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.