… no worries. Sorry for the inconvenience and have a super swell day!

Some memories are like early fall’s leaves. Red, coral, gold. Yellow dappled with green. Round, smooth- edged birch leaves, almost lemony-yellow. Jagged-edged, tough golden beech leaves, veined and oblong. The classic, red/gold/orange sugar maples, the kind of fall leaf children draw when asked to draw the Platonic Fall Leaf. Blood red, delicate Japanese maple leaves, straight out of a Hiroshige woodcut print. Red oak leaves, the more delicate, branch-like arms of the leaves a deep, almost maroon red in some lights. These leaves, on and off the tree, are cause for rejoicing—they’re ready to be picked over, collected, set into pleasing arrangements of happy colors and thoughts of when they provided you shade in the heat of summer, green-shielded you from rain in early spring and during late August’s thunderstorms, dappled you with warm sunlight in the breeze as you lay underneath, admiring the view. There are as many memories as there are early fall leaves, each one distinct, and colorful, and welcome. The whish-whish-whish as you walk through the leaves piled along memory lane, admiring the ones on the ground and the ones overhead yet to fall is a sensory experience, almost an overload, with the colors, the cool air, the warm smell, almost like baking.

They’re pretty, on the tree and on the ground. We like to admire them where they fall—they’re pleasing to the eye, a reminder of how as time marches on, there are some things you can count on, like colorful leaves in the fall, and memories of how they were when they were younger

The leaves of late fall are a different matter. Dried, leathery white oak leaves, bloated indistinct shapes like a brutalist artist might draw—those leaves are dull brown and tough. The other leaves, other types, are now dried up, their colors faded, their supple texture lost. These memories are no longer malleable. They are what they are, and you’re stuck with them. They must be cleaned up, or the things underneath them will rot, fail to grow, fail to thrive. It’s only after you’ve cleaned them off, scratched the surface underneath, that new, better memories can be made. These dried up old leaves smell almost like urine as they become sodden and wet with November’s cold rains. They bog down, hold in dirt and detritus, unpleasant flotsam and jetsam of the past and the present intermingling with their breath stealing layers, their weight. Leaves and memories are ephemeral, we like to think—they shouldn’t be so heavy, so permanent. We should be able to rake them up handily, and throw them away. But who hasn’t been surprised, shocked, even, by how heavy a seemingly simple bag of wet leaves can be? If you overload it, don’t clean up carefully, assessing the weight of the memories as you clean them up, measure them out into their proper receptacles, then the bag, the bough, the bin breaks, and all the work that we’ve tried to do to clean up spills back on the pavement. The sodden, malodorous memories spill all over our shoes, into the edges between our pants and our socks, all over the area we’ve just cleaned.

There’s no magic leaf blower, no all encompassing rake that will haul these old leaves away with a single, cleansing pass. There’s no old leaf killer chemical to make them dissolve in an instant. Instead, we have to rake each individual leaf with our small, handheld rakes, combing carefully to make sure we get them all, and put them into piles that we can then gather into their proper final receptacles. There’s nothing for it. Each individual leaf has to be dealt with on its own terms. Sometimes they’ll gather with others under the gentle pressure of the rake. Others will yield to more forceful scraping, gathering with the other stubborn, ground clinging leaves once more attention is brought to bear upon them. Some, though, will require us to stoop over, inspect the individual leaf from the ground, pick it up with our bare hands before we can be rid of it.

Putting our now-raked leaves in piles isn’t enough, though. We need to protect the piles, deal with them as we work, rather than leave them alone, trusting as we move on to another pile that the last one will stay organized. There’s no guarantee. Some person with no regard for all the work we’ve just done will come along and jump right into the pile while our backs are turned, scattering all our hard work and leaving us to clean up after them, because we let them in by not keeping an eye on the pile, or cleaning it up before they could come along and do damage.

Predictable, inconvenient, boundary-ignoring, work-disrespecting, pile-jumping people aren’t the only thing to worry about. Random strong gusts of wind, out of nowhere, unpredictable, uncontrollable, are always an option—maelstroms of unexpected force coming in, snatching the leaves out of their piles and scattering them, whirling them into a cyclone that blinds us, obscures our view of what’s in front of us and the work that needs to be done in the future. The swirling, scattering leaves in great masses make it impossible to move forward, to do more work raking leaves until the wind has passed again. And when it does, the leaves are scattered all over again, leaving us to look on in dismay at the scene now before us, once things calm down again. All that hard work, scattered, and now we have to start over again, though our hands are sore from the rake handle, our backs and the backs of our thighs tired from leaning over to stuff armfuls of leaves into receptacles, our hands and feet muddy from digging up the stubborn, smelly wet bits.

It’s harder to rake up leaves that second, or third, or nth time, if we don’t learn our lesson about taking the time to dispose of each pile of leaves as we go.

Part of the process of falling in love, one person makes an agreement with their object of affection, pledging their undying loyalty and love.

One agrees to shelter the other from the storms of life.  They will prove their love by fighting the others battles, standing up to the monsters and vowing to never leave their side.  Loyalty becomes an extreme sport.

You’ve heard their history, their stories, the failed relationships in the past and you know without a doubt that you can be the one person they can count on.  You will be the one to fix them.

In that very moment, the ones who are willing to seal the deal, in blood if necessary, in order to prove themselves, do so without one word spoken.

This is an agreement made without specific words from the other person involved.  The agreement is made through body language, hopes and dreams, whispers of love in the heat of passion.

Sadly, neither party realizes this at the time, they do not realize that in reality, they are crippling the other person.  Cutting them off at the knees, not allowing them to fully realize their own human experience.

I suspect we are not meant to be aware of such things, why else do we experience the release of heavy chemicals from our very own bodies during the early stages of love.

You do not realize, until years later there actually were red flags but something in your brain pushed them to the side.  They were there, they are always there.  They are best viewed using your hindsight lenses.

We seek to protect our beloved, believing it to be the honorable thing to do, in order to prove ourselves to them.  In order to prove just how much we love the other person.

Until one day you are sitting in a comfortable chair telling someone the full story, not understanding how it came to this.  Realizing that you can no longer carry their burdens, and it was never your job to begin with.

The love you used to cloak your intended with was merely a reflection of your very own lack of needs.  You realize that those brave promises you made for the one you loved, were in reality the proclamations your heart longed for.  You, were the one that needed saving.

We project all of this onto our partners, our husbands, and our wives.  We act out the very role we wish someone would provide for us.  We love them in the manner in which we want to be loved.

And, they do the same.

Finding the stopping point in some situations has always eluded me. Either I go on too far, or I stop early and miss the opportunity.

How does anyone know they are officially at the end? When they are screaming and shouting to whomever is within closest range? I know it doesn’t have to come to that, but isn’t that a stopping point for many of us?

It would be nice if I could just pull out my favorite purple crayon and draw a line across my day, my life and announce to all involved, “this is the end”.

Am I really any better off from all the worrying, the second guessing, and years of digging around in the graveyard of my life? If I look back into the written archives here, I can see that I’ve had times in which I would shout from the rooftop of the mental health building telling all who would listen, therapy will save your life!

Therapy is worth all the tears, all the self actualization, all of the broken that brought you to the door in the first place. And then, some days it’s icky. Like the honey jar that no one ever wipes clean, leaving a trail of sticky wherever the honey pot goes.

It’s dark, and sad, and you question everything in your life and despise yourself for always asking why, or what can I do to make this better?

Sometimes, when I am looking for a reason for all of this hashing laid out for all to see, I will kid myself. I will say that the reason that I do this is because I am a thinker. A reacher, a digger, an archaeologist of the mind and I am this way for no other reason than this is who I am.

Often, I wonder if other people have the right idea. Just keep your head down, nose to the grindstone and block it all out. How many people do I actually know that do this and they are free from their demons?

None. Not a one person, despite their claims of being happy or peaceful and FINE with the way things are.

They are big fat liars, those people are.

I know it, you know it, and most of all THEY know it.

But what can you do?

Nothing.

If I am having a problem dealing with a person, or struggling with their actions, my therapist drills home the “accept them for who they are” concept. My job, if I am to be a content person, is to accept them for who they are. The biggest piece of this, is accepting myself for who I am. The better equipped I am for that, the better equipped I am with accepting you for who you are.

I must tell you, I have found that this actually works. Me, accepting people for who they are and not who I want them to be. It really works.

Most days, my simplest choice to pick up the tools that lay at my feet and use them as I embark into the world. Some days, I refuse to pick them up.

Arguing with myself about the tools. “They are too heavy today”, or “I’m SICK to death of picking them up”, “Why do I have to do it when no one else is doing it”.

Look at those other lazy fuckers just walking around with their noses to the grindstone, not looking, not telling, and pretending not to know. They seem fine to me!

And then the voice, that comes from deep inside, the one that speaks logic.

It says to me, in a loving voice that I can trust, “but you are not them”.

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 had therapy this week and, it was intense. One of those sessions in which you regress and experience deep emotions that are under lock and key.

My therapist is very good at stopping me when I hit one of those points and encouraging me to feel and experience the moment. My preference is to just glide right by those icky bits.

I always wonder why I resist this, getting to the other side of the pool of tears? I still resist that process over and over when I know it is what helps get me safely to shore.

This particular trip, brought about by me beginning to cry about a memory. Then I told him there was a voice in my head screaming.

I told him, there is a voice telling me to shut up and quit being a baby.

He asked, “who’s voice is it”?

I said, “mine own” or, “maybe not mine, maybe hers”.

He said, “yes, I am guessing it is her voice you are hearing. Why shouldn’t you cry when you feel pain?”

Because it is a waste of time and nothing gets solved by crying.

While in the zone of regression, I cannot make eye contact with my therapist. If I do, I will lose sight of the process and the little one will go back into hiding.

I begin to sob, painful, deep sobs. I ask aloud, “why did you hate me so much, why do you hurt me?” I was just a little kid that had no idea what was going on or what I’d done to cause your rejection of me. She hurt me.

There are people that always ask why it is necessary to re-experience your history. This is the reason it is important, to release those trapped emotions that you were not allowed to experience at the time the damage was inflicted. My guess is that our brains go into defense mode in order to move past the experience not realizing that they get trapped in there.

My biggest reason for doing this kind of work is to set that pain free. I do not regress in ever session, I’m not sure I could handle it, the payoff is usually an insight that allows me to connect the dots.

It drains me emotionally for the rest of the day, I compare it to a car accident with internal bruises.

At the end of September, when the antidepressant I was on made me go wonky, I asked my doctor to refer me to a psychiatrist.

 And then I waited.

 And waited.

 And waited some more.

 Because, while I usually have nothing but praises to sing about the Canadian health care system, when it comes to mental health care, if you don’t have a knife to your throat, you’re shit out of luck. If you want to get in with a psychiatrist for the first time, you have to wait three to six months, no matter how bad you are doing. As long as you’re not actively suicidal or homicidal, you wait.

 I waited five months. By the time my appointment came up, I was feeling fine. My drugs were working and I wondered if I even needed a psychiatrist after all. But, given my family history, I decided to go anyway. It couldn’t hurt, right?

 Wrong. Oh, so very wrong.

 The psychiatrist, whom I shall call Dr. R, came very highly recommended from my family doctor. I had told her, “I want someone who will allow me to be an active participant in my own care, who will listen to me.” She said this woman is fantastic and very compassionate. I adore my family doctor and we get along quite well, so I trusted her opinion.

 My appointment was three weeks after I had major jaw surgery, and only one week after I had my jaw unwired, so I was still on some painkillers and having problems getting enough calories into my body. That didn’t really help my emotional state going into the appointment.

 However, I was determined to have a positive attitude and to be open-minded. Sitting in that waiting room, I tried not to be nervous and instead psyched myself up (hah), telling myself: this is something I’m doing to make my life better and ensure I am going to be healthy long into the future.

 I quickly figured out that this appointment wasn’t what I was hoping it would be, no matter how much positive energy I tried to throw at it. The moment I told Dr. R my family history and the adverse reactions I had to the Effexor and Wellbutrin, she decided I was Bipolar II and tried to fit everything I said into that diagnosis.

 I’m not disputing the diagnosis itself; it’s a fair hypothesis, and one that I have considered myself. However, I have a huge problem with a doctor diagnosing a patient within five minutes and then “accusing” her of all kinds of behaviour that doesn’t exist.

As the “interview” (or interrogation, as it became) went on, the two of us got more and more frustrated, and the conversation grew heated. She was frustrated because I refused to just accept what she was telling me about myself, and I was frustrated because she wasn’t listening to me or considering my explanations for my decisions or behaviours.

 And then it just got plain weird.

 Dr. R: Do you ever spend large amounts of money?

Savia: Sure. I have a house. I’m doing home renovations right now.

Dr. R: How are you paying for that?

Savia: A line of credit.

Dr. R: That’s hypomanic, irresponsible financial behaviour.

Savia: But I’m making an investment in my home, and my house value has quadrupled in the past seven years.

Dr. R: Going into debt for any reason is hypomanic.

Savia: What? But it’s not just any debt. It’s good debt.

Dr. R: There is no such thing as good debt.

Savia: But… [about to explain how her sewer blew up and also how the energy efficient renovations were eligible for a $3,000 government grant, which would pretty much pay for them, not to mention the savings on the monthly energy bills.]

Dr. R: [Cuts me off] The only way it would be acceptable for you to go into debt for home renovations is if you were selling your house and would get the money back right away.

Savia: [looks at her like she’s on smack] I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.

 Note how she didn’t even ask how much money I make or how much the home renovations cost or any other details that would have explained why I was going into debt for this project? It was all about absolutes. And let me just say, if going into debt for any reason makes a person bipolar, I guess the majority of North Americans have this disorder. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to get in with a psychiatrist?

 After that, it quickly went downhill. She snapped her questions at me and cut off my answers. Any time I tried to explain or elaborate on one of my answers, she said, “You’re rationalizing your behaviour.”

Um…no…I’m just trying to give context – the grey answer to a question that she tried to make black and white. Because life isn’t like that – it’s all about the shades of grey.

 At the beginning of the appointment, I was quite succinct in my answers. But then, she would jump in and fire several more at me, obviously looking for more context. So, I started giving more thorough answers. She never smiled and she cut me off a lot, which made me really nervous and uncomfortable. I started talking faster and being less concise. At one point, she stopped, tilted her head, smirked at me and said:

 Dr. R: You’re talking fast and circumventing the question. That’s hypomanic.

Savia: I’m nervous!

Dr. R: [cutting me off] There you go, rationalizing your behaviour again.

 I’ve lost count of how many arguments we got into in that hour and a half. Our personalities clearly do not mesh, and I could tell that she didn’t appreciate me challenging some of the things she was saying or asking questions to help me understand where she was coming from. We both ended the session thoroughly pissed off.

I was so angry and upset, not about the diagnosis (though that did scare me quite a bit, because I don’t want to have this disorder and I don’t want to have to take mood stabilizers, ever), but about the way she treated me. Her cruelty to someone so vulnerable cut very deep.

 I didn’t sleep at all that night, and then I cried for two days straight and fell into a depression. What if she was right, and all of these things that I consider as part of my personality are just a disease? I thought I knew myself really well, but if this is the case, who the hell am I, then?

 I talked to a few friends who’ve known me through all of the ups and downs, and they said the same thing, “You’re always Savia. No matter if you’re depressed or anxious, there’s still something about you that’s always there and doesn’t change.”

 And they were right. I tried to put Dr. R’s harsh words behind me and take the good out of the appointment. A few things that she said did ring true.

 For instance, when I told her that I don’t have hypomanic or manic episodes, she said that for me, hypomania may manifest itself as anxiety. I found that interesting, and it would fit with what’s been happening to me. She also gave me the signs of hypomania and told me to keep a mood chart for the next three months so I would have a record of my patterns.

 Dr. R said that the current drug mix I was on (Celexa and Wellbutrin together, in low doses) could put me at a higher risk for hypomania and that it would be better for me to be on just one of those drugs, or off them entirely and on a mood stabilizer, my reaction to which would serve as a diagnostic tool.

 She also told me to take Omega 3 fatty acids, which she said is the one thing that has been clinically proven to help with depression and mood disorders.

 So, I did take the good advice she had and used it to my advantage. I went off the Wellbutrin at the end of April and found that just being on the Celexa was much better for me. I started taking Omega 3s, along with a daily arsenal of B complex and Vitamin C, and am amazed at what a difference that makes in stabilizing my mood.

And last, but certainly not least, I am keeping a daily mood blog where I quickly jot my mood, appetite, sleep, spending, menstrual cycle, drugs and sexual interest levels. It takes me two minutes a day, but it has made me aware of some of the factors that affect my mood, which gives me the opportunity to deal with things before they get out of hand.

 And the best thing about the mood chart is that the next time I go to a psychiatrist (in six months, if I can get in with someone else, that is), I will have that record to show him/her. And, hopefully, I can avoid any further nastiness.

Because going to the psychiatrist is stressful enough without having to prepare yourself for a knock-down, drag-out fight with the person who is supposed to be helping you.