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.