4.12.10
Things are different than my last blog. Things are the same. Things will return to how they have been. And then they will be different again. I read an article in the New York Times this morning about modern psychology researches reopening investigation into psychedelic drugs as a form of antidepressant. Study subjects--the depressed cancer patients, the terminally ill and a couple of other populations--experienced a dropping of boundaries between themselves and their environment and a powerful sense of unity with the world and its inhabitants that lifted their spirits for months and changed their mindsets. The article ended with a strikingly Buddhist phrase-something to the effect that the hallucinogens opened the patients experience to the one true constant in life--change. Ugh.
So I sat stunned in the coffee shop, paper felled to my lap, and let the electrical impulses speed down the nest of snakes in my brain that comprise my thought disorder. I can't let myself change. Since a child I have fought change. My parents are going to die soon. I need to learn to change. I have to learn to change. A cloud of self-abasement wafts over me and settles in. I am recalcitrant, bad, a hopeless meditator because I refuse to change. It is my fault. I should just change. I can't have a boyfriend or a true friend, or open myself up to a new experience. I can't love. I've learned nothing from the three years at my halfway house. I haven't changed a bit, I castigate myself. Well, maybe a few little things here and there,like the chips of plaster falling of my parents living room ceiling, if I am lucky.
This is the same. This is my illness, I can see objectively out of the corner of my eye. Will it ever change? And am I separate from it? If so, have I changed? Can I change? No, I fear. I still have the same challenges--loneliness, meaninglessness, fear. I guess everybody has these challenges. How much then, is the success or failure of this human struggle affected by the snakes twisting everything in my head, corrupting the most basic thoughts and interactions? What is fair to expect from myself, and what can I celebrate as success?
I feel successful after last week. I did not go once, not a' once, to my clubhouse. I actually walked by it on the way to the bank, to Dunkin' Donuts, to the sporting goods store to buy socks and a kick ass water bottle, but did not go in. Sitting trapped in the airless room (the windows don't open) that has begun to stink being frustrated with an atmosphere of members waiting to be waited upon by staff, or carrying on nonsense conversations, or whining at the top of their lungs puts me in the worst mood and makes me feel lousy about myself. It is only made worse because I can't leave, knowing I can't return to my halfway house until the afternoon. Stuck. Trapped. Annoyed. Feeling like the detritus of society forced to sit in a milieu of craziness was not good for the soul. On top of it all I had to go home and do it all over again--more people, more staff, more milieu--at my halfway house. Endless treatment.
I finally caught on to this dynamic to my days, hence the no clubhouse week. So much better. Harder, too in ways. Harder to fill in the empty hours in my day as I go from the farm I volunteer at to therapy a couple of hours later. Or what to do in the morning until my art class starts. Or how to spend Mondays. Like today. I was just dying to go sit at my clubhouse and just sit. I really wanted to stay home. I just needed to sit and relax and I was tempted to go to Medication Group and hear my favorite psychiatrist at the clubhouse talk and answer questions. I just like the sound of her voice and her presence but I knew I couldn't handle members screeching about their doctor over and over again or ---jeez, I'm being cruel. How did I get so bitter? So mean? I guess I can have more compassion if I am not there, not forced to be there, able to leave. I hope that is true because when I leave my halfway house for an apartment I will be going back to my clubhouse for support. Is doing just one answer enough? Or does it have to be a particular one? Do I have to stay at my halfway house where the people are more active and capable and responsible and interactive. I would say intelligent, articulate, and talented too but I know this isn't necessary true.
Anyway. This one week experiment has left me feeling much better about myself. I have bought a cool shirt (and new socks!) I have put more energy and commitment into my the people at my house. I have accepted help. I think I've gone on a date with a guy from the clubhouse. We met up for ice cream Saturday night and he paid, which surprised me, so I took a dare and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, my heart thumping. I had set the stage, thought, putting on some good jeans a nice top and my kick ass boots and a little make up too. Of course, who do we cross paths with but my therapist, M, who just smiles and mouths "hello" to me. It made me smile but I felt too uncomfortable to sit with my friend (date?) and watch M. 's son run around the park so I finally had to ask G. if we could move to a different part of the square. So G. walked me home and put his arms around me to show me the gargoyles on one of the university's halls. We hugged good-bye. He said to call him the next day if I wanted to, and I wanted to, but my energies quickly go kidnapped by terror that my roommate had taken off to harm herself and all the anger and feeling used, and thoughts about my mother and so forth that go into that set of snakes. So I never called him, but believe you me, I had trouble falling asleep that night I was so excited. Whether I can really handle a boyfriend or not is a big question, but I think I want one and I'm certainly attracted to him even with his smoking and dirty teeth. The only thing is, he has the upper hand--his illness is under better control, he is happier, more social, works, has hobbies and interests. On other hand I think I should have the upper hand because I am more refined, better looking (debatable), better educated, more complex. I really get irritated too when he turns every conversation into something about himself. I want to be listened to and understood. But is it that important to be understood--to have my illness, my pain, my history, etc, etc, all understood? I'm beginning to think not. Maybe all he needs to know is that I need to switch benches because I'm distracted by my therapist and that I don't like the peanut butter in his smoothie. He is not someone I can control. He could reject me. It is a risk. I felt with D my first real boyfriend, I was in control, but with G. neither of us is in great control. If control is great.
So anyway. I guess all this posturing about whether I'm human or not just boils down to a date.
Hmmm...
3.22.10
I don't know where to begin. I don't know what to write. I don't know what is pertinent fact and what will become a dry wild goose chase for an end to my suffering. I guess I will start with the house; with my immediate experience.
I am flooded in the fetid waters of being a pariah in the halfway house I live in. I am being stung by the nest of bees gone wild with self-hatred.
I am positive no one likes me. I sat in the living room drinking my tea feeling K.'s disdain and repulsion envelop me as she worked at her computer. I don't work at anything. I just sit here and think. I don't try hard. I felt the house director's disdain hit me like a block of concrete because I did not ask her about her week-end. She will not help me, be kind to me, like me, give me extra consideration if I don't ask about her trip. I am angry to be put in such a position. She greets me good morning a second time and I weakly disguise my snarl, "good morning,again." I don't want her to mess with me. I end up asking her about her weekend, my face blank, my eyes bland with disinterest. Am I mad or do people hate me or both?
I was mad last night. I had a lovely morning comprised of a walk that slipped here and there into a meditative silence and a good sitting meditation (which I know is a much discouraged judgment) when I came back. I dressed in some more stylish clothes than I am used to and went to the movies with my friend S. Just as I was walking outside to wait for her my phone rang and it was my friend L. I did not pick up. That was the beginning of the end of my good day.
I worried during the movie. L.'s tone on her message was gruff and disappointed. We've been playing phone tag for a week. Mostly me escaping her as I escaped G. in the kitchen this morning. I walked back into the house after the movie and was assaulted with acute annoyance--I wanted to be alone. I didn't want to call L. I was tired. I was in emotional pain. I tried a cup of tea. B. came jumping up at me to tell me some random piece of data about god knows what. I weakly smiled, threw him a few bones "gee, wow, uh huh," and made my way upstairs. My roommate was there. No where to go! I should call Lauren. "Do you mind if I make a call?' No. I call Lauren, not home; call her cell and leave a message that I will be call again at seven and sit down to meditate. She calls. Fuck. I just want to mediate. I talk to her; I don't want to listen to her. I don't want to support her. I don't want to be there for her. I don't want to be empathetic. I try to tell her about me, but have to raise my voice to do so. It's not worth it. I don't want to be the bucket in which she puts her trust.
I hate being in that position. I told R. a few days ago that I don't want to be the person he says things to that he doesn't want other people to hear. Then he goes and announces he's going to steal some of one of the staff's wheat germ this morning right in front of me. He's doing it to goad me, he knows he's putting me in an awful position, he's testing me. He is a bad man. I am stuck. C. made it clear taking other people's food is equated with stealing. I don't want to be the conscience of the house. I have already been in that position too many times.
I feel like a dark specter in the house Nobody includes me in the fun and games. No, I should put it accurately, I don't include myself in the fun and games. I don't want to be in the fray. That way people won't entrust me with their needs, their secrets, their complaints and confidences. I don't want to be that person and it seems to me that is just who I am. Not even that so much even more. I am taking myself farther and farther from the center of the house. I am jealous of my roommate who explodes her distress all over the place and so people support her, bake her a cake, even me, I end up holding her and rubbing her back while she cries and while my skin crawls.
I am just not used to being in these human relationships. After reading and autobiography of an innocent man on death row who becomes a Buddhist, I recall how institutionalized I am. I have lived twelve of the last twenty one years in supported housing, in addition to the fifty--at least--inpatient hospitalizations I have had when I have literally been locked in. I spend my days now in a halfway house living with people I did not choose to be friends with following rules that make it hard to do all I want to do. I spend a good portion of my days in a clubhouse filled with people with whom it is hard to have a conversation. I sit there and stare out the window because I can't go back to my "home" before two in the afternoon.
But let me not misrepresent myself. I choose this life. I choose this life. Goddamnit, I chose this life and I am so mad at myself. Infuriated. I'm the one who does not play pool with the crowd at my halfway house. I am the one who does not get down the task of really writing my book. I am the one who is isolating myself further and further and further from people everywhere in my life. Housemates, clubhouse members, family, friends. I guess I am just used to the hospital/halfway house model: premade social structures supervised by professionals where you really don't have to become real friends with anyone. I've left a trail of acquaintances who want to get to know me better in my wake, but I just can't handle the responsiblity of being a friend. You know, I don't even really know what that means. I chastise myself for not being willing to do for others, but I do for others out of spite all the time. What if I were to operate out of love?
I don't know why I can't be friends. I don't know why I sulk on the sidelines in the living room or at the dinner table ashamed, angry, and awed by how well others get along and interact and form bonds. I've always had trouble, right from kindergarten, even nursery school. I found a couple of girls I liked but with whom I could not really keep up with. I would circle their bond, their energy but never fully commit myself to all the playground drama and the bullying and the overnights. Soon I fell into a pattern of having one best friend a year, and it would switch like clock work each year. Even as an adult I have abruptly ended two friendships and romantic relationship. Simply severed each with a phone call or a letter. Each was around feeling like I was in the position of therapist, helplessly pinned by their needs with no courage to lay down my own boundaries. It is nothing new in my halfway house or clubhouse or my friendships so now I just refuse to play. I won't have friends. I won't have family. I will die alone.
Dramatic, but those are the thoughts chasing me around on my walk this morning. I wish I had some answers here. Illness. Not illness. Environment. Family dynamics. I don't know. The feeling of being emotionally raped comes through though. As if I am used by everyone, like I'm being fucked against my will by everyone else. And I just have to grin and bear it. Smile and offer sympathy. And then get angry at myself for not being able to protect myself better, or more so, angry at myself for not being able to be like them. People who know how to relate.
I don't know if the any of this is rational. But it makes me very, very sad. I wonder how much I can chalk up to my illness. I know there is great fear at my back pushing me away from relationships and endeavors, not so much because I can't do what it takes but because I am afraid of asserting myself in this world--of being the authority in my life. I worry making friends will take me away from my mother--ugh, such distortions. I know my illness limits how many times I can do something social a week, how adventurous I can be in trying new things, but that is not the same as the distortions. Can I change? Do I want to? I am so very, very, lonely.
Later Today:
I just have to add that the whole thing came together for me as I walked out of the library (or stepped away from the computer, I do not remember.) The not wanting people to trust me with their secrets, their feelings, opinions, complaints, their life stories, and, the intense feeling of hatred and anger when they do--the feeling used and abused, only good for people dumping their shit on me, an interpersonal rape over and over again. And then it hit me. I do not want people's trust, because I don't feel good enough to be anybody's friend. I do not feel like I am worth their trust. I don't feel adequate enough. I hate myself too much to think that anybody would want me for anything else other than to cheer on and/or repair their own lives. I am not adequate for friendship, so I get mad at everyone else for the lacking I feel in myself. It is their fault I am not friends with them--they are too young, too old, too skanky, too self-centered, too invasive, too dangerous to my fragile mind. Ya' I got a bad illness, but I got a bad sense of self, too, and maybe that I can repair.
It will not be repaired in a doctor's office. It will not be repaired by medication, will, or thought. It will only be repaired by making friends with someone.
Dr. M says I do have normal relationships and that all of this here is in my head, one distortion piled up over another. And maybe he is right. All the way home from my clubhouse I kept getting mental wafts of how things really are. Meaning, maybe people are not out to get me, to use me selfishly; that it is not all about me but mostly about them. Most significantly I got fleeting senses that anger is just anger and not the kryptonite to my fragile sense of being, based as it is on fulfilling people's needs in hopes that they will return the favor--a clearly distorted sense of relating. Maybe anger is just anger. How can I express to you how that one thought feels like the first spring breeze of the year floating through the screen of a window just lifted after a long winter.
I guess that's all I have to say for now without getting boring. All I know is maybe it is not just a feeling of being safe or not safe with others, but even more deeply of feeling inadequate and not valuable and how hateful of myself and others I living life in a perceived mental deficit all the time--I am not good enough to be anyone's friend.
I don't know where to begin. I don't know what to write. I don't know what is pertinent fact and what will become a dry wild goose chase for an end to my suffering. I guess I will start with the house; with my immediate experience.
I am flooded in the fetid waters of being a pariah in the halfway house I live in. I am being stung by the nest of bees gone wild with self-hatred.
I am positive no one likes me. I sat in the living room drinking my tea feeling K.'s disdain and repulsion envelop me as she worked at her computer. I don't work at anything. I just sit here and think. I don't try hard. I felt the house director's disdain hit me like a block of concrete because I did not ask her about her week-end. She will not help me, be kind to me, like me, give me extra consideration if I don't ask about her trip. I am angry to be put in such a position. She greets me good morning a second time and I weakly disguise my snarl, "good morning,again." I don't want her to mess with me. I end up asking her about her weekend, my face blank, my eyes bland with disinterest. Am I mad or do people hate me or both?
I was mad last night. I had a lovely morning comprised of a walk that slipped here and there into a meditative silence and a good sitting meditation (which I know is a much discouraged judgment) when I came back. I dressed in some more stylish clothes than I am used to and went to the movies with my friend S. Just as I was walking outside to wait for her my phone rang and it was my friend L. I did not pick up. That was the beginning of the end of my good day.
I worried during the movie. L.'s tone on her message was gruff and disappointed. We've been playing phone tag for a week. Mostly me escaping her as I escaped G. in the kitchen this morning. I walked back into the house after the movie and was assaulted with acute annoyance--I wanted to be alone. I didn't want to call L. I was tired. I was in emotional pain. I tried a cup of tea. B. came jumping up at me to tell me some random piece of data about god knows what. I weakly smiled, threw him a few bones "gee, wow, uh huh," and made my way upstairs. My roommate was there. No where to go! I should call Lauren. "Do you mind if I make a call?' No. I call Lauren, not home; call her cell and leave a message that I will be call again at seven and sit down to meditate. She calls. Fuck. I just want to mediate. I talk to her; I don't want to listen to her. I don't want to support her. I don't want to be there for her. I don't want to be empathetic. I try to tell her about me, but have to raise my voice to do so. It's not worth it. I don't want to be the bucket in which she puts her trust.
I hate being in that position. I told R. a few days ago that I don't want to be the person he says things to that he doesn't want other people to hear. Then he goes and announces he's going to steal some of one of the staff's wheat germ this morning right in front of me. He's doing it to goad me, he knows he's putting me in an awful position, he's testing me. He is a bad man. I am stuck. C. made it clear taking other people's food is equated with stealing. I don't want to be the conscience of the house. I have already been in that position too many times.
I feel like a dark specter in the house Nobody includes me in the fun and games. No, I should put it accurately, I don't include myself in the fun and games. I don't want to be in the fray. That way people won't entrust me with their needs, their secrets, their complaints and confidences. I don't want to be that person and it seems to me that is just who I am. Not even that so much even more. I am taking myself farther and farther from the center of the house. I am jealous of my roommate who explodes her distress all over the place and so people support her, bake her a cake, even me, I end up holding her and rubbing her back while she cries and while my skin crawls.
I am just not used to being in these human relationships. After reading and autobiography of an innocent man on death row who becomes a Buddhist, I recall how institutionalized I am. I have lived twelve of the last twenty one years in supported housing, in addition to the fifty--at least--inpatient hospitalizations I have had when I have literally been locked in. I spend my days now in a halfway house living with people I did not choose to be friends with following rules that make it hard to do all I want to do. I spend a good portion of my days in a clubhouse filled with people with whom it is hard to have a conversation. I sit there and stare out the window because I can't go back to my "home" before two in the afternoon.
But let me not misrepresent myself. I choose this life. I choose this life. Goddamnit, I chose this life and I am so mad at myself. Infuriated. I'm the one who does not play pool with the crowd at my halfway house. I am the one who does not get down the task of really writing my book. I am the one who is isolating myself further and further and further from people everywhere in my life. Housemates, clubhouse members, family, friends. I guess I am just used to the hospital/halfway house model: premade social structures supervised by professionals where you really don't have to become real friends with anyone. I've left a trail of acquaintances who want to get to know me better in my wake, but I just can't handle the responsiblity of being a friend. You know, I don't even really know what that means. I chastise myself for not being willing to do for others, but I do for others out of spite all the time. What if I were to operate out of love?
I don't know why I can't be friends. I don't know why I sulk on the sidelines in the living room or at the dinner table ashamed, angry, and awed by how well others get along and interact and form bonds. I've always had trouble, right from kindergarten, even nursery school. I found a couple of girls I liked but with whom I could not really keep up with. I would circle their bond, their energy but never fully commit myself to all the playground drama and the bullying and the overnights. Soon I fell into a pattern of having one best friend a year, and it would switch like clock work each year. Even as an adult I have abruptly ended two friendships and romantic relationship. Simply severed each with a phone call or a letter. Each was around feeling like I was in the position of therapist, helplessly pinned by their needs with no courage to lay down my own boundaries. It is nothing new in my halfway house or clubhouse or my friendships so now I just refuse to play. I won't have friends. I won't have family. I will die alone.
Dramatic, but those are the thoughts chasing me around on my walk this morning. I wish I had some answers here. Illness. Not illness. Environment. Family dynamics. I don't know. The feeling of being emotionally raped comes through though. As if I am used by everyone, like I'm being fucked against my will by everyone else. And I just have to grin and bear it. Smile and offer sympathy. And then get angry at myself for not being able to protect myself better, or more so, angry at myself for not being able to be like them. People who know how to relate.
I don't know if the any of this is rational. But it makes me very, very sad. I wonder how much I can chalk up to my illness. I know there is great fear at my back pushing me away from relationships and endeavors, not so much because I can't do what it takes but because I am afraid of asserting myself in this world--of being the authority in my life. I worry making friends will take me away from my mother--ugh, such distortions. I know my illness limits how many times I can do something social a week, how adventurous I can be in trying new things, but that is not the same as the distortions. Can I change? Do I want to? I am so very, very, lonely.
Later Today:
I just have to add that the whole thing came together for me as I walked out of the library (or stepped away from the computer, I do not remember.) The not wanting people to trust me with their secrets, their feelings, opinions, complaints, their life stories, and, the intense feeling of hatred and anger when they do--the feeling used and abused, only good for people dumping their shit on me, an interpersonal rape over and over again. And then it hit me. I do not want people's trust, because I don't feel good enough to be anybody's friend. I do not feel like I am worth their trust. I don't feel adequate enough. I hate myself too much to think that anybody would want me for anything else other than to cheer on and/or repair their own lives. I am not adequate for friendship, so I get mad at everyone else for the lacking I feel in myself. It is their fault I am not friends with them--they are too young, too old, too skanky, too self-centered, too invasive, too dangerous to my fragile mind. Ya' I got a bad illness, but I got a bad sense of self, too, and maybe that I can repair.
It will not be repaired in a doctor's office. It will not be repaired by medication, will, or thought. It will only be repaired by making friends with someone.
Dr. M says I do have normal relationships and that all of this here is in my head, one distortion piled up over another. And maybe he is right. All the way home from my clubhouse I kept getting mental wafts of how things really are. Meaning, maybe people are not out to get me, to use me selfishly; that it is not all about me but mostly about them. Most significantly I got fleeting senses that anger is just anger and not the kryptonite to my fragile sense of being, based as it is on fulfilling people's needs in hopes that they will return the favor--a clearly distorted sense of relating. Maybe anger is just anger. How can I express to you how that one thought feels like the first spring breeze of the year floating through the screen of a window just lifted after a long winter.
I guess that's all I have to say for now without getting boring. All I know is maybe it is not just a feeling of being safe or not safe with others, but even more deeply of feeling inadequate and not valuable and how hateful of myself and others I living life in a perceived mental deficit all the time--I am not good enough to be anyone's friend.
interested?
3.20.10
My last two weeks I have been devoting my creative energy to my visual arts--painting, drawing, throwing color on the page, taking photographs and learning how to get them from the camera to the computer and to the printed page. I've made some cards, I've painted an ugly butterfly on a fiery background on a board I gessoed--the biggest piece I've ever done. I've done gruesome abstracts to reflect my mood and thoughts (these I really like the best, as they capture both shape and motion in a passionate palate of color, but they are not fine art.) Some of these things I've done in my art studio group, but I've also tried to uphold a pact I've made with myself to do something creative every afternoon, no matter how little. As I've done this the thirst in me to create has only grown stronger, pushing for an outlet. This clear, pure urge, however, must escape prison to come to fruition. It must clear, or at least not be mortally wounded by, the barbed wire rolled along the top of my exercise yard of thought fence all the while looking not to get shot down by the guards of my mind sporting rifles high above in the tower overlooking the prison of my heart.
It has, a bit, as the couple of weeks have passed. A few times I have really enjoyed making my art and like patches of low level fog settling over a day or two, I have begun to notice a change of heart--my creations are of me and for me instead of "these I really like the best...but they are not fine art." Do I need to make fine art? Is that the goal?
Arise fear. Arise fluttering wings inside my body. Arise tension like pulling on stale bubble gum. Arise urgency to answer the question once and for all. Arise anger and blame which deletes all the other feelings. Arise discomfort with not knowing the answer. At all. I do not know the answer. I could draw you a schematic of all the years and all the dynamics that led to me being so stymied in expressing myself but that would not be the truth, I'm sure, even if I don't know the truth now myself. I don't know. I just don't know. What else is there to write?
All I know is that my best moments, my deepest insights, my best artwork, come from places of not knowing. Not knowing the end result, not being able to answer a posed question, allowing myself to sink into experience without the rope of years of therapeutic understanding dangling beside me. I'm afraid that all the answers just lie in the doing and I've never been a doer, always a thinker, an analyzer.
I also punish myself for not being a doer in that I can't do as much as my roommate, my friends, my family, my fellow clubhouse members, the people I went to high school with. Example. It is the first day of Spring and it is sunny and seventy degrees outside. It seems to me that everyone is talking about it, everyone is outside with friends or family or their dogs. I, on the other hand, am inside. I mean, not having taking a shower, not walked, not gotten out of bed until almost 12pm, lying there picking at the scabs on my scalp (an old habit I have just recently started again.)I made a list last night of all the things I wanted to do today and tomorrow--walking, shopping for art supplies and a yoga mat and a water bottle; raking leaves and writing on my blog; yoga tomorrow, paying bills. Even more so I had fantasies of bring my friend S. to my hometown with her dog so we could run him on the beach for the first time in his life. Yet here I am, all musty and moldy, in the house--in my bedroom--not wanting to talk to anyone or do anything with anyone. I am a failure. It is only my call from my father which brought to light my Catholic guilt and got me to jump out of bed and throw on some jeans and make my bed. Otherwise I might still be there. Ya' I spent the whole morning lying in bed, thinking about writing this blog--"How will I write my story. My writing has to go somewhere. It hast to! I am exploding! But I can't organize it. My brain can't organize the scope of work I have already produced. I don't want to work hard. I am lazy. I am not a good worker. Do I really want M. to read my stuff? What will I ask him to comment on? 'What grabs you? What is interesting? What is informative?' How do I make this mass of work mean something? What do I really want it to mean? I can't do this. I'm doing this just to make a name for myself; just to mean something. It's all for me; I don't really care about it helping anyone else. I am bad. How do I write the truth without hurting anyone? Do I erase the mother blame from the whole book or --wait! can I really write a book? Do I want to? Will I stick with it? I can't do this. I am too small. I don't mean much . I can't create anything big and meaningful like my sister and her book. It will mean this, it will mean that. I keep changing my mind. i just want to do this to make meaning out of my life. Is that so bad? Do i have to feel so altruistic. I am filled with garbage that has to get out. What if it is just a 'tell all?" I don't want to write that. How can i use the details without falling into gruesome, the angry, the blaming? I have no time to write. And do art. I don't have the time in the morning. I have to write in the morning. No, the real block is in the details. How do I write my truth, without harming others. Not just without harming others but without falling off the path of what my family imagines when they tell me to write a book. Here is what I mean. Writing a book seems like a sure-fire arrow fired towards and landing on the mark of finally making something meaningful and acceptable of myself and making my family happy. When I wrote for my high school alumni bulletin about a retiring teacher my mother had exclaimed in joy "...shows them you're not dead yet!" But what if my arrow gets bent and does not reach its mark. Meaning what if I write a book, but it is my book, for my purpose, for my enjoyment and finally from MY VOICE! What if it doesn't affirm that i can still compete with my fellow prep school alumni who now have careers, marriages, children, houses, and belong to the posh clubs they all group up at, and instead what if i write something that just affirms me.
Arise the urge to shed tears. Arise the same boring old theme in my life that I can't seem to shake. Arise the same anger that I can't just fix this conflict between fear and anger. Anger--I want to break free! Fear--I am afraid I will be on my own if I do, abandoned by my family (are those the same?) It is this conflict that as a sixteen year old had me sticking my finger down my throat and vomiting up all my meals in secret. It is this conflict whose only answer seemed to be to finally stop eating altogether and train my mind to hate myself by chanting horrible insults to my reflection in the mirror. There seemed no other solution. Writing a book is not the solution either. But it might be nice to be heard. It might be nice, truly, to help someone else out. This book will not cure me, it will not resolve this conflict, and it will not make me back into the daughter everyone wants. But it maybe nice to write for the sake of putting down my experience--struggling every day with the conflict between fear and anger in revealing myself. And the conflict between wanting to write a masterpiece and wanting to write an honest work. It's that "masterpiece" that will thread my life through the eye of a needle and get me back into the graces of those I grew up with (although I think they think fine of me anyway.)
Notes: Distortions to be noted: I am more of a doer than I think--I just do what I'm allowed by my symptoms, and what I want, which may be different than others and my expectations of myself. I am not about to be abandoned by my family, but I may be more on my own (which is terrifying in and of itself.) My prep school classmates probably don't give two hoots about what has happened to me and would smile upon seeing me. And most importantly, thus needing restatement, writing a book is no endpoint--no solution, no cure, no resolution. Am I still interested?
My last two weeks I have been devoting my creative energy to my visual arts--painting, drawing, throwing color on the page, taking photographs and learning how to get them from the camera to the computer and to the printed page. I've made some cards, I've painted an ugly butterfly on a fiery background on a board I gessoed--the biggest piece I've ever done. I've done gruesome abstracts to reflect my mood and thoughts (these I really like the best, as they capture both shape and motion in a passionate palate of color, but they are not fine art.) Some of these things I've done in my art studio group, but I've also tried to uphold a pact I've made with myself to do something creative every afternoon, no matter how little. As I've done this the thirst in me to create has only grown stronger, pushing for an outlet. This clear, pure urge, however, must escape prison to come to fruition. It must clear, or at least not be mortally wounded by, the barbed wire rolled along the top of my exercise yard of thought fence all the while looking not to get shot down by the guards of my mind sporting rifles high above in the tower overlooking the prison of my heart.
It has, a bit, as the couple of weeks have passed. A few times I have really enjoyed making my art and like patches of low level fog settling over a day or two, I have begun to notice a change of heart--my creations are of me and for me instead of "these I really like the best...but they are not fine art." Do I need to make fine art? Is that the goal?
Arise fear. Arise fluttering wings inside my body. Arise tension like pulling on stale bubble gum. Arise urgency to answer the question once and for all. Arise anger and blame which deletes all the other feelings. Arise discomfort with not knowing the answer. At all. I do not know the answer. I could draw you a schematic of all the years and all the dynamics that led to me being so stymied in expressing myself but that would not be the truth, I'm sure, even if I don't know the truth now myself. I don't know. I just don't know. What else is there to write?
All I know is that my best moments, my deepest insights, my best artwork, come from places of not knowing. Not knowing the end result, not being able to answer a posed question, allowing myself to sink into experience without the rope of years of therapeutic understanding dangling beside me. I'm afraid that all the answers just lie in the doing and I've never been a doer, always a thinker, an analyzer.
I also punish myself for not being a doer in that I can't do as much as my roommate, my friends, my family, my fellow clubhouse members, the people I went to high school with. Example. It is the first day of Spring and it is sunny and seventy degrees outside. It seems to me that everyone is talking about it, everyone is outside with friends or family or their dogs. I, on the other hand, am inside. I mean, not having taking a shower, not walked, not gotten out of bed until almost 12pm, lying there picking at the scabs on my scalp (an old habit I have just recently started again.)I made a list last night of all the things I wanted to do today and tomorrow--walking, shopping for art supplies and a yoga mat and a water bottle; raking leaves and writing on my blog; yoga tomorrow, paying bills. Even more so I had fantasies of bring my friend S. to my hometown with her dog so we could run him on the beach for the first time in his life. Yet here I am, all musty and moldy, in the house--in my bedroom--not wanting to talk to anyone or do anything with anyone. I am a failure. It is only my call from my father which brought to light my Catholic guilt and got me to jump out of bed and throw on some jeans and make my bed. Otherwise I might still be there. Ya' I spent the whole morning lying in bed, thinking about writing this blog--"How will I write my story. My writing has to go somewhere. It hast to! I am exploding! But I can't organize it. My brain can't organize the scope of work I have already produced. I don't want to work hard. I am lazy. I am not a good worker. Do I really want M. to read my stuff? What will I ask him to comment on? 'What grabs you? What is interesting? What is informative?' How do I make this mass of work mean something? What do I really want it to mean? I can't do this. I'm doing this just to make a name for myself; just to mean something. It's all for me; I don't really care about it helping anyone else. I am bad. How do I write the truth without hurting anyone? Do I erase the mother blame from the whole book or --wait! can I really write a book? Do I want to? Will I stick with it? I can't do this. I am too small. I don't mean much . I can't create anything big and meaningful like my sister and her book. It will mean this, it will mean that. I keep changing my mind. i just want to do this to make meaning out of my life. Is that so bad? Do i have to feel so altruistic. I am filled with garbage that has to get out. What if it is just a 'tell all?" I don't want to write that. How can i use the details without falling into gruesome, the angry, the blaming? I have no time to write. And do art. I don't have the time in the morning. I have to write in the morning. No, the real block is in the details. How do I write my truth, without harming others. Not just without harming others but without falling off the path of what my family imagines when they tell me to write a book. Here is what I mean. Writing a book seems like a sure-fire arrow fired towards and landing on the mark of finally making something meaningful and acceptable of myself and making my family happy. When I wrote for my high school alumni bulletin about a retiring teacher my mother had exclaimed in joy "...shows them you're not dead yet!" But what if my arrow gets bent and does not reach its mark. Meaning what if I write a book, but it is my book, for my purpose, for my enjoyment and finally from MY VOICE! What if it doesn't affirm that i can still compete with my fellow prep school alumni who now have careers, marriages, children, houses, and belong to the posh clubs they all group up at, and instead what if i write something that just affirms me.
Arise the urge to shed tears. Arise the same boring old theme in my life that I can't seem to shake. Arise the same anger that I can't just fix this conflict between fear and anger. Anger--I want to break free! Fear--I am afraid I will be on my own if I do, abandoned by my family (are those the same?) It is this conflict that as a sixteen year old had me sticking my finger down my throat and vomiting up all my meals in secret. It is this conflict whose only answer seemed to be to finally stop eating altogether and train my mind to hate myself by chanting horrible insults to my reflection in the mirror. There seemed no other solution. Writing a book is not the solution either. But it might be nice to be heard. It might be nice, truly, to help someone else out. This book will not cure me, it will not resolve this conflict, and it will not make me back into the daughter everyone wants. But it maybe nice to write for the sake of putting down my experience--struggling every day with the conflict between fear and anger in revealing myself. And the conflict between wanting to write a masterpiece and wanting to write an honest work. It's that "masterpiece" that will thread my life through the eye of a needle and get me back into the graces of those I grew up with (although I think they think fine of me anyway.)
Notes: Distortions to be noted: I am more of a doer than I think--I just do what I'm allowed by my symptoms, and what I want, which may be different than others and my expectations of myself. I am not about to be abandoned by my family, but I may be more on my own (which is terrifying in and of itself.) My prep school classmates probably don't give two hoots about what has happened to me and would smile upon seeing me. And most importantly, thus needing restatement, writing a book is no endpoint--no solution, no cure, no resolution. Am I still interested?
sitting pretty
3.9.10
Here I am again, sitting pretty in front of the computer, back straight, legs crossed, chair tucked under the console as far as it will go, make-up applied, ready to write. How different today is than yesterday. Than last night when I sat with my goals person for almost an hour, tears pushing to be released, heart broken over my cross in life--my fear. One might say how dare I call it a cross to bear, how dare I compare myself to Jesus Christ, climbing up a hill, cross on his back, dying for our sins. I guess I do see myself as a martyr, a victim, brave in the face of great adversity. I am an expert sufferer.
I have an old friend, someone I've known now for a good fifteen years. Someone I've lived with, fought with, laughed with and cried with. Someone who has berated me and cheered me on. Someone I have disappointed, frustrated, and angered. Someone who I have loved and hated. Someone I have complained about. Someone who I have grown to be careful around, not to fall into her vision of me, not to fight it either, as she is fixed in this vision. And right now that is of poor, pained, dangerously close to suicide me. And I resent it. But I respond to it, because I feel a maternal gush from her when she says "You are amazing. You fall down, you get hit with such pain, and you always get up, you pull yourself up each and every time." And then there is that gnawing sensation in my mind when I listen to her say this that she is right. That she knows this part of me and speaks it, like I rarely do and that very few people in my life do with such accuracy and volume.
But is that me? Am I this courageous sufferer or am I more complex than that? Am I more complicated? Am I healthier than that? Or, no, it is not a question of health, but do I have more of a capacity for peace, love, and enjoyment in myself?
How do I go on from here? Do I tell of my fear? My constant, terror that grips my chest with it's frozen fist and sends icicles darting through my organs, spewing apocalyptic thoughts out of my neurons into my consciousness in the form of angry scenes and gruesome images and little movies that drip with themes of guilt and shame and all add up to an impossibility to stay alive. So that is my fear. And for a lifetime I have been trying to get rid of it. I have become an expert at describing it. I have, early on, mastered the art of manipulation, learning to make my anxious mother comfortable and happy and full so that then she could and would attend to me,make me feel safe. I have charmed doctors and treaters and have been undergone every type of treatment possible to abolish this fear. I have discovered that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Now, middle-aged, I am no less terrified; I just hate myself more that I can't get rid of it.
It sort of goes like this. I'm trying Buddhist meditation. I'm meditating. I know I should just "be in the moment, watch my thoughts, no, woops I shouldn't say no, I shouldn't say shouldn't," I remember my good meditation a few days ago, "I shouldn't judge my meditation, I am attached, don't be attached to an out come." The teacher's voice repeats in my head-"you like some thoughts, you don't like some other's, watch them pass, become awareness." "I can't do it. Oooh! there was a moment." I race to fill it with thought. I can't tolerate an empty mind. The fear wells up in me. I'm relieved. I now know who I am, familiar territory, but now I want to make it go away, still familiar territory. I try to get rid of it by feeling it without thougth. "I'm suffering. See the suffering." I see it for a few moments, then I start analyzing it, putting words to it. "Maybe if I just see it without thought, THEN it will go away. No, that's wrong. That's the opposite of what I should be doing. I want an outcome. I am here to feel peaceful. I need to feel peaceful. I MUST feel peaceful. I can't do this." My frustration level rises. I see myself in my mind's eye screaming and yelling and waving my arms all over the place and jumping up and down. I force myself to stay sitting. I hate this "Kill me or Kill her" my minds spews forth. "Why do I say that? Maybe if I'm quiet the reason will reveal itself" I picture talking to M. about the answer that hasn't revealed itself yet. One day it is revealed to me that shame lies under my guilt; I am on that like butter on bread, analyzing it throughout the day, remembering every humiliation at my mother's hand, seeing myself talk to M. about it. Not wanting to;wanting to keep the knowledge earned by meditation in the meditation. I will tell M. at some point.
My pain is not my fear. My pain is pretending I am not afraid. My pain is stuffing it back down the rabbit hole from which it came. My pain is the edict that I should not be afraid. My pain is my attachment to a life free of terror. I write terror to pathologize it. to make clear to us that it is an illness-to make clear that it is a truth needing acceptance.
I use the dharma (Buddha's teachings) as a weapon against myself. I twist it until it becomes another tool to be cured. But I know better. I know better. I know, among all the mental weeds and overgrowth, well...what do I know? This is tricky. The Four Noble Truths are that 1)there is suffering, 2)there is a cause of suffering, 3)there is an end to suffering and 4)by following the Eighthfold Noble path. It's not tricky. I know it works. I know when I allow myself the moment, when I even allow myself my fear, my attachments to a cure, my sense of impatience and urgency, when I refrain from speaking just to get attention, I feel better. I know that walking out of Dr. M's office last Tuesday I felt better than I did on Friday, despite the fact that we talked about the same thing on both days. The difference was on Tuesday I let the tears flow and we came to the conclusion that I had done something that had changed a relationship and that there are no rules in relationships--in short the truth, albeit a very scary one, but he did nothing to take away my fear. On Friday, I just talked and talked, looking for an answer from him to my dilema at the house. I left feeling tired and overwrought.
Open my arms to my suffering. Practice right speech. Cultivate nonattachment. All of these are good aspirations. Unfortunately I pervert them all into a twisted call for a cure. I might as well be demanding Ativan for anxiety. But to bring this to an end, I know, somewhere, somehow,and at sometimes I experience a little joy. And this is what I would like to tell my long time friend, I am capable of a little joy here and there. And what I would like to tell me is to...I don't know. I guess just enjoy it.
I don't know what to tell myself. That is the authority I must find in myself. What do I want to tell myself--no doctors,teachers, or goals persons. What do I need to tell myself.
Here I am again, sitting pretty in front of the computer, back straight, legs crossed, chair tucked under the console as far as it will go, make-up applied, ready to write. How different today is than yesterday. Than last night when I sat with my goals person for almost an hour, tears pushing to be released, heart broken over my cross in life--my fear. One might say how dare I call it a cross to bear, how dare I compare myself to Jesus Christ, climbing up a hill, cross on his back, dying for our sins. I guess I do see myself as a martyr, a victim, brave in the face of great adversity. I am an expert sufferer.
I have an old friend, someone I've known now for a good fifteen years. Someone I've lived with, fought with, laughed with and cried with. Someone who has berated me and cheered me on. Someone I have disappointed, frustrated, and angered. Someone who I have loved and hated. Someone I have complained about. Someone who I have grown to be careful around, not to fall into her vision of me, not to fight it either, as she is fixed in this vision. And right now that is of poor, pained, dangerously close to suicide me. And I resent it. But I respond to it, because I feel a maternal gush from her when she says "You are amazing. You fall down, you get hit with such pain, and you always get up, you pull yourself up each and every time." And then there is that gnawing sensation in my mind when I listen to her say this that she is right. That she knows this part of me and speaks it, like I rarely do and that very few people in my life do with such accuracy and volume.
But is that me? Am I this courageous sufferer or am I more complex than that? Am I more complicated? Am I healthier than that? Or, no, it is not a question of health, but do I have more of a capacity for peace, love, and enjoyment in myself?
How do I go on from here? Do I tell of my fear? My constant, terror that grips my chest with it's frozen fist and sends icicles darting through my organs, spewing apocalyptic thoughts out of my neurons into my consciousness in the form of angry scenes and gruesome images and little movies that drip with themes of guilt and shame and all add up to an impossibility to stay alive. So that is my fear. And for a lifetime I have been trying to get rid of it. I have become an expert at describing it. I have, early on, mastered the art of manipulation, learning to make my anxious mother comfortable and happy and full so that then she could and would attend to me,make me feel safe. I have charmed doctors and treaters and have been undergone every type of treatment possible to abolish this fear. I have discovered that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Now, middle-aged, I am no less terrified; I just hate myself more that I can't get rid of it.
It sort of goes like this. I'm trying Buddhist meditation. I'm meditating. I know I should just "be in the moment, watch my thoughts, no, woops I shouldn't say no, I shouldn't say shouldn't," I remember my good meditation a few days ago, "I shouldn't judge my meditation, I am attached, don't be attached to an out come." The teacher's voice repeats in my head-"you like some thoughts, you don't like some other's, watch them pass, become awareness." "I can't do it. Oooh! there was a moment." I race to fill it with thought. I can't tolerate an empty mind. The fear wells up in me. I'm relieved. I now know who I am, familiar territory, but now I want to make it go away, still familiar territory. I try to get rid of it by feeling it without thougth. "I'm suffering. See the suffering." I see it for a few moments, then I start analyzing it, putting words to it. "Maybe if I just see it without thought, THEN it will go away. No, that's wrong. That's the opposite of what I should be doing. I want an outcome. I am here to feel peaceful. I need to feel peaceful. I MUST feel peaceful. I can't do this." My frustration level rises. I see myself in my mind's eye screaming and yelling and waving my arms all over the place and jumping up and down. I force myself to stay sitting. I hate this "Kill me or Kill her" my minds spews forth. "Why do I say that? Maybe if I'm quiet the reason will reveal itself" I picture talking to M. about the answer that hasn't revealed itself yet. One day it is revealed to me that shame lies under my guilt; I am on that like butter on bread, analyzing it throughout the day, remembering every humiliation at my mother's hand, seeing myself talk to M. about it. Not wanting to;wanting to keep the knowledge earned by meditation in the meditation. I will tell M. at some point.
My pain is not my fear. My pain is pretending I am not afraid. My pain is stuffing it back down the rabbit hole from which it came. My pain is the edict that I should not be afraid. My pain is my attachment to a life free of terror. I write terror to pathologize it. to make clear to us that it is an illness-to make clear that it is a truth needing acceptance.
I use the dharma (Buddha's teachings) as a weapon against myself. I twist it until it becomes another tool to be cured. But I know better. I know better. I know, among all the mental weeds and overgrowth, well...what do I know? This is tricky. The Four Noble Truths are that 1)there is suffering, 2)there is a cause of suffering, 3)there is an end to suffering and 4)by following the Eighthfold Noble path. It's not tricky. I know it works. I know when I allow myself the moment, when I even allow myself my fear, my attachments to a cure, my sense of impatience and urgency, when I refrain from speaking just to get attention, I feel better. I know that walking out of Dr. M's office last Tuesday I felt better than I did on Friday, despite the fact that we talked about the same thing on both days. The difference was on Tuesday I let the tears flow and we came to the conclusion that I had done something that had changed a relationship and that there are no rules in relationships--in short the truth, albeit a very scary one, but he did nothing to take away my fear. On Friday, I just talked and talked, looking for an answer from him to my dilema at the house. I left feeling tired and overwrought.
Open my arms to my suffering. Practice right speech. Cultivate nonattachment. All of these are good aspirations. Unfortunately I pervert them all into a twisted call for a cure. I might as well be demanding Ativan for anxiety. But to bring this to an end, I know, somewhere, somehow,and at sometimes I experience a little joy. And this is what I would like to tell my long time friend, I am capable of a little joy here and there. And what I would like to tell me is to...I don't know. I guess just enjoy it.
I don't know what to tell myself. That is the authority I must find in myself. What do I want to tell myself--no doctors,teachers, or goals persons. What do I need to tell myself.
back to blogging
3.5.2010
I'm back to blogging, at least for the meantime. I am so frightened of being found out. Of being recognized here on line where I've put so many details of my life and trailing from them so many details of my true thoughts and feelings--more than I would say to anyone in my life, excepting my doctors. But I tried, a while back, to write an entry on Word and just print it out with the intention to add it to my folder of printed out blogs. I tried to write as if I were writing to someone, to some crowd, or audience, but it just didn't work. It turned into a long piece that felt like, as my mother would often describe much of my treatment, I was just "examining my belling button." I pulled a lot of lint out but it just felt like incest with my brain--self-indulgent and purposeless. A lot of my writing feels like that. At least here I am not stuck only in my head. There is a flow out to you, my reader, that creates a sense of purpose to the information, thoughts, feelings, experiences, that I keep locked up inside of me. I can only hope that someone out there finds it useful.
So you might be wondering what I have decided about leaving my halfway house. I have decided to stay. In fact I have decided to really stay. Not just for an extra couple of months, but for an entire year, at least. Of course this is an estimate. I still have in my pocket a plan to combine my two storage units into one just in case I decide to leave while my parents are in Florida. With only one unit my father will have to pay less to store my stuff, number one, and number two, I can leave whenever I want, having just the stuff I need so all I will need from my parents is a signed lease, which can be done by fax, I'm pretty sure. Knowing I can leave whenever I need to, knowing where I want to live, knowing I will be living alone, knowing what type of apartment I want gives me a security. But the best security, right now, is to stay.
But it really isn't just security that is driving my decision. I have goals--to make my life easier, to have more freedom, to have a sense of purpose, to approach my loneliness and isolation, learning, hopefully to share my life with others (outside of blogging!) I thought, with the slightest waft of confidence entering my body, with the tiny spots of comapassion eking into the corners of my innards, with the beliefs in local farming and feeding the poor seeming like a potential purpose, that I could only pursue these things if I didn't have to leave the house for four hours a day and had the space and the solitude to produce art.
What a familiar trap I was setting up for myself! I recognized the pattern. Each time I just manage to stand on my wobbling feet with shaking knees and quivering thighs I get excited and suspicious. Move on! Move up! Go to college! Get a job! Get an apartment! Become and artist! Become a writer! Be this! Be that! Do something! Be on your own!
Be own your own. That is what it comes down to--the drive and request for me to be on my own. I think it is no longer a request but it is hard to shake the pressure of it from my shoulder; the pain is like phantom leg syndrome suffered by amputees who still feel great pain in their missing limbs. But honestly, I think it is me who is trying to fill this archaic demand. And it is exactly the opposite I am learning at my halfway house and with my friends and family--it is not about being on one's own.
My first lesson in this was two summers ago. New to my halfway house one evening I was awash in pain and paranoia and was stretched out on the living room couch pretending to read until the book found it's way to my chest and I was staring into space. People were around, but I was lost in spaghetti thoughts and succumbing to a black vortex in my chest and all around my head was a cloud of darkness. I could have lay there all evening. I could have slipped upstairs and curled up in bed, letting myself fall from the precipice of sanity that I had a fingernail's hold on. These were my two choices. Aha! Not so. On impulse I sat up, looked around, and called out to the people around me, "Anyone want to go and get ice cream?" And lo' and behold they did. I think there ended up being about five of use heading off together down the neighborhood street chatting and joking together to the best ice cream shop I've ever known. We were a group, and I was part of it, and I felt better. No PRN, no paging Dr. M, no talking to staff. I had created something with people that help me feel better. I was effective, powerful, and connected. They don't teach you this in the hospital.
So my decision to stay here is loosely based on experiences like that. Making my life easier means only doing two,maybe three, different things during the day. Being free is not about being allowed to go home for lunch or staying home late in the morning, but making room on my desk for art making and actually doing a bit when I come home in the afternoon. Being free is writing this blog. These lend itself to meaning and purposefulness. Volunteering at the farm or at a greenhouse at a local school lends itself to meaning and confidence. And learning to share myself and my life with people opens me up, showing the isolation the door. This is truly being on my own. They are not my mother's values anymore. My values have changed. Being on my own is not about living alone, paying all my bills, fixing all my leaking faucets, creating art alone, writing for no one. All of the things I have listed in this paragraph I am just starting, this week, to really do. To really do. I don't want to leave until I have been doing them. Actually doing them. For at least a year, maybe two. I don't want to run out half-cocked with great plans but not concrete experience to support them or prove them right for me.
The odd thing is, suddenly my halfway house feels like home. I am not thinking every day about when will I leave, where will I go. I have made a commitment to myself.
I'm back to blogging, at least for the meantime. I am so frightened of being found out. Of being recognized here on line where I've put so many details of my life and trailing from them so many details of my true thoughts and feelings--more than I would say to anyone in my life, excepting my doctors. But I tried, a while back, to write an entry on Word and just print it out with the intention to add it to my folder of printed out blogs. I tried to write as if I were writing to someone, to some crowd, or audience, but it just didn't work. It turned into a long piece that felt like, as my mother would often describe much of my treatment, I was just "examining my belling button." I pulled a lot of lint out but it just felt like incest with my brain--self-indulgent and purposeless. A lot of my writing feels like that. At least here I am not stuck only in my head. There is a flow out to you, my reader, that creates a sense of purpose to the information, thoughts, feelings, experiences, that I keep locked up inside of me. I can only hope that someone out there finds it useful.
So you might be wondering what I have decided about leaving my halfway house. I have decided to stay. In fact I have decided to really stay. Not just for an extra couple of months, but for an entire year, at least. Of course this is an estimate. I still have in my pocket a plan to combine my two storage units into one just in case I decide to leave while my parents are in Florida. With only one unit my father will have to pay less to store my stuff, number one, and number two, I can leave whenever I want, having just the stuff I need so all I will need from my parents is a signed lease, which can be done by fax, I'm pretty sure. Knowing I can leave whenever I need to, knowing where I want to live, knowing I will be living alone, knowing what type of apartment I want gives me a security. But the best security, right now, is to stay.
But it really isn't just security that is driving my decision. I have goals--to make my life easier, to have more freedom, to have a sense of purpose, to approach my loneliness and isolation, learning, hopefully to share my life with others (outside of blogging!) I thought, with the slightest waft of confidence entering my body, with the tiny spots of comapassion eking into the corners of my innards, with the beliefs in local farming and feeding the poor seeming like a potential purpose, that I could only pursue these things if I didn't have to leave the house for four hours a day and had the space and the solitude to produce art.
What a familiar trap I was setting up for myself! I recognized the pattern. Each time I just manage to stand on my wobbling feet with shaking knees and quivering thighs I get excited and suspicious. Move on! Move up! Go to college! Get a job! Get an apartment! Become and artist! Become a writer! Be this! Be that! Do something! Be on your own!
Be own your own. That is what it comes down to--the drive and request for me to be on my own. I think it is no longer a request but it is hard to shake the pressure of it from my shoulder; the pain is like phantom leg syndrome suffered by amputees who still feel great pain in their missing limbs. But honestly, I think it is me who is trying to fill this archaic demand. And it is exactly the opposite I am learning at my halfway house and with my friends and family--it is not about being on one's own.
My first lesson in this was two summers ago. New to my halfway house one evening I was awash in pain and paranoia and was stretched out on the living room couch pretending to read until the book found it's way to my chest and I was staring into space. People were around, but I was lost in spaghetti thoughts and succumbing to a black vortex in my chest and all around my head was a cloud of darkness. I could have lay there all evening. I could have slipped upstairs and curled up in bed, letting myself fall from the precipice of sanity that I had a fingernail's hold on. These were my two choices. Aha! Not so. On impulse I sat up, looked around, and called out to the people around me, "Anyone want to go and get ice cream?" And lo' and behold they did. I think there ended up being about five of use heading off together down the neighborhood street chatting and joking together to the best ice cream shop I've ever known. We were a group, and I was part of it, and I felt better. No PRN, no paging Dr. M, no talking to staff. I had created something with people that help me feel better. I was effective, powerful, and connected. They don't teach you this in the hospital.
So my decision to stay here is loosely based on experiences like that. Making my life easier means only doing two,maybe three, different things during the day. Being free is not about being allowed to go home for lunch or staying home late in the morning, but making room on my desk for art making and actually doing a bit when I come home in the afternoon. Being free is writing this blog. These lend itself to meaning and purposefulness. Volunteering at the farm or at a greenhouse at a local school lends itself to meaning and confidence. And learning to share myself and my life with people opens me up, showing the isolation the door. This is truly being on my own. They are not my mother's values anymore. My values have changed. Being on my own is not about living alone, paying all my bills, fixing all my leaking faucets, creating art alone, writing for no one. All of the things I have listed in this paragraph I am just starting, this week, to really do. To really do. I don't want to leave until I have been doing them. Actually doing them. For at least a year, maybe two. I don't want to run out half-cocked with great plans but not concrete experience to support them or prove them right for me.
The odd thing is, suddenly my halfway house feels like home. I am not thinking every day about when will I leave, where will I go. I have made a commitment to myself.
making decisions
2.27.10
I am about to turn out my light and go to bed in the hopes of waking up perky and early tomorrow. "Perky" is one of my mother's words and although not completely accurate as to what I want to convey it does hold the optimism I feel when I wake up without my brain feeling like a shredded tire on hot asphalt under the August sun and my sternum feeling itself being split down the middle and my innards eviscerated. This is how I've been feeling for over a week, deciding and deciding again that I can move out of my halfway house, then deciding I can't then deciding I can, and so forth. I have felt frustrated with my conversations with Dr. M as if he is not listening to me, that our conversations are an exchange of lofty ideas and oft repeated yet unfulfilled plans. Then I realized what I wanted was for him to tell me could move out and to promise it would be ok; a fantasy along the lines of him being able to fulfill my plans for me. As he said in his office over a week ago when I said, "you really mean I can move out?!", "Oh, now we are going to pretend I am the boss?" That has been the frustration with this decision/non decision, I think--I have wanted other people not only to make it for me, but to guarantee its success, whether it is to stay here or go. I've been wrestling it in a million ways, but it always comes back to it being my decision. As I've written before, I've just come to the realization that all that lies between me and ruin is the thin membrane of myself, like the diaphragm muscle causing the lungs to inflate and separating the thoracic and abdominal cavities. My life depends on me.
This knowledge, new to the marrow of my bones at age 41, reminds me of the sessions I spent in my early twenties with my relational therapist, a young but kind and intelligent woman whom I immediately looked up to as someone of authority. We sat in her office for hours as I tried to force her to say that we are all ultimately alone. She would not say it. She hedged and qualified but would not come right out and agree with me. I wish she had, because then we could have started working on things from there--from my utter loneliness and my inability to take care of myself and my sickness or even able to tell the two apart; in fact I've just stumbled across the feeling that there is actually more to me than disease since I've been writing this blog.
I don't think I was asking her to doom me to a life of existential loneliness. I think, in fact, I was asking her to help me find a way out of it by retrieving my power from the jaws of my illness. Instead we endlessly analyzed my mother's and my relationship, with my family as I had grown up. We knocked on the door of a possible PTSD disorder but never found one. We analyzed each overdose I took, each new scar on my arm from a razor I had pulled apart and assaulted myself with, each time I refused my meds or dumped them down the toilet, each self-inflicted cigarette burn. I guess I'm saying we could have helped me so much more if we had just focused on wrestling me, my very self, out from under my symptoms and behavior. But I am honest, so I'll say it; she tried her best. She tried, in the later years, to tell me I had an illness over and over again but it I could not let it sink in, as much as I wanted to. The thoughts go like this--"If I have an illness and accept it then I will feel better then I will get well and fulfill my dreams and fly away from everyone I need and I will be all alone in the world and unable to take care of myself." This is the distortion that keeps me dead in my tracks, empty, dreams unfulfilled, meaningless. I simply can't shake it. So I could not let her help me. As hard as we both tried. My drive to be better is deep and ingrained but my attempts in the face of such backwards delusions were, and often still are, made to look Herculean while all the time I keep checking to see if everyone is looking and that I am doing just what they want me to do and will guarantee me a good outcome. It's like those scars on my arms--they are faint because they were not deep cuts; they were only communications, calls out to Dr. R., Dr. H, Dr.Y, Dr. K (all my early treaters) and my parents ultimately, to hold on to me, to not let me go. I didn't really want to be fixed, if so I would be alone and helpless my mind tells me. I just wanted to be held on to. And I have been. My family has stuck with me and Dr. M has been treating me for at least twenty years, and M. for around thirteen and I'm here at this halfway house for about three. I am being held in kindness and understanding and respect and a funny thing is happening-I am learning to make decisions of my own. I am learning, right now, that I, and only I, can decide whether to live longer here in this supported living house or to go to my own apartment. And even more important it is I, and only I, I repeat, that will live the consequences of either decision, like stains on my clothes--in inescapable.
Rereading this I am recalling a pastel drawing I made of a blue heron my uncle had photographed and published in a book and given to me for Christmas. I was in my art group and I was working on this drawing. It was hard and yet what I remember was letting all the harsh, distorted, paranoid thoughts consciously drift through my brain instead of letting them lodge there. I really started to feel like I owned that drawing. Pure ownership. It felt great.
I've been saying lately that every day is a work of art, given my illness and being in remission from thyroid cancer. Ever day is a work of art. Every day is MY work of art. My blue heron.
I'm drifting a bit here into the department where the elves start wrapping things up in nice little bows. Such completions don't exist,so I will leave you with what i have written. And just to say where i stand tonight; I am in no way ready to leave my halfway house. I am only at the beginning of building a meaningful life for myself. I know part of doing so will require me to shift my values. Instead of killing myself off just to get rid of this illness and achieve some great notoriety or something, I must let who I am change in the face of something as immutable as this illness. I must rethink what is important to me, how I value myself. A degree,a career, a husband may not be the path to freedom for me. Nor might be an apartment with cool furniture an space for an office and an easel to live in alone. I've always been terrified to change but maybe jut maybe it is the way to live an easier life.
I'll leave it at that. My butt is getting sore!
I am about to turn out my light and go to bed in the hopes of waking up perky and early tomorrow. "Perky" is one of my mother's words and although not completely accurate as to what I want to convey it does hold the optimism I feel when I wake up without my brain feeling like a shredded tire on hot asphalt under the August sun and my sternum feeling itself being split down the middle and my innards eviscerated. This is how I've been feeling for over a week, deciding and deciding again that I can move out of my halfway house, then deciding I can't then deciding I can, and so forth. I have felt frustrated with my conversations with Dr. M as if he is not listening to me, that our conversations are an exchange of lofty ideas and oft repeated yet unfulfilled plans. Then I realized what I wanted was for him to tell me could move out and to promise it would be ok; a fantasy along the lines of him being able to fulfill my plans for me. As he said in his office over a week ago when I said, "you really mean I can move out?!", "Oh, now we are going to pretend I am the boss?" That has been the frustration with this decision/non decision, I think--I have wanted other people not only to make it for me, but to guarantee its success, whether it is to stay here or go. I've been wrestling it in a million ways, but it always comes back to it being my decision. As I've written before, I've just come to the realization that all that lies between me and ruin is the thin membrane of myself, like the diaphragm muscle causing the lungs to inflate and separating the thoracic and abdominal cavities. My life depends on me.
This knowledge, new to the marrow of my bones at age 41, reminds me of the sessions I spent in my early twenties with my relational therapist, a young but kind and intelligent woman whom I immediately looked up to as someone of authority. We sat in her office for hours as I tried to force her to say that we are all ultimately alone. She would not say it. She hedged and qualified but would not come right out and agree with me. I wish she had, because then we could have started working on things from there--from my utter loneliness and my inability to take care of myself and my sickness or even able to tell the two apart; in fact I've just stumbled across the feeling that there is actually more to me than disease since I've been writing this blog.
I don't think I was asking her to doom me to a life of existential loneliness. I think, in fact, I was asking her to help me find a way out of it by retrieving my power from the jaws of my illness. Instead we endlessly analyzed my mother's and my relationship, with my family as I had grown up. We knocked on the door of a possible PTSD disorder but never found one. We analyzed each overdose I took, each new scar on my arm from a razor I had pulled apart and assaulted myself with, each time I refused my meds or dumped them down the toilet, each self-inflicted cigarette burn. I guess I'm saying we could have helped me so much more if we had just focused on wrestling me, my very self, out from under my symptoms and behavior. But I am honest, so I'll say it; she tried her best. She tried, in the later years, to tell me I had an illness over and over again but it I could not let it sink in, as much as I wanted to. The thoughts go like this--"If I have an illness and accept it then I will feel better then I will get well and fulfill my dreams and fly away from everyone I need and I will be all alone in the world and unable to take care of myself." This is the distortion that keeps me dead in my tracks, empty, dreams unfulfilled, meaningless. I simply can't shake it. So I could not let her help me. As hard as we both tried. My drive to be better is deep and ingrained but my attempts in the face of such backwards delusions were, and often still are, made to look Herculean while all the time I keep checking to see if everyone is looking and that I am doing just what they want me to do and will guarantee me a good outcome. It's like those scars on my arms--they are faint because they were not deep cuts; they were only communications, calls out to Dr. R., Dr. H, Dr.Y, Dr. K (all my early treaters) and my parents ultimately, to hold on to me, to not let me go. I didn't really want to be fixed, if so I would be alone and helpless my mind tells me. I just wanted to be held on to. And I have been. My family has stuck with me and Dr. M has been treating me for at least twenty years, and M. for around thirteen and I'm here at this halfway house for about three. I am being held in kindness and understanding and respect and a funny thing is happening-I am learning to make decisions of my own. I am learning, right now, that I, and only I, can decide whether to live longer here in this supported living house or to go to my own apartment. And even more important it is I, and only I, I repeat, that will live the consequences of either decision, like stains on my clothes--in inescapable.
Rereading this I am recalling a pastel drawing I made of a blue heron my uncle had photographed and published in a book and given to me for Christmas. I was in my art group and I was working on this drawing. It was hard and yet what I remember was letting all the harsh, distorted, paranoid thoughts consciously drift through my brain instead of letting them lodge there. I really started to feel like I owned that drawing. Pure ownership. It felt great.
I've been saying lately that every day is a work of art, given my illness and being in remission from thyroid cancer. Ever day is a work of art. Every day is MY work of art. My blue heron.
I'm drifting a bit here into the department where the elves start wrapping things up in nice little bows. Such completions don't exist,so I will leave you with what i have written. And just to say where i stand tonight; I am in no way ready to leave my halfway house. I am only at the beginning of building a meaningful life for myself. I know part of doing so will require me to shift my values. Instead of killing myself off just to get rid of this illness and achieve some great notoriety or something, I must let who I am change in the face of something as immutable as this illness. I must rethink what is important to me, how I value myself. A degree,a career, a husband may not be the path to freedom for me. Nor might be an apartment with cool furniture an space for an office and an easel to live in alone. I've always been terrified to change but maybe jut maybe it is the way to live an easier life.
I'll leave it at that. My butt is getting sore!
wow...
2.24.10
...a lot has happened since I last wrote. Well, a whole lot of nothing, really. Then a big decision, made yesterday, which I am already doubting--can I, can I not, can I, can I not, should I, should I not live alone? I know I shouldn't, but I don't know what else to do. I can't live with just one roommate--the dynamics there with all my insistent guilt and anger and fear mucking up my relationships would poison the household almost immediately. I'd always be thinking, "What did that look mean? Is she mad? Do I dare tell her to wash her dishes?" I'd be unable to make eye contact and most days the slightest annoyance would become a huge--unwarranted--rage.
At least I think this is what would happen. It happens where I live now but I can handle it. Could I handle it on my own? Without staff? Without fourteen other people do diffuse my anger, fear, guilt, suicidal feelings, distorted thoughts, etc.
Then I look back at those words, "I know I shouldn't [live alone.]" Why not? I've done it before and most of that time it was successful. It was only that last year or so when I had no structure and lived in those last two dreary apartments and had only one friend that I became so depressed and my life in such danger. Towards the end I also had a three month case of vertigo that kept me in bed. Then I was on Clozaril which had miserable side-effects.
The questions are, am I different now and if so can I maintain that change. Yes,I am much different. I am much more grown up and enjoy moments of confidence. What I mean there is that I know, deep in my heart, that the only thing that stands between me and the ravages of my illness is myself. Not my mother, not Dr. M, not M. Ultimately it is just me. And I am up to the cause. Granted, I get a lot of help form these people--they help sustain me, but they do not live for me.
I'm just blabbing here, writing a sort of groundless poetry of the mind, citing all the worn down points. What I really want to know is how am I going to survive waking up alone, without S. to smile at in the bed across the room from me? How am I going to make the morning transition from poor mood to ready to take on my day without the grunted good mornings from my housemates as we glide about the kitchen fixing breakfast and getting ready for the day. How will I wake up fully without shower negotiations and asking and being asked "What are you up to today?" How am I going to feel real without getting annoyed at the dishes being left in the sink by others? How am I going to feel effective and purposeful without being able to report inappropriate behavior on someone's part, speaking for one of our young residents who can't seem to speak for herself? How am I going to feel special without receiving from and giving notice to others at house meeting for the noteworthy things we have done throughout the week?
And how will I feel living in the somewhat depressed area I have chosen to live in and not have this gorgeous new library and be able to walk about these vibrant city streets for gourmet ice cream or delectable Indian food or at the crack of dawn along the famous river? How will I feel having my clubhouse as my sole community instead of living with a houseful of intelligent (very), functional, talented, active, people?
And how will I prevent myself from quitting? The first serious downturn in mood may bring on a rash of quitting--volunteering at the farm which I will start shortly, going to my art group, perhaps volunteering at a food pantry close to my "to be" neighborhood? I quit things when I live alone, because I wake to my pain alone and I am not forced to leave the house at 10am until 2pm. Maybe S.T at my clubhouse can help.
How about the nights. Will I become glued to Law and Order reruns again? How will I cook each night instead of the one meal a week I am responsible for now, with the rest of the week, being served up to me? How will I food shop when I am steeped in pain, recovering from pain? How will I spend my nights? I can't just sit in the living room and listen to the conversation and watch the traffic go by because there will be none. I will even miss our cat. I cannot have a cat--I tried before (both cats and a dog) and could not take care of them. I keep thinking I will have lots of plants, but it's not he same. Will I really be doing more art and writing or will it be just as hard as it is at my halfway house to get over that hump of sitting there staring, to creating? Will I get so lonely that I sit, holding my phone, going through my contacts and end up calling my mother more times a week than is good for us?
How will I afford it all? Rent is taken care of, but how about food, utilities, possibly some aftercare treatment (someone stopping by a couple nights a week with dinner,)cleaning service maybe once a month, cable, wi-fi? Do I have to get a job? I don't want to take any more money from my parents than I already do. I hate my living room furniture, but I have just realized, it is too expensive to replace right now. I must make do with the cool, dark colors when what I is warm beiges, golds, and whites. My furniture depresses me--brings back bad times, I wish I could trade almost all of it in, but I don't have the money to replace it and I don't want to dive into my investments.
Will the boundaries between me and my friends, once we are closer in miles, become blurred? Will my friends expect more emotional support from me, more of my time, more of my understanding, listening, cooing? Or is it me, that has fantasies of casual drop-ins and teas, seeing them more, getting more help from them (i.e. picking up stuff from my apartment when I am in the hospital?) Will I really be walking S.'s dog? Or will it remain the same. How will I survive the seemingly catastrophic guilt of saying no to my friends despite our proximity? I think the trick is not to hang on to them so they won't hang on to me.
What will I do when something breaks? Or a ceiling bulb needs changing or the toilet backs up? At my house now there is always an element of passing things off to some other mystery resident. I may have the energy to wash the kitchen rags one day, but I may pass by the dishwasher that needs to be empty another day. It evens out, but how will I be when I have to do it all? And I want cleanliness, order, threes squares a day. I know I will not be happy with dishes in the sink, ordering out pizza, calzones, chinese food all week. How will I do all this, plus...
...manage a super complicated medication regime, pay my bills, reminding my mum to pay rent, insurance, etc, deal with all the mail, manage my finances,etc. HOW WILL I DO IT ALL? I am not happy with disorder.
These are the struggles that lie ahead for me. Like Dr. M said, we just have to keep our fingers crossed. I wish I had a better answer. I wish I could talk about confidence and all that shit and really mean it, but these things, what I have just written about are what really matters. Ouch. I'm scared.
...a lot has happened since I last wrote. Well, a whole lot of nothing, really. Then a big decision, made yesterday, which I am already doubting--can I, can I not, can I, can I not, should I, should I not live alone? I know I shouldn't, but I don't know what else to do. I can't live with just one roommate--the dynamics there with all my insistent guilt and anger and fear mucking up my relationships would poison the household almost immediately. I'd always be thinking, "What did that look mean? Is she mad? Do I dare tell her to wash her dishes?" I'd be unable to make eye contact and most days the slightest annoyance would become a huge--unwarranted--rage.
At least I think this is what would happen. It happens where I live now but I can handle it. Could I handle it on my own? Without staff? Without fourteen other people do diffuse my anger, fear, guilt, suicidal feelings, distorted thoughts, etc.
Then I look back at those words, "I know I shouldn't [live alone.]" Why not? I've done it before and most of that time it was successful. It was only that last year or so when I had no structure and lived in those last two dreary apartments and had only one friend that I became so depressed and my life in such danger. Towards the end I also had a three month case of vertigo that kept me in bed. Then I was on Clozaril which had miserable side-effects.
The questions are, am I different now and if so can I maintain that change. Yes,I am much different. I am much more grown up and enjoy moments of confidence. What I mean there is that I know, deep in my heart, that the only thing that stands between me and the ravages of my illness is myself. Not my mother, not Dr. M, not M. Ultimately it is just me. And I am up to the cause. Granted, I get a lot of help form these people--they help sustain me, but they do not live for me.
I'm just blabbing here, writing a sort of groundless poetry of the mind, citing all the worn down points. What I really want to know is how am I going to survive waking up alone, without S. to smile at in the bed across the room from me? How am I going to make the morning transition from poor mood to ready to take on my day without the grunted good mornings from my housemates as we glide about the kitchen fixing breakfast and getting ready for the day. How will I wake up fully without shower negotiations and asking and being asked "What are you up to today?" How am I going to feel real without getting annoyed at the dishes being left in the sink by others? How am I going to feel effective and purposeful without being able to report inappropriate behavior on someone's part, speaking for one of our young residents who can't seem to speak for herself? How am I going to feel special without receiving from and giving notice to others at house meeting for the noteworthy things we have done throughout the week?
And how will I feel living in the somewhat depressed area I have chosen to live in and not have this gorgeous new library and be able to walk about these vibrant city streets for gourmet ice cream or delectable Indian food or at the crack of dawn along the famous river? How will I feel having my clubhouse as my sole community instead of living with a houseful of intelligent (very), functional, talented, active, people?
And how will I prevent myself from quitting? The first serious downturn in mood may bring on a rash of quitting--volunteering at the farm which I will start shortly, going to my art group, perhaps volunteering at a food pantry close to my "to be" neighborhood? I quit things when I live alone, because I wake to my pain alone and I am not forced to leave the house at 10am until 2pm. Maybe S.T at my clubhouse can help.
How about the nights. Will I become glued to Law and Order reruns again? How will I cook each night instead of the one meal a week I am responsible for now, with the rest of the week, being served up to me? How will I food shop when I am steeped in pain, recovering from pain? How will I spend my nights? I can't just sit in the living room and listen to the conversation and watch the traffic go by because there will be none. I will even miss our cat. I cannot have a cat--I tried before (both cats and a dog) and could not take care of them. I keep thinking I will have lots of plants, but it's not he same. Will I really be doing more art and writing or will it be just as hard as it is at my halfway house to get over that hump of sitting there staring, to creating? Will I get so lonely that I sit, holding my phone, going through my contacts and end up calling my mother more times a week than is good for us?
How will I afford it all? Rent is taken care of, but how about food, utilities, possibly some aftercare treatment (someone stopping by a couple nights a week with dinner,)cleaning service maybe once a month, cable, wi-fi? Do I have to get a job? I don't want to take any more money from my parents than I already do. I hate my living room furniture, but I have just realized, it is too expensive to replace right now. I must make do with the cool, dark colors when what I is warm beiges, golds, and whites. My furniture depresses me--brings back bad times, I wish I could trade almost all of it in, but I don't have the money to replace it and I don't want to dive into my investments.
Will the boundaries between me and my friends, once we are closer in miles, become blurred? Will my friends expect more emotional support from me, more of my time, more of my understanding, listening, cooing? Or is it me, that has fantasies of casual drop-ins and teas, seeing them more, getting more help from them (i.e. picking up stuff from my apartment when I am in the hospital?) Will I really be walking S.'s dog? Or will it remain the same. How will I survive the seemingly catastrophic guilt of saying no to my friends despite our proximity? I think the trick is not to hang on to them so they won't hang on to me.
What will I do when something breaks? Or a ceiling bulb needs changing or the toilet backs up? At my house now there is always an element of passing things off to some other mystery resident. I may have the energy to wash the kitchen rags one day, but I may pass by the dishwasher that needs to be empty another day. It evens out, but how will I be when I have to do it all? And I want cleanliness, order, threes squares a day. I know I will not be happy with dishes in the sink, ordering out pizza, calzones, chinese food all week. How will I do all this, plus...
...manage a super complicated medication regime, pay my bills, reminding my mum to pay rent, insurance, etc, deal with all the mail, manage my finances,etc. HOW WILL I DO IT ALL? I am not happy with disorder.
These are the struggles that lie ahead for me. Like Dr. M said, we just have to keep our fingers crossed. I wish I had a better answer. I wish I could talk about confidence and all that shit and really mean it, but these things, what I have just written about are what really matters. Ouch. I'm scared.
bats in the belfry
2.20.09
I've got the infamous bats in the belfry that crazy people are often accused of having, especially in the nineteen-twenties, I think.
Anyway, usually they are just nestled in the trees, shifting their weight, rustling the leaves, threatening me with their presence, causing my brain to be always aware,always on guard, always distracted by their presence, frightened. But sometimes they explode, swooping down from the treetops en masse with their mouse like bodies and their thin rubbery wings obscuring reality completely, enveloping me as I stumble into a bottomless swamp of guilt and fear and anger until I can't walk down the sidewalk with my grocery bags so I have to use a guest pass to park in front of the house.
What more is there to say? I know. I survived. Again, I survived. I took extra medication, I paged my doctor two hours after leaving his office and sobbed to him, "I know it (the guilt,terror, fear, anger, the scenarios being played out in my mind's eye) isn't true, I know it isn't real (because he has told me as much) but it FEELS real, I BELIEVE it," and I really do.Despite this, I accepted a little bit of help with dinner (I was in charge, solo, to make dinner for the house last night.) I talked to my dad without a trace of pain in my voice, wishing him a happy birthday. I fielded my pain and fear when he said "have a good weekend." (What do you mean? I won't talk to you all weekend? When did that happen?) I left L. a message that I couldn't see her on Sunday, which brought down the bats in a near blizzard of flapping blackness, entangled in my hair they caused me to writhe in pain and fear and guilt all night. I revealed my situation to staff. I left some pans for my cooking partner, doing clean-up, to clean instead of leaving a spotless kitchen for him as I usually do. I met with the same staff member and, when she tried to explore my guilt,snapped at her to not even try, that would not help, I just needed to get through the night. And I did. I told her I could not stay up until my "milieu" commitment was through at 9pm, that I would be short my four milieu requirements for the week and she pardoned me. I took my night meds and was in bed by 7pm.
I woke up distraught, still feeling my way through the blackness of the winged mice. Should I call L? Should I not? What should I say? How much should I apologize? Will our friendship last? Why does everyone glomm on to me so much. Why does S. drag me into the bathroom to pull down her pants and show me her bruise? Will L. really drop all her friendships for me once I live closer to her? How can I protect myself from other people. Why does everyone NEED me so much? I feel cornered, sucked dry, unknown, guilty,angry, mean, withholding, austere. This is dangerous stuff to say online but let me put in a foot note here--the depth of these feelings, the intractable nature of them, the inability for me to learn not to be guilty every time L. understands when I can't see her and carries on just fine, create a bat stew--a bubbling cauldron of bloody and black and still biting bats that I am sunken into, with my head barely above the sloshing sickness of it all.
And that's what it all is--sickness. Distortions, delusions, irrationalities, psychosis--pick a word, any word. At face value my complaints sound average and a striation of them are, but my cries are hysterical and deep because I yelling out for someone to come get me out of this f'in pot of bat guts where all becomes extreme and distorted. But no one can and that is why, though I will forget it in my next episode, it is worth saying that I made it through. That I've made good choices and ended up with the week-end I want (today to myself, tomorrow a movie with S.) That I am aware of the extra stresses that are on me (namely motion made toward the possibility of moving out of here at the end of the summer and also planning a vacation on my own to be taken in two weeks.) These, I'll briefly say, are stresses because they are actions and decisions I'm making on my own terms (aaarghhh! more guilt, fear, anger.) So I'm learning to say that making it through counts. That it almost counts more than the experience of pain, because that is just mostly sickness, mostly unreal,while my movie with S. tomorrow and my recuperating today are real. While this blog is real. While reading the book I got out of the library is real. While my decisions, even, are real. While the Indian food I will get myself today is real. While the nice conversation I had with K. yesterday is real. ( I'm trying to convince myself here, if you haven't noticed.) Bats, I know, are not real. But for something not real they can sure abscond with my brain. Every day in little bits, some days, the whole thing they fly away with. It is so painful to have something so out of control going on up there.
I have to say, I now understand why my meditation teacher of the course I am taking said that meditation is not for everyone, when I asked him if it could apply to mental disease, this Buddhist belief that there is an end to suffering. Meditation cannot touch the wild bats. It can really help with my attachment issues that make it hard to live with such an out of control force in my mind, but it hit me last night that, this, this storm that was so bad last night is out of the realm of rationality,immune to even kryptonite, shall we say, and no amount of meditation can take it way. But I maintain that meditation helps me when things aren't quite so bad and has helped me with my relationship with my mother mainly and helps me with my sense of equanimity while facing this illness. I could go on more but R. just called and I want to call her back.
I've got the infamous bats in the belfry that crazy people are often accused of having, especially in the nineteen-twenties, I think.
Anyway, usually they are just nestled in the trees, shifting their weight, rustling the leaves, threatening me with their presence, causing my brain to be always aware,always on guard, always distracted by their presence, frightened. But sometimes they explode, swooping down from the treetops en masse with their mouse like bodies and their thin rubbery wings obscuring reality completely, enveloping me as I stumble into a bottomless swamp of guilt and fear and anger until I can't walk down the sidewalk with my grocery bags so I have to use a guest pass to park in front of the house.
What more is there to say? I know. I survived. Again, I survived. I took extra medication, I paged my doctor two hours after leaving his office and sobbed to him, "I know it (the guilt,terror, fear, anger, the scenarios being played out in my mind's eye) isn't true, I know it isn't real (because he has told me as much) but it FEELS real, I BELIEVE it," and I really do.Despite this, I accepted a little bit of help with dinner (I was in charge, solo, to make dinner for the house last night.) I talked to my dad without a trace of pain in my voice, wishing him a happy birthday. I fielded my pain and fear when he said "have a good weekend." (What do you mean? I won't talk to you all weekend? When did that happen?) I left L. a message that I couldn't see her on Sunday, which brought down the bats in a near blizzard of flapping blackness, entangled in my hair they caused me to writhe in pain and fear and guilt all night. I revealed my situation to staff. I left some pans for my cooking partner, doing clean-up, to clean instead of leaving a spotless kitchen for him as I usually do. I met with the same staff member and, when she tried to explore my guilt,snapped at her to not even try, that would not help, I just needed to get through the night. And I did. I told her I could not stay up until my "milieu" commitment was through at 9pm, that I would be short my four milieu requirements for the week and she pardoned me. I took my night meds and was in bed by 7pm.
I woke up distraught, still feeling my way through the blackness of the winged mice. Should I call L? Should I not? What should I say? How much should I apologize? Will our friendship last? Why does everyone glomm on to me so much. Why does S. drag me into the bathroom to pull down her pants and show me her bruise? Will L. really drop all her friendships for me once I live closer to her? How can I protect myself from other people. Why does everyone NEED me so much? I feel cornered, sucked dry, unknown, guilty,angry, mean, withholding, austere. This is dangerous stuff to say online but let me put in a foot note here--the depth of these feelings, the intractable nature of them, the inability for me to learn not to be guilty every time L. understands when I can't see her and carries on just fine, create a bat stew--a bubbling cauldron of bloody and black and still biting bats that I am sunken into, with my head barely above the sloshing sickness of it all.
And that's what it all is--sickness. Distortions, delusions, irrationalities, psychosis--pick a word, any word. At face value my complaints sound average and a striation of them are, but my cries are hysterical and deep because I yelling out for someone to come get me out of this f'in pot of bat guts where all becomes extreme and distorted. But no one can and that is why, though I will forget it in my next episode, it is worth saying that I made it through. That I've made good choices and ended up with the week-end I want (today to myself, tomorrow a movie with S.) That I am aware of the extra stresses that are on me (namely motion made toward the possibility of moving out of here at the end of the summer and also planning a vacation on my own to be taken in two weeks.) These, I'll briefly say, are stresses because they are actions and decisions I'm making on my own terms (aaarghhh! more guilt, fear, anger.) So I'm learning to say that making it through counts. That it almost counts more than the experience of pain, because that is just mostly sickness, mostly unreal,while my movie with S. tomorrow and my recuperating today are real. While this blog is real. While reading the book I got out of the library is real. While my decisions, even, are real. While the Indian food I will get myself today is real. While the nice conversation I had with K. yesterday is real. ( I'm trying to convince myself here, if you haven't noticed.) Bats, I know, are not real. But for something not real they can sure abscond with my brain. Every day in little bits, some days, the whole thing they fly away with. It is so painful to have something so out of control going on up there.
I have to say, I now understand why my meditation teacher of the course I am taking said that meditation is not for everyone, when I asked him if it could apply to mental disease, this Buddhist belief that there is an end to suffering. Meditation cannot touch the wild bats. It can really help with my attachment issues that make it hard to live with such an out of control force in my mind, but it hit me last night that, this, this storm that was so bad last night is out of the realm of rationality,immune to even kryptonite, shall we say, and no amount of meditation can take it way. But I maintain that meditation helps me when things aren't quite so bad and has helped me with my relationship with my mother mainly and helps me with my sense of equanimity while facing this illness. I could go on more but R. just called and I want to call her back.
2.17.10
In two days it will be my father's seventy-first birthday. How did that happen? How did he get old? How did he stand trial against the federal government, have neurosurgery that left him without full rotation of his neck, have various procedures and surgeries to get rid of the polyps in his nose so that he could breathe better? How did he have cancer and survive, how did he develop high blood pressure, how is it that now when he gets off the couch or out of the car he has to lean back to collect momentum,lurch himself up or out and then sort of skip to catch himself once he approaches vertical? How is it that my mother tells me dad likes to sit under the sun on the lanai of their Florida home because it soothes the rash that has developed on his back that itches so badly. My father's body is rotting, I think. How is it finally, that my father and I sit on the kitchen couch one summer day a year or so ago and he tells me he used to be afraid of dying and now he is not? Shit, I'm afraid of his dying and I jump up and blur him out with what feels like nonsensical mumble.
But as I write down all of these ailments, all of these steps of living decomposition, my father, MY father, rises above them and I feel relieved. I'm not quite sure what relieves me. I don't want to sound trite and say it is his existence beyond the physical, his spirit, whatever. The only word that seems to fit at all is "trust." I trust my father. Implicitly. Fully. And he is teaching me to trust myself. I trust him to die when he knows that it is tight and I trust myself to survive it. I trust that I love my father, and I trust that he loves me. Simple, ordinary love.
Once, when I was,I think, nineteen years old, I was inpatient on a psych. unit at a general hospital. I had been at the private hospital I have since been to about fifty times but our insurance ran out and I was still too much of a danger to myself to be discharged--there was no question. I was a typical teenage mess with a bad psychiatric illness thrown in that was years from being diagnosed. I was being treated for the wrong things in the wrong way. I didn't know this except somewhere in my deepest places where real knowledge, real seeing resides. So I was angry, frustrated, tugging and pulling and at my doctors and my parents and there ministering like they were ill-fitting clothes I just wanted to rip off my body and stomp on. No one was getting it right, and I felt bad. Really, really bad.
So my insurance runs out and I am to be shipped off to a general hospital. But not quite shipped. There are two choices and my parents take a day to go and look at them both. A rainy, winter day and they go out and transverse the city to check out what might be best for their youngest daughter who missed Thanksgiving and missed Christmas because she was crawling around an empty room in a psych hospital trying to kill herself and getting restrained again and again for each suicidal gesture. I could easily have been abandoned but off went mum and dad, gravity in their hearts and picked the hospital that had the most organized group schedule and activity plan. And off I went.
We had some family therapy there with a guy who looked, my mother and I both agreed, a bit like Robert Redford. He was great. He used baseball analogies for my dad and kept it simple and straightforward, with little digging into the past and more of a focus on "what to do now." He was the one who set up the weekly dinners I would have with my parents once I got to the farm I lived at for three years after discharge. Still, when meeting with him individually once, I did manage to try to kick him then run out of the office. I wasn't easy.
And that is just what my father said one day while meeting with Robert Redford, there. He said, my dad said, "Love is a commitment and I don't know if I have the energy to stay committed to you." Wow. That scared me. Love is a commitment. Love can be withdrawn. Love can be too hard. Love must be respected. I must respect my dad's love. Love is hard work. Yes, that is it. Love is hard work. And dad was working so hard and didn't know if he could keep it up.
Lately as I go through my days I sort of think "what would my dad do?" like those bracelets people used to wear--"WWJD" (what would Jesus do.) But dad is not Jesus. He is a man. His love is ordinary. It is love of the working man. It is hewn of spirit and brawn. Inspiration and effort.
Dad is so real.
I don't know how to end this and my time is running up and I need to go shovel my car out so off I go.
In two days it will be my father's seventy-first birthday. How did that happen? How did he get old? How did he stand trial against the federal government, have neurosurgery that left him without full rotation of his neck, have various procedures and surgeries to get rid of the polyps in his nose so that he could breathe better? How did he have cancer and survive, how did he develop high blood pressure, how is it that now when he gets off the couch or out of the car he has to lean back to collect momentum,lurch himself up or out and then sort of skip to catch himself once he approaches vertical? How is it that my mother tells me dad likes to sit under the sun on the lanai of their Florida home because it soothes the rash that has developed on his back that itches so badly. My father's body is rotting, I think. How is it finally, that my father and I sit on the kitchen couch one summer day a year or so ago and he tells me he used to be afraid of dying and now he is not? Shit, I'm afraid of his dying and I jump up and blur him out with what feels like nonsensical mumble.
But as I write down all of these ailments, all of these steps of living decomposition, my father, MY father, rises above them and I feel relieved. I'm not quite sure what relieves me. I don't want to sound trite and say it is his existence beyond the physical, his spirit, whatever. The only word that seems to fit at all is "trust." I trust my father. Implicitly. Fully. And he is teaching me to trust myself. I trust him to die when he knows that it is tight and I trust myself to survive it. I trust that I love my father, and I trust that he loves me. Simple, ordinary love.
Once, when I was,I think, nineteen years old, I was inpatient on a psych. unit at a general hospital. I had been at the private hospital I have since been to about fifty times but our insurance ran out and I was still too much of a danger to myself to be discharged--there was no question. I was a typical teenage mess with a bad psychiatric illness thrown in that was years from being diagnosed. I was being treated for the wrong things in the wrong way. I didn't know this except somewhere in my deepest places where real knowledge, real seeing resides. So I was angry, frustrated, tugging and pulling and at my doctors and my parents and there ministering like they were ill-fitting clothes I just wanted to rip off my body and stomp on. No one was getting it right, and I felt bad. Really, really bad.
So my insurance runs out and I am to be shipped off to a general hospital. But not quite shipped. There are two choices and my parents take a day to go and look at them both. A rainy, winter day and they go out and transverse the city to check out what might be best for their youngest daughter who missed Thanksgiving and missed Christmas because she was crawling around an empty room in a psych hospital trying to kill herself and getting restrained again and again for each suicidal gesture. I could easily have been abandoned but off went mum and dad, gravity in their hearts and picked the hospital that had the most organized group schedule and activity plan. And off I went.
We had some family therapy there with a guy who looked, my mother and I both agreed, a bit like Robert Redford. He was great. He used baseball analogies for my dad and kept it simple and straightforward, with little digging into the past and more of a focus on "what to do now." He was the one who set up the weekly dinners I would have with my parents once I got to the farm I lived at for three years after discharge. Still, when meeting with him individually once, I did manage to try to kick him then run out of the office. I wasn't easy.
And that is just what my father said one day while meeting with Robert Redford, there. He said, my dad said, "Love is a commitment and I don't know if I have the energy to stay committed to you." Wow. That scared me. Love is a commitment. Love can be withdrawn. Love can be too hard. Love must be respected. I must respect my dad's love. Love is hard work. Yes, that is it. Love is hard work. And dad was working so hard and didn't know if he could keep it up.
Lately as I go through my days I sort of think "what would my dad do?" like those bracelets people used to wear--"WWJD" (what would Jesus do.) But dad is not Jesus. He is a man. His love is ordinary. It is love of the working man. It is hewn of spirit and brawn. Inspiration and effort.
Dad is so real.
I don't know how to end this and my time is running up and I need to go shovel my car out so off I go.
back in the saddle
2.16.10
Here I am again, after a two day hiatus. I'm feeling excited, relieved, overwhelmed, pressured and frightened. Happy to be writing, not knowing what to write, wanting it to come out perfectly. The perfect cocktail for a kind of buzzing urgent paralysis, as if I am horseback, digging my heels into the creature's flanks to urge him forward while pulling back on the reins to hem him in. I am both beast and rider. All in all a lonely situation.
I did however tell K. this morning that I was coming to the library to write this morning. I am telling no one I am blogging because when that gets played out in my mind there is an uprising in the house against me and a furious end to my friendship with L. too. But I did share that partial truth with K. and it felt pretty good--a whisper of relief of being known. I even told B. last night that I, too, like him, feel life should be easy and that I get angry at myself and others when it is not. I mean really, really, really angry. I left the last part out to B. I felt cold squiggly fear in my chest after I bared my secret to him, but it passed.
And that is it. I live in secret, and I am getting tired of it. I live in secret. I write in secret. I am hard pressed to create art in my art group because I am not alone. I am either going to soar on my stead over that Olympic jump or I am going to balk at it and be sent flying over the rails and break my neck, the metaphorical dreams of being an Olympic rider only remaining as a taunting nightmare. There is no in between.
I realized last week that while I have things that mean something to me--this writing, making art, farming, meditation--they are like blocks of chalk--dry, dusty,diminishing in my silence. At B.'s concert there were so many people there for him. I've always been surprised that B. has such a following, that people thing he is a "great guy," when I have had so many problems with him. Indeed, when I first met him a year and a half ago i couldn't stand him. He didn't have an emotional or social boundary to save his life and I had not way to control what came out of his mouth. When some invasive comment did fly out it invariable landed in my heart like a fish hook and I got terrified, with the requisite paranoid images flooding my brain.
But now he is so much better and I am able to sit with him lately and listen to him, giving him my time and attention and interest. And as I suspected, we have a lot in common. It's just that he says it, shamelessly, and I don't. His lack of guilt and shame is one of the last thing that perturbs me about him, while at the same time, I covet it. So last night, I let a little out with the comment about life should be easy, and that conversation had more meaning for me than this blog entry, or my paintings that hang on the wall in the living room for all to see. I've known it for a while now--a good, connected, conversation has more meaning for me than anything else.
So here's the question: can I bring people into my art, my writing? Can the blood of relationship, the lightness of social connection be infused into my dry assignations of meaning in my life? Can I have a conversation about something I've created and survive the criticism or the compliments? Either one, right now, stymies me and holds me in my tracks.
I have no idea who, if anyone, is reading this blog, yet I imagine I am getting all sorts of criticism: "dry writing," "self-indulgent," "boring," "examining her belly-button," just as an example.
But is it only my art and writing that needs opening up? Maybe I shouldn't even start there. I know when I do share I invariably stop doing whatever I am doing, even if it is just being me. Can "me" stand the test of "you?" Can my blogging stand the test of lousy comments if I were to allow comments? Or would the pressure to create constantly good writing cause me to shut down this blog if I got good feedback?
One might wonder what this has to do with being schizoaffective. It all sounds quite normally neurotic, doesn't it. But as my shrink said to me "you have a psychosis that masquerades as a neurosis." These struggles of meaning, isolation, loneliness and creative energy have deep and implacable tap roots, like beautiful water lilies on a pond that have roots down through the clouded, silty water down to the muddy bottom teeming with snapping turtles and underwater snakes (if they exist.) And that's the thing--my experience of these feelings are so extreme that they might not even exist and I am left to bushwhack my way through some fantastical underwater jungle. In the past year or so I have slowly given up trying sort through the roots, reeds, weeds, and dangerous reptiles and just tried to find a way to breath. Some would call this "keeping your head above water," a common phrase for an uncommon problem.
But I am a hybrid. Some part of the problem is uncommon--those underwater snakes. But they wrap themselves around what is often common--a wish to succeed, to have meaning, to love, to be connected--chocking these things and making them nearly impossible to achieve. (bad word if I'm thinking Buddhist.)
I must go now. My time is running up. More about this later.
Here I am again, after a two day hiatus. I'm feeling excited, relieved, overwhelmed, pressured and frightened. Happy to be writing, not knowing what to write, wanting it to come out perfectly. The perfect cocktail for a kind of buzzing urgent paralysis, as if I am horseback, digging my heels into the creature's flanks to urge him forward while pulling back on the reins to hem him in. I am both beast and rider. All in all a lonely situation.
I did however tell K. this morning that I was coming to the library to write this morning. I am telling no one I am blogging because when that gets played out in my mind there is an uprising in the house against me and a furious end to my friendship with L. too. But I did share that partial truth with K. and it felt pretty good--a whisper of relief of being known. I even told B. last night that I, too, like him, feel life should be easy and that I get angry at myself and others when it is not. I mean really, really, really angry. I left the last part out to B. I felt cold squiggly fear in my chest after I bared my secret to him, but it passed.
And that is it. I live in secret, and I am getting tired of it. I live in secret. I write in secret. I am hard pressed to create art in my art group because I am not alone. I am either going to soar on my stead over that Olympic jump or I am going to balk at it and be sent flying over the rails and break my neck, the metaphorical dreams of being an Olympic rider only remaining as a taunting nightmare. There is no in between.
I realized last week that while I have things that mean something to me--this writing, making art, farming, meditation--they are like blocks of chalk--dry, dusty,diminishing in my silence. At B.'s concert there were so many people there for him. I've always been surprised that B. has such a following, that people thing he is a "great guy," when I have had so many problems with him. Indeed, when I first met him a year and a half ago i couldn't stand him. He didn't have an emotional or social boundary to save his life and I had not way to control what came out of his mouth. When some invasive comment did fly out it invariable landed in my heart like a fish hook and I got terrified, with the requisite paranoid images flooding my brain.
But now he is so much better and I am able to sit with him lately and listen to him, giving him my time and attention and interest. And as I suspected, we have a lot in common. It's just that he says it, shamelessly, and I don't. His lack of guilt and shame is one of the last thing that perturbs me about him, while at the same time, I covet it. So last night, I let a little out with the comment about life should be easy, and that conversation had more meaning for me than this blog entry, or my paintings that hang on the wall in the living room for all to see. I've known it for a while now--a good, connected, conversation has more meaning for me than anything else.
So here's the question: can I bring people into my art, my writing? Can the blood of relationship, the lightness of social connection be infused into my dry assignations of meaning in my life? Can I have a conversation about something I've created and survive the criticism or the compliments? Either one, right now, stymies me and holds me in my tracks.
I have no idea who, if anyone, is reading this blog, yet I imagine I am getting all sorts of criticism: "dry writing," "self-indulgent," "boring," "examining her belly-button," just as an example.
But is it only my art and writing that needs opening up? Maybe I shouldn't even start there. I know when I do share I invariably stop doing whatever I am doing, even if it is just being me. Can "me" stand the test of "you?" Can my blogging stand the test of lousy comments if I were to allow comments? Or would the pressure to create constantly good writing cause me to shut down this blog if I got good feedback?
One might wonder what this has to do with being schizoaffective. It all sounds quite normally neurotic, doesn't it. But as my shrink said to me "you have a psychosis that masquerades as a neurosis." These struggles of meaning, isolation, loneliness and creative energy have deep and implacable tap roots, like beautiful water lilies on a pond that have roots down through the clouded, silty water down to the muddy bottom teeming with snapping turtles and underwater snakes (if they exist.) And that's the thing--my experience of these feelings are so extreme that they might not even exist and I am left to bushwhack my way through some fantastical underwater jungle. In the past year or so I have slowly given up trying sort through the roots, reeds, weeds, and dangerous reptiles and just tried to find a way to breath. Some would call this "keeping your head above water," a common phrase for an uncommon problem.
But I am a hybrid. Some part of the problem is uncommon--those underwater snakes. But they wrap themselves around what is often common--a wish to succeed, to have meaning, to love, to be connected--chocking these things and making them nearly impossible to achieve. (bad word if I'm thinking Buddhist.)
I must go now. My time is running up. More about this later.
winter saturday
2.13.10
How is it that the days that are going smoothly are the hardest in which to find something about which to write? I am used to mining the depths of pain and spewing it forth in deliciously vivid and visceral metaphors and calling it communication. And indeed it is; I am communicating my pain in a way that is most accurate, so (and this has been and remains the driving motivation of my life) some doctor, social worker, mental health worker, parent (in rare instances), of Buddhist monk may understand it and take it away.
But I'm finding there are all sorts of other kinds of communication which are vaguely, and in bits an pieces revealing themselves to me. Ones not based solely on the demand to be cured. Ones that are not handing over the self to have it be returned cleaned, pressed and hung, smelling vaguely like starch. Is this the life I want--wrinkle free by way of a chemical spray?
I'm not up for this today. Not up for a big exploratory piece. Not wanting to wrap up anything in that proverbial bow. And somehow I think you are not up to reading it either--that dry philosophizing and generalizing about relating to other. So I'll just tell you what I've done today, an insignificant winter Saturday.
Good god, that seems boring, too! A chore to write, a possible chore to read. I would rather be reading. I would rather be, dare I say, in conversation with people--friends, family, the owner of the flower shop down the street from whom I am going to buy tulips to give to R.,my housemate, who is giving his first concert in years tonight. I think it is classy and called for, to give flowers to the performer. When I was a young teenager I took part in summer theater in our hometown. Each summer was a different musical and we would audition and then chosen, would rehearse five nights a week and on week-ends for things like tech rehearsal as the performance dates drew near. Opening night there would be a table out front of the auditorium filled with bouquets for almost every cast member from parents, aunts and uncles, maybe even grandparents and friends. It was so exciting. We felt so special, so thrilled, so caught up in what felt like true theatrical professionalism. I loved it. So it only seems natural to buy flowers for R. and bring them along to the recital.
Of course nothing comes naturally to me. I've been worrying about the gesture a lot. Is it only a way to make the event about me? I don't really want to go, why am I professing a kindness I don't feel? I hate myself for ending up displaying affection, interest, intimacy that is false, an outright lie while others who don't want to go, just don't go. How do they manage that? If I don't go will R. retaliate with a mutual lack of support? I'm only going to be in with the in crowd. Hmmm. Now the in crowd isn't going. I don't dare drive, having never been to that city.
I announced in our house meeting that I won't be driving but like a trap door under the feet of the hanged, my conviction will open and I will fall through, directly into the driver's seat of my car, driving a crowd of house mates, heart pounding, head swimming, panic flooding my chest as I try to navigate my way to the venue.
And so on. Now, however, today, things are quite different. I am kind of excited to go. It will be lovely to hear an hour of beautiful piano music. And I mean really beautiful. This guy is good; it has been his life's work. I have secured a ride with M., even though I have to take on the role of navigator. I actually engineered that. I held back when anxiety wanted me to quell her and grab the certainty of a ride right away by asking S., but common sense knew he could not be counted upon. So the next day, at my clubhouse, I carefully asked M. if I could get a ride with him and looked up the directions on Mapquest as he asked. Then at dinner last night we discussed it with B., who M. also offered a ride to. R. is taking the T and I looked up the directions again, this time with the correct destination address. M. seemed to have a general idea of what they referred to but asked me to hold on to them and direct him as we drove. B. is worried about the time so we may leave earlier than 5:30 for the 7pm performance. M. assured me "we'll get there," and I responded openly and honestly and without forethought but with great warmth and cheeriness, "That's the confidence I don't have; that's why I'm not driving!"
Perhaps that is a glimpse of the communication I was talking about, honest and true, sometimes careful and planned, requiring assertivenss and revealing of personal idiosyncracies, a negotiation that develops over time into a solution. It was sprung from the depths (my terror of driving) but not vomited out onto everybody's lap as with a golden retriever who pukes up half a barrel of trash from the beach parking lot with an awful yakking and convulsing of body then looks up at you imploringly and without remorse, eager to forget the whole thing and be thrown the ball or fed dinner--to be loved.
Do I want to be loved like a dog, or loved like a person, a woman? A pet or a person? That seems to be the question lately and I seem to be the only one who has any potential for an answer. Beyond what I want, taking it out of the arena as a goal or expectation that I am in concrete control of filling or not filling, I will re-ask the question; can I be loved like a human? Then, probably most importantly can I love like a human?
Well, through all the trash in my head, I think I will go buy R. his tulips now. Step 1.
How is it that the days that are going smoothly are the hardest in which to find something about which to write? I am used to mining the depths of pain and spewing it forth in deliciously vivid and visceral metaphors and calling it communication. And indeed it is; I am communicating my pain in a way that is most accurate, so (and this has been and remains the driving motivation of my life) some doctor, social worker, mental health worker, parent (in rare instances), of Buddhist monk may understand it and take it away.
But I'm finding there are all sorts of other kinds of communication which are vaguely, and in bits an pieces revealing themselves to me. Ones not based solely on the demand to be cured. Ones that are not handing over the self to have it be returned cleaned, pressed and hung, smelling vaguely like starch. Is this the life I want--wrinkle free by way of a chemical spray?
I'm not up for this today. Not up for a big exploratory piece. Not wanting to wrap up anything in that proverbial bow. And somehow I think you are not up to reading it either--that dry philosophizing and generalizing about relating to other. So I'll just tell you what I've done today, an insignificant winter Saturday.
Good god, that seems boring, too! A chore to write, a possible chore to read. I would rather be reading. I would rather be, dare I say, in conversation with people--friends, family, the owner of the flower shop down the street from whom I am going to buy tulips to give to R.,my housemate, who is giving his first concert in years tonight. I think it is classy and called for, to give flowers to the performer. When I was a young teenager I took part in summer theater in our hometown. Each summer was a different musical and we would audition and then chosen, would rehearse five nights a week and on week-ends for things like tech rehearsal as the performance dates drew near. Opening night there would be a table out front of the auditorium filled with bouquets for almost every cast member from parents, aunts and uncles, maybe even grandparents and friends. It was so exciting. We felt so special, so thrilled, so caught up in what felt like true theatrical professionalism. I loved it. So it only seems natural to buy flowers for R. and bring them along to the recital.
Of course nothing comes naturally to me. I've been worrying about the gesture a lot. Is it only a way to make the event about me? I don't really want to go, why am I professing a kindness I don't feel? I hate myself for ending up displaying affection, interest, intimacy that is false, an outright lie while others who don't want to go, just don't go. How do they manage that? If I don't go will R. retaliate with a mutual lack of support? I'm only going to be in with the in crowd. Hmmm. Now the in crowd isn't going. I don't dare drive, having never been to that city.
I announced in our house meeting that I won't be driving but like a trap door under the feet of the hanged, my conviction will open and I will fall through, directly into the driver's seat of my car, driving a crowd of house mates, heart pounding, head swimming, panic flooding my chest as I try to navigate my way to the venue.
And so on. Now, however, today, things are quite different. I am kind of excited to go. It will be lovely to hear an hour of beautiful piano music. And I mean really beautiful. This guy is good; it has been his life's work. I have secured a ride with M., even though I have to take on the role of navigator. I actually engineered that. I held back when anxiety wanted me to quell her and grab the certainty of a ride right away by asking S., but common sense knew he could not be counted upon. So the next day, at my clubhouse, I carefully asked M. if I could get a ride with him and looked up the directions on Mapquest as he asked. Then at dinner last night we discussed it with B., who M. also offered a ride to. R. is taking the T and I looked up the directions again, this time with the correct destination address. M. seemed to have a general idea of what they referred to but asked me to hold on to them and direct him as we drove. B. is worried about the time so we may leave earlier than 5:30 for the 7pm performance. M. assured me "we'll get there," and I responded openly and honestly and without forethought but with great warmth and cheeriness, "That's the confidence I don't have; that's why I'm not driving!"
Perhaps that is a glimpse of the communication I was talking about, honest and true, sometimes careful and planned, requiring assertivenss and revealing of personal idiosyncracies, a negotiation that develops over time into a solution. It was sprung from the depths (my terror of driving) but not vomited out onto everybody's lap as with a golden retriever who pukes up half a barrel of trash from the beach parking lot with an awful yakking and convulsing of body then looks up at you imploringly and without remorse, eager to forget the whole thing and be thrown the ball or fed dinner--to be loved.
Do I want to be loved like a dog, or loved like a person, a woman? A pet or a person? That seems to be the question lately and I seem to be the only one who has any potential for an answer. Beyond what I want, taking it out of the arena as a goal or expectation that I am in concrete control of filling or not filling, I will re-ask the question; can I be loved like a human? Then, probably most importantly can I love like a human?
Well, through all the trash in my head, I think I will go buy R. his tulips now. Step 1.
No Name Politics
2.12.10
The "no name" was the name of restaurant in the North End of Boston my parents used to visit with other couples. I'm not quite sure if that was its real name or a pet name my parents had given it. They like to do that--draw on their feelings about a place, a person, or each other and affectionately baptize it or the other with a nickname. It's a little bit like that poetry technique of describing a part of something to capture the essence of the whole. The House of Pizza down the street from them has become the "5 Star," because the food is so good, the nickname dripping with irony because it is, after all, just a pizza joint manned by a salt of the earth waitress and owned by a huge Italian guy to whom my father calls himself "Rico." You bring your own wine. I think the whole thing captures the dichotomy of my family and the joy of my father--a common man done well, who has lived in the same town for his entire life, just moving out to the shore line and building himself a magnificent house. Growing up in this motion towards wealth with our souls still firmly planted in our Irish Catholic morals, values, ethics, and yes, sense of guilt, our family is unique to a lot or the people I've encountered who fall on either one side or the other quite squarely. And it REALLY makes it hard for me to know who to vote for. This quandary is deepened by my decades of travel through the mental health system.
You see, I've encountered more types of people than most anyone in my family but my father. When you are mentally ill suddenly all the mentally ill become your peers. You have that in common. You may not have wealth or financial hardship in common, you may not have ethnic background in common, you may not even have diagnosis in common, or IQ, or education but you have suffering, a very particular kind of invisible suffering, in common. Suddenly, sitting about the nurses station of an inpatient unit, killing time and holding on to a frozen orange to distract you from the storm in your head, you become friends with the other people sitting there doing the same. All other divisions just fall to the wayside and you can discover the most beautiful things about people that you would otherwise never have encountered in your life.
And it is in this environment that I've found many people like myself. People with family of means who live simply, on a tight budget either instituted by their family or by their own sense of pride, wanting to make it as much on their own as they can. Or maybe their families have disowned them.
Then there are people quite unlike me. People who are homeless or on the brink of being so . Then the other side--people whose families, steeped in "old" money, have financed exclusive private pay treatment for them. Either way, we're all living at the same halfway house in the end. Boundaries of means are washed away by illness and the struggle to recover.
I'm so glad I've met all these people. I'm so glad, that me, a societal mongrel, has carried on my father's tradition of being firmly planted in the salt of the earth. On the other hand I am so proud of him for making his dreams come true, for being unfettered by caps on his creativity and his outlandish capacity for hard work and building the life he wanted for him and his family. But it leaves me wondering, which side of the ballot do I mark? I really don't know.
I think that is all I will write today.
The "no name" was the name of restaurant in the North End of Boston my parents used to visit with other couples. I'm not quite sure if that was its real name or a pet name my parents had given it. They like to do that--draw on their feelings about a place, a person, or each other and affectionately baptize it or the other with a nickname. It's a little bit like that poetry technique of describing a part of something to capture the essence of the whole. The House of Pizza down the street from them has become the "5 Star," because the food is so good, the nickname dripping with irony because it is, after all, just a pizza joint manned by a salt of the earth waitress and owned by a huge Italian guy to whom my father calls himself "Rico." You bring your own wine. I think the whole thing captures the dichotomy of my family and the joy of my father--a common man done well, who has lived in the same town for his entire life, just moving out to the shore line and building himself a magnificent house. Growing up in this motion towards wealth with our souls still firmly planted in our Irish Catholic morals, values, ethics, and yes, sense of guilt, our family is unique to a lot or the people I've encountered who fall on either one side or the other quite squarely. And it REALLY makes it hard for me to know who to vote for. This quandary is deepened by my decades of travel through the mental health system.
You see, I've encountered more types of people than most anyone in my family but my father. When you are mentally ill suddenly all the mentally ill become your peers. You have that in common. You may not have wealth or financial hardship in common, you may not have ethnic background in common, you may not even have diagnosis in common, or IQ, or education but you have suffering, a very particular kind of invisible suffering, in common. Suddenly, sitting about the nurses station of an inpatient unit, killing time and holding on to a frozen orange to distract you from the storm in your head, you become friends with the other people sitting there doing the same. All other divisions just fall to the wayside and you can discover the most beautiful things about people that you would otherwise never have encountered in your life.
And it is in this environment that I've found many people like myself. People with family of means who live simply, on a tight budget either instituted by their family or by their own sense of pride, wanting to make it as much on their own as they can. Or maybe their families have disowned them.
Then there are people quite unlike me. People who are homeless or on the brink of being so . Then the other side--people whose families, steeped in "old" money, have financed exclusive private pay treatment for them. Either way, we're all living at the same halfway house in the end. Boundaries of means are washed away by illness and the struggle to recover.
I'm so glad I've met all these people. I'm so glad, that me, a societal mongrel, has carried on my father's tradition of being firmly planted in the salt of the earth. On the other hand I am so proud of him for making his dreams come true, for being unfettered by caps on his creativity and his outlandish capacity for hard work and building the life he wanted for him and his family. But it leaves me wondering, which side of the ballot do I mark? I really don't know.
I think that is all I will write today.
afternoon delight
2.11.10
Does anyone remember that song from the seventies? "ooooh, ooooh, afternoon delight!" It brings back bare feet on the newly laid asphalt of my parent's driveway. Summer afternoons spent alone--discounting my dog. Hanging around the slope and flat surface of grass that the house sits upon. Skinny legs but strong kneecaps. Shorts of a polyester cotton blend, if not all polyester. Perhaps throwing a slimy, mushy tennis ball down the hill to the dog. Perhaps riding my bike up and down the small incline of our driveway or up to the shared drive to the circular part at the top of the hill, hidden from view by a tunnel of rhododendrons three times as tall as me. Smelling the sweet ocean that lay down the driveway and around the bend of the street. Maybe searching for birds to capture or chasing chipmunks skittering in and out of the crevices of the stone drywall lining the main driveway. Lots of silence, except for the songs in my head. I liked it that way, except for the strange constraint I felt. A constraint that said it had to be that way; that I could not invite a friend over, that I could not knock on a neighbor's door--"Will you come and play with me?" Early on I had a sense that others could not handle me, as I've written before. That no one could understand me and trying to explain never occurred to me, as fraught with danger it seemed. After all, I didn't want to be misunderstood--the pain would be, is, too great. For misunderstanding came before advice that only, well, f'ed me up with its inaccuracy. Lonely. Lonely, I felt in this konundrum.
So thirty years later this is what I am talking about with M., my therapist, in his office this morning. We trace the whole path of thinking, feeling, history of having been institutionalized, of interpersonal patterns born self-preservation and paranoia
--all the factors that trace down to immutable isolation. "Help." I plaintively state partly to stave off the end of the session which I feel is drawing near and partly because I feel impossibility of the situation and want him to solve it. He makes it clear that he can't. What he, what we, come up with is far better than "three cognitive steps to healthy relationships!" or following Marsha Linenahann's (sp?) "DEAR MAN" acronym for interpersonal interactions. It takes a lot of back and forth, a lot of M. struggling to articulate himself in a way I'm not used to seeing with him and a lot of knitted brows and gaze raised to the ceiling on his part, which I watched with fear and waning confidence. Then I say "I wasn't talking about that kind of rat's nest [situtional] I was talking about an intrapsychic rat's nest" "Exactly, "he said. "What I am saying is that all your discomfort does not come from..." I join him in the last two words, "...my illness." Silence. Profound silene.
I turn my head to the left and down, couch my cheek in my left hand, elbow on the arm of the chair. When anyone has ever dared to say that to me in the past, even suggest it, I would refuse to listen and throw out any variety of behaviours from tears, to stonewalling, to angry tutorials on my illness through venoumously tight lips, to cutting, burning, running out of offices, outbreaks of fury--"What do you mean I don't have an illness!!??!!" ( as if that was what they were saying.) I felt gravely, grossly, and dangerously misundertood. I felt no one could help me. I felt alone. And mainly I felt accused of making up my pain and of pretending I couldn't make it go away. Of being underhanded and manipulative and dishonest and greedy for attention. I felt the gautlet down and pronounced guily of a terrible hate crime against myself and others. I felt demanded to fix what I knew I couldn't.
I had a lot of treatment in the eighties and nineties that seemed designed to make me feel this way and all I could do, powerlessly ensconced in the hospital or a residential program at the hospital and recieving the fashinable treatment of the time for the fashionable diagnosis of the time (Borderline Personality Disorder,) was too revolt with what was at hand--mainly what the treaters seemed to want--symptoms and behavior. My self-esteem, low as it was, took a dive and I became fully and wholeheartedly a patient for many years, a role I am slowly inching my way out of.
So when Mark and I chorused that "all my discomfort does not come from my illness, " I was surprised by my reaction: I smiled. Looking into the corner, cheek in hand, taking a moment to let it sink in and then the slightest rounding up of my bottom lip and tighening of the corners of my mouth, I felt relieved, and happy. Perhaps there is a human in me after all. It poses great threat, risk, and opportunity and must be coupled with this horrible disease that isn't going anyhwhere, but I am excited to explore the possiblities of looking at myself in a slightly different way.
Does anyone remember that song from the seventies? "ooooh, ooooh, afternoon delight!" It brings back bare feet on the newly laid asphalt of my parent's driveway. Summer afternoons spent alone--discounting my dog. Hanging around the slope and flat surface of grass that the house sits upon. Skinny legs but strong kneecaps. Shorts of a polyester cotton blend, if not all polyester. Perhaps throwing a slimy, mushy tennis ball down the hill to the dog. Perhaps riding my bike up and down the small incline of our driveway or up to the shared drive to the circular part at the top of the hill, hidden from view by a tunnel of rhododendrons three times as tall as me. Smelling the sweet ocean that lay down the driveway and around the bend of the street. Maybe searching for birds to capture or chasing chipmunks skittering in and out of the crevices of the stone drywall lining the main driveway. Lots of silence, except for the songs in my head. I liked it that way, except for the strange constraint I felt. A constraint that said it had to be that way; that I could not invite a friend over, that I could not knock on a neighbor's door--"Will you come and play with me?" Early on I had a sense that others could not handle me, as I've written before. That no one could understand me and trying to explain never occurred to me, as fraught with danger it seemed. After all, I didn't want to be misunderstood--the pain would be, is, too great. For misunderstanding came before advice that only, well, f'ed me up with its inaccuracy. Lonely. Lonely, I felt in this konundrum.
So thirty years later this is what I am talking about with M., my therapist, in his office this morning. We trace the whole path of thinking, feeling, history of having been institutionalized, of interpersonal patterns born self-preservation and paranoia
--all the factors that trace down to immutable isolation. "Help." I plaintively state partly to stave off the end of the session which I feel is drawing near and partly because I feel impossibility of the situation and want him to solve it. He makes it clear that he can't. What he, what we, come up with is far better than "three cognitive steps to healthy relationships!" or following Marsha Linenahann's (sp?) "DEAR MAN" acronym for interpersonal interactions. It takes a lot of back and forth, a lot of M. struggling to articulate himself in a way I'm not used to seeing with him and a lot of knitted brows and gaze raised to the ceiling on his part, which I watched with fear and waning confidence. Then I say "I wasn't talking about that kind of rat's nest [situtional] I was talking about an intrapsychic rat's nest" "Exactly, "he said. "What I am saying is that all your discomfort does not come from..." I join him in the last two words, "...my illness." Silence. Profound silene.
I turn my head to the left and down, couch my cheek in my left hand, elbow on the arm of the chair. When anyone has ever dared to say that to me in the past, even suggest it, I would refuse to listen and throw out any variety of behaviours from tears, to stonewalling, to angry tutorials on my illness through venoumously tight lips, to cutting, burning, running out of offices, outbreaks of fury--"What do you mean I don't have an illness!!??!!" ( as if that was what they were saying.) I felt gravely, grossly, and dangerously misundertood. I felt no one could help me. I felt alone. And mainly I felt accused of making up my pain and of pretending I couldn't make it go away. Of being underhanded and manipulative and dishonest and greedy for attention. I felt the gautlet down and pronounced guily of a terrible hate crime against myself and others. I felt demanded to fix what I knew I couldn't.
I had a lot of treatment in the eighties and nineties that seemed designed to make me feel this way and all I could do, powerlessly ensconced in the hospital or a residential program at the hospital and recieving the fashinable treatment of the time for the fashionable diagnosis of the time (Borderline Personality Disorder,) was too revolt with what was at hand--mainly what the treaters seemed to want--symptoms and behavior. My self-esteem, low as it was, took a dive and I became fully and wholeheartedly a patient for many years, a role I am slowly inching my way out of.
So when Mark and I chorused that "all my discomfort does not come from my illness, " I was surprised by my reaction: I smiled. Looking into the corner, cheek in hand, taking a moment to let it sink in and then the slightest rounding up of my bottom lip and tighening of the corners of my mouth, I felt relieved, and happy. Perhaps there is a human in me after all. It poses great threat, risk, and opportunity and must be coupled with this horrible disease that isn't going anyhwhere, but I am excited to explore the possiblities of looking at myself in a slightly different way.
Hmmm....
2.10.10
I have to say, I'm at a loss today--too much to write, too little passion or inspiration to write. Things, remarkably, are going fine. i got the news Monday afternoon that my father's polyp, found where he had cancer several years ago, was benign. At first I did the usual--gasp, smile, grin, laugh, exclaim "I knew it, I knew it!" (despite the fact that I well know--such things can't be known) to which my mother interjected "I did, too." They were "on their way out the door" to some sort of operatic outdoor concert at their gated community in FLA, so we couldn't talk for long. I did manage to get in there--"so when can I come down for a long week-end?" This was harbinger of things to come. Then, after hanging up, I did the requisite jumping up and down and telling anyone I could find suitable in the house to tell. "It's benign! It's benign!"
None of that did anything for me. Very little of those exclamations, proclamations, or turning figurative cartwheel in the living room seemed very accurate as to how I was feeling; I still felt like shit, but it had to be done, the excitement had to be expressed, if only as estimated interpersonal truth.
What did really happen was over the next several hours, the entire evening actually, as I watched t.v. and talked to Dr. M and took an extra anti-psychotic for my persistent symptoms, and ate dinner and walked to my meditation class and sat there and walked home, was that the relief slowly seeped in, like a cool maroon tide flooding a fecund marsh, feeding it, bringing the reeds and nesting birds back to life. The shroud of psychosis enveloping me populated with all those instant movies and paranoid fear, and the stinky, pungent smell of sickness, was lifted and I could breathe a bit better again. Left in my chest was the rock of despair, the insistent of suicidal rage but by morning that, too was gone. Note: none of this completely abandons me but believe you me, the air is much cleaner up here now.
Clearly the anxiety, the being on tinder hooks, waiting, waiting, waiting for this doctor to call with the biopsy results and waiting, waiting some more as he failed day after day to call in the time frame he said he would, ratcheted up my symptoms. Maybe this is a clue to my previous question: "where does disease end and human begin." Human stress, in this case, gave my illness a boot in the ass that shot it so far into the atmosphere on a wild arc of a ride that could only decline once the stress was removed. But then there was the other boot, this one shod on the foot of my family--we weren't allowed to talk about it. Hmmm...
It was hard, when I called my mother the first time, when I was sure the results to my dad's test were in, to hear her say to me breathlessly and urgently (almost violently) "Wendy, you've got to take a page from my book...you've just got to erase it, erase it from your head. " "But you know i don't work that way, mum. " (a daring response from me) "Well, you've got to try." (or something like that.) "But it doesn't always help, mum." "I know, I know, sometimes it comes around and bites you in the ass, but it is the only way..." And Then I heard the recipe for chicken caccitore at manic speed until she gave the phone to my dad and I heard about the palm rats in the attic in surreal detail. Then the phone call ended, me knowing I wouldn't be calling again soon.
I haven't written this stuff about my family in a long time and I can feel the sneaking snake of "my illness is not one at all but just emotional wreckage from living in a family where most stuff was "erased" I know this is not true. I know I have a bitch of an illness AND I know that it took years, my adult lifetime, for my parents to learn it can't be erased AND I think I know that most of this progress has been pushed onward by my learning--still in progress of course--to take care of myself. When I delivered my father's seventieth birthday cake to him amongst our entire family singing to him, he leaned a bit towards me, sparkling his eyes up at me and said softly "I never thought you'd make it here." At first I thought he meant to the house that day, then I understood. I can take care of myself. And when I call my mother without the strain of need in my voice, five times out of ten we have an enjoyable conversation and she ends with "I love you," which I return. She never used to say that Now, now that I can take care of my self, she is free to love me. There is space created in the cocoon that has bound us so tightly.
This freedom, this air to breathe and love, this space to enjoy comes out of decisions I have made. And to be fair, decisions my parents have made. When my first half-way house closed down, my instinct was to run home to my parents and live there until it was opened again. My mother's instinct was to get me an apartment ASAP. Instead, after crying, I breathed and made the best decision I've probably ever made. I agreed to go to another house in the system until they reopened the first one. I know living with my parents for a month or two rot would away any progress I was making in a beaker full of old patterns like following my parents around the house and long drawn out conversations with my mother about my emotional life and stuffed irritations and jealousy of my sister's life and fear of her children and resentment of her relationship with mum and dad, and so forth. Then, after finding the second house much better than the first, I, yes I and no one else, decided to stay and not go back to the first, newly staffed, house. It was the right decision by far and I made it on my own in the office with the director. I remember discussing it with my mother, telling her what I was deciding, getting her support, but clearly it was left up to me, and I felt confident about it.
Another decision I made, was to allow myself to see my parents aging and to change how I related to them. Especially, my mum. I started listening to her, and asking her questions as well as being a little more honest with her about myself--just the little things, like when she gasps and startles in the passenger seat of my car as I drive I've told her it is not helpful as she proposed but is harmful as it makes me a more nervous driver with her in the car. In the camera store, as we talk to the salesman I ask a question and she answers it. "Please let me ask questions, " I request and she snaps at me. I don't let it get into a fight. I listen to her about her bridge and golf and I look for common areas of interest. I mostly forgive her. I don't want to be mad at her, angry, furious, whatever. I don't want to blame her. If she is a tenth as anxious and fearful and paranoid as I am, I understand that she could not help me as a child deal with my own illness. What ensued that was a terrible tangling of our needs and obscuring of our boundaries and competition for my father's affection, and jealousy of each others success. What I'm left with in the end is this immutable belief that if I "get better" or if I am confident, talented, and take up space; if I lay stake to the veins, aortas, capillaries of my nature and my illness and treat myself and it with love and kindness, if I, in effect, take over her role--to save me--, as antiquated and impossible to fill as it is, she will die, as if we breathe from the same lungs and nourish ourselves from the same heart. My blossoming will kill her. I can only survive from her ashes. Guilt. Guilt. Unfathomable guilt is what I feel for growing up, because, after all, isn't that what I'm talking about, illness or no illness?
The odd thing is I know, too, that while all these wild beliefs and horrendous feelings about my mother whiz around in my head and chest and gut and taunt me with a deep sense of authenticity, I know they are not true. For am I not taking care of myself and is not my mother alive and well, and really, she's telling me she loves me. It is so damn hard for this stuff to take root!
Of course in the end, I am trading the fantasy of being instantly and dramatically saved forever by another for the reality something a previous therapist called my dad's love for me--"ordinary love." Is that enough when the devil is pouring oil on my body and my skin is peeling off and my mind is dank and burning all at the same time? Not not really. Then it is a case of surviving the unsurvivable and that is when my love, for myself, counts the most.
I have to say, I'm at a loss today--too much to write, too little passion or inspiration to write. Things, remarkably, are going fine. i got the news Monday afternoon that my father's polyp, found where he had cancer several years ago, was benign. At first I did the usual--gasp, smile, grin, laugh, exclaim "I knew it, I knew it!" (despite the fact that I well know--such things can't be known) to which my mother interjected "I did, too." They were "on their way out the door" to some sort of operatic outdoor concert at their gated community in FLA, so we couldn't talk for long. I did manage to get in there--"so when can I come down for a long week-end?" This was harbinger of things to come. Then, after hanging up, I did the requisite jumping up and down and telling anyone I could find suitable in the house to tell. "It's benign! It's benign!"
None of that did anything for me. Very little of those exclamations, proclamations, or turning figurative cartwheel in the living room seemed very accurate as to how I was feeling; I still felt like shit, but it had to be done, the excitement had to be expressed, if only as estimated interpersonal truth.
What did really happen was over the next several hours, the entire evening actually, as I watched t.v. and talked to Dr. M and took an extra anti-psychotic for my persistent symptoms, and ate dinner and walked to my meditation class and sat there and walked home, was that the relief slowly seeped in, like a cool maroon tide flooding a fecund marsh, feeding it, bringing the reeds and nesting birds back to life. The shroud of psychosis enveloping me populated with all those instant movies and paranoid fear, and the stinky, pungent smell of sickness, was lifted and I could breathe a bit better again. Left in my chest was the rock of despair, the insistent of suicidal rage but by morning that, too was gone. Note: none of this completely abandons me but believe you me, the air is much cleaner up here now.
Clearly the anxiety, the being on tinder hooks, waiting, waiting, waiting for this doctor to call with the biopsy results and waiting, waiting some more as he failed day after day to call in the time frame he said he would, ratcheted up my symptoms. Maybe this is a clue to my previous question: "where does disease end and human begin." Human stress, in this case, gave my illness a boot in the ass that shot it so far into the atmosphere on a wild arc of a ride that could only decline once the stress was removed. But then there was the other boot, this one shod on the foot of my family--we weren't allowed to talk about it. Hmmm...
It was hard, when I called my mother the first time, when I was sure the results to my dad's test were in, to hear her say to me breathlessly and urgently (almost violently) "Wendy, you've got to take a page from my book...you've just got to erase it, erase it from your head. " "But you know i don't work that way, mum. " (a daring response from me) "Well, you've got to try." (or something like that.) "But it doesn't always help, mum." "I know, I know, sometimes it comes around and bites you in the ass, but it is the only way..." And Then I heard the recipe for chicken caccitore at manic speed until she gave the phone to my dad and I heard about the palm rats in the attic in surreal detail. Then the phone call ended, me knowing I wouldn't be calling again soon.
I haven't written this stuff about my family in a long time and I can feel the sneaking snake of "my illness is not one at all but just emotional wreckage from living in a family where most stuff was "erased" I know this is not true. I know I have a bitch of an illness AND I know that it took years, my adult lifetime, for my parents to learn it can't be erased AND I think I know that most of this progress has been pushed onward by my learning--still in progress of course--to take care of myself. When I delivered my father's seventieth birthday cake to him amongst our entire family singing to him, he leaned a bit towards me, sparkling his eyes up at me and said softly "I never thought you'd make it here." At first I thought he meant to the house that day, then I understood. I can take care of myself. And when I call my mother without the strain of need in my voice, five times out of ten we have an enjoyable conversation and she ends with "I love you," which I return. She never used to say that Now, now that I can take care of my self, she is free to love me. There is space created in the cocoon that has bound us so tightly.
This freedom, this air to breathe and love, this space to enjoy comes out of decisions I have made. And to be fair, decisions my parents have made. When my first half-way house closed down, my instinct was to run home to my parents and live there until it was opened again. My mother's instinct was to get me an apartment ASAP. Instead, after crying, I breathed and made the best decision I've probably ever made. I agreed to go to another house in the system until they reopened the first one. I know living with my parents for a month or two rot would away any progress I was making in a beaker full of old patterns like following my parents around the house and long drawn out conversations with my mother about my emotional life and stuffed irritations and jealousy of my sister's life and fear of her children and resentment of her relationship with mum and dad, and so forth. Then, after finding the second house much better than the first, I, yes I and no one else, decided to stay and not go back to the first, newly staffed, house. It was the right decision by far and I made it on my own in the office with the director. I remember discussing it with my mother, telling her what I was deciding, getting her support, but clearly it was left up to me, and I felt confident about it.
Another decision I made, was to allow myself to see my parents aging and to change how I related to them. Especially, my mum. I started listening to her, and asking her questions as well as being a little more honest with her about myself--just the little things, like when she gasps and startles in the passenger seat of my car as I drive I've told her it is not helpful as she proposed but is harmful as it makes me a more nervous driver with her in the car. In the camera store, as we talk to the salesman I ask a question and she answers it. "Please let me ask questions, " I request and she snaps at me. I don't let it get into a fight. I listen to her about her bridge and golf and I look for common areas of interest. I mostly forgive her. I don't want to be mad at her, angry, furious, whatever. I don't want to blame her. If she is a tenth as anxious and fearful and paranoid as I am, I understand that she could not help me as a child deal with my own illness. What ensued that was a terrible tangling of our needs and obscuring of our boundaries and competition for my father's affection, and jealousy of each others success. What I'm left with in the end is this immutable belief that if I "get better" or if I am confident, talented, and take up space; if I lay stake to the veins, aortas, capillaries of my nature and my illness and treat myself and it with love and kindness, if I, in effect, take over her role--to save me--, as antiquated and impossible to fill as it is, she will die, as if we breathe from the same lungs and nourish ourselves from the same heart. My blossoming will kill her. I can only survive from her ashes. Guilt. Guilt. Unfathomable guilt is what I feel for growing up, because, after all, isn't that what I'm talking about, illness or no illness?
The odd thing is I know, too, that while all these wild beliefs and horrendous feelings about my mother whiz around in my head and chest and gut and taunt me with a deep sense of authenticity, I know they are not true. For am I not taking care of myself and is not my mother alive and well, and really, she's telling me she loves me. It is so damn hard for this stuff to take root!
Of course in the end, I am trading the fantasy of being instantly and dramatically saved forever by another for the reality something a previous therapist called my dad's love for me--"ordinary love." Is that enough when the devil is pouring oil on my body and my skin is peeling off and my mind is dank and burning all at the same time? Not not really. Then it is a case of surviving the unsurvivable and that is when my love, for myself, counts the most.
Good Morning Sunshine
This is how S. greets me in the morning. I manage to croak out "Good morning star shine," in response but it feels awkward, like the warmth of the greetings overestimates the warmth of my feelings for him. But I murmur it anyway, because I want that closeness, that warmth, that casual affection, even if I don't feel it. Can one chase after their dreams this way, by pretending they are already fact? Actually, I know the answer to that. No, it is not a good policy because all,at least all I end up doing is bearing down on myself mercilessly to fulfill some reality that doesn't exist.
I just got a call from the woman who is scheduling my Neuropsych. testing. It will be done with a man, a male doctor. It never occurred to me I will have a male doctor testing me. Somehow I want a woman, which is odd because both Dr. M, my psychiatrist, and MS, my therapist, are male. It's just that all the psych testing I've ever had was done by women. But if I didn't take that appointment, I wouldn't get one until March and I just want to get it done. (I just called and left a message for the scheduler, asking her could I keep the appointment and just switch doctors to a female doctor. If not I'll still keep the appointment.) The bottom line is I am nervous about the testing. It is hard. You have to define words, figure out spatial puzzles, figure out puzzles of things like hands and elephants. They are not only testing memory (my main complaint after 9 months of ECT) but they are also testing your ability to learn and, most dauntingly to me, your IQ.
I am an IQ snob. I have a high one, or at least I did, but I've always wanted it higher. It is my only proof that I am smart. My mother gets in on it,too, telling me she has the numbers filed away and my IQ is higher than my sister's who has a PhD. You see, I don't have a college degree. Not even near one. I have completed only three years of high school but racked up enough credits in those three years to graduate with a diploma from my prep school. I like to tell people "I did high school in three years, " but sometimes it is closer to the truth to say I dropped out of high school when I was seventeen, three weeks into my Senior year. I so badly want to be smart, to have an education, to excel.
In fact, I'm still furiously trying to find THE THING I will excel at. Will it be writing, art, photography, cooking the best meals at my halfway house, being the friendliest, the kindest, even if I'm hateful inside?
That's the thing about this illness. You have to make huge adjustments to what you value, to what you find meaningful. Shit, I would find a Harvard degree meaningful. I would find an MD helpful in that vein as well. I would find a published autobiography meaningful, but all I done got here is this little blog.
At our house meetings every week we go around the room and each person pays compliments to other residents. Such as, "Thanks for playing pool, that was really fun," or "congratulations on your new full time job," or "I've enjoyed our conversations together lately." As the months go by and the chemistry of the place changes and I have fallen farther and farther from the center I don't get as many compliments from people as I used to; I feel less included. But the one I get, more often than I get any others is "W. thank you for being you." No one else gets this. Or almost never.
I don't receive it as gracefully as I should. I kind of smile and roll my eyes at the same time and after the meeting adjourns I, teasingly but also seriously, wonder aloud, " I can't figure out if that is a compliment or a cop-out." And I really mean it. I can't figure it out. It is the crux of my crumbling sense of worth and the green shoots of grass and fiddlehead ferns growing at the base of the ruins. Am I really worth something inherently? Do I really have meaning in being? Am I really kind?
I feel so worthless and mean and hateful and meaningless most of the time, always struggling to meet what I wish was, demeaning myself inexorably. In meditation class it hit me last night, the big question: "Where does the diseased animal end and the human begin?" Scary not to know. Where do I hang my identity, like a woolen cap on a wooden peg, dripping from the snow--calm, solid, humble?
So, one thing I've always known is that I have a high IQ, that has been one solid touch point of who I am. I am afraid after all these years gone by--hospitalizations, ECT, medication galore, not reading much, watching stupid t.v. alot, just not thinking about anything but myself, not applying myself to any mental tasks, not learning anything new--that now I don't have that either--a high IQ I can call my own and derive the slightest sliver of identity, if not meaning, from.
You know, so much of this as I read it sounds like pure bunk. Rising from the distortions or my illness there is an other plane, smoky and ethereal. A hint of an other way to look at the cities of ashes below. Gray buildings with spires and domes and all sorts of dark gothic turrets and such; building that I live in most of the time. But meaning arises from this city of dark and doomed ash city.
I wish I could hang on to this separation long enough to write about it, but it is fleeting. So very fleeting, but it leaves a hint, a tiny doubt, a clue, that it perhaps I am something different than just "naught."
I wrote once, in a poem: "Sometimes I get a little bit confused/as to what is fantasy and what are truths/ And I have a fear that someday/ that I'll never find my way/ And I'll fall right through a seismic fault/And all I'll ever be is naught.
I just got a call from the woman who is scheduling my Neuropsych. testing. It will be done with a man, a male doctor. It never occurred to me I will have a male doctor testing me. Somehow I want a woman, which is odd because both Dr. M, my psychiatrist, and MS, my therapist, are male. It's just that all the psych testing I've ever had was done by women. But if I didn't take that appointment, I wouldn't get one until March and I just want to get it done. (I just called and left a message for the scheduler, asking her could I keep the appointment and just switch doctors to a female doctor. If not I'll still keep the appointment.) The bottom line is I am nervous about the testing. It is hard. You have to define words, figure out spatial puzzles, figure out puzzles of things like hands and elephants. They are not only testing memory (my main complaint after 9 months of ECT) but they are also testing your ability to learn and, most dauntingly to me, your IQ.
I am an IQ snob. I have a high one, or at least I did, but I've always wanted it higher. It is my only proof that I am smart. My mother gets in on it,too, telling me she has the numbers filed away and my IQ is higher than my sister's who has a PhD. You see, I don't have a college degree. Not even near one. I have completed only three years of high school but racked up enough credits in those three years to graduate with a diploma from my prep school. I like to tell people "I did high school in three years, " but sometimes it is closer to the truth to say I dropped out of high school when I was seventeen, three weeks into my Senior year. I so badly want to be smart, to have an education, to excel.
In fact, I'm still furiously trying to find THE THING I will excel at. Will it be writing, art, photography, cooking the best meals at my halfway house, being the friendliest, the kindest, even if I'm hateful inside?
That's the thing about this illness. You have to make huge adjustments to what you value, to what you find meaningful. Shit, I would find a Harvard degree meaningful. I would find an MD helpful in that vein as well. I would find a published autobiography meaningful, but all I done got here is this little blog.
At our house meetings every week we go around the room and each person pays compliments to other residents. Such as, "Thanks for playing pool, that was really fun," or "congratulations on your new full time job," or "I've enjoyed our conversations together lately." As the months go by and the chemistry of the place changes and I have fallen farther and farther from the center I don't get as many compliments from people as I used to; I feel less included. But the one I get, more often than I get any others is "W. thank you for being you." No one else gets this. Or almost never.
I don't receive it as gracefully as I should. I kind of smile and roll my eyes at the same time and after the meeting adjourns I, teasingly but also seriously, wonder aloud, " I can't figure out if that is a compliment or a cop-out." And I really mean it. I can't figure it out. It is the crux of my crumbling sense of worth and the green shoots of grass and fiddlehead ferns growing at the base of the ruins. Am I really worth something inherently? Do I really have meaning in being? Am I really kind?
I feel so worthless and mean and hateful and meaningless most of the time, always struggling to meet what I wish was, demeaning myself inexorably. In meditation class it hit me last night, the big question: "Where does the diseased animal end and the human begin?" Scary not to know. Where do I hang my identity, like a woolen cap on a wooden peg, dripping from the snow--calm, solid, humble?
So, one thing I've always known is that I have a high IQ, that has been one solid touch point of who I am. I am afraid after all these years gone by--hospitalizations, ECT, medication galore, not reading much, watching stupid t.v. alot, just not thinking about anything but myself, not applying myself to any mental tasks, not learning anything new--that now I don't have that either--a high IQ I can call my own and derive the slightest sliver of identity, if not meaning, from.
You know, so much of this as I read it sounds like pure bunk. Rising from the distortions or my illness there is an other plane, smoky and ethereal. A hint of an other way to look at the cities of ashes below. Gray buildings with spires and domes and all sorts of dark gothic turrets and such; building that I live in most of the time. But meaning arises from this city of dark and doomed ash city.
I wish I could hang on to this separation long enough to write about it, but it is fleeting. So very fleeting, but it leaves a hint, a tiny doubt, a clue, that it perhaps I am something different than just "naught."
I wrote once, in a poem: "Sometimes I get a little bit confused/as to what is fantasy and what are truths/ And I have a fear that someday/ that I'll never find my way/ And I'll fall right through a seismic fault/And all I'll ever be is naught.
A morning in the life
What do my readers need to know about "living schizoaffective" today? Or more to the point, what can I tell you all? I don't want to prove some hopeful, meditative, logical point true, all tied up with a red ribbon edged in gold. On the other hand, it may be harmful for me to try to bring you all into the wildly out of control gears and disks and pins (like the inner workings of an old fashioned watch) that reside in my head and color my emotions, my relationships, my ability to work (none), play (very little), think clearly (with great will power and determination.)
The rage is back. Like on Saturday I was ruefully tempted this morning not to take my meds. Revolt! Revolt! Against what, I'm not quite sure, but I was so tempted to call my kind doctor and cry to him, "I can't stand it! I can't stand it anymore!" What can't I stand? The videos that play in my head nearly all the time as judge, jury and trial of my slightest error? Just like in "Law and Order" I am questioned by the police for jaywalking. Or I am banned from Dunkin' Donuts on my morning walkd because, after using their bathroom I buy only a banana and don't have two pennies to make up the $1.02 cost. They say it's ok but I know they are looking at me funny and I know they think I am homeless and won't let me back in. Or worse, can I not stand all the self-recrimination, the constant assault on myself from every twist of my mind? I pass a mother yelling at her child to hold her hand as they cross the street and my attention alights on the fact that I have never had and never will have a baby and that that is a good thing because I would be a horrible, mean, dangerous mother unable to prevent myself from taking out the pain and rage of my illness on my unsuspecting child. Gauntlet down; I am guilty. Of course, my mind doesn't let me know until now that I am a good aunt, a gentle, warm, interested presence in my nephews' and niece's lives. That fact just won't take root.
How much longer can stand this twisted assault on myself? And the great pain and shame and sacrilege of writing yesterday that I want no friends? (Mother's face again, swollen from her Prednazone, looms above me.) I want so badly to go back and redeem myself from that entry. How much longer can I take the sensation that my body parts are being pulled in different direction like the hard pink taffy I used to buy at the penny candy store in my hometown? There are tears behind my eyes; searing pain is mounting in my muscles--How much more can I stand??!!
So I slipped, earlier this morning into the next phase--"Maybe it is time. Maybe it is time." I wonder if it is time to say good-bye, to end my life. I've gotten to this point many times before and will not act on it, but it is a seductive place to let my mind fall into. An answer, a decision, a finality, a cure (of sorts.)
I don't disclose this to anyone at the house. I sit at breakfast with a fellow resident and try, in all my heightened anxiety caused merely by his presence, to make the right kind of conversation-casual, relaxed, nonchalant, cool--and slam myself for the things I say that make me sound like a nervous old biddy. I embarrass myself; I know he thinks I don't count, am not worth much in the social circle in the house.
I don't talk to staff. She is useless to me. Telling her, a new addition to the house and the field, would only confuse the situation. Human contact is out. No one can handle me. I would get more enraged at her ineptitude rather than be open to what, if not much, she may be able to offer me. In all truth, I don't think many people can handle me. No one can help me. No one can take it away. No one can take it away.
And I guess that is the bottom line. I don't want help. I want a cure. I WANT A CURE!!! Not taking my meds, flirting with suicide, whatever, are only ways of letting out a little steam in an impossible situation. I am cramped inside a box that is far too small for me and can't get out, I'll never get out.
Ironically, I am starting a new meditation class focused on the Four Noble Truths which address suffering. And I know what they want me to say, that I want a different relationship with my suffering, and on my better days I want this, too. But after a week of stepped up psychosis and guilt and self-flagellation, and loneliness, and so forth, I want a cure, goddamn it.
But what at last happened this morning is that once all my preparations for the day were complete I sat on the living room couch with K. and S. and sipped my decaf and read a few pages of my book and slowly the urgency for the impossible slipped away and I was in the present again. The present only being, there is no fix.
This visceral knowledge will not last. I will fight this all day, this anger, this wish for some action to happen to relieve me, this urge to revolt, to not take my meds, to take too many. It will fill my mind and put great pressure on the inside of my skull, aching to be put into action. ButI will steel my will and clench my teeth, and maybe call my doctor if it unbearable, and it will pass. Maybe I will need the hospital, maybe not. Ultimately I will go through it alone. I will smile and appear kind while inside I raking any usefulness or value everyone has over coals in my head; I cannot love if I don't love myself.
My question I'll leave myself with is can my suffering ever turn me into a kinder person? Can I not use my suffering to love? Myself? Others? Even when intrinsic to my symptoms is guilt and self-hatred? Help me god, help me love. Help me not be alone and a let me be unencumbered enough to help others.
The rage is back. Like on Saturday I was ruefully tempted this morning not to take my meds. Revolt! Revolt! Against what, I'm not quite sure, but I was so tempted to call my kind doctor and cry to him, "I can't stand it! I can't stand it anymore!" What can't I stand? The videos that play in my head nearly all the time as judge, jury and trial of my slightest error? Just like in "Law and Order" I am questioned by the police for jaywalking. Or I am banned from Dunkin' Donuts on my morning walkd because, after using their bathroom I buy only a banana and don't have two pennies to make up the $1.02 cost. They say it's ok but I know they are looking at me funny and I know they think I am homeless and won't let me back in. Or worse, can I not stand all the self-recrimination, the constant assault on myself from every twist of my mind? I pass a mother yelling at her child to hold her hand as they cross the street and my attention alights on the fact that I have never had and never will have a baby and that that is a good thing because I would be a horrible, mean, dangerous mother unable to prevent myself from taking out the pain and rage of my illness on my unsuspecting child. Gauntlet down; I am guilty. Of course, my mind doesn't let me know until now that I am a good aunt, a gentle, warm, interested presence in my nephews' and niece's lives. That fact just won't take root.
How much longer can stand this twisted assault on myself? And the great pain and shame and sacrilege of writing yesterday that I want no friends? (Mother's face again, swollen from her Prednazone, looms above me.) I want so badly to go back and redeem myself from that entry. How much longer can I take the sensation that my body parts are being pulled in different direction like the hard pink taffy I used to buy at the penny candy store in my hometown? There are tears behind my eyes; searing pain is mounting in my muscles--How much more can I stand??!!
So I slipped, earlier this morning into the next phase--"Maybe it is time. Maybe it is time." I wonder if it is time to say good-bye, to end my life. I've gotten to this point many times before and will not act on it, but it is a seductive place to let my mind fall into. An answer, a decision, a finality, a cure (of sorts.)
I don't disclose this to anyone at the house. I sit at breakfast with a fellow resident and try, in all my heightened anxiety caused merely by his presence, to make the right kind of conversation-casual, relaxed, nonchalant, cool--and slam myself for the things I say that make me sound like a nervous old biddy. I embarrass myself; I know he thinks I don't count, am not worth much in the social circle in the house.
I don't talk to staff. She is useless to me. Telling her, a new addition to the house and the field, would only confuse the situation. Human contact is out. No one can handle me. I would get more enraged at her ineptitude rather than be open to what, if not much, she may be able to offer me. In all truth, I don't think many people can handle me. No one can help me. No one can take it away. No one can take it away.
And I guess that is the bottom line. I don't want help. I want a cure. I WANT A CURE!!! Not taking my meds, flirting with suicide, whatever, are only ways of letting out a little steam in an impossible situation. I am cramped inside a box that is far too small for me and can't get out, I'll never get out.
Ironically, I am starting a new meditation class focused on the Four Noble Truths which address suffering. And I know what they want me to say, that I want a different relationship with my suffering, and on my better days I want this, too. But after a week of stepped up psychosis and guilt and self-flagellation, and loneliness, and so forth, I want a cure, goddamn it.
But what at last happened this morning is that once all my preparations for the day were complete I sat on the living room couch with K. and S. and sipped my decaf and read a few pages of my book and slowly the urgency for the impossible slipped away and I was in the present again. The present only being, there is no fix.
This visceral knowledge will not last. I will fight this all day, this anger, this wish for some action to happen to relieve me, this urge to revolt, to not take my meds, to take too many. It will fill my mind and put great pressure on the inside of my skull, aching to be put into action. ButI will steel my will and clench my teeth, and maybe call my doctor if it unbearable, and it will pass. Maybe I will need the hospital, maybe not. Ultimately I will go through it alone. I will smile and appear kind while inside I raking any usefulness or value everyone has over coals in my head; I cannot love if I don't love myself.
My question I'll leave myself with is can my suffering ever turn me into a kinder person? Can I not use my suffering to love? Myself? Others? Even when intrinsic to my symptoms is guilt and self-hatred? Help me god, help me love. Help me not be alone and a let me be unencumbered enough to help others.
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