Monthly Archives: January 2013

So…Going on week two with no antidepressant.

The lamictal keeps the mania and severe mood swings at bay. Sort of.

Sometimes, I can manage to stay in a decent mood for a couple of hours.

It inevitably crashes. Starts out as sudden mood crash. Then turns into a depressive state.

Which lifts. Enter stable or good mental state.

Then crash.

I am impatient, irritable, easily agitated and quick to snap if not have a mini tantrum. Which is humiliating and makes me feel ashamed of myself. But there have been days the last week or so where I feel so crowded by everything, and the panic has been creeping in  for no reason, causing me to be weird about making phone calls or running errands, because it triggers the panic further. I don’t understand if it’s coming off Cymbalta or if it’s a mixed bipolar state or if it’s the untreated depression.

I’m clueless and pretty fucking lost.

But the last week there has been a silver lining for me.

I have been writing again. A vampire novel. And I have written 128 pages in five days. I can barely get out the door with all my clothes on and my hair brushed because I am so unfocused…and yet when my writing is “on”, I am focused within an inch of my life, to the point where existing outside the story is excrutiating torture and every minute of the day revolves around the moment I am free to return to my writing.

Last year marked the four year anniversary of when I had last worked on a novel. Busy raising my kid, helping another marriage fail because ya know, truth be told, I never wanted to be married, it’s just what society expects you to do…Drowning in an insane state of bip0lar mood states and crippling panic and depression…For four years, I could not think straight and felt no inspiration. There were times I questioned whether I would ever write again (even though deep down, under all the despair, I knew I would write again because I have written since I was  years old, it’s not a hobby, it’s a compulsion that possesses me completely).

Last summer, I began to write a bit. Finished six or so chapters.

The brick wall. Writer’s block.

Two weeks ago, I forced myself to open an Abiword document. And I stared at the blank page and blinking cursor and felt absolutely terrified. Paralyzed, even.

But once I had strung the first few sentences together, it poured out of me, so fluid, so easily, just like it used to. It felt like home, to be writing again. Unfortunately, reality takes precedence at least Monday through Friday, forcing me to bed earlier than I’d like, robbing me of hours I could be writing because I am trying to exist like the 9 to 5-ers. It is grueling for me to be on a roll and have to force myself to stop because I have to be up in five hours and be gone all day and even when I am free from that, there’s being mommy and housework and taking care of cats and errands and…It all seems insurmountable, and irritates me, because it is keeping me from doing what I love.

Weekends, though…Last weekend I wrote 75 pages in less than 3 days.

I can’t do it like I used to,where I would hole up for ten hours if that’s how long the streak ran. I can’t lock myself in a room sans distractions because my kid comes first. Initially, it felt like a stranglehold.

Then I realized the problem was me, failing to adapt.

Now, I write whether my kid is asleep or not. If the urge and the creative drive are there…I write. Sometimes, I am lucky to get a page and half written with all the necessary distractions.

But…in spite of my mixed states, in spite of being demoralized and depressed because the meds never fucking fix that which fucks up my life in every way…

I’m writing again.

I am me again.

And yet, that darkness in the pit of my stomach, that all encompassing depression that closes in on me sometimes…I don’t want that to be me.

Part of me desperately wants to find an anti depressant that will work.

Part of me is paralyzed that maybe the reason my creativity is flowing is because my senses aren’t so completely dulled by an anti depressant.

And it makes me sad that it would come to that, be creative and suffer the mental stuff, or give up that which you love so you don’t entertain notions of walking in front of a bus.

It shouldn’t be that way.

But then again, I shouldn’t hyperventilate at the shop on some days when R asks me to make phone calls for him.

There is nothing about my existence that doesn’t feel like a clusterfuck. I’m not entirely convinced any pill will ever change that. Because I have so many mental things going on-bipolar, depression, panic attacks- the odds of finding a trifecta of meds that help with it all are pretty slim.

For now, though…I am writing.

And I’d much rather focus on that.

Except I can’t entirely because I’ve been asked to go in tomorrow and make cold calls, which is a trigger for me. So with each moment that ticks by, I am pulled further away from my writing towards the dread that accompanies reality.

And the more reality seeps into my head, the more exhausted I feel and the more I just want to escape into sleep.

THAT, my friends, is the lovely mixed state of anxiety-depression.

Creativity killer from hell.

Yes, I know this is a blog about being bipolar.  And you know what?  I think the topics of bipolar-ism and prostitution go hand in hand.

And why is that?  It is because pimps hone in on the vulnerable, the lonely, the ones who are looking for love and not finding it, the ones with poor self esteem, the depressed, the confused.  And because the mentally ill often become homeless, jobless, drug-addicted, and desperate.

It’s still January, and January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month.  I’ve been reading a lot and learning a lot about the dynamics of sex trafficking and prostitution.  Among the things I’ve learned are that:

• Depending on the study, the average age for entry into prostitution is 11 to 13 years old.
• The vast majority of prostituted youth (and adults) come from abusive homes.
• Girls (and sometimes boys) are often “groomed” by “loverboys” who give them jewelry, clothes, and mostly, attention, and when they are “ready” they are abducted and forced into a life of slavery.
• This goes on in virtually every country.
• Girls who try to refuse to cooperate are beaten and raped into submission
• Girls are “domestically trafficked,” which means they are moved from city to city within a country: like from Columbus, OH to Detroit, MI, for instance
• Girls as young as 12 and 13 get arrested, thrown into jail, and charged with prostitution, while pimps and johns go scot free

Can you imagine being taken away and raped over and over, many times a day, for years, until you either “disappear” or get spit out on the street because you are too old to appeal to the child rapists any longer?  It just totally tears me apart.

And then there is the child pornography.  Need I say more?

But prostitution is “the oldest profession.”  Isn’t it?  Women (and men) CHOOSE to sell their bodies because

• They like sex
• They like money
• They like sex AND money
• It’s easy money
• It’s an exciting, glamourous lifestyle
• It’s empowering to women to be able to do whatever they want with their bodies

Not really.  If you want to know how glamourous and empowering the prostitution lifestyle is, look at the rates of drug abuse.  Prostituted women are either given drugs by their pimps to keep them cooperative, or else the women themselves develop drug habits to escape from the hell of being used as sperm receptacles.  Those with serious drug habits often do get into a vicious cycle of having to get money to buy drugs, and the quickest and easiest way to do that is to turn a trick.

I have known a lot of prostitutes, and not one of them has done it because she enjoyed the sex.  Sex for the prostituted is for one thing: money. And most of the time most of the money doesn’t go to her, it goes to the pimp or madam who rents her out.  Prostitutes learn how to dissociate when a john is on top of them.  The problem is, the dissociation doesn’t always work: that’s where the drugs come in.

Now we come to runaways.  As some of you already know, I was a teenage runaway.  I ran away from an abusive home after being drugged, abducted, and brutally raped by a man who had been admiring me at work.  So I ended up on the street.  I wasn’t there because I wanted to be; I was there because I thought I was going to find peace and love.  What I found was that if I needed food, shelter, a shower, drugs, anything really, the only way to get it was to sleep with some guy.  If I didn’t have a place to crash (meaning a guy to sleep with), I slept outside or walked the streets all night.

That was back in the early 1970′s.  Things have changed now, for the worse.  Runaways now are caught and funneled into the sex trafficking business by pimps who work the streets looking for them.  It is very easy to spot a runaway.  Your hair is uncombed, your clothes are a mess from sleeping under some bush in the park, you are probably carrying a backpack, maybe a sleeping bag if you thought that far ahead.  You look homeless, because you are.

So some handsome, well groomed guy offers to buy you a meal, and you are hungry.  Then he offers you a place to crash, and you are tired of sleeping in doorways or in the park, and have probably been raped a couple of times by now so you are ready to come indoors.  Then you discover that you can’t get out.  And then the nightmare really begins.  That’s the way it is now.

As for the glamourous call-girl life, I’ve known a couple of women who’ve done that.  I thought about it myself sometimes, when I was young and beautiful and needed money to make it through college.  Yeah, I have some friends who got through school by “turning tricks,” as it was called back then.  I have never seen such damaged people in my life, apart from the ones who were kidnapped into it.  My friends who were “voluntarily” prostituting themselves found their self-esteem eroded trick by trick, and to bolster themselves up they had to turn another trick, and another….”the life” becomes an addiction.

We were all hooked on cocaine.  My cocaine habit was small change compared with theirs.  I did coke because it actually treated my depression (I didn’t realize that till years later); they did coke because they couldn’t stand their lives.  I got my coke by sleeping with dealers; they got their coke by turning tricks to make the money to buy more coke.  I guess I was a prostitute too, huh?  I just didn’t do it for cash, because I was scared to.  I did it for “stuff,” whatever was needed at the time.  Yeah, I heard myself being called a “coke whore,” but I chose not to listen until one morning I woke up next to yet another man I had never seen before, and I quit. Cold turkey quit.  I was one of the lucky ones.

To get back to the original question: Is Prostitution Ever Voluntary?  My answer is: it can look that way, when it’s an adult woman who makes what she thinks is an informed, purposeful choice, because she thinks she can make money quickly and easily that way.  But once in “the life,” a woman becomes trapped, either by her pimp or her drug habit or the crushing of her soul that is prostitution. Then it’s not voluntary: it’s slavery.

Seemingly tireless campaigner for abolition of human trafficking Ruth Jacobs presents another in her eye-opening series of interviews with survivors of sex trafficking.  Stella Marr, who was trafficked in New York City for ten years, talks about her work.  The link to her personal blog, ManhattanCallGirl, is at the bottom of the interview linked below.  I had the honor of speaking with Stella a couple of days ago.  She is a powerful and compassionate woman, dedicated to effecting change in the system that currently criminalizes trafficked women, while allowing the men who buy them to either get off free or get a slap on the hand.  Please read Stella’s compelling interview, and while you’re at it, take a look through the many other interviews that Ruth has compiled during January, which is Human Trafficking Awareness Month.

via In the Booth with Ruth – Stella Marr, Sex Trafficking Survivor, Anti-Sex Trafficking Activist and Advocate, Executive Director and Founding Member of Sex Trafficking Survivors United (Survivors Connect).

Today was just a strange day for me mentally. I could not get the mental fog to clear and every single thing I did felt like a battled trudged uphill except the only thing I was fighting was my own mind. Paranoia and panic ran rampant. I could not focus, could not remember things ten seconds after told, did not want to make calls or answer phones because the panic attacks were running riot.

I still feel off kilter to the nth degree.

The added bonus is the ongoing random as fuck brain zaps from coming off Cymbalta.

Now that I am sans anything but Lamicatal and xanax…my brain is having a field day being a freak. I can’t reason with the distorted thoughts. It is telling me I am scared and thus panic kicks in, and I have no fucking clue what is going on. It’s like my brain has been injected with Novacaine, only instead of feeling good numb, I am stumbling clumsy numb, bumping into things, tripping over stuff, and struggling to find the right words to string into sentences that sound vaguely coherent.

After a couple of decent days…

This baffles me.

Throw in the depression which is telling me I serve no purpose and should just kill myself because it’s never going to get any better than this…And my sheer exhaustion and self disgust over so many fucking medications in the past 15 months that did not fucking work or gave me nightmare side effects…

This is not even my normal state of dysfunction, this is something new, something else, something much much worse than the usual.

I feel alien, even to myself.

And it is disconcerting beyond mere words.