Category Archives: Fun With Mental Illness

real

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“Because it’s not real.”

My therapist’s expression softened. “That’s the great thing about imaginary places,” she said. “You can do anything with them. They’re not limited by realistic factors. You can kind of craft whatever you need and change it any time.”

I dug in my heels. “I need you to understand. I can’t dream up a place that isn’t already real. I have huge defense mechanisms against it. That’s probably what’s wrong. No fantasy. I’ve got to use a real place.”

“What happens if you try to imagine a safe space?” she asked.

I looked at her. She was watching my hands. I looked down at my hands and saw that I was compulsively gathering the corners of the Kleenex I was holding into perfect alignment, trying to fold it exactly right, putting it in order, mashing down creases. I looked back up at her.

“I have to tell the truth,” I said. “I can’t lie.”

She thought for a long moment, then said, “The problem with a real place is that it can change. Something can happen and then it goes from being a safe space you’ve built out to unsafe. You’re left without one. That’s why I feel apprehensive about you using it.”

“I understand,” I said. “I can think of spaces I would have chosen in the past that became sinister, even dangerous, because they were real and real things happened in them or around them.” I paused. “But for the time we’ll be working together, and from what I know about the frequency of reinforcement and the nature and likelihood of it all, this space is ideal. I want to use it. Please.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just be sure to let me know if anything at all changes.” She handed me the smooth metal balls that we settled on for bilateral stimulation during EMDR work. “So this exercise is what we do to build out the space. You’ll actually focus on the positive things about it. Instead of imagining them and strengthening that, find what it is about that room that makes you feel safe and protected, like you could retreat there from any attacker or terrible thing and be completely safe, able to catch your breath. So go ahead and be in the room, feel what that’s like.”

( …. be in the room. The house, the open space they made by relocating the staircase just so gatherings could happen. Sitting in the arm chair, looking at the hand-hewn rough timbers holding up the roof, forming the center pole, the foundation for floor boards above our heads, the loft. Looking at the kitchen, the gently ramshackle bathroom with a hook for a door knob, the island a shuffled mess of games and activities and toys for the several children who live here as part of an extended family. Looking at the bookcases stacked with some of the same science fiction books that P.J. has, not neat but stuffed and pulled from and put back in no particular order, the bookshelves of a rebellious and free-spirited librarian ….)

“How do you feel about being in the space?” she asked.

“I can see it all clearly,” I answered, which wasn’t an answer at all.

“Okay, try again. Go back into it and see how you feel when you’re there.”

( …. the chair beside a smaller bookcase, the one I always get to sit in. It’s a lower-set armchair, rounded, floral fabric and shabby and too big for me, and I can cross my legs and sit in it like a little girl and take everything in. Because it’s beside the bookcase and backed against the stair rail, it feels like it’s tucked away in a corner, and this …..)

“It makes me feel safe,” I said before she could ask me. “There’s a chair I always sit in, and it’s tucked just right, and from it I can see the door and everyone who comes in it, but I don’t feel trapped there. I feel like I never want to leave through that door, that I want to stay in the chair. Nothing bad can reach me there, no matter what comes in.”

“That’s interesting, and it sounds like a good space. Okay, so tell me more about what happens there and why it feels safe to you.”

( …. Kate with a toddler on her hip showing me how she braided her silvery hair to be like mine. Stu and Nathan watching each other as they pick out an old English traditional song and tune that each can barely recall, scratching it from their brains. Hannah smiling with her lips shut to hide a misgrown tooth but her smile is beautiful and she should just let it happen. Bobby’s grunge-metal guitar skills and charisma across from Steve’s hippie-leaning mild mannerisms and skillful ear. The choruses we all sing when the songs lend themselves to it, making us belong even if we don’t perform a song when our turn comes around. The chair, a safe place in the circle, an anchor, an entitlement, a bit of real estate, just enough and all one really needs ….)

“It’s chaos. There’s so much music and talking and in that chair, the chaos is around me but it can’t touch me. I promise you, it’s safe. It’s perfect for letting memories come through EMDR. No matter what shows up, that slipcovered arm chair can hold me. It’s worn with love and there’s a stain on the arm and it smells slightly of cat and dog and all that makes it real, so incredibly real. I could never dream up something so raggedly perfect. That chair tells the truth. I will sit in it.”

smoldering

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candle knot

I’m in the process of recognizing that I have an undiagnosed auto-inflammatory syndrome.

It would appear I’m allergic to stress – at least, to what my endocrine system dumps into my bloodstream any time I’m the least bit upset by something, or subconsciously worried, or not processing. I envision waste treatment plant vats bubbling with ACTH and epinephrine and tiny little men in uniforms directing other tiny little men driving industrial machinery as the entire works operates in response to the world as it appears inside my head.

Since as early as 2017, I’ve had “fevers” that have sometimes been called “weekend fevers”, “fake fevers”, “fake colds”, and “day flus.” I’ve had runs streaks stretches of weeks when I thought I had developed IBS-D that then spontaneously resolved. Vague weakness spells and maladies. Sore throats that never progressed. “Coming down with something” but never, in actuality, descending anywhere in particular. And always, those fevers, with burning cheeks and forehead and temperature fluctuations that don’t register on thermometers.

I’ve gone through seven thermometers and thrown them out. They were all rubbish. They all said this isn’t happening.

I feel like a pale woman draped on a fainting couch in Victorian times, a hand to her forehead, declaring that she is too delicate to be subjected to the whims of a turbulent world.

I’m not fragile. I carry ladders in my job. I scurry up and down stairwells and crawl under desks. I have a tattoo and I once pulled out my own IUD. I broke my tailbone this spring and didn’t miss a day of work. My head is a different matter. I’m hyperaware, hyper-emotive, and incredibly sensitive. My psyche is glass-blown intricacy. I’m wide-open and vulnerable, born missing a protective shell. The gift of the genuine, heartfelt smile that stays put many seconds after I speak to a stranger in the hall and pass by is countered by the burden of exaggerated interpretation of the slightest disapproval.

It’s a mystery why the immune response kicked in a few years ago; the greater mystery is why it’s getting worse, at an accelerated rate. The slightest provocation causes the tiny little men to check things off their clipboards and upend another steaming vat of cortisol into my system. I go up like a match and fatigue comes on me like an egg cracked on top of my head, trickling down. Post-nasal drip begins. I go through Covid tests like potato chips.

Sometimes my bladder becomes inflamed. Sometimes my joints ache. Sometimes I have facial paresthesias. Sometimes I cannot endure anything touching my wrists or hands, clothing touching my skin, a chair touching my legs or back. Sometimes I feel I cannot get enough oxygen, no matter how deeply I breathe.

If there is such a thing as “postive anxiety” then it applies here. Looking forward to something delightful in the future can produce the same constellation of symptoms. There is a brain center responsible for processing both, and that must be the source, the impetus.

So all I need to do to feel healthy on a daily basis is to never be excited about anything, have any good experiences, or feel strongly toward anyone, and to hole up at home so I never encounter any anxiety-producing situations. Right. Easy peasy.

I should probably avoid thinking, too, for good measure. Metabolizing is iffy. So is basic circulatory function.

Breathing. Breathing is a safe bet. I’ll focus on breathing.

anchor store

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It’s just a grocery store, right? There is nothing sentimental about visiting, or not visiting, a fluorescent-lighted, linoleum-floored, generic chain store with sale signs and cash registers beeping and the same products that can be found anywhere, everywhere.

This morning, I woke with a smooth, gray, heavy stone in the bottom of my heart. It feels like the pain I experience at the nadir of a depression cycle. It’s almost debilitating. My limbs do not want to move. I’m forcing down food and drink that I’d rather spit out. My blood is sludge and my body grinds and I’m fighting drowsiness.

It would make sense that this is the wall I’ve feared I would hit, with all of this cleaning, packing, hauling, dismantling, pushing my body to its limits each day so that my muscles don’t have time to heal and I wake each morning weaker and achier than the day before. Last night, I couldn’t clench my hands into fists because they had held a screwdriver and a sponge past their point of tolerance. Surely there is a wall and I’ve smashed into it. That must be it.

But that isn’t it.

It would make sense that I’ve been losing too many things, sending them away and saying good-bye, one by one, and seemingly taking it in stride. I’ve cried a little, but on the whole, I’ve been eerily okay with it all. Surely there is a tipping point, a straw that makes it all break and crumble. Surely this small thing, a run to the grocery store, could not be responsible for feeling that the gods turned up the gravity.

But it makes sense.

I’ve shopped there for twelve years. James was six and in full manifestation of ADHD. I would move up and down the aisles, trying to envision myself as the nucleus of an atom, with a whizzing electron in my orbit. I would try to shop when there weren’t many other customers who would be bothered by his enjoyment of running and falling and sliding on the floor, his spin-dancing. A nucleus can exert considerable binding force on an electron, and I wasn’t that parent who doesn’t try to control her kid, but usually, contained chaos was all I could manage.

When James was nine and ten, we played the game where we would pass a misplaced item on the shelf and one of us would point it out to the other, and we would laugh at the randomness of the juxtaposition. He was just old enough for me to permit him to leave my side and go put it back without forming, in three seconds, the certainty that he had been abducted and was already in someone’s car, speeding away from me forever. He loved putting things back. He knew where every single item was. He loved the game.

When he was twelve, he told me the things he would like and stayed home, turning back to his video games.

When he was sixteen, he told me he wasn’t allowed to check me out in his lane, because I’m family, but that he could bag my groceries.

Somehow, I became the “cool mom” and the teenagers all want me in their lines. The adults all want to tell me something funny James said or did or a reason they’re proud of him. At home, I point out when his work pants are fraying between the legs and I order him new ones.

Sometimes the goat cheese crumbles are buy-one-get-two-free and we have it in salad with mandarin oranges and chicken and almond slices.

Once, I thought I’d broken the coffee-grinding machine. I spent twenty minutes helping the manager troubleshoot, and we diagnosed the problem. It was the electrical outlet above the top of the shelf. Someone flipped a breaker and I was able to coarse-grind the beans for homemade cold brew. We high-fived.

The Sunday after I’d been released from the psych unit at the hospital, I did the shopping. The disparity was surreal, coming twenty-four hours after I hadn’t even been allowed to have shoelaces, but the asparagus and ice cream and ready-to-microwave mashed potatoes were so mundane and tangible and … normal. They were an anchor that kept me in the real world.

During COVID lockdown, James kept coming home late from work. There were time discrepancies and they concerned me. I looked into it and learned that he was buying fresh produce after his work shift for his best friend’s parents, who couldn’t go out in public places, and dropping it on their doorstep. They’d leave cash out for him. He never wanted to tell us.

The deli subs are pretty good, especially the ones on cheese bread.

Places don’t leave me. I can still close my eyes and wander around the offices of former jobs, see the names on the mailboxes and file folders and smell the hand soap in the bathrooms. I can peruse the border art and posters of former classrooms and turn to the right pages of church hymnals, ready to stand and sing. I can walk in these places as settings in dreams. When the raw edges heal over, I know I will walk the hallways of the schools I just left.

But this place? It’s just a grocery store.

what remains

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What remains of me is an altered self. Subtly altered.

Two years ago today, I tried to die and failed. I was salvaged. If I was a table, they would call me distressed, vintage, shabby chic. If I was a car, they would have said I just had a small dent, just a few scratches. They would have marveled at how a car could have come away from a major crash so close to unscathed.

I’m not unscathed.

Some things are less bearable. I can’t detect a survival instinct, something that would make me want to struggle to get oxygen if I were underwater, something that would make my life flash before my eyes in a dire moment. It might be there, but I can’t sense it any longer. In its place is a low-grade hum, a quiet knowledge that there is unfinished business that will stay unfinished.

Depression takes me straight to the bottom now, and ideation comes walking in freely, like it owns the place, even when lithium is on duty as the bouncer. I am tethered to life but fighting ideation is exhausting. It leaves dents and scratches.

I have a number line in my head that is shaped like a paperclip, and I used to be able to see down the length of it to eighty and ninety, the probable age I will reach, if my life is statistically average. There’s fog there now. I don’t see a future any longer, but I know that fog clears when you reach it and I may only be able to see a short distance ahead, for years and years, at any given time.

Some things are more bearable.

I have lost some kindness. This morning, I realized that we left our deck light on overnight. It’s faulty because I’m the one who installed it and I am not an electrician, and it alternates between ten seconds on, ten seconds off. It’s quite bright. It occurred to me, as I made my coffee and packed my lunch at 5:30 a.m., that it must annoy the fuck out of the neighbors who built their house practically in our back yard last year. And this thought pleased me. I wondered vaguely how much it would add to the electric bill if we left it on every night, on purpose. An LED bulb would take care of that. A cool-colored one, the kind that mimics xenon headlights.

James doesn’t remember what today is, that it’s an anniversary. The wound I administered didn’t fester, and it healed as well as that kind of wound possibly could. My guilt is somewhat mitigated.

I’ve become far more introverted and far less interested in the world. It takes too much energy to live and there isn’t any left over. Self-centered doesn’t even begin to describe it.

My brain uses itself against me; my memory, my objects of great love, my anger, my sensory recall, and even my writing are at times turned into weapons.

I’m a salvage vehicle with a sullied title. I’m scratch-and-dent furniture.

And I am loved. Loved. Loved anyway. Distressed and loved.

It’s incomprehensible that others now see me as priceless. But these days, people make top-dollar furniture out of salvaged wood, the remnants of tobacco barns and century-old decaying structures. They call it reclaimed. Their expert hands give life to what remains.

the color of peace

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When I was in my late twenties and P.J. and I had just fallen in love and the world got rearranged, I painted the living room of my small house as a first step toward getting it ready to go on the market. Dark, blood-red walls were transformed with light brown paint that I was delighted to see turned out to be the exact shade of a cup of hot chocolate, made from a mix. Not too yellow, not too red. I didn’t keep the paint chip and I could kick myself for that, because I may never be able to repeat those results.

That shade of soft, light brown, swirling hot chocolate, is what color the peace has been, yesterday and today, as the hypomania has subsided and I’ve drifted down as slowly as a light autumn leaf on the gentlest of winds. I can trust myself again to have normal relationship with others and make decisions.

And if I think back, it’s always been this color when it has come, the peace of calming down. My peace is Swiss-Miss, soft, milky brown.

Through the synaesthesia, I’ve had a good deal of music and some smells take on color, but rarely an emotion. The color of my peace on this morning, however, is unmistakable.

A mug doesn’t stay warm in the winter of bipolar disorder, so I am sipping and savoring while holding this cup of peace in comforted, becalmed, thankful woolen mitten hands.