Delicate/Demanding

There's a beauty in walking away.

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:54:00 -0500

A little over two years ago, a person I thought was one of my closest friends got drunk, fought with me, followed me around, and then called the cops when I told him to leave me alone. The story is far more complicated than that, obviously, but irrelevant. He drunkenly insisted I needed to be “escorted” around my college campus (at which he was not a student, and also at which I felt perfectly safe). When I repeatedly told him that I wanted him to leave me alone, he got into a snit and called the cops.

Specifically, he called the cops to say that he was worried about me, his friend, because I was drunk and wandering the streets threatening to kill myself. I was no longer shitfaced and I was certainly not suicidal — he just couldn’t handle that I was refusing to bend to his will, so he retaliated by attacking my weakest spot. The cops showed up to find a drunken asshole and a frightened woman. I was scared because I was exhausted, very slightly buzzed, and hurt. Given my past history with self-harm and extreme depression, I didn’t know what would happen to me. I was escorted home by a very nice woman who suggested, kindly, that I have no more contact with Alan (the name of my now-former friend).

Earlier that summer, I had been suicidal. I was getting help (though I clearly still had issues, given that I was abusing alcohol regularly), and I was no longer suicidal. What Alan did was unforgivable. I see that now. At the time, I wanted to justify it. Maybe I had brought it on myself — did I lead him on and make him think we were more than just friends? Did I actually seem like I wanted to kill myself? I knew drinking was bad for me — if I hadn’t been drunk, maybe all that wouldn’t have happened and things would have been fine. The answer to all those things is, clearly, no. I didn’t lead Alan on. I wasn’t suicidal — didn’t act like it, said I wasn’t, and had not used it as some sort of threat to get my own way. Yeah, drinking wasn’t the best idea, but this guy would have been an asshole with or without booze in him.

It was the first time I had experienced my mental illness being used against me. My parents questioned it and it was clear that friends found me to be a drag when I was depressed, but no one had ever shot an arrow directly into that weak spot in my armor. Even Ryan, who lives with me day in and day out, has never stooped so low. Not once has he said that things would be better if only I weren’t depressed. Never has he threatened me with hospitalization to garner the reaction he wanted. Alan pretended to be my friend. He listened to me, pretended to care (or maybe even did care, in his own way) about my problems, and was always there when I needed a friend. In return, he expected to be able to act however he wanted, I guess. When I finally had enough of his emotional manipulation, he not only made my private pain personal, he used it against me by calling the cops.

That incident was a defining moment for me. After I crawled out of my cave of raw hurt and betrayal, I decided two things: first, I would not put up with chronic bad or abusive behavior from someone who called themselves my friend. Anyone who took from me without giving back, anyone who emotionally abused me, anyone who made me consistently unhappy didn’t deserve a spot in my life. Second, I would not let my mental illness be a private wound that could be exploited to hurt me — by hiding my struggle away in the dark, I let it become a monstrous, writhing thing that could wound me.

Since then, I have tried to be honest about what I struggle with: depression, hypomania, anxiety, and the occasional mixed episode. I don’t even care what it’s labeled anymore: bipolar II, nervous, mad, sad, or bad — I am mentally ill. I will not let anyone tell me what I can or cannot do because I am mentally ill. I will not let someone use it as weapon against me, let it be held over my head. I know some people think I over-share here, and maybe I do. But I over-share on my terms.

Escaping unhealthy relationships has been difficult for me. I don’t always see the tipping point, when a relationship turns toxic. I don’t always have the backbone needed to break things off in a timely manner. But I’m doing better.

Since I realized Alan is a toxic, self-loathing, messed up guy who would use my confidence in him against me, I have not lamented the end of us. I have cursed the beginning, cried over the middle, and felt ashamed over how the end came about, but I don’t regret that the end came.

2:07

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:07:41 -0500

The Thanksgiving weekend was wonderful because Ryan and I had three whole days to just hang out together (the fourth day, my parents came to visit and we, sadly, had to put on something other than pajamas). We talked and laughed and watched movies and played video games and stayed up way, way, way too late.

By Sunday night, I was exhausted and fighting off some gross head thing that caused me to produce mucus at an alarming rate. As an added bonus, exhaustion causes me to feel panicky. Then the headache hit me, like someone clocked me in the temple with a sledge hammer. I felt like my left eyeball was exploding, and I thought I was going to throw up. In what is probably the most disgusting confession I will ever make on the internet, I actually threw up in my mouth and swallowed it because I had just taken my nightly fistful of medication that had definitely not been down long enough to make it into my bloodstream.

That started around eleven thirty, as I recall. I took a pain reliever and then I tried rubbing at my temple and neck, taking a bath, and stretching — things that usually clear up any headache I have. Nothing worked, and by two in the morning, I fell into bed, curled into the fetal position, and cried for almost two more hours while my fever climbed steadily. I got some patchy sleep from four until seven, when Ryan’s alarm went off. At eight, the headache let up suddenly and my fever disappeared. I slept fitfully for a few more hours, then woke up to a rainy Detroit Monday morning.

One thing I’ve learned over this past year that included four hospitalizations: being in that kind of pain takes about twenty years off my age. It scares me and makes me feel vulnerable. With every breath in and out, every beat of my heart, I felt pain and nausea. The minutes melted into hours and an hour took an eternity to pass. Sunday night felt a week long. I felt unsteady this morning, legs wobbling like a newborn colt or a drunken frat boy.

It hit me today: it’s not just physical pain that bends and stretches time for me. Depression does it, panic does it. I spent all day being crushed by sadness and the clock moved at a glacial pace. Night comes and my mood picks up a bit, then time slips through my fingers like water and I’m resentful of the night. The night will end while I’m asleep, and I will wake up to gray light and slanting rain and time standing still again. When I’m at my best, there’s never enough time. When I’m at my worst, I have nothing but time. It’s all the same time, I know. But the end result is still that I feel like I keep losing the best parts of me in time’s stream that takes them away before I even fully see them. The worst of me simply sits in a puddle and stagnates, nothing growing or changing.

And to think, I wanted to maintain an air of intelligence and wit, to add to the discourse on mental health.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:27:01 -0500

Instead, I present you with my current mental status:

Fuck. This. Shit.

Life feels like the morning after all year long

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:03:26 -0500

When I was in kindergarten, I used to cry about having to wake up and go to school. Half asleep, I would bite and kick my parents as they tried to wake me. Once awake, I started crying. I cried through breakfast and all the way to the bus stop — where I threw up my breakfast from crying so hard. When I woke up, I felt overwhelmed and couldn’t bear the thought of having to face the day. As I got older, I became better at imitating decent human behavior. No biting or kicking or sobbing — at least most of the time.

Nothing has changed since I was five, though. I still find waking up to be like staring into a black hole. I’ve never been a morning person, no little birds helping me bathe and braid my hair. Each morning, I wake up with a giant bucket sitting on my chest. It’s filled with the nightmares I just had and the things I have to do during the day and the empty spaces I have to fill and the people I have to talk to and the thought of all the anxiety I will face. Even when I manage to shake it off and have a good day after fully coming to, darkness comes again and I resist going to sleep because the sunshine makes me miserable.

So there’s that.

Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:40:25 -0500

Can’t sleep. My whole body itches. The cats are trilling and the door is bump bump bumping because it’s windy outside — every time I hear the door rattle, I want to scream. The little cat played in his litter box for half an hour and stirred up a cloud of litter dust that’s exacerbating my headache.

I want to rip my own skin off and stomp on it while I howl. Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had moments where all the sensory input completely overpowers any rational thought and I see red. Inexplicable, irrational rage boils in my gut and rips through me like something out of Alien. It doesn’t happen as much now that I’m older, and I’ve learned to control it, but when I was a child, the strangest things could set me off: the dog barking and bunchy socks, or flickering Christmas lights and slightly too-small pajamas. It gets worse when I’m exhausted or just waking up.

And I am tired. I am so tired. I’ve slept just over six hours in the past thirty-six hours — no more than an hour and a half at a time — and I feel like I’m unraveling. It’s incredible what sleep (or lack thereof) does to me. Ryan, he can pull a few nights of five or six hours without much problem. If I get less than eight hours (preferably nine to ten), I become useless. Panic attacks, headaches, confusion, panic attacks, and a general feeling that Everything Will Be Wrong Forever. Honestly, I avoid driving at all costs unless I’ve had eight hours of sleep because my cognitive function drops to zero and city driving overwhelms me a bit on the best of days.

Tilting at windmills

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:17:00 -0500

Give me a break, a little escape
I am so tired of being me; I want to be free
I want to be new and different — anything I’m not
— Lenka

Medication adjustments (add Lamictal and melatonin, gradually titrate off trazodone — because I am apparently the only person in the whole world to suffer withdrawal from 12.5 mg of it, according to the internet) and therapy homework to try and identify sleep issues/why I practically lack the ability to self-soothe.

They don't know I used to sail the deep and tranquil sea

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:49:17 -0500

Days like this, I don’t know what to do with myself
All day — and all night
I wander the halls along the walls and under my breath I say to myself:
I need fuel to take flight

— Fiona Apple

Do not tempt the fates by saying that you are “always bending, never breaking.” That is the lesson, here. Because as soon as you do, things will reach critical mass and you will find yourself thinking about different ways to kill yourself.

Ryan had to stay home from work to be with me today. I alter between moments of panicked sobbing and drawing into my shell in silence. When I panic, I feel as though a heavy object is sitting on my chest while I fall into a void. When I withdraw, I feel numb and can’t make any meaningful conversation. My tongue is silenced by both an inability and a lack of desire to pick a coherent thought from my snarled thoughts. I’ve lost five pounds in a week (not that I’m complaining) because food turns to ash in my mouth.

This has been coming on for a month now, but even I am surprised by it. I’ve been trying to hard to fake it until I make it in the sanity department that I’ve been too quick to assume that I was just mildly miserable and would stay that way forever. It’s as if I’ve been building up depression straws and somewhere over the past three days, someone dropped the one that broke the proverbial camel’s back, tilting the needle from “Mild depression” to “Remove the knives.”

I haven’t self-injured since we moved to Detroit, and now when I am in the bath, I find myself wishing I could see myself bleed. It’s actually strange because in the past my problems with self-injury have been because I was so upset. This is a detached desire to cut and maybe feel something.

What worries me even more is that, when I am comfortably numb (as opposed to pegging the freak-out o’meter), I am good at keeping up appearances. I made a delicious dinner and dessert tonight. I did dishes (something I loathe) and called my mom to wish her happy birthday, acting not just normal, but better than normal.

(For anyone worried, I have an appointment with my psychiatrist scheduled for tomorrow, and I have told Ryan about these worrisome thoughts. I will not be offing myself or opening an artery. I just need some help.)

(Another note: I am sick of this.)

Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:39:51 -0500

[Anxiety] makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
— Anais Nin

I want to go into my bedroom and wake Ryan up, beg him to stay up with me — to stay home with me tomorrow because I can’t imagine how I will get through a whole day by myself.

I could do that. He would do it for me in a single heartbeat; he’s done it before. But interrupting real life is not a healthy way to deal with my anxiety, nor is it a viable long-term option.

Sunday nights are the worst. They bring out the biggest panic attacks as I face down the next five days — sometimes full and sometimes empty — and realize I have to get through a good portion of each one alone. I don’t mind being alone, really, which I know sounds stupid given that I am currently terrified of being alone. No, I am not afraid of being alone — I like my solitude because it allows me to page through books, crank the music and dance in my underwear, plan my plans and list my lists, be alone with my ideas. I am not a stranger to myself and like to keep my own company. What I am really afraid of is that the next time a tidal wave of fear washes over me, I will happen to be alone. Even now, I’m dealing with this panic attack alone, but Ryan is in the next room, asleep, being my safety net.

When he’s at work, I don’t have a safety net. I cannot call him and let him talk me down from the ledge for an hour every other day when he’s already in a time crunch at work as it is. Plus, the phone terrifies me, paralyzes me, when I am like this. And there is no one else. I’ve lived here a year and a half, and I have no friends within a thirty mile radius that I could keep in the back of my mind as a pinch hitter in case things get really rough. I have friends, but none here. I am alone here, a minority in a gray and unforgiving city filled with crumbling buildings. I don’t know a single neighbor’s name. Most of them exchange polite and disinterested small talk on the elevators, but a few are openly hostile and seem to view me as an outsider.

I am all alone in this city, and every Sunday night when I face that reality again, I feel terrified.

I’m so tired lately. No matter how much I sleep, I feel like I could sleep more — except...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:48:00 -0500

I’m so tired lately. No matter how much I sleep, I feel like I could sleep more — except I can’t. I’m exhausted, but I toss and turn restlessly. I feel wrung out. I feel wrung out and cranky and overwhelmed. Little things make cry or make me angry. I’m completely unstable.

Disregarding my feelings entirely, life continues to run its course inside the measure of my breaking arms. There’s bills (and bills and bills) that need to be paid and meals that are supposed to be eaten even though they all taste exactly like nothing. I’m also supposed to be writing something that might turn into a novel.

I’ll pause for your laughter because once it sinks in that I am unable to even focus enough to read a book or do the dishes, the idea of me writing a novel will be completely hilarious. The rumors that being crazy make people wild artistic beasts are untrue; it’s more like being crazy makes me an artistic werewolf and I produce fantastic stuff occasionally when the night sky aligns in my hypomanic favor. Those nights, I see clearly what I want to create and the exact words to cut the path from here to there; what I write needs minimal editing and it’s so sharp it makes my tongue bleed. Much of the rest of the time I lay on the couch and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD while occasionally crying about nothing at all and wondering if I can wear this shirt for one more day — at least lately.

Malackey keeps telling me that it will get better, that I will get better. My life isn’t going to be one mood swing after another, and I need to give it time. Patience and all that. Now, if someone could just hurry up and give me some patience.

Posted in two places. First and last time that will happen. Sorry guys who end up reading it twice.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:25:04 -0500

I intended — and would still like for — Delicate/Demanding to be a place where I talk about mental health issues in general and bipolar disorder in particular. I envisioned more frequent posting, however, and thought that I could clearly delineate between me (shoesonwrong.tumblr.com) and what my mental illness is doing to me (delicatedemanding.tumblr.com). I’m finding it not to be that simple. I can’t always tell where the “real” me trails off and the “bipolar” me picks up. I don’t know that there’s a clear dividing line. As Marya Hornbacher says (in one of my favorite memoirs about being bipolar):

I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

I’ve grown into it, and it’s grown into me. I don’t think that’s how it will be forever — and maybe I’m wrong — but that’s how it is right now. When I first learned I was bipolar, I was angry and sad and scared, but mostly I was determined that I was going to get better. I had A Plan. I was going to follow prescribed medicine and exercise and diet regimens, go to therapy, and be just fine. The days of deepest, darkest depressions were gone and I would never have one of those pesky (terrified me straight to my core because I thought I would have to be hospitalized) mixed episodes again.

I am not fine. I take my medications regularly, I exercise as much as I’m supposed to (though if the Good Lord had intended us to use the stair machine he would not have invented the elevator machine, now would he) and don’t drink alcohol. I attend therapy. And I am not just fine.

I’m not trying to say that all these things have been useless. I walk this tightrope of dosages and stair climbing and talk therapy (all the while always, forever, painfully sober), and if I stray from it even a little, I start to fall. The Plan does help; it keeps me always bending, never breaking. The Plan has not made the illness go away, however. And that was what I expected from it — that I could do everything right and everything would turn out right.

I know, I know. If wishes were horses. Something about a beggar riding it to McDonalds in the eighties and making it into a hamburger.

My point is, when I started this thing, I had very different expectations for how things would go. I could blog about Crazy Annie here and Regular Annie here. But they’re mixing, fighting each other, and I cannot objectively tell where one starts and the other one stops — if that’s even possible. More days than not, I suspect that Crazy Annie has won and eaten Regular Annie to gain power from her corpse.

"Brain Bile" is the best thing I've said so far today

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:03:06 -0400

I had therapy last night, and it went really well, actually. I didn’t walk away from it feeling like complete shit for the first time in, well, ever. I should say that in no way have past therapists contributed to me feeling like utter shit — not even the one who had two appointments with me, flaked out on like five more, and then quit without her or anyone else notifying me.

No, me feeling like shit is all me. It’s not even anything I actually do or don’t do in therapy, it’s more my skewed expectations of therapy. (Namely that it will begin to work instantly) and myself (I will be awesome. I will say all the “right” things and think all the “right” things and I WILL WIN THERAPY, BITCHES.)

The first thing we did last night was discuss my lithium levels (on the low side of normal), what to do about it (increase lithium), and what my future options were if lithium just doesn’t do it for me (something I’ve been worrying about because I like to have a plan at all times for all possible contingencies). Then we talked about my anxiety and what’s causing it.

Anxiety trigger number one: I am not getting enough sleep. On a long, luxurious night, I get eight or nine hours. Most nights, between six and seven. I need nine to eleven hours of sleep a day to feel human and capable — I have since I was old enough to start sleeping through the night. Sometimes, I start to feel cheated that everyone else gets so many extra hours in their life not spent sacked out, and I try to cut back on my sleep. This never goes well, and if I get below five or six hours of sleep, I start having waves of panic attacks during the day that cripple me and leave me feeling terrified. Most people go without sleep and feel like they’re dragging ass or a little bit cranky — I go without sleep and my brain starts telling my body it’s going to die or something. I panic, my chest feels tight, and I cry a lot.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep in about a month, which is really cranking my anxiety from it’s usual eight to eleventy hundred. So Nancy prescribed me trazodone, an anti-depressant that apparently does jack for depression and carries a low risk of inducing hypomania (my main problem with anti-depressants). Instead, it makes you sleep and sleep and sleep. I can take it as needed and it’s not habit forming, according to Nancy (a statement backed up by the vast majority of anecdotal evidence I could find on the web). I took some last night, and while it didn’t knock me out (I took a small dose, also), when I did fall asleep, I slept soundly and for almost ten hours. I feel better today than I have in quite awhile. Plus, now that I’m on trazodone, I can start taking my Klonopin twice daily or as needed like I was before. I had been lumping it all together at night in order to knock myself out.

Anxiety trigger number two: crap in my life I haven’t dealt with in a long time but have internalized so much that I have nightmares about it most nights. There was no quick fix for this one, sadly, but yesterday was the first day I’ve really been able to talk freely about things. You know that feeling you have during a stomach virus, where you feel so disgusting and like you’re going to throw up? And then you throw up and it feels SO. MUCH. BETTER. For a little while, anyway. That’s what it was like, except in my head. I thought-barfed all over her office and felt so much better. It was like floating. I’m sure I’ll have built up some brain-bile by time my next appointment rolls around.

Anxious Reptilian Brain Would Be A Good Band Name

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:54:08 -0400

We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.

— Ingrid Bergman

I am a ball of anxiety, wrapped in worry, encrusted in nervousness and then deep fried in fear. Anxiety is a constant, thrumming presence in my life and has been for as long as I can remember. In the past, when I say that I become depressed and anxious at times, what I mean is that I become depressed and my anxiety amps up to intolerable levels.

Today, someone from IMed me and asked if I knew any ways to deal with anxiety in the short term — any behavioral techniques that could quell anxiety quickly. I did my best to help, but my answer was basically, “No, do you have any benzos on hand?” I’ve been in and out of therapy for years to try to learn behavioral techniques to modify my anxiety levels. Deep breathing, distractions, happy thoughts — all that stuff. It doesn’t work.

That’s not fair. I’m sure it works, but I haven’t been able to make it work yet. I’m not sure if I’m not hitting it in the right spots or have failed to jiggle the handle properly, but I’m an anxiety-reducing failure. (Which makes me sort of anxious.) Deep breathing and similar things don’t seem to reach far enough into the tornado of my head to have any real effect. I feel my heart rate slow and my breathing even out. My muscles relax and I can picture a meadow filled with butterflies and just the right amount of hypoallergenic flowers. But in my head, there’s still a hamster on meth running on that wheel.

I joke about my anxiety because really, what else is there to do if I am already trying my best to deal with it, but it’s not a small entity in my life. I wake up and I start worrying, I go to bed when I finally manage to become more tired than I am worried. If there is nothing for me to worry about, I will pace around in mental circles, worrying about past events in my life. When there is something remotely valid for me to worry about, I cannot let it go until it is resolved in a manner I find acceptable. This makes for very good honors students and very bad human beings.

While I’ve been open with friends, family, the internet, and strangers in the elevator about my mental health issues in general, I’ve avoided some specifics. Specifically, my anxiety. When it comes up, I am inevitably told to “relax” or “stop worrying” because “what good will it do?”

What good will it do? The rational part of my brain knows that worrying will not do any good beyond any action it prompts me to take. Worrying for no reason at all or about something I cannot change is pointless. However, the rational part of my brain is not in control of my anxiety — that power lies buried deep with some reptilian part of me that knows in my heart of hearts that if I don’t constantly worry about money will we end up on the streets, if I don’t constantly worry about the future I will end up an old woman eating cereal three times a day under a bare bulb with only one sickly cat to keep me company, if I don’t constantly worry about what is going to happen in the next hour then something bad will happen. Something bad will always happen if I am not ever vigilant. I feel it down to my core.

What to wear, what to eat, what to do, where to go — those are just the tip of my anxiety iceberg. Sometimes, it’s crippling. We drive to the movie theater and suddenly I am too scared to go in. Why? THE REPTILIAN BRAIN COMMANDS IT, THAT’S WHY.

Most of the time, it’s not crippling. I get up, I get dressed, I do work. I shop for groceries and pay my bills. I try my best to talk to people, even though I feel every single thing I say is excruciatingly wrong. The anxiety isn’t always debilitating, but it is always there, racing around my brain. When it really gets going, I feel it latched onto my chest and crawling up into my throat.

There’s no rest for the weary or the anxious, apparently. Nighttime is no reprieve. I can count on one hand the number of nights I’ve not had nightmares in the past year. The face peeling off, everyone you loved has died in front of you gruesomely, your house burned down with you in it, reliving a college sexual assault, punch your mother in the face on accident when you were throwing your arms out and it snaps her neck type of nightmares. Sit bolt upright in the bed, drenched in sweat nightmares. I feel more tired when I wake up then I did when I went to sleep. Every. Single. Night.

This is probably no way to live, but I don’t really know any other way and I haven’t thrown in the towel on living just yet. So I make do, I cobble a life together, and I keep going. Every single day. I am constantly aware of the space anxiety takes up — leave a chair open, a plate out on the table, a towel on the hamper for it — but I keep going. Every single day.

I’m tired.

Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:02:06 -0400

Edina: No no, I’m not drinking, I’m not bloody drinking.
Patsy: What shall you drink then?
Edina: I shall drink water. It’s a mixer Patsy. We have it with whiskey.

— Absolutely Fabulous

I have had bloody nothing but mixers since late January, except for one unfortunate incident in April that made me say the same thing every time I have a hangover: I AM NEVER DRINKING AGAIN. Of course, after the hangover, came the existential hangover where I could not find one good reason to leave the darkened cave of my bedroom nor the comfort of my bed where the covers pull all the way up over my head.

The past few years, every time I drink, the after effects lasted a little longer each time. Then it got to the point where I was like, is it really worth a week of despair to drink a ~~couple~~ ~~few~~ dozen shots of whiskey? And the answer was no, it was not. I was not in college anymore, and I just didn’t take the same pleasure in drinking when I wasn’t with a crowd of friends that dwindled to a few friends as I took of my pants and threw up in the dumpster behind the bar. (Moderation: it’s not my strongest suit.) For me, drinking was just another crazy thing I did in college. Like walking three miles at two in the morning to get pancakes or throwing an impromptu toga party that encompassed an entire floor of my dorm. I think my favorite part of drinking was how it changed other people. They weren’t as uptight and more easily coerced into my various schemes. I felt like there was a level playing field when my friends were drunk — they finally were as spontaneous and crazy as I was normally.

(Of course, I am excluding the perpetually sad drunks. We all drink a little too much then cry about a boyfriend who dumped us five years ago once in awhile, but I had this friend, Alan, who would get drunk and then cry into my hair for five hours every time. And I didn’t sign up for snot hair, okay? KEEP UP OR GET LEFT BEHIND IN YOUR SNOT PUDDLE.)

Sometimes, when I catch a whiff of a really good gin or I see the Svedka vodka bottle, I get a little twinge of longing, but mostly I’m okay with sobriety. It hasn’t changed my life too much, and I don’t like having the hangovers from hell, so I get by.

Until tonight, though. I just got some big unexpected medical bills, someone close to me is divorcing, I spent all last weekend in the most excruciating pain from a kidney stone, I haven’t slept properly in five days, and my moods are completely messed up because of all the narcotics the doctors at the hospital gave me for the pain last weekend. I want a drink. I want a drink and another drink. I would like to get stupid drunk and watch cartoons while eating pizza. When used very sparingly, I’m of the opinion that a nice bender is good for the soul; a sleeping pill for the higher cognitive processes, allowing our reptilian brains to come out and point us toward the cartoons and pizza. I wish I could have a bender.

But I won’t. I will stay sober, wrung out, stressed to the limit, and exhausted. Because that’s what mental health is: making the best possible choices to keep yourself going. For me (and this is in no way a blanket statement applying to everyone who is bipolar or otherwise) that means no booze now or maybe ever.

Have a gimlet for me.

I like it when I'm reading message boards or blogs with bad grammar and people spell it BiPolar. It's that lowercase i. I'm not bipolar, I'm BiPolar! I get 3G and all kinds of fun apps!

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:40:00 -0400

Like Being A Bit Daft Isn't Enough All By Itself

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:42:26 -0400

Over on Jezebel, Sadie had a piece about Lisa Carver’s piece about being addicted to Xanax. Carver’s article essentially demonizes the drug, claiming that it made her dead to the world and addicted to feeling that way. Carver also mentions she was abusing Xanax, but doesn’t seem to make the connection between the abuse and the addiction. Instead, while she carefully avoids explicitly saying it, Carver paints a pretty clear picture that anti-anxiety medications for people who are weak and only serve to make them weaker. She says, “That’s the problem with anti-anxiety medication: Its purpose is to help you ignore internal danger signals that aren’t real. Once in its velvety thrall, however, how are you supposed to recognize the warning signs that are real?”

That’s right, anti-anxiety medications, even when used properly, apparently have a velvety thrall. A velvety thrall that will make you ignore real problems in your life. I do not believe I am taking the proper medications, then, because all my anti-anxiety medication does is stop me from feeling like my heart is going to explode out of my chest in some horrible Alien-esque, panic-induced moment. I am not dead to the world and it’s hulking dangers; in fact, I wish that it would stop grating on me quite so severely some days, leaving me raw with a hysteria-tinged anxiety.

Reactions to Carver’s article are mixed, and it wasn’t too hard to find a fair number that read similar to and/or agreed with this comment:

Fuck psychiatric drugs big time. I was on the old tricyclic antidepressants when I was a kid, and they positively drove me insane and made it terribly difficult to develop any kind of normal friendships with people. Depression is part of life. Nobody needed any special medicine to cure them of emotions for the first few million years of human existence. Nobody needs it now.

It’s stunning to me that this feeling can remain in our society. I can understand the belief that psychiatric medications are over-prescribed — I even agree with it to an extent. (I think that there needs to be better screening and follow-up processes to ensure that people with mental health problems are getting the care they need rather than allowing general physicians to blindly hand out anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications like candy.) However, the belief that all psych meds are unnecessary and “cure” emotions was a surprising one that I didn’t expect to find so much support for. The comments section of that article is filled with peopel decrying Xanax as an evil drug that should be banished simply because they a) abused it, b) had trouble getting off it, or c) it wasn’t the magic pill they had hoped for so it must be evil.

Sadie’s article on Jezebel reviews Carver’s article and decides it is ultimately a mixed bag. She applauds Carver for decrying abuse of prescription medications, but feels that Carver throws the baby out with the bathwater by deciding that ALL psychiatric medications are evil bullets trying to turn our brains to marshmallow. Overall, I thought it was a fair and balanced review. And it being on Jezebel, where there’s a whole lot of women hugging it out in the comments between snarking on celebrities and Sarah Palin, I thought the comments would be a lot more supportive of people who take mental health medication. You know, a sisters are doing it for themselves, I support your choice, you go girl type crap. (Which I appreciate, don’t get me wrong.) It’s true that the atmosphere was slightly more accepting and featured more anecdotal comments about how psychiatric meds had helped someone out, but there was still a lot of negativity. One comment in particular that stuck out for me was:

Try different approaches before jumping for the drugs though. I mean, I do think people should be aware of the options that are out there, drug-wise, but I think they should also realize that in many cases, drugs may not work and they may not “fix” you. In 2005 I fell into a very, very dark pit. I clawed my way out. I know that’s not an option for many, and I know that some day I might need medication. But just don’t pretend like drugs are a cure-all.

There was a whole lot of similar comments that essentially boiled down to someone getting all up in someone else’s business over mental health treatment. They would do this without shame or a hint of embarrassment — as if it were somehow okay to simply decide what medications another person (a stranger, no less) should be on just because of a personal prejudice against psychiatric drugs.

I know it’s the internet, and people say and do all kinds of crap on the internet they would never do in real life, but this kind of behavior, while perhaps not as prevalent in the real world, is still present offline. My mother frequently asks me, “How much longer” I will have to be on lithium, my aunt told me she didn’t think I am bipolar because I was “such a happy child”, and my dad has tried to (I assume) reassure me by saying that I’ll “grow out” of bipolar because he also went through a “dark phase” in his twenties. Friends and family alike ask, without reservation, what medications I’m on and how much I’m taking of each. I do not mind being open about what I’m taking because I feel like refusal to talk about something will do nothing but increase the stigma of the thing itself, but more often than not, people ask me about my medications to tell me how I am on the WRONG medications. Everyone has a horror story about lithium or Klonopin. Everyone knows what I should be on instead, or if I shouldn’t be on anything at all because I just need to buck up and soldier on.

There’s hundreds of thousands of blogs, articles, and comments out there demonizing mental health medication. There’s fewer pro-mental health medication counterparts, and I think it’s because as soon as you mention being mentally ill, you paint a giant target on your back. If you’re depressed, you must not exercise enough. If you’re anxious, you just don’t know how to deal with life. If you’re bipolar, you are just flaky and unreliable — a drama queen. You will get comments and emails telling you that whatever mental health problems you have, you brought on yourself in one way or another. I have been running this blog for less than six months, have almost no readers, and I have already gotten a handful of emails like that. However, if you come out against mental health medication, like Carver did, you are applauded for finally standing up to the system, for escaping some great conspiracy to keep the Western world all doped up. Dozens of commenters called Carver “brave” for taking the stance she did — very, very few noted that perhaps, given her history of risk taking behavior and drug use, she was prone to abusing Xanax and Valium. Her past was irrelevant now that she kicked the Xanax. My past is, for some reason, highly relevant because I take lithium and Klonopin. There’s a stigma surrounding mental illness and treatment for it, an enormous, pervasive cultural stigma. I know it’s not much, but I like to be one of the people pushing back against it.

Falling or Flying

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:19:13 -0400

Every time I sit down with the intention of writing here, I find myself pinballed in another direction. Every single time. I think it’s a subconscious thing; stuff is going okay(ish) for now, and maybe writing about it will jinx it. Or maybe I just don’t like to think about having a mental illness when it’s not cornering me.

Either way, I’m still here. I’m still bipolar.

During the last few days of June and the entire month of July, we experienced the following:

A stressful family wedding.
A visit to my familiy that was ten hours of driving, round trip.
A visit from The World’s Most Obnoxious Person (one of Ryan’s friends).
Ryan was notified that his current assignment within his company was ending and he had a month to find another assignment or he would probably be laid off.
We didn’t think he would find anything.
BUT! At the last minute! He did! And! We can still afford food!
He even got a raise. So we can buy a pony.
Our student loans were consolidated after the Fed lowered interest rates, so we’re paying half as much monthly but will end up paying them off in the same amount of time.
Except there was a problem and they didn’t consolidate Ryan’s loans right the first time.
Our building caught on fire at midnight on a Sunday. We had to haul ass down forty flights of stairs. I fell part way down and pulled something so bad I couldn’t really walk for nearly a week, instead doing an attractive hop and occasional crawl.

All in all, a stressful month. After about number five, I reconciled myself to the fact I would be constantly having a mild to moderate panic attack FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. About a week ago, life settled down, and I’ve been doing well since. Of course, for me, “well” is a subjective term that tilts toward hypomania.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m not bipolar, I’m just really crappy at life. Maybe if I could just buck up, I wouldn’t get depressed over seemingly nothing at all. Maybe if I could chill out and keep my heart out of my throat and my adrenaline at human levels, I wouldn’t be hypomanic.

As it is, I know that it’s a disease and not me failing at life — though I do my fair share of failing at life as well. But it’s summer; the weather is lovely, I’m reading and writing again, and I only need seven or eight hours of sleep (normally, I am a ten hour person). I want to simply enjoy this without wondering if it’s going to escalate into something more or if the bottom will drop out and leave me living in the mental gutter again. I’m new to bipolar, new to actively watching my moods to try and keep them from getting out of hand.

I feel a lot like I did when I was a teenager learning to drive. At first, the idea of being in control sounded super awesome. Then I had to start driving on road trips and family vacations, and it kind of blew, being in charge and having to pay attention.

And So You're Back From Outer Space

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:19:48 -0400

Aw, blerg.

— Liz Lemon

I have a few topics and corresponding drafts floating around my head and queue. I want to write about how my relationships (old, new, romantic, otherwise) are, all the way to the core, affected by my mental illness. I want to discuss what my hypomanias feel like and why I miss them so much. I really want to talk about medication, how much I really don’t want to take it, and how I am occasionally known to childishly lie about taking medication or hide pills altogether.

But depression, my old friend, came calling on me again a week and a half ago. It’s too soon for this, I don’t want this, and you’re not welcome here, I think. But it just comes in without knocking, sets up camp on my couch and asks where the takeout menus are. At least when someone from the mania family comes to visit, we have a lot of fun. There’s the shopping, the talking, the creative outpouring — it’s a lot like being drunk. Sure, eventually you might get so lit up like a Christmas tree that you break a few vases in a rage and spend the night dry heaving regret all the way down until you’re covered in barf sweat, but there’s a little bit of good times in there. Depression is no fun, right from the get-go.

It descended on me suddenly — a summer storm that turns the sky black and makes the air crackle with anxiety. I was awake at ten this morning but didn’t leave my bed until three in the afternoon because the prospect of interacting with anyone or anything beyond the confines of my thirty-six square feet bed was too daunting. I tried to read a bit, but lacked the focus. Instead, I curled into a ball and watched the people in the office building across the street go about their days, feeling as though they were looking back at me and judging me. From three to five, I did my best to put on a human face and do real people things. In the evening, I ate my one meal of the day that I managed to choke down and worked out for an hour before returning to the safety of my nest.

One of the things that frustrates me the most about this entire bipolar diagnosis and treatment process is that I feel like I don’t know me anymore. I don’t know where I end and the disease picks up. I don’t know what to attribute to the normal ebb and flow of life and natural mood shifts and what to attribute to bipolar. We just had a few weeks of unbelievable, butt-kicking stress. Travel, a wedding, interacting with estranged family members, seeing family we hadn’t seen in a long time, and news about Ryan’s job. To boot, I visited my beloved grandpa’s grave for the first time since his funeral, nearly five years ago. Did all this trigger something I just need to work through? Do I just fake it until I make it? I am trying. I’m phoning friends and writing emails and paying bills; after I get out of bed, that is. What if I make too big of a thing about this and cause yet another medication switch? I don’t want to overreact, I just want to feel better.

It Rhymes With Shmiters Shmock

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:48:22 -0400

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

— Steven Wright

When I was a little girl, my mother had an enormous tin filled with buttons — hundreds and hundreds of buttons. For fun, I would dump them out and sort them. I’d try to find matching ones or sort them by color and size. I’d do this for hours, never satisfied until they were sorted “right”. In addition to probably being an early sign of being out of my gourd, my button sorting abilities were something I carried on to college with me and resulted in never recieving less than an A on a paper. I’ve always had the ability to deftly sift through my hundreds of button-thoughts and sort them, organize them, form them into a lean and direct narrative.

I’m having trouble sorting the buttons right now, though, having trouble organizing my thoughts into any semblence of, well, anything. I don’t know if I should sort by size or color or texture, and just when I start to latch onto something they jumble up again. Like right now — I’m talking about buttons, for God’s sake.

I keep waiting for the muses to grant me clarity again so I could write something good here. Apparently they’re on summer vacation and I’m going to have to settle for writing some awful. I guess I’ll just talk and hope it breaks something loose.

My first psychiatrist, Betsy, the one I previously wrote about when she was jerking me around, has been canned. Not just by me, by the entire practice. I had decided to stick it out with her just to keep my meds level and prescribed while I was going to a six week group therapy program, then I was going to find a new psychiatrist. The decision to stick with her temporarily was based on a combination of factors: I am sort of anxious about the group thing and didn’t want to add to it by interviewing new doctors during, I didn’t want to make the haul to Ann Arbor (about forty-five minutes away) more than once a week in order to find a new doctor during the group program, and finally, I am lazy.

The third week of the program, I was introduced to a new psychiatrist, Nancy, that I had time to talk with and sort of interview. I really clicked with her, and asked her if she was taking new patients and had any openings in her schedule. She said she wasn’t taking any new ones technically, but that she would like to try and fit me into her schedule. After the group met, I had an appointment to stop by Betsy’s for a quick discussion about meds. It was a half-hour appointment and by the time she was fifteen minutes late, I approached the receptionist and asked her why Betsy wasn’t there yet. She blanched and asked me in a shocked tone if anyone from the practice had contacted me at all, and when I said they hadn’t, I was informed that Betsy had been let go. She (and other people I’ve talked to since) have apologized profusely for the mix up while also making it sound like her departure was planned. But since I scheduled with Betsy a week prior and she made no mention of leaving, I doubt it was.

I was left hanging for a day, wondering how I was going to go about finding a new psychiatrist and how soon I needed to do it, when Nancy called me and told me that she would like to take me on as a patient and that she didn’t have any official openings in her schedule for a month and a half but that she would move some meetings around and make time to meet sooner. We met yesterday for our first appointment and discussed what I wanted from the relationship, and I feel like it went well.

She’s the resident meds expert, and she does talk therapy as well. I feel confident with the meds aspect of it, and we’ve decided to set up three or four sessions to talk and then decide if I want to continue therapy with her or just keep my meds going with her and be referred to someone else for talk therapy.

Nancy is in her early thirties and seems professional but warm. She also laughs at my jokes, which I like. Betsy, and a lot of other doctors (psychiatric or otherwise) don’t laugh at my jokes and it makes me uncomfortable. I try to put myself at ease with humor and when people don’t respond to my humor it makes me uncomfortable. Which leads to more, increasingly frantic and awkward humor. It’s a bad cycle, I promise.

This has felt like mentally swimming through hummus. Buttons.

Just because I'm unemployed and spend the majority of my days with two cats you assume I'm a weird loner?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:47:37 -0400

We live on an island and the world comes to us over the water.

— Gloria Whelan

Or, in this case, the world comes to me over the internet. Ever since we’ve moved to Detroit, I’ve become very isolated. Being unemployed and not attending graduate school presently, I have no traditional outlet through which to meet people locally. It’s not that I’m without friends, they just do not live near me. Childhood friends are long scattered and the post-college diaspora took care of my more recent friends.

It doesn’t really bother me, or at least I don’t think it does. In the past three or four years, I’ve transitioned into a more quiet and watchful version of myself. I can still pull on my party persona when needed, playing the part of the coversation-carrying cutup, but it exhausts me as well as making me anxious. I’m happy to be home with my books and paper, the internet always available to cater to my every questioning whim. Perhaps it’s due to a lack of practice recently, but verbal communications unnerve me. I’m at my best when communicating through the written word; I can manipulate it to concisely coney my thoughts far better than I can when I speak — I tend to ramble, trip over my words, never get it right the first time. I don’t know how much of this is a natural maturation, how much of it is related to my childhood, and how much of it stems from being bipolar.

My father, who I am much like in both looks and temperment, began his transition from social extrovert to lone wolf in his twenties. My mother dragged me from church to church as a child, always prodding me to be a social crowd pleaser, and it felt as though I was forever playing with some kid I didn’t know on the floor of a dirty trailer while my mother had coffee with their mother. I understand why she did it — my mother is socially awkward herself, and she was also trapped in rural Northern Michigan with a four year old, no friends, and no job. To maintain her sanity, she insisted on regular social outings, something I feel pressed to do to this day.

Until my late teens, I socialized pretty normally on my own, all things considered. I was home schooled, and all my friends were either home schooled as well or were members of the various churches my mother bounced me through. I formed a small group of friends and kept in contact with them regularly, but was mostly content to keep my nose in a book or my pen in a journal. With the onset of bipolar and my move to college coinciding, my social norms flew out of the window. In a dorm, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people I saw on a daily basis as well as the fact that I was living in a room a quarter the size of my bedroom at home, didn’t have my own bathroom, was sleeping in a twin bed that was too small for my long body’s nighttime flailings, and I was sharing this closet-sized room with another person for the first time in my life. From home schooled only child to dorm dwelling college student in a week and a half. The result was that I was hypomanic and always, always ON. I was telling jokes and stories, listening intently to every person who wanted to talk to me, and volunteering for every social event that passed my way in addition to maintaining a spot on the Dean’s list my first semester. I was sleeping less than a third of the time I normally slept, as well. My second semester, I plunged headlong into my first major depression. I was reeling from being inducted into the hectic college life, my first extended visit home (Christmas vacation) left me feeling out of place and resentful, and I had unresolved issues pertaining to a sexual assault my first semseter. That social girl disappeared, and a weepy, angry, unwashed girl showed up in her place. I didn’t reach out to friends anymore — my social circle shrank drastically as a result of my shrinking world.

My highest high and lowest low were experienced that first year of college, but ever since then the pattern has been basically the same: hypomania prompts me to make superficial friendships with everyone I meet, and depression traps me in my own head, leaving little time or energy for maintaining friendships. After leaving home, I never established what I would consider a normal pattern of behavior for adult friendships, probably because I still feel as though I haven’t even established a normal pattern of adult behavior. I pay my bills on time, run a household, make grocery lists, and do all the day to day things an adult is supposed to do, but I don’t have a job or firm plans for grad school, and am floundering when faced with the blank expanse of my future. I have a healthy, if tightly entwined, relationship with Ryan, but every other relationship in my life has either recently been in or is currently going through a rocky patch. I love my mother, for example, but our relationship is a complicated one as I struggle to find adult norms and boundaries with her.

As a result of all these things, I vacillate between putting on a social show for people and simply retreating into my book-walled fortress, espcially since our move to Detroit. I have been trying to be more consistent in keeping up my friendships lately, but it all takes place online.I’m in a group therapy thing for people with bipolar disorder, now, and right now we’re talking about social rhythms (structuring your days to help control mood), and I have to fill out a chart every day that demands all kinds of stupid information (I hate hate hate hate charting anything) like who my first human contact is, how many other people I interact with daily, whether it’s in person, etc. And dude, on paper I look like a LOSER, all capital letters, when at best I am a loser, all lowercase ones.

I live on an island and the world comes to me over the internet.

Srs Bsns

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:25:51 -0400

I spent the past five or six days nailed to the floor. Well, as much as you can nail a puddle of misery to the floor. I was over-medicated with Kolonopin, a benzodiazepine, which is an anti-anxiety medication that can cause depression. Of course, for me, over-medicated meant taking more than 1 mg a day. From what I can tell on the CrazyMeds discussion boards, that’s a pretty low dosage to bring on depression, but not unheard of. And, as priorly discussed, I am someone who doesn’t generally require a lot of medication to feel the effects. All I know is I doubled my dosage from 1 mg to 2 mg and within a day or two I couldn’t summon the energy or the desire to crawl out from under the covers. The reason I upped Klonopin was because, at my last appointment, my psychiatrist said that I could if feelings of anxiety persisted.

Which brings me to the thing about my psychiatrist: she totally flaked out on me and I’m kind of pissed off about it. She canceled four sessions in a row, came back, and then canceled the next one because she was gone again. From what limited information I could gather without prying into my shink’s life and going all What About Bob on her, someone close to her (family) became very ill and died. I don’t know if they got better and she came back for that one week then they got worse and died and that’s why she left, or if she just thought she was ready to come back but then wasn’t (which I am understanding of, but it’s still jerking me around which sucked).

Every week, I would get a call saying that my appointment was canceled because she was out of town dealing with a family crisis. Every week, I would ask if my next week’s appointment was going to be canceled as well, and the scheduling people couldn’t tell me that because she had only given them information a few days in advance. Apparently, she’d call in every few days and be like, “Still crisisin’ over here. Give me a few more days.” Or something. Which, to me, seems like total crap. When you have people relying on you for things like therapy and medication adjustments and stuff, you either show up when you say you will or you nut up and admit you have to take a month or two off. At least if she had done that, I could have either decided to wait her out, knowing how long she would be gone, or I could have started the process of finding a new shrink. As it was, I was left with the impression that the next week I would be able to see her. Five weeks in a row.

Then, when I did see her, she clearly should not have been at work and dealing with patients. She seemed fragile and anxious — both understandable feeling if your dad or someone has just kicked the bucket — and could probably have benefited from some more time off. We discussed my anxiety level, which at the time, was kind of high because I’d just been in the hospital and broken off contact with a friend because the relationship was unhealthy. I hate hospitals (and those damn bills they always send afterward) and the whole experience left me a little shaken, and I hate confrontation of any kind, which is what I had to do with the friend I broke off contact with. So my anxiety levels were a little high. Not off the charts high, like when I came in, but high. (No, seriously, they have a little test with about twenty questions on it to measure anxiety level, and the first time I came in, I had maxed that sucker out. My dot was so far up the chart it looked like it was part of the top of the chart.) My doctor said that I could try upping my Klonopin slightly at home and if it worked, then call her and she would phone in a prescription.

She forgot to mention that Klonopin is a depressant as well and to look out for that. I think she mentioned it offhandedly the first time we met, but I was sort of in the middle of a mixed state and rapid cycling so the details of that meeting weren’t exactly crystal clear. She seemed upset and distracted through our entire appointment. Which is not something I would want to pay $250 for — if I weren’t lucky enough to have great insurance, that is exactly how much I would be paying.

I’m not sure what to do. The first time I met her, I LOVED her. I felt like we connected and that she was really willing to work with me to help me get healthy. I felt comfortable with her. Now, I’m torn. Maybe after a little bit, things will settle down and she’ll be just fine again. Losing a loved one is a hard thing and can really take a toll on a person. Plus, I don’t want to find a new doctor — I didn’t want to find this one to begin with, and I don’t want to go through another nervewracking introductory process. On the other hand, the past month and a half has been unacceptable and I’ve received subpar care. I don’t really have any reason to believe she’ll flake out on me in the future, but what if she does?

Mental health is srs business. I don’t want to be pinned to the floor, sobbing and not having any idea that medication caused it. My next appointment with her is in three weeks, and I’m supposed to get my lithium levels checked before then. I think I’ll give her one more chance and see if I feel any more comfortable with her next time than I did last time.

Jeez. The only doctors I see with any regularity in the past year have been a gynecologist and an ER doctor. Not good, Annie. Not good.