Thank you.
You and you and all of you. Your words, and emails and text messages and everything – even though I was overwhelmed by the response I got for simply saying I’m losing my mind and I’m getting off this ride, it was a good kind of overwhelmed.
It was a good driving force, having all of you yous who said that I was doing the right thing, that I couldn’t question the why or the process and that giving in wasn’t the same thing as giving up on myself. It was what I, this person largely driven by social-acceptance, needed – permission to be broken and seek fixing.
I went to the doctor the day after my last post, as I said I would.
I opened myself up, ugly crying at some points. Especially when this walk-in clinic physician (who normally sees patients for a few minutes) spent half an hour trying to convince me that I wasn’t soulless, because I cared about failing. That I wasn’t failing, because I was trying. That Zoë loves me despite the nagging thought that she wouldn’t when she was older, when she knew better. That when I looked in the mirror, I was a mom, friend, 28-year old woman, not a representation of lack of success being everything I thought I should be – thin, unlined, unfreckled, financially responsible, without cracks in the mental veneer.
He started off saying that I should disregard my sister’s diagnosis as he scribbled it in my chart – it would just be something to focus on that would hold me back from health. It’s a rare diagnosis and hard to treat and it’s not one that anyone wants. I shouldn’t worry about what she might be or I might be, I should just worry about being.
By the end of the appointment, after I’d shudder-talked my way through the I can’ts and I’m not okays, he had a game plan, which probably includes re-diagnosis. Not because he thinks I’m not bipolar or I am one of the lucky ones who will get borderline personality attached to her file, but because, as he so tactfully and gently put it, disorders can co-exist. He said he wasn’t putting a name on his hunch because he didn’t think it would be beneficial, but he did say that I needed to be on some form of chemical management, and to start managing my life differently, and to seek out therapy (various forms, if possible).
He gave me homework. So the side blog will start documenting my progress in that, because for one of the first times in my life, I really, intrinsically, want to get better and feel balanced – even if it means taking pills and talking to strangers in over-air conditioned offices.
And going to bed earlier.
I’ve been here before. The last time was over four years ago, but it was similar: I got to the end of my rope and there wasn’t much to hang onto. I was swinging over a canyon, prepared to jump into an abyss, and I second-guessed myself and decided to call into the rescue chopper.
My mood has been trying, unsuccessfully, to switch again. It’s been attempting to bring back the high and diminish the low, but the fact is, the low is winning. As someone who has gotten used to a lack of low, it’s heartbreaking – I mean it, it’s literally breaking my heart, because I’ve had to admit that I just can’t.
I can’t wake up in the morning and be happy to be awake. I can’t look at the full sink and see anything more than energy I don’t have. I can’t think of the jobs I should be applying for and see anything more than jobs other, normal people who can think straight should get.
I’ve gotten back to the place where being crazy isn’t a fun quirk that’s occasionally annoying; now, it’s just holding me down.
I’m back, and I don’t know how I fell so fast, so hard, after so much health, at looking in the mirror and thinking fat – starve – run – measure – weigh – water – 100 calories – hateful, ugly bitch.
I’m being held captive by all of the could have beens and the never ares – and I’m back to waking up every morning, half wishing I hadn’t, a failure.
Zoë’s become a teenager overnight and all I want is a break from the nearly constant defiance. My mind alternates between too many thoughts to track and nothingness. I don’t feel anything, again, while at the same time, everything hurts me so deeply that I’ve got tears welling up at any point of the day.
I laugh and I hear it echo, the falseness. I lay down and attempt automatic reactions, knowing that this could be the thing that wakes me back up, but I’ve fallen further than a magical kiss could correct.
I know, from before, from the black days, from pre-child-mother-responsible-commitment where this can lead and it’s a road that I refuse to go down, that I can’t because she deserves so much better than I ever had a hope of having. She doesn’t need to see her mom lose her shit, to grow up wondering if one day she might come home to nothingness, rage, a noose.
Maybe it’s time for me to grow out of this fantasy life where I can control my broken brain with enough sleep, diet and exercise. Maybe it’s time for me to just give in.
I’ve been so adverse to medicating for so long. Forever, really. Because to me, it was giving up on myself. It was saying, I can’t, not I need to try harder. There’s always I need to try harder, even when I have been medicated, but the difference is this: clean and clear and crazed, it’s fanatical, coming in starts and stops, without long-term aim; under the influence of a psych cocktail, it’s finite and doable and the lists do not number more than one or two. There’s an end-goal, instead of constantly replenishing 180s.
You know you’re in a bad way when you start thinking that you just want to have someone else tell you what to do, to have no power or choices, to just do. Become a little beetle, push more shit uphill, whatever, as long as the route is planned.
One of my sisters got an all-expenses paid vacation in the psych ward. I was envious. The solitude, the routine, the talking. God, the talking. I couldn’t ever, because that would be the weapon that could be used to diminish what little love and reason there is in my life, but God, the talking.
She was rediagnosed. It looks like I should be too. Because though to anyone somewhat versed, I have a screaming little b tattooed on my forehead, it goes further than that. Cyclothymia, the name given to my personal brand of crazy, has been known as a primary cause of instability in relationships, but that instability is caused by the fluctuating moods; borderline personality disorder, what I might be looking at now if you believe in such a thing, causes instability just by being the name of the game.
You’ re terrified of being alone, being abandoned, but you’re helpless to stop yourself from pushing people away as a first strike. People can’t hurt you when you’re not within stabbing distance and you can’t watch them walk away if you never turn to face them.
I’ve been turning this potential over in my head for a week, wondering what the difference is between daddy issues and a diagnosis – how do I know whether I’ve never allowed myself to fall in love because of my relationship with my father or because my brain is off-kilter. Is it not working properly because of him? If I forgive him and myself and get therapy to learn how to cope and erase those childhood flashes from my soul’s dictionary, will I be cured?
So, full-circle, I’ve resisted medication for all of my life that I’ve known that I might need it because of one simple thing: I don’t know if I need it, or I need a different childhood.
There’s so much to be said for battling demons with promiscuity, alcoholism, codependence, drugs, diet, sleep deprivation, tattoos, piercings, sewing kits and so on. So many people without a chemical imbalance are doing the same dance I’ve done off and on for nearly two decades. How do we know?
And I know, too, how stereotypical it might be for someone diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder to consider themself not sick. That’s why people go off of meds – it gets to be so manageable that they think they’re healthy.
Until they fall again.
I’ve tripped. And there’s a gigantic crack in me that I fear can only be filled with medication. God, I wanted to be bigger than this.
But I’m not, so tomorrow, because she is worth more than my ego and my stubbornness and all of the me that I think I might lose in the process from the chemicals, I will go to the doctor and I will get a little piece of paper that says I need help in the form of white, blue and probably yellow and red pills. And I will cry at the vulnerability of it all. Then I will pick her up from preschool and pretend nothing happened.
It’ll be the first real lie I’ve ever told her.
