Daily Archives: July 31, 2013

That is the question always asked on my disability review papers. It’s also a question,or form of the question, others have asked me when interrogating (that’s how it felt to me) about why I “can’t” work.

My illness IS my life.Maybe I have made it the center, but even if I hadn’t, the bottom line is it impacts EVERYTHING about my existence. People hear “mood disorder” and roll their eyes. Society has no problem calling you crazy, but to actually qualify for societally acceptable crazy, you have to wear a tinfoil hat, walk around naked, and talk about the spork people from planet Monsoon. Anything less than stark raving off your nut is simply your personality therefore you can suck it up.

How I wish it were that easy.

For about a week, I was a whirlwind of mania and all that accompanies it. High energy, vivacious mood, uber stress coping skills, the feeling that nothing in life can keep you down.

This week, I have been uber depressed, uber stressed, and my mind has simply been fading in and out of the coherent place. Like earlier today, I couldn’t even remember how to turn my wipers off. I’ve been driving this car 9 months now and I honestly just blanked out on how to shut the damn wipers off. It came to me five minutes and 100 tries later but at that moment…my mind was just blank. Like I’d wandered into an unfamiliar car and had no clue how to operate it. It was annoying but also scary. I mean, I am raising a kid, I can’t afford such mental slips. It also got the panic going thinking, “This could be a brain tumor.”

And ya know, the reality is, tumors can cause mentally ill behavior. But the panic rules supreme in my world so even if it is a big festering tumor of death, I won’t know about until a, I die, or b, I am in so much physical pain that the pain overwhelms the panic receptors. That’s the way it’s always been for me. Xanax helps, but when the panic is on ten, a hubcab sized valium wouldn’t touch the anxiety. Logic says get it checked out, right? Ha ha ha. My panic laughs at your logic. And panic trumps it, as well.

But it’s just slips like that. The other day I ordered something for R and my brain just kept clicking at checkout…And afterward, I realized I’d put his personal expense on the business card. SHIT. My brain was just not in the building. I run on auto pilot so much.

Today I overslept because last night I took a measly 25 mg Trazadone. It put me down good. When my kid didn’t wake me at the crack of dawn my body just kept sleeping. It’s not my norm. So by the time I got to the shop, I was damn near hyperventilating because I knew he needed me to take him to get his car tires changed and…He kept telling me to calm down. Which only makes the panic worse. (Yes, I also take the shop trash to his house, which is why when people call it “work” I have to laugh because mostly, I am just a damn errand wench for all the stuff he is too important to make time to do.)

Anyway…Bipolar, specifically cyclothymia, does impact every facet of my life. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to overcome it or how much I don’t want it to make an impact. It just does.

I know my personality is difficult.

But most men have been able to handle most of my personality. Of course, they don’t like my “open mouth and insert feet” approach to brutal honesty but mostly they complain about the rapid mood swings and the panic affecting their lives. So my relationships always seem doomed to fail because the primary issue is the one thing I can’t change. They get the luxury of walking away. I don’t.

How has it impacted being a mother?

During the worst down period, over a year and a half, I didn’t take my kid outdoors because I was TERRIFIED the neighbors were going to beat me up. In fact, other than grocery shopping and bill paying I rarely left the house, which meant she rarely left the house. I didn’t even attempt to put her in preschool or take her to places for playdates so she could socialize. My illness pretty much made her isolation a given because it was my life. It impacted her, and I still feel shitty about that. I was never gonna be the “mommy and me” or “baby yogo” type but it was…well, it was bad, for her, for me, even for the Donor. Yet he watched me drown and I couldn’t seem to do anything but drown.  THAT is why bipolars like myself MUST have a partner with a spine. Because we don’t always know we’re being awful, we don’t always know we’re drowning. Sometimes we do and we’re crippled, we literally don’t know what to do about it and can’t make ourselves figure it out. I’ve always found myself with submissive personalities who just let me drown. Which is not to absolve me of my responsibility, but to show that I didn’t realize just how bad things were and they were so bad, he left rather than deal with my state. Had he simply told me, helped me…Things might have been different, or might not have been.

I just didn’t realize until after the fact how bad I had gotten. I had stopped living. I was existing. And I had dragged those around me down with me.

Which is why I now try so damn hard with my that it is killing me. I can’t handle 7 kids 7 nights a week in addition to my own. Maybe some people can. I’m just not the Michelle Dugger type. I think for all my deficits, I do pretty well.

Another example of the panic/paranoia aspect..

It’s 5:30 pm. We have been home two hours. Not one kid has appeared. That is an anomaly and my stupid brain is telling me I did something to somehow offend the kids or parents and now my kid will suffer for it. I should be relieved for the peace. But my kid keeps asking where her friends are. And I keep thinking it must be my fault.

And it’s not without a basis in reality. The other day the chick from next door came over snarking at me about how I had no right to talk to her son the way I did and she would never talk to my kid that way and I didn’t know what was going on because the other kids weren’t mine. I stood there and watched her son throwing rocks at one of the kids at my house. It hit the car. I told him not to throw rocks and if he couldn’t get along with the kids here, he needed to go away. His version he told her was very different. I became this big adult bully who hurt his fragile feelings and made him feel threatened.

Maybe I could have been more…I don’t know, less me, perhaps? I am pretty rough around the edges.

What gets me is I was so damn submissive with this woman, because the panic kicked in and my mind began to spin.Instead of defending my actions and telling her what her snowflake actually said to me that brought about my tone and actions, I just said, “No, that’s not what happened, but you’re right, I will come talk to you if there’s ever another problem.”

I feel like an utter moron. Because now she thinks I am scared of her (my panic attacks and property kind of are) she will exploit it. Her kid just looks at me and grins now. She glares and mutters things. Of course, she is the woman who called a 7 year old girl a bitch the other day for daring to walk on the edge of the road near her trailer. So I don’t suppose she is the fine upstanding adult here that I should care about her opinion.

Ahhh…A kid has appeared to play with Spook. Sigh of relief. I live in terror that one of my altered mind states will cost her a friend. Kids forgive. Other parents of said kids do not. I just want peace and yet, I freak out when they don’t appear because I fear I did something to offend. I’ve built a life out of trying to offend or shock and yet, here I am, worrying over doing just that. Because it’s one thing to alienate people for myself, but I soo don’t want that for my kid. If they are to be alienated, let her do it for herself (lol).

I took Spook out to Dollar Tree today, was going to get her supplies for the party I am going to have here on the 10th for her friends. My mood just crashed and suddenly, I didn’t want to get party stuff. So I let her pick out the invites and said I’d get the stuff after I find out how many of the kids can make it. Another instance where the moods alter my mindset and interfere with daily life.

R, when he doesn’t have his head up his ass, takes note of my sudden quietness and morose expression and inquires. I tell him I am just low, and he asks why. That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? I’m depressive, ffs.

And there is a major factor in dealing with someone like me, ie, bipolar. Or maybe this is just me personally.

If we are making the effort to be quiet and keep our mood crash to ourselves, then you can make the effort to maybe give us a comforting pat on the back, or a compliment, and move on. We don’t expect to be coddled. We just need to ride it out, without an inquisition, without judgment. It was a big bone of contention with the donor. I tried so hard, fought so furiously, to keep my mood crashes in, to shelter him from it. I would just be quiet, maybe go do something in another room. And he still took it personally and made it about himself, as in what did he do. And when i said nothing, he insisted something had to cause the mood swing.

In cyclothymia, no, that’s not true.

The more he tried to cheer me up, the more annoyed I became. I would assert myself and say, “Just let me ride it out.” He would keep badgering with the humor, then with the “woe is me, what did i do” whining. And I would blow up. And no matter how many times it happened, he never could grasp how he was making it happen. That’s not to absolve myself. I should have handled it differently. But then if I were in the right mind to handle things well, I wouldn’t be mentally ill now would I?

How does mental illness affect my life?

In every possible way.

And it sucks.

I met with my advisor at school yesterday. I told her that I was following my psychiatrists orders and we began cancelling classes that I was scheduled to attend this Fall. We cancelled them all except for English 101. That’s it. Just one damn class. That’s all I apparently am capable of.

I thought I was ready. I thought I could finally take classes full time. I was stoked until my pdoc told me I wasn’t ready. I thought maybe I could cut back a class. Maybe even two. I never considered That I could only handle one. So, I talked to my friends and family about it. To my unpleasant surprise there was unanimous agreement that my pdoc was right.

I figured I was on a ten year plan. Get my BA degree in Religious Studies. Two – three years at seminary and then one – two years of internship. But what now? How long is it going to take me to get through school taking one class at a time. My advisor and I had drawn up my action plan towards graduation. I started to ask her if we should redo it, but I didn’t. How can I create an action plan when I have no idea how many classes I’ll be able to take each semester?

Does this sound like a pity party? You bet your ass I’m having a pity party. I’m going to allow myself to wallow in it for a day or two and then, I guess, I’ll work on acceptance. It ain’t going to be easy.

I read this interesting and short article on the secret meanings behind a few different types of tattoos.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/theprotojournalist/2013/07/30/203681761/the-secret-meanings-of-tattoos?utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130730

Do you have a tattoo? If so what is it and why did you get it?

I have two tattoos. My first one is a small outline of a dove on the side of my back. My aunt had just died and it sent me into such a state of depression that I had to literally scar the pain onto my body (I used to be a cutter). After a few months my father passed away and that set off a bomb in my brain. I have written about their deaths in more depth in It Is To Hard.

After the sudden death of my dad I started cycling quickly through my bipolar disorder and grief. I decided to get another tattoo in black, white, and grey on my upper back between the shoulders of an female angel with the same haircut as me and her wings spread open a little. My step-dad didn’t speak to me for a week when he found out. Oh joy.

But as I read the previous article I could relate to the meaning behind a black and white tattoo. It does represent my lost loved ones but also because I put myself into the angel I sort of marked my own mortality. So Yes, i have two tattoos and yes they both hold great meaning to me. Would I get another…..probably, if the reason was powerful enough.

Our esteemed victim interviewee this Wednesday is David Henry Sterry, who has done everything. Really.  I thought I lead multiple parallel lives, but he makes me look like an amateur.  I met him through a consultation I had with him about my book-in-progress.  Among the other million things he does, he is one-half of the Book Doctors, a dynamic duo whose job it is to help you get your book in good shape and hopefully published.  I was blown away by David’s story, so I asked him to give us an interview here on Breaking the Silence of Stigma.

BSS: How long have you known that you are living with a mental illness?

DHS: When I was 17 years old I was violently sexually assaulted.  The sparkly wide-eyed boy who went into that room with a large predator disappeared and when I escaped with my life, my brain had been more or less torn apart.  From that point forward I have suffered (for a long time not knowing it) from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

BSS: When did you find out that’s what was going on?

DHS: I did not tell anyone about this assault for 15 years.  I was diagnosed after I revealed the true nature of my condition to my hypnotherapist.  By that time I was a professional screenplay writer and actor, as well as being an amateur drug and sex addict.  Which is not nearly as much fun as it sounds like it should be.

BSS: How was your PTSD diagnosed?

DHS: My hypnotherapist diagnosed me by asking me lots of questions.  This diagnosis was later confirmed when I was studied like a human guinea pig at Vanderbilt University, where I was brought by the television show 20/20.  I was also diagnosed officially as a Problematic Hypersexualist.  Although I prefer the term Sex Maniac.

BSS: Yes, that’s a much more friendly term.   What kind of things were going on for you then, that made you seek treatment?

DHS: For many years I did not know I had any kind of mental illness.  I just felt a gigantic gaping yawning black chasm inside me that desperately wanted to be filled.  But no matter how much food, drugs or sex I shoved into that black hole it was never enough.  Also, when people touched me on certain parts of my body, I would flinch and often have a flashback.  My fight/flight reflex was constantly being set off, bells alarms and whistles shrieking shrilly inside me.  Also, I found out later that that when I suffered this terrible and violent sexual trauma, the part of my brain responsible for communication atrophied and shrunk, while the part of my brain responsible for emotion was enlarged, engorged, ready to explode.  I had a very difficult time looking beyond my own needs.  I always feel people hate me and I’m a miserable failure and totally unlovable.  Apart from that, nothing too bad.

BSS: Sounds horrible.  Did you ever end up in the hospital because of your PTSD?

DHS: No, but I self medicated for years with varying degrees of success.  Cocaine really didn’t help.  A wee bit of marijuana does wonders.  The side effects don’t really affect me too much, luckily I don’t suffer much from the munchies, although I had to give up smoking it and now I drink it in a tea.

BSS:  I’ll be right over.  What other things do you do to help with your illness?

DHS: I was cured, or rather I should say I learned how to handle my PTSD with the help of an amazing hypnotherapist, mentioned above.  She gave me the tools to stop having mental, physical, emotional, spiritual breakdowns.  It’s all about catching the symptoms as they first happen.  Being in the here and now.  Dealing with it early before the negativity sucks me down into the black hole.

BSS: That’s fantastic.  How has your illness impacted your life (jobs, education, relationships, children, alcohol, drug abuse…..?)

DHS: With my problem, I was unnaturally drawn to people who were incapable of giving me the love that I wanted and needed.  Most of these people were charming charismatic sexy smart underachievers.  I had what by most standards would be considered a very successful acting career, I was in thousands of commercials, I acted in cartoons, sitcoms, I have a three picture screenwriting deal with Disney, but I never reached my full potential because I was always sabotaging myself.  I was much more concerned with superstar success, so everyone would love me, since I couldn’t love myself, and I ended up not being able to make something great and valuable out of my artistic gifts and my relentless Protestant work ethic.  Interestingly enough, I’ve always felt very comfortable around children.  They’ve always been, for me anyway, so much more fun than the adults.

BSS: Have you ever felt discriminated against because of your illness, or had to deal with disparaging comments, denied a job or other opportunities?

DHS: Well, I can pass very easily.  You would’ve never noted in 1 million years that I had any kind of problem unless we became friends, then at a certain point you would realize and start to hate me.

BSS: If you could give advice to someone else struggling with mental illness, what would it be?

DHS: Ask for help.  Tell your story.

BSS: Anything else you’d like to add?

DHS: Writing has been an amazing healing tool for me.  For years after I was assaulted and raped, I had terrible nightmares about the incident, and the man who inflicted all this misery on me.  I would play out elaborate revenge fantasies in my head.  But when I wrote my first memoir, Chicken, and made art out of the sexual assault, I stopped having those nightmares, and I stopped plotting revenge that was never going to happen.

David Henry Sterry is the author of 16 books, a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, editor and book doctor.  His anthology was featured on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.  He co-authored The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published with his current wife, and co-founded The Book Doctors, who have toured the country from Cape Cod to Rural Alaska, Hollywood to Brooklyn, Wichita to Washington helping writers.  He is a finalist for the Henry Miller Award.  He has written books about the teenaged brain, Leroy Satchel Paige, throwing a pajama party, being the rollerskating emcee at Chippendales Male Strip Club, a patriciding mama’s boy, World Cup soccer, and working at Chippendales’s Male Strip Club. He has appeared on, acted with, written for, been paid to, worked and/or presented at: Will Smith, a marriage counselor, Disney, Stanford University, Hellroller, National Public Radio, Milton Berle, Huffington Post, Sex Museum, George Washington, 92^nd St Y,  barbershop singing pig, Brooklyn, a sodajerk, Michael Caine, the Taco Bell chihuahua, Smith College, Penthouse, the London Times, Playboy, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a human guinea pig and Zippy the Chimp.  He loves any sport with balls, and his girls.  www.davidhenrysterry

Hendrix had a purple haze.

I have this constant gray haze. No colors, just different shades of hazy gray.

My brain rebooted last night with a little sleep, only to wake me at 2 am. I thought I would feel better, though. I didn’t. I just went back to sleep. Which means I am entering back into the depressive cycle where my comfy warm bed and blankie are more important than functionality or enjoyment.

Woke up again at 8 am. Mood was okay, suited the cold rain. Got trash out, cats fed, kid dressed, myself showered. Auto pilot. A little while at the shop. Then mood crash. Followed by a swimming head where things seemed blurred and I was wobbly. Blood sugar thing perhaps? Then came the migraine. Which affected my balance and I tripped and fell. I finally just said I was leaving.

Came home. Neighbor kids already in the yard. I let my kid play for a half hour before my frayed nerves screamed enough.

So the calm from no neighbor kids is canceled out by my kid’s constant need to talk gibberish. I swear she is in love with the sound of her own voice.

My headache went away. But my mood remains low and I keep looking at the clock wondering if it’s her bedtime yet, because then I get to go to bed and roll the dice on a chance to wake up in a different mind set. And that’s all I am gonna do tonight. Sleep. Because I am cranky and irritable and the anxiety is reaching fever pitch and maybe some good solid rest (even if induced by trazadone) will do some good.

I get so sick of doing all the stuff I am supposed to do-take the meds, counseling, et al, and yet never really improving. I read this article on line today where Jennifer Aniston was quoted as saying, “Happiness is a choice, you have to choose to be happy.”

What a wonderful (deluded) sentiment. My brain chemicals don’t know what happy is. Maybe they never did. I sure as fuck don’t choose these rapid non sensical mood changes and distorted thoughts. I fight it with everything I am, actually. I just get my ass kicked.

One thing about being in the gutter mood wise… I had an epiphany as far as my own relationship patterns go. Most men don’t want a partnership. They want a nice tidy codependent situation where they can enable and be enabled. A woman who doesn’t require coddling and doesn’t coddle them is just at odds with what they need.

I am not the coddling type. I am blunt, often brutal. And while I feel bad and in every relationship I try to conform and tow the line…Spewing the party line I don’t believe in for awhile just makes me resentful and I eventually just pop off with how I feel. Because it is more important to stay true to myself than to cater to anyone’s ego.

Fatal flaw? Could be. Or maybe I just haven’t found someone strong enough to deal with my ways. Whatever. It just goes to show that my relationships aren’t so much as failures due to any wrong doing on my part, although I am certainly guilty of much trespassing. It would seem I sabotage things from the get go by trying to be what others want me to be while betraying myself. I can never maintain though because deep down, I have nothing but disdain for those who’d have me be someone I am not to make their ego comfy.

Anyway…From the pits of depression comes clarity.

Now if I could just figure out the rest of my dysfunction.

It will have to wait for the next mood cycle, though. The only thing this one is conducive to is assuming the fetal position.