How To Recognize A Schmutzie At BlogHer
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
UPDATE: This is not me.
SparksFley inspired me with a post she wrote to reveal a few things about myself that I am a touch insecure about before I hit the BlogHer '08 conference. I do not show my face on this website, I have never been to a BlogHer conference before, and I am nervous as hell about meeting new people no matter what the circumstance, and these three things conspire to unnerve me to greater and greater depths as the conference weekend draws near.
It is becoming ridiculous. For example, the following are a few of the things that have added themselves to my Fear List: my passport will not be ready before my flight, I will miss the plane for the second leg of my trip to San Francisco, the airline will confiscate my psych meds, I won't know how to get from the airport to the hotel, Sweetney will decide that I am an obnoxious roommate and should go back to Canada already, people will be disappointed with what I look like, the conference will feel like high school/summer camp/team sports events from my painful formative years, and my feet will smell. My feet do not usually smell terrible, but, for some reason, this plays out as a major complicating factor in my fear fantasies.
Aaaaaaand breathe.
I think that most of these fears are actually about my social anxiety, which is partly due to the fact that the way I look and the way I behave, as the person behind Schmutzie, will be on public display for the first time. I am nervous in new social situations anyway, but, in this case, I precede myself, which is WEIRD. Add to that the fact that I have been chosen as one of the presenters in the BlogHer Community Keynote, and I am almost willing to don a gorilla mask for the weekend and pretend that none of it is really happening. To alleviate some of the pressure I am feeling about that, I am going to tell you a few things about myself:
1. I have fairly prominent boobs. They sit high and plump, which a lot of people probably think is a good thing, but they make me feel kind of freakish. They are not huge, but they do nothing to hide themselves. So, there you have it. I have nice boobs that I don't like. Feel bad for me.
2. When I drink, I become a talker, and Talky Schmutzie retells stories that everyone has already heard. If you have read this website with any regularity, and you are going to be at BlogHer, be prepared to smile and nod. I promise that I will pick up on that and shut up shortly.
3. I look like I have a double chin in half the photographs that are taken of me. That's because I am growing a more noticeable double chin with every passing year.
4. I often walk around with lettuce, poppy seeds, broccoli, or other detritus stuck in my teeth. I promise that I do brush my teeth. It's just that me and my teeth have a love/hate relationship, and they like to try to embarrass me in public. Teenagers.
5. Like SparksFley, I smoke. Yes, I've had cancer. No, I don't care to hear what you think about that. Subject closed.
6. I tend to talk faster and faster when I'm nervous, so, if you are at the BlogHer Community Keynote, listen carefully, or you might miss it.
7. I have a tendency to stick my gut way out when I am concentrating on taking a photograph. So, if you see me at the conference taking a picture and looking five months pregnant, remind yourself that I am just concentrating. My uterusless self and pregnancy ne'er the twain shall meet.
There. So, if you happen to see a boobilicious person picking food out of their teeth while smoking or pushing their gut out while taking a photograph AND trying to obscure a double chin, it's probably me. To make sure, just say hello and ask me which weblog I write. I'll say "HimynameisSchmutzieandIwriteMilkmoneyOrNotHereICome".
Aaaaaaand breathe.
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Tipping Point? Even Keel?
Saturday, May 10, 2008
I'm not sure what it is. I am either okay with the present state of things in my life, or I am on the verge of collapse. It could be one or the other.
It could be neither and instead be nestled somewhere in that infinite array of greys between extremes. I'm not good with the shades of grey, though. I seem to prefer throwing myself out onto one ledge or the other.
I suppose that I could just stop thinking about which it is and go on with getting myself cups of coffee and meeting work deadlines and knitting the partners to the lonely, single arm warmers I've created, but that would be dull. It feels like waiting without knowing that there's anything to wait for.
It might just be I that am less than dynamic lately.
Maybe that's it. Maybe I am standing at the midpoint on a seesaw, waiting to see which way I'll tip.
I could never do that as a child. Stand at the midpoint on a seesaw, that is. Other kids did it, and they'd balance for awhile like they were surfing before making the brave run down one end of the plank to leap onto the ground. Fear scaled my desire down.
I preferred to watch from across the playground and finger the bumps pressed through to the underside of the slide. I didn't want to be the kid who got their teeth knocked out by some crashing combination of red-painted wood and metal bars.
Knitting, anyone?
Labels: the crazy, the photographs
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A Universal Apology For Dropped Balls
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
I am not sure where to start with this, because it is decidedly not funny, but every time I start writing about it, I get the giggles. You know that funny bone that is not in your elbow but is in your knee? The one that really kills when you bump it? Yeah, well my knee funny bone keeps jerking and kicking a whoopee cushion, a whoopee cushion that I wrote sad teenage poetry all over.So, let's start again. Hello, my name is Schmutzie, and I am not being funny. In fact, I am being very sad, especially over the last few months. I do not mean sad-all-the-time sad. It is more like anxious-sad, it's-blooding-fucking-spring sad, seasonal-affective-disorder sad, dealing-with-the-past-year-from-hell sad.
For those of you who were not here as far back as September 2006, that was the month in which I went for my first full physical exam in six years. If you are in a similar position, I would suggest that you run to your nearest doctor's office, demand a full physical, and gladly hop up into those stirrups, because otherwise you might find yourself not only facing highly abnormal cervical cells but also facing a colposcopy, a LEEP, a cancer diagnosis, and then, eventually, a hysterectomy.
You don't want that, do you? No? I didn't think so. Welcome that speculum with open
And then, while all of that was going on between September 2006 and July 2007, the Palinode's back decided it would be a good thing to get broken, reduce him to near immobility, put him through excruciating amounts of pain that opioids could barely touch, and then put him under the knife in November 2007.
Oh, and I nearly forgot that I started medication for my general psychological malfunction in January 2007.
So, the last nineteen months have been stressful, and while I am presently cancer-free and the Palinode is once again walking upright and using his cane less and less, all of which I thought would be a welcome relief, it is not. Yet. It may be at some point, but right now I am quite busy having all kinds of emotions related to spending well over a year wondering at times if I was going to live and if the Palinode was ever going to be over three-and-a-half feet tall again.
I do not know what made me think that everything would magically be hunky dory once we both were back at work and healthy. I think I was operating under the hope that all that crap would be behind us and that we would just move seamlessly into far less crappy lives. I was so very wrong on that front.
As a result of it taking me a while to snap myself back together, I have been unable to fulfill all the duties that come along with being Schmutzie, and I feel tremendous guilt for having had to scale back my activities so much and for taking so long to do things that seemed so perfectly doable.
I once belonged to two volunteer boards. I resigned from first one and then the other. I have backed out of more evenings out at other people's homes than I can count on both hands. Knitting projects pile up unfinished. My photography and poetry writing has all but stopped. Internet-related projects, my biggest source of guilt, have been sluggish in the offing at best.
At times, I feel like I should dig out my stash of blank note cards and send out fifty kajillion apologies to all and sundry that have depended upon me for anything even as small as showing up for snacks and a board game. I feel that I have failed so many over the last several months when, at the time, I was thinking that I should have been able accomplish the normal things I set out to do. I know now that my expectations of myself did not match with my compromised abilities, but it is still difficult to look back at all I have not done because of it.
The truth is that I am tired. After dealing with cancer and the Palinode's back surgery, what I really wanted to do, what I really hoped to do, was jump up and run into my future, but instead I am tired and anxiety-ridden. I have to accept that I can run headlong into my life later. Right now, I need to relax, breathe, and decompress.
I am slowly learning not only that I need more time to heal my mind and my heart but also that it is okay to do that. The difficult part is learning to accept that this is not a failure on my part but a fact. I am not lost. I am getting better.
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Do You Think Jabba The Hut Would Do Chenille?
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Today is a day in which Bitch uncoils herself from my within my chest, swells up through my throat, and declares Feck off, all of yous!I am doing my best to remain calm, but I am caught up in my annual early spring irritation, which begins right after the first sign of thaw and the disappointing re-freeze that follows it. I want out: out of the office, out of my apartment, out of the city, out of every last thing that places and schedules me into a pattern. I am fifteen (in spirit) and fed up with The Man. Let's go smoke a carton of cigarettes and steal your dad's gin.
People keep coming up and talking to me, because I am normally a very nice person, but I can tell that I am being a bit off-putting today. I can feel my aggression rising, and suddenly my voice is too forceful, too loud, and I am saying black every time they say white. Could I be any more the three-year old who has been denied candy? You are talking to me, and can't you see that my brain is twisted wire wool right now? If you don't leave RIGHT NOW, all this shit's gonna start on fire!
I have my ups and downs throughout the year, but I find that the biggest complicating factor is my seasonal anxiety and depression during the winter and spring. A subtle change in the weather and the sunlight, and I can be thrown into a deep depressive fog or be thrust up into happy busy-ness. I can never be sure which it will be. Today, I have been pushed out on a third precipice, for example: Bitch.
I have a plan, though, to take care of myself at the end of the day. I am going to wash all the bedding, take it straight from the dryer, pile it all on top of myself, and drink chocolate milk from a straw. I will be like Jabba the Hut dressed in orange chenille. And then I will breathe in and breathe out and remember that this is just today.
Sometimes it is a blessing to be a fairly rapid cycler.
(This entry is also posted at RealMental.org)
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Labels: realmental.org, the crazy
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Next Year, I’m Telling February To Take A Hike
Thursday, February 21, 2008
I have written about this before, but I cannot emphasize it enough. February is a difficult month. It is already the 21st, but I am not feeling hopeful yet that I will dig myself out of my wallow for a little while yet, because January was not so hot, either, and March is not always so forthcoming with the relief.You will have to excuse me if I sound like I am complaining. I am.
At this time of year, I do my best to move ahead with things. I go to work, I see friends, and I eat food, but my heart is not in it. My mind is usually wanders off to bed or a hot bath or anything else that accomplishes nothing but offers the possiblity of taking my mind away from its everything-is-futile default setting.
I worry that my medication is not working, even though I know that it is; it is just struggling against February's oppression. I worry that no one loves me, or even likes me, because I am obviously irritating and selfish and boring. I worry that I am far uglier than I think, and that any physical confidence I have is baseless. I worry that I have an as-yet-to-be-diagnosed terminal disease. I worry that my pets will turn on me. I worry that the toaster will electrocute me. I worry that all my written words are worthless.
Just yesterday, I was setting the dye in a Guatemalan bedspread with vinegar and salt in the washing machine. I stuck my finger in the little hole that the lid triggers to start the machine so that I could watch the agitation. I was there for twenty minutes before I noticed that I had not moved or thought in all that time. My brain wants to run far afield of reality right now, even if all it does is watch the back-and-forth swish of water in the drum.
This will subside. The sun will shine more often, the cold will give way to warmth, and I will break out my spring clothing and regain my faith in moving forward through life. I know this. It will happen.
But (a word that hangs covertly behind every good thought) I must first work my way through to that day when spring and summer lift me out of winter. Until then, I will continue to use my full spectrum lamp, take comforting baths, and let knitting carry me into the limbo of nothought.
Before I go, let me ask you: how do you deal with seasonal depression? I have been figuring that one out for thirty-five winters, but it could not hurt to try what you've got.
(This entry is also posted at RealMental.org)
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The February Crazy Makes Itself Known
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
I spent half the night crisscrossing the line between sleep and wakefulness as I was plagued by stupid dreams with stupid plot lines.Actually, the irritating dream thing started not last night but the night before when I dreamt that I was holding a friend's baby. It had an abnormally small head covered in dark hair with pinhole eyes and one gargantuan tooth jutting out of its lower jaw. It started nuzzle at my breast, and I said No, little guy, that won't do, and then he latched on through my shirt anyway and bit my nipple really hard with that abomination of a tooth of his. I spent the rest of that dream annoyed and embarrassed about the wet circle of baby spit on my shirt over my left nipple.
I will give you a short synopsis of last night's dream's adventures in a list, because this bitch just goes on and on:
Last night's dreams completely confounded me until That Girl figured out what was going on. Apparently, each time something annoying or fucked up happened, it was because someone was trying to be nice or helpful to me. That Girl said, It sounds like you really need to hermit yourself away for awhile. No freaking kidding.
I have really enjoyed the things I have gone out of the apartment to do with people lately, but I find every excursion exhausting. The February Crazy is upon me.
What is the February Crazy, you ask? Well, it is a lovely period of time that occurs annually each February. Its symptoms vary but may include any or all of the following:
Tonight, I am choosing a blanket and a bottle of beer to curl up with while I watch hours of "Law & Order" to divert my attention away from the fact that my system is still trying to deal with the loaf of garlic bread I ate on Sunday. Yes, I said LOAF. The February Crazy also has some slightly less common symptoms, such as the overconsumption of underbaked, white flour products slathered in cheap margarine and garlic powder.
(This entry is also posted at RealMental.org)
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Labels: the crazy, the dreams, the lists
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There Are No Controls Left
Friday, January 18, 2008
I have been writing less over the last several days. That always happens when I come up against something I do not want to write.I have not written much about my hysterectomy since I returned to work at the beginning of September. I have not been able to put my thumb down on it. It keeps floating out around the corners of my eyes. It behaves like the ghosts I terrified myself with as a child. They were to the side of or behind or above me, but they were never where I could confront them. For a while, I believed that a late great uncle lived among the crystals in a chandelier, and I avoided our dining room table because of it for a week. I was afraid that it would get into my hair and touch my scalp.
Just like my now phantom uterus, this thing with which I am trying to deal is not specifically here. It flirts in my periphery. It is elusive. It is difficult to see a thing you have never before seen.
I never really wanted children. The idea of them sometimes seemed appealing, but the actual physical reality of bearing and raising them never did. Now, though, I find myself avoiding people who are pregnant or who have babies and toddlers.
I used to have a choice. I did not want that for myself, so I avoided it. Now it is no longer a matter of choice. It is a decision I cannot make with my body. Losing that choice, even though I always chose not to, is arresting. It is the first thing that I absolutely cannot ever do because my body is a faulty transport vehicle.
I am not a gymnast, because my parents did not continue to enroll me in gymnastics.
I cannot draw terribly well, because I did not pursue that form of creative expression.
I hated organ lessons, so I will never play for a synth band.
A bit of it might be that no one cut off my fingers or deafened me or broke my spine to negate those possibilities, but a doctor came and cut away a major portion of what used to fill my abdominal cavity. I never even really wanted a woman's body, so not only did I not want what I had, but now it seems to be even less mine than it was before. It feel like cancer stole my agency.
There is more to this than my being a sore loser. I just can't put my thumb directly on it.
Your babies smell good, but I do not want them. My body is more what I wanted it to be post hysterectomy, but I did not want a traitor. It is not possible for anyone to ever have my eyes or that black, curly hair I was born with.
These are choices I would have made, but I did not. There are no controls left. All conditions are fleeting. I am a malfunctioning contraption.
If you are so moved, please vote for me in each of the following three categories in the Canadian Blog Awards:Best Personal Blog, Best Photo/Art Blog, and Best Humour Blog. Thank you.
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Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Five
Thursday, December 13, 2007
See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Three and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Four for the full story.**************
For the first time in my life, I had someone to talk to about what was going on in my head. My history was littered with failed attempts at reaching out, which made Dr. Ragu's intense attention all the more unbelievable.
For instance, when I was in grade ten, I joined a group called Peer Counseling that met over the lunch hour once a week. I had this idea that it was going to be some kind of support group, which I wanted, because I was fighting strong suicidal feelings at the time, but when I showed up to the first meeting, I was greeted by a circle of smiley-faced eleventh- and twelfth-graders dressed in expensive clothing and seated with their hands folded on top of their desks.
I'm sorry, I said. I think I have the wrong room.
Are you looking for Peer Counselling? the guidance counselor leading the group asked.
Yes.
Then you're in the right place, she said.
I thought to myself, I doubt that very much, and took a seat near the door.
As it turned out, Peer Counseling was not a support group that was intended to help its own members; it was a support group that was intended to reach out to students in apparent need outside the group. We were all supposed to be well-adjusted good samaritans who kept lonely students from offing themselves in out-of-the-way bathrooms.
I am not kidding. The guidance counselor, to whom I will refer as Mrs. Lester, took a few minutes during our third meeting to give us all a heads up about a loner who was often found eating her sandwiches alone in the bathroom just outside the theatre. One girl shot up her hand.
Do you think she's depressed? she asked.
Yes, I do, said Mrs. Lester.
She must be suicidal, another girl said. I totally would be suicidal if I ate my lunch in a bathroom. What should we do?
I think it would be nice if you all could make an effort to bump into her and let her know that she's not alone, Mrs. Lester said.
I could just imagine it. Ten members of Peer Counselling were going to drop on this girl like Christian fundamentalists on a possible new convert, filled with the spirit of charity for the psychologically downtrodden. I was a bit of a loner myself, so I felt bad for her that Mrs. Lester had sicced a bunch of rosy-faced do-gooders on her in what might have been her only calm place in that whole high school. These people irritated the hell out of me, and I rarely even had to speak to them directly let alone be cornered by them in a dingy bathroom where no one could hear me scream.
A few meetings later, Mrs. Lester showed us a film that contained interviews with suicidal teenagers. She turned off the lights and started up the clattery film projector. As soon as an ancient, green, metal film projector made an appearance, you knew that you were going to be treated to a scratched 1960s educational movie with stilted line delivery. We spent the next half-hour watching teenagers who were now our parents' age telling us how hopeless they felt.
Mrs. Lester asked us what we had learned from the film.
I think that you would have to be crazy to feel like that, one person said.
I agree, said another. No sane person would ever think that way.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I had contemplated suicide off and on for six years already, and the other peer counselors' reactions to the film seemed cruel to me. I finally figured out what I hated so much about all of them: they saw themselves as benevolent, psychologically superior, leaders of the lost. All I ever really saw them do was brag about how they had bothered to wave hello or say something nice to someone who looked sad, and Mrs. Lester did nothing to dispel their belief that other people were sad because either they did not smile enough or they were completely mad.
You're all full of shit, I said under my breath. My hands and legs were trembling. I never spoke out loud in formal situations.
What was that? asked Mrs. Lester.
You are all full of shit, I said more loudly and stood up. I swivelled around and propelled myself toward the door. I was unsteady on my feet from all the adrenaline my glands were spitting out, and I was not sure that I could make it out of the room if I waited any longer.
Why do you say that? asked Mrs. Lester, ever calm.
Suicidal thoughts can happen to anyone, Mrs. Lester, and you should tell them that. I made it through the door and pulled it closed behind me. There was no sound from the other side. I felt like a freak. I was pretty sure that I was a freak.
A few days later, I was called down to Mrs. Lester's office. She told me that she was worried about me. You would think that I would have seen that as an opportunity to share how afraid of my own brain I was, but I knew that I could not talk to her. I was less than impressed with her Peer Counseling group.
Can you tell me what's going on with you? she asked.
It's hard to talk about, I said, trying to buy myself a little time until I found a decent diversion. Then, I hit upon it. I think I might be a lesbian. Lesbianism: a surefire way to add tension to a conversation in the mid-1980s in a largely uninhabited agricultural province.
What? Are you sure? How do you know? She almost always spoke in questions, and they were almost always stupid. Do you want to talk about it?
Nope. Not really, I said as I gathered up my books. I'll come back if I need anything. She told me to make another appointment with her on my way out, but I didn't. I was gender-confused and bi-curious at the time, but I did not know enough about lesbianism to keep up my end of a fake counselling session.
That last meeting with Mrs. Lester following my outburst signalled the end of my Peer Counselling career. I decided never to go back. I was relieved, but I also realized that I had completely screwed up any opportunity it had afforded me to be honest about what I was going through. I had joined the group because I had a need to fill, only I did not tell anyone why I was there, including the guidance counsellor. Of course, I later discovered that they were all a bunch of nimrods, but before I found that out I had ample opportunity to tell someone, anyone, what I was going through and that I needed help.
I guess I was too used to keeping mum. I had managed to stay quiet about being suicidal for six years, so I wasn't exactly itching to spill the beans. I just wanted to stop feeling so alone with it, and the other members of the Peer Counselling group only managed to compound my sense of isolation with their utter lack of comprehension.
Some days, I wish I could take that fifteen-year-old Schmutzie and drag her to a therapist already.
Oh, but wait! I did! Only she was twenty when I took her to see her first psychiatrist. I mean, I was twenty when I took myself to see my first psychiatrist, Dr. Ragu. It is a good thing that fifteen-year-old Schmutzie did not know that it would be another five years before she sought help in any sort of effective manner, because things got really hinky after that, and she did not need any more stress than she already had.
(This entry is also posted at RealMental.org)
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Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Four
Thursday, December 6, 2007
See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Three for the full story.And so, I found myself at twenty years old in a small office with Dr. Ragu, the psychiatrist to whom my medical doctor had referred me. I had no belief whatsoever that he would be able to help me, but nothing else had saved me from my hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, and depression - not alcohol, not marijuana, not LSD, not food - and I was finally willing to pursue the officially accepted avenue afforded to those who do not know where else to turn. He handed me a styrofoam cup filled with water.
Why are you here? he asked.
I have to be. I'm depressed, paranoid, I said.
You don't have to be. You wanted to come. Why are you here?
I've been depressed my whole life, but I can't deal with it anymore. My voice sounded unconvincing and hollow, but that may have been the cheap office walls.
Is there more than just the depression? he asked.
Yes, but I don't want to talk about it, I said. I had never spoken openly about it before, and I was not sure that I wanted to start now. I felt like an idiot sitting across from him in that chair. I suddenly did not know why I was there.
But that's what you're here for, isn't it? The sooner you open up the better.
I guess, I said to my knees, which I noticed my thumbs were massaging compulsively.
Well? Why are you paranoid?
I decided to give in and tell him about the hallucinations. I needed to come clean, and his lilting East Indian accent was comforting.
I hallucinate. The words blew in tumbled breath past my lips.
Dr. Ragu's eyes lit up as though this were an exciting turn of events, and I could not help but smile at him. His face made the idea of hallucinating seem like fun. It wasn't, but I liked his enthusiasm. I told him about the six-inch aphids I saw crawling through his spider plants, the snow that fell softly most days despite the fact that it was July, and the bodies in vehicles at night. I still did not believe that psychiatry held any promise for me, but I liked letting my stories out into the air.
For the first time, I was not hidden and locked in a struggle to maintain a veneer of normalcy.
(This is also posted at RealMental.org)
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Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Three
Thursday, November 29, 2007
See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two for the full story.As I get older, my relationship to the events of my past changes. The chronology seems far less significant than it once did, and I find myself skipping from a story from when I was thirty to a game I played when I was three, connecting them by intuitive rather than direct association. When I tell these stories now about my history with mental illness, I move through the events that describe it in a seemingly haphazard manner, picking up pieces of it from very different times and places and hanging them together in constantly shifting triptychs.
My intent when I began this series was to follow a natural, chronological progression through my initial experiences with psychiatry, but that turned out to be less natural than I thought. It seems more rational to begin with the place at which I arrived, the point of the story, the point at which I began to seek help, and then work my way back to how that point came about.
So, I will tell you about when I was two, which I remember quite well. I can remember being one-and-a-half and wearing itchy plastic diaper pants that scratched my skin, so two is pretty clear. One of my first memories is of my sudden attachment to a pair of white oxford-like shoes with navy stripes on the sides. My mother decided to put them in a neighbour's garage sale, because I outgrew them, and I was gripped by a terrible anxiety about not being able to have them anymore. They were mine! Mine! And I loved them! I really LOVED them!
My mother explained about how I could not wear them anymore, but I did not care. Those shoes were beautiful. I did not want to be bigger than those shoes. Those shoes should be mine and stay in my closet. I did not care that they no longer fit on my feet. I wanted to be able to touch them whenever I wanted. I still remember how they smelled.
At each stage of life until I was an adult in my twenties, I panicked over leaving an era of myself behind. On my fifth birthday, I cried all day, because I knew that I was leaving being a really little kid behind and that I was going to get old and die. The day I could no longer wear my red nightie, not even as a shirt, made me feel like I had moved into some parallel netherworld I no longer recognized. When I got my first period, my body's betrayal of my childhood devastated me, and I avoided human touch for months. I felt no joy in the changes that some children embrace.
Of course, those shoes disappeared. I knew that some other kid was going to wear those on their feet, because my mother told me that would happen, and it made me very sad. How could something be mine and then not be mine? The space on the floor of my closet where they used to sit was empty, but I checked it often, hoping I might see them. I sat on my bed and wept. I was grieving.
This sense of grieving became a near constant throughout my childhood. It took me another eight years to put a word to what I was feeling, and at ten years old, I realized that I was depressed. Upon that realization, I began to hatch plans, because even at that young age, I was weary of my condition. I did not know how to express my agony, and I did not know how to ask for help or that help was even available. I only knew that the way I was was not "normal" by any means, and I began to plot my escape. Any number of escapes were possible: physical pain, suicide, running away - under the weight of my grief, any type of relief or way out seemed reasonable.
Escape felt necessary to my very survival, and I began a long road filled with many ineffective attempts at distancing my pain. If anything good can be said about that part of my life, it is that I was certainly goal-oriented and persistent.
... to be continued ...
(This entry is also posted at RealMental.org)
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Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two
Friday, November 23, 2007
The following entry was written for a series I am publishing at RealMental.org. The first two parts were published on November 8th and 22nd, 2007.(...continued from "Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One")
I left off in Part One of this story with my arrival at my boyfriend's house after hallucinations of dead bodies slumped over the steering wheels of cars on my way home from a friend's house. At the time, I lied to him about why I was out of breath, and I feel that I should backtrack in order to explain why I did so.
Although such full-blown hallucinations as the bodies in the cars were new to me, the sudden excessive paranoia and scattered thoughts were not. When I sat down on my boyfriend's couch after fleeing my nightmare of a walk home, the only thing I could think about was when I was in grades ten and eleven in high school. During those two years, I went through greater and lesser phases of paranoia that involved, at times, keeping my back to walls at all times when alone so as not to be sneaked up on, checking the houseplants for video cameras and microphones, worrying that I was being drugged through my food, hearing distant music coming through the hot-air vents at home, believing that I was waiting for a sign to take my position as the new prophet, assuming that all men were rapists in waiting, and on and on. There were periods during which I was less fearful, but for the most part, I believed that I was under surveillance at all times, and I learned to keep my anxiety to myself accordingly. I would not allow a suspicious look or word out into the public eye lest They find out what I knew: I knew that They were watching, and They knew that I was direct threat to their hegemony.
I hated being fifteen. It was far more complicated than I had bargained for.
Aside from my parents asking me if I wanted to "see someone" once and an English teacher sending me to the guidance counselor over a dark piece of poetry, I managed to keep my behaviour well enough in check to remain unnoticed, and then, with no real effort on my part and for no apparent reason, the cloud of erratic thinking began to ease up. I was no longer a future prophet, They receded into a muddy memory of fanciful thinking, and the houseplants were no longer blinds for spy technology. And yet, the reversion to my old self terrified me.
What was I now without what I had believed I was becoming? Prior to my delusions, I had always lived with depression, and that is where I found myself again. I wanted neither state. Knowing how to behave as a functioning person had saved me from what I saw as unnecessary intervention at the time, and my plan was to continue that way, even though I was deeply unhappy. I wanted no one to know where I had been, because if it came back, and I had been correct, my secret still needed to be kept. As difficult as it had been to suffer so much paranoia and anxiety, I still harboured a desire for it. The possibility of the assurance of my own universal importance was intoxicating.
And then, the next four or five years passed without much incident. I graduated from high school and I moved out on my own. I was unable to hold down a job due to depression and anxiety, but I passed that off as simply being ill-suited to customer service. I was well relative to how things had been, and I wanted to believe that I could remain that way. I saw myself as having dominion over my own mind. I would overcome, and that was that. And then, slowly and quietly, I began to slip away from myself again.
This time, though, I no longer believed that I was a burgeoning prophet or that I was being continually surveilled. The world I grew in my mind to inhabit this time was a wasteland. There were dead bodies in cars. It snowed softly all through long June evenings and nights, as though the weather did not know its own mind, either. My tastebuds went numb, but my ability to perceive colour skyrocketed. I liked to sit well back from riverside paths as a lonely, forgotten thing in the trees and watch the passersby. I had one foot in reality and the other in a place that was never quite there, and I was frightened by my secrets.
So I did not tell my boyfriend when the paranoia returned with such suddenness. I did not want to be told that I was wrong. I did not want to be locked up in an institution for seeing and thinking differently. As scary as it was to have my world shifting out of range, I wanted it to be real. If it was not real, I was lost, and if I was lost, I had nowhere to go. The other me was interminably sad. In the end, I was too scared to be able to keep up the ruse of normalcy as I had before. I knew how far my fear could go.
That June or July, I made an appointment with my doctor so that I could get a referral to a psychiatrist. Part of me worried that They might be real, that I was basically turning myself in to Them. Another part of me knew that the snow I saw falling and settling on spring's new leaves was seen only by me. I simply wanted to stop, get off somewhere soft, and sleep.
Some time later, I found myself seated in an office building watching impossibly large, six-inch aphids grazing along Dr. Ragu's hanging plants while I tried to decipher english through his thick, East Indian accent. He asked if they were green, and I said Of course they are. Finally, I felt I had an ally.
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Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One
Thursday, November 22, 2007
The following entry was written for RealMental.org on November 8th, 2007. I am writing the sequel to it today and have included this first part here as background for the coming sequel.I visited my first psychiatrist when I was twenty years old. Over the course of several months before that, my sense of detachment from life had become more and more pronounced. I have never felt particularly real, firmly set in the here and now, so this gradual shift went unnoticed for quite a while. I wish I could point to a certain date or an incident as the starting point, but the initial changes were far too subtle for me to take note of at the time.
Along with my sense of detachment came a growing paranoia. It was inconstant, and its focus was erratic. That, too, came along so quietly that I did not notice it until one night when I was walking home from a friend's house. I turned a corner onto my street, took a few tentative steps, and found myself glued to the sidewalk with fear. I shot looks up and down the street. I was absolutely certain that someone was watching me with ill intent. There was not a whiff of wind, not another person or animal visible, and the night was bright with streetlights and a full moon. I stood near the corner and smoked a cigarette, looking right, looking left, and trying not to blink in a bid to be aware of as much of my surroundings as possible. Eventually, I rubbed out my cigarette with the toe of my shoe, found my courage, and stepped out into the middle of the street. I figured that everything would be most visible to me from there, and it was comforting to walk where the streetlights shone brightest. No one was going to outwit me in the middle of the night.
And that's when things took a very bad turn, a turn I would never have suspected.
Both sides of the street were lined with parked cars, and when I reached the second cars in from the curb, I stopped and did a double-take. The interior of the vehicle on my right was dark inside and also shaded from the streetlights by overhanging elms, so I could not be sure, but I thought I saw a body slumped over the steering wheel. I was too terrified to take a closer look, but from what I could tell, the person had been shot through the forehead. That can't be a body in there. It's not a body. It's not a body, I thought. I looked again. It was like I was high. I could see the body, but at the same time I could not really make it out. I held my breath and stood stone still for what seemed like half an hour, not knowing how to move forward or go back to the place I had been. I decided to continue with my plan to walk down the middle of the road, because I simply could not accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. It's not a body. It's not a body. It's not a body.
But then I saw another body in the third car on the right, and then in the fourth on the left, and then in the fifth on the left. I walked faster and faster until I was running at top speed, desperate to get inside out of the night and into a lit house. I knew that there could not possibly be bodies slumped over steering wheels in nearly every car for a full block. There just couldn't be. But knowing that what I was seeing was not real did not counteract the terror I felt at seeing it.
I raced up the stairs into my boyfriend's house, chest heaving. I had never been so relieved to be home. Are you okay? he asked. Yeah, fine, I said, panting, I just thought I'd run home.
It was shortly after that that I decided it was time to find my first psychiatrist.
(read Part Two)
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#836: Patience, Patience
Thursday, November 1, 2007
I have been meaning to write about what these last two weeks have been like for me since I upped my dosage of Celexa from 20 mg to 30 mg, but when I sit down to explain everything, all I can come up with is a hodgepodge of emotive descriptors, such as anxious and defeated and scared.I want to have more to say than feeling words. I want to be able to tell you what I have done, realizations I have come to, behaviours I am hoping to change, but I have got bupkis. This is not at all surprising, really, because I am still making it through that first month after a dosage change, but don’t we always want to have more to show for all our hard times than orange stains on our fingers from cheez puffs and a dwindling supply of facial tissues? I know I do.
Yesterday, I was setting out cartons of asian takeout and chopsticks and whatnot for the Palinode and me, and you would have thought that I was waiting for someone to beat me by the way I was behaving. My anxiety was so high that I was fumbling with everything, and each time I dropped or bumped something, I would jump or squeak or issue an apology. I ended up reaching such a fever pitch that the Palinode took to patting my arm and saying You’re doing really well, really good, don’t worry, you’re doing fine.
Who needs this kind of support to get through setting out utensils and takeout? Apparently, I do, and it is frustrating. I always have high hopes when I change dosages or medications, so when the road to wellness is bumpy, I take that as a personal failure. I become certain that I am weak, that I am less intelligent than I thought I was, that I am inherently unlovable, that this is all there will ever be for me. I know this line of thinking is not entirely realistic, but even so, these ideas take me by the nose.
If this scenario works out the way I hope, this is just the storm before the calm. My body has to take its (sweet) time to adjust to its new chemical configuration; I have to adjust to not being the kind of anxious depressive I was when my experience of the medication (hopefully) evens out. Transitions are rarely easy, even when they do not involve psychological illnesses, so I just have to keep in mind that I am in transition and try to stay patient.
Is there a drug for patience?
(also posted at RealMental.org)
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#832: Crying Over Everything But The Kitchen Sink
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
This is one classy joint.
Lately, I have become much more aware of the stress I have been under since the beginning of the year. The Palinode and I have had to face a couple of fairly overwhelming health issues (my cervical cancer and subsequent hysterectomy and now his broken back and awaiting surgery), and that was coupled with job changes, so it would come as no surprise to anyone that I might be feeling some stress. It certainly comes as no surprise to me. What is strange, though, is that it took this long for me to lose my shit about it.
I love rundown streets.
I have always been someone who overlooks my own stress. Chronic headaches? I must be drinking too much coffee. Moody and short-tempered? I must not be eating properly. Only sleeping three or four hours a night? It must be a combination of the coffee and the food.
For some reason, I have convinced myself that I am a calm person, and will deny the obvious until I cannot help but fold in on myself and, as I said before, lose my shit. Which shit, by the way, I did lose last night.
This is a hole where a house used to be.
I came home yesterday, suddenly realized how woefully unfit I felt to be dealing with most of 2007, verbally threw up all my crazy on the Palinode, who listened and patted and consoled, and then I cried myself to sleep.
3:30 a.m. found me weeping in the bathroom.
At 7:15 a.m., I woke up crying. And then I cried when one of the cats was cute at 7:32 a.m. And then again at 7:47 a.m. when the Palinode said that he loved me. 8:01 a.m. had me searching for the roll of toilet paper I use as facial tissue to clean up gobs of snot from yet another crying stint. I rode this delightful hobby horse until sometime after 2:00 p.m.
What do good coffee, my cold sore, changing a lightbulb, talking on the telephone, making the bed, and hanging up the Palinode's towel all have in common? They all had the power to turn on my waterworks today.
One building reflects another, which makes the world look wavy.
Most of the time, I was not feeling particularly sad or sorry for myself. Having any emotion at all set the tears in motion. I had come uncorked, and nothing was going to stop me from expressing each and every feeling through passionate tears.
It felt good. Terrifically good.
Empty parking lots remind me of the moon.
I am glad to finally see myself freaking out a bit, because I have done almost zero of that until now, and I was a little worried about my relative calm. I had cancer, and I barely shed a tear. I had a hysterectomy, and blew my nose over it maybe once. The Palinode is shuffling around with his broken back like he is 127, has done so since March, and may not have the surgery to correct it for another three months, and I manage to fetch his painkillers and wayward shoes with dry eyes.
It is nice to have the post-breakdown knowledge that I am not a robot. That is a good fact, too, because I would be rusted through right now if I were a robot.
This building wants me to throw paint at it.
Tomorrow, my plan is to get right back to my dissociative, robotic this and that.
One tidy alley that, frankly, kind of creeps me out.
Kidding!
But I am hoping for a more tempered mash up of Robot Schmutzie and Dramatic Schmutzie. It would be a positive step forward if I did not completely fall apart over misfiled papers or the goodness of the chocolate chips in my muffin but still had enough emotional stuff to get fired up about the nerdy things I am into like the arrival of a fresh shipment of office supplies.
I like fountains, even when they are drained for fall.
It has been a good five hours since my last cry, so I am feeling hopeful that the crazy is quieting down for the time being. Wish me luck. I would hate to short out my keyboard tomorrow.
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#826: High On Fabulon
Monday, October 15, 2007
I have a psychological disorder with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and a touch of paranoia. Do I know distinctly what I have? No, I do not. Three psychiatrists gave me three different diagnoses - paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and schizoid affective disorder - and so I lost faith in the solidity of labels.So, I have a disordered brain for which I take a particular pill, which I will call Fabulon. I love Fabulon. It has done wonders for me. Last January it dug me out of a particularly nasty spell of anxiety that had me hiding under blankets on the couch for a week and spiking fevers every time I even thought about leaving the apartment, and since then, it has managed to keep me pretty even keel without any nasty side effects. Every other drug I have tried has dried out my mouth, turned my pee green, made me too nervous, made me too tired, given me migraines, caused sexual dysfunction, and generally has not alleviated my poor self of the burden of The Crazy. Fabulon does, though, and I love it.
Of course, my love of Fabulon comes from its effects once I have already adjusted to a new dosage and am on the sanity straightaway. Starting a new dosage is a strange, dreamy journey in which nothing seems to stick to me. Time fritters away from me, seeming both long and short, while I float in a permanent present. I lose track of the quantity of things, so it is easy to drink too much, completely overestimate how much money I have, and talk so loudly to the Palinode that his head hurts.
I am now in the midst of my third such trip. I experienced this at my first 10 mg dose, and then again at 20 mg, and now again at 30 mg, so it is familiar territory for me at this point, but it has not stopped me from behaving a little dottier than usual.
On Saturday afternoon, the Palinode explained to me something that he was going to do. What? I said. He went over it again. I have no idea what you are talking about, I said. He looked at me like I must be kidding him, and I could tell that whatever he had been talking about was not difficult to comprehend. That thing you are talking about? I said. You just go ahead with whatever it is, because I can't understand a thing you're saying. I still do not know what he was talking about. My brain recalls him sounding like the adults in animated Peanuts cartoons: wah wah wah wah wah, like a muffled trumpet.
On Sunday morning, I looked high and low for my purse and became convinced that I had lost it at the pub the night before. It wasn't in the car we rode home in, it had not been turned in to the pub staff, and it was nowhere to be found in our apartment. I looked in the closet, behind the furniture, and even under the bathroom sink. Just when I was sure that my favourite bag of all time was lost forever, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my night table, and there it was jammed tightly in between balls of yarn, some bandaids, and an old cat toy. It was obvious that I had used some force to wedge it in there, but I have no recollection of doing so.
Last night, the Palinode put me in charge of ordering in some asian food for supper. I remember feeling quite confused in between consulting the menu in the yellow pages and talking to the lady on the telephone. I even had her read my order back to me, because something just seemed terribly off with what I was doing. I could not figure out what might be wrong, so I just went with it and hoped for the best. When the food arrived, I was stunned. I had ordered twice as much food as we ever order to the tune of $56. FIFTY-SIX DOLLARS OF ASIAN FOOD FOR TWO PEOPLE. It was ridiculous. By the end of the week, we will be so sick of noodles and bean sauces that baked potatoes are going to look pretty terrific.
The past two times that I have had to deal with a Fabulon dosage change, the more major effects lasted about a week, so I only have to contend with another three days of this brainless wonderment at the world's turning. Until then, I plan on doing nothing more difficult than watching the world go by while I chug coffee to maintain wakefulness and work at remembering that one thing at a time that I can manage to hold in my head.
Of course, now that I have mentioned that I am supposed to remember one thing, I have lost it. Hopefully, it was not something important like having to pee or feed our cats. I guess I will find out soon enough if my chair suddenly becomes too warm or the cats are dragging their spindly bodies across the floor when I get home.
Wish me luck with the whole not wandering out into traffic thing.
(Also posted at RealMental.org)
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#824: My Brain On Drugs
Friday, October 12, 2007
The symptoms that inspired me to go to my doctor and have her readjust the level of my drug-to-stave-off-the-crazy:- Crying while happy
- Crying while sad
- Crying while thinking nothing at all
- Shallow breathing, as though trying to hide while being hunted
- Occasional burning sensation across my shoulders and up the back of my neck
- Tingling in my arms and legs
- Itchy skin
- Restless sleeping
- Decrease in appetite
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Inability to concentrate
- Inability to finish a knitting project
What my brain is experiencing on its first day of a higher dosage of its beloved brain medication:
- La la la la
- Was that a cat under my desk? No?
- Coffee is made out of beans. Beans!
- Where was I again?
- La la la la
What my Friday night might entail, because this brain would not do well out in the general public:
- Sewing a button back on to my new office pants. Why are buttons sewn on to the inside of pants' waistbands in such a shoddy manner?
- Knitting a scarf
- Reading the Palinode's latest copy of "Harper’s Magazine
"
- Repeatedly knocking the cats off a chair that they are hell bent on destroying
- Eating junk food and sitting around in my underwear
- Taking photographs of miniature things that I have been collecting over the last few months with no real goal other than to photograph them standing around
Why you wish you were me:
- Being this high legally sounds like a pretty good deal.
- Sewing buttons on to your pants on a Friday night is all the party you can handle.
- Hanging around the house in your underwear is your life's dream, but your mom doesn't let you / you are a gymnophobe.
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#822: More Of Everything
Monday, October 8, 2007
I feel like I cannot go to work or see people out in public. Over the last several days, every time I think of work or meetings that I have to go to, a burning sensation crawls up through my neck and behind my ears. Shortly after, the nausea starts. It is happening now just writing about it.If I read for too long, the informations swarms behind my face, and I feel that I will drown in the too-muchness of it all. I turn to television, but it only seems to speak of heartbreak and violence with the occasional laugh track to tell us when the heartbreak or violence is funny. Food does not fill the holes it once did, and so I find myself c