Tag Archives: mental health

On Arting

26 Saturday Feb 2022

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Art is inherently scary. What the sheep does it mean, all those countless people falling prey to what is really a neurological illness—being compelled to endlessly create, whether it be Moby Dick or a hand-knitted scarf? Art makes no sense, really. Never has; I think that’s part of what the resistance to abstract painting and sculpture was all about: It swept aside the screens and forced us to seriously consider the implications of the saying, “Art for art’s sake.”

Art is the result of the universe reaching out for eternal fruition; we artists are the very tiniest tips of the Creator’s fractal. Sounds great on your resume, but actually it’s kind of a pain in the sheep. Forget all the high-minded words over What Art Means and stop agonizing over the weight of your content, you precious flower, you. Instead, create—endlessly create. Let it flow out of the parts of your body which you use as your art tools—because if you don’t, you will get sick.

Let me repeat that: You. WILL. Get sick. Physically, spiritually, psychologically. You are already fragile—a receptor made from conception to tune into the highest frequencies—and you will spend a higher amount of time than Average Joe on bodily maintenance. Sorry about that. And that’s if you are a good bunny and create, create, create.

If you don’t, you get what I will call spiritually constipated. All that untold, unsung, and unbeaded Stuff just piles up on itself, like the chocolates in Lucy Ricardo’s assembly line. Moreover, your poor little Universe Antenna is straining itself to the utmost to reconnect. This results in all sorts of nonsense. For me, it worsens my mood, causing a spiral in which it becomes harder and harder to function. It also turns up my fibromyalgia, and my ADHD batters itself against its physical cage like a frantic bird. Yuck.

Don’t spend too much time erasing and editing—that’s all very well and necessary, but unless you have a slot open for an endless slew of new art, the revision process can devolve into a comforting nanny who shields you from the nasty Universe.

Create, create, create.

Off My Meds

18 Friday Feb 2022

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Just when you think you’re jogging along in your OK-enough-I-guess rut, Sheep Happens.

I am an N and a J (the other letters flip-flop on me depending on my mood when I’m taking the test), so I make sense of the Universe by logic and deduction to the best of my ability. So I *think* this all started when I got kidney stone surgery last year.

My urologist put her foot down, having seen me many times for this, and I ended up with an endocrinology workup which showed that all I needed was a huge mucking dose of Vitamin D. So I took it (am taking it still), and as a result. . . my mild but chronic depression gradually faded away.

As many before me have likened it, it was like some cobwebs got swept away. And gradually I noticed that my years-old anxiety seemed to be ratcheting up. We raised my mood stabilizer—and it actually got worse.

In a phone session, my prescriber and I had a simultaneous epiphany: It wasn’t anxiety, it was an extra-pyramidal effect called akathisia. Bad news. I needed to come off the drug.

We tapered me off relatively quickly because the akathisia is really hellish (think of having had too much coffee and wanting to shake out your entire body, all the while some brain chemical or other is saying “Danger, Will Robinson!”), and here I am.

At first, the “anxiety” morphed at first into plain old fear: What will happen? I’m off my meds! Aieeee!! Visions of my manic episodes flashed, coupled with terror of their depressive partners. Would I go back on the rollercoaster?

Well, not necessarily. My life is really stable right at the moment, and while I was on the drug, I did a decade’s worth of work on the trauma that pushed me onto the ride to begin with. I figured, there are other stabilizers out there we can try if we need them, so let’s poke our nose out and see what the world is like.

And the answer is, really intense! It’s sort of like being on an epistemological acid trip. I feel a little naïve. All those years the drug was keeping me stable, it was doing other things as well—and it turns out that those things meant it was buffering me from my emotions. And both my PTSD and my ADHD are like kids on a holiday right now: Whooo hypervigilance! Focus? What’s that?

Yet despite all, it feels like a normal and healthy process. My brain is Doing Stuff as it readjusts to life without the drug, and I kinda need to stay out of the way.

The first thing I noticed was that I am experiencing pleasant sensations more intensely: Washing my face was its own mini-epiphany of the joys of warmth and friction. Of course, there’s a flip side: I have become what a co-worker charitably called “irritable,” partly due to my getting a lot less sleep, I suspect.

(I am still on a fistful of pills, what with the heart disease and fibro and all, as well as the possibly-not-as-needed-now anxiolytics. But in the recovery world, they’re just the backup singers.)

So in short, I am having a neuro sheepstorm. I took advantage of my accrued leave, and bugged out of work for two weeks, almost before I said anything I really shouldn’t have. My plan is to just catch up with who I am now and what my dealio is: I’ve lost 100 pounds; I turn 60 this year; my creative process has been on a slow but persistent uptick. And now I’m off my meds.

Salad Forks and Knitting Needles

21 Thursday Oct 2021

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Today I was a very little dismayed when a guy I’ll call Troy came in to the place I work. (I’m a certified peer specialist, and I help run a small group of recovery learning centers, where people who’ve experienced mental health diagnoses come to hang out. We peers also have lived experience, and we’re trained . . . differently than your average Mental Health Professional.)

Troy has something called word salad, in which his language gets garbled. People with this are in a way sort of like having killer mega ADD, in which they distract themselves second by second: Sentences merge into other sentences, words interweave with their cousins and their sisters and their aunts, and the result is that the simplest attempt at conversation is about as linear as a plate of spaghetti. It’s Ulysses in a blender.  

I have a really beautiful verbal processor for my native tongue, and so I find talking with Troy to be fascinating. But I just realized that the dismay came from old memories of what talking to Troy felt like. See, it makes my processor work very hard, and it’s not used to that as a rule! Not since grad school, in fact. I’m a weekend jogger who just ran a half-marathon. So the net result is that I’m exhausted now and my brain feels sorry for itself, unsure of any logical connection and unwilling to make decisions.

(“Ooh, I know! Let’s attempt to write something now and put it up on the Interwebs!”)

Troy hadn’t seen me for several years, and approved of my weight loss in the most straightforward fashion, approaching me with hopeful hands outstretched and asking if he could embrace my thigh so as to appreciate how much was just loose flesh. I told him that wasn’t happening, and he then offered me the same privilege, so I could tell him what the difference was. No dice there, either, but it did occur to me that it was just as well my co-workers were just a holler down the hall—just in case.

But Troy was just testing boundaries, which I’m used to from our community members, and we went out with his coffee and my knitting. (I don’t go anywhere without my knitting if I think I’ll have to sit still for more than five minutes.) So Troy talked to me, and I tried to follow along, with him having me repeat back verbatim what had come out of his mouth, and both of us laughing: Whatever I had heard had not been the impulse of Troy’s brain; it’s unsurprising that sometimes he talks of himself as only borrowing Troy’s body.

Luckily, I had my knitting, in which I make things out of sheep fur, imposing order onto the chaotic universe. It calms me down and centers me—some people smoke, but I knit. No great shakes—we’re talking an average of a sock a month—but it anchors me, and lets me focus on things like talking to Troy, and sometimes the much harder task of talking to myself.

“It’s OK,” I said fairly early on. But he transfixed me with a sharp-nailed fingershake.

“It’s not OK,” he declared. And I felt like an ass: How would I feel if my brain pulled that sheep on me? Not OK, that’s how. But Troy carries it with an abundant sense of humor, and what I must call grace, meaning both a rough sort of etiquette and what some would call a gift from God.

Troy called my attention to the embarrassing fact that I say, “It’s OK” a lot. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but I seem to have a pattern of needing to reassure people, possibly because my trauma survivor brain sees the world as a dark and scary place.

Hmm. That’s not OK.

Panic and Anxiety

13 Friday Mar 2020

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I’m on Xanax. Been on Xanax for a while now. It helps me sleep, so I take one at night with the rest of the handful in my cocktail. Every so often I have a random panic attack, and I take one then. Soldiering on, so it goes, etc. But yesterday was different.

See, my generalized anxiety disorder tends to not get triggered at work, because I’m too busy to live in my head. But yesterday felt like a movie. You know what I mean, I betcha, because you’re starring in one too. It’s the Doomsday movie with the mysterious virus which decimates the human population.

Because talking about our feelings is not only OK but encouraged at staff meeting (I’m a peer specialist), I admitted to feeling just plain scared–of what, I don’t know. And others agreed. As the day wore on, and we poured ourselves out upon the two or three people who made it in, it was hard not to notice the deserted halls. Panic hung in the air like an impending thunderstorm, with the same sense of pressure on the soul.

The coup de grace came when our director came in and announced that as of Monday, we would be closed until further notice. The phone support line folks can come in, but not those of us who do face time. Instead, my boss and I will spend some quality time doing some overdue things like writing an employee manual. Hi-ho. I’m trying to look at this as a weird Lenten vacation, sort of like Spring Break, only without the cheerfulness.

This is not the first pandemic H. sapiens has endured, and it won’t be the last. 9/11 showed us how cohesive our society is, and so far the 1918 Spanish flu makes this viral reaper look like a pitiful tryhard. So have some faith, beloveds. My hope is that the survivors take some lessons to heart, primarily that once expressed by the old saw “Man proposes; God disposes.” I expect to be one of the survivors, but I’m high risk, so time will tell. We are now all on an adventure; I am hoping the treasure at the end is an increased mutual trust and compassion.

Which is all very well, but my anxiety level is through the roof. (It didn’t help the bing-bing-bing that I was out of my ADHD meds yesterday.) So I have messaged my shrink like a good girl, and I am about to start applying all the non-allopathic tools I’ve assembled: Meditation, art, writing, breathing (I was probably on the edge of hyperventilating yesterday from all that deep oxygen intake), listening to music, and *sigh* processing my feelings.

Which sucks as a general thing, but fear is an old, old friend.

Roll Them Bones

18 Saturday Jan 2020

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I have always loathed the New Age theory which mumbles something fuzzy about how we have chosen everything which happens to us. This particular bilge is offensive to every raped child on the planet, but even discounting that for a moment, it’s the shoddy logic which gets me: It implies that human souls are like children who like repetition in their stories. Why on the literal earth would you go through the inordinate trouble which is having a life when you already know what it’s going to be like?

I suspect the people holding this belief to be significantly entitled (at least more so than I am, and that’s saying a lot) and unfamiliar with other people’s suffering. If we’re going to seriously entertain the notion that we spend our pre-game warmup time in such a way, shouldn’t it be more like putting together a roleplaying character?

I do think it’s reasonable, in this posited green room outside of Time, that we are instead given a certain number of points to be spent on a wide variety of probably vague categories. For example, I spent more points on being right-brained than left, and seem to have taken every single left-brained bit I have in linguistic intelligence: I’m a helluva wordsmith, but I count on my fingers, and ask anyone present at the Great Gingerbread Fail of 2018 what my recipe skills are.

It’s worthwhile taking a stab at what your character sheet might look like in this system. I’m pretty sure I traded in some stamina for extra wisdom (nobody ever asks how you get wisdom, which is why all those Zen sages spend so much time whacking people over the head). I also made the apparently pointless choice of IQ over Health (both Physical–I’m looking at you, fibromyalgia–and Mental: ooh, somebody rolled a 1 on Family of Origin over here, although I feel like if I bitch too much about this, the natural 20 I got on One’s Own Children might somehow evaporate on me), but maybe in the last round I was like, rilly stupid, y’know?

At any rate, I’d rather see the Supreme Deity as DM instead of child-abuse instigator, wouldn’t ya think?

Stuffing

01 Tuesday Oct 2019

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I was eleven or so. One afternoon my parents called me into the living room for some minor task, and inquired almost angrily what my deal was.

My face working, I stammered out that I was trying not to cry.

Well, what did I have to cry about?

I had cut my finger just moments earlier, while peeling an apple in the kitchen.

So why didn’t I cry?

“B-bec-cause y-you told m-me n-not to,” I wailed.

Oh, well then, cry away! I was told, with the largesse of a Victorian philanthropist, and I burst into tears.

I don’t recall being told not to cry, but I’m sure that I was. My mother was sexually abusing me nightly, although my conscious recollection boiled down to an eternal blazing fury: I hated my mother, but didn’t know why. My dad, on the other hand, as ignorant of the abuse as I, merely beat me a lot with his belt, mainly for not cleaning my room. To this day, when I hear somebody sweeping, there is a flashknot in my stomach.

But despite the abuse and neglect, I was not allowed to cry. What to do? I stuffed it, of course, and those tears waited with corrosive patience until an excellent therapist coaxed them out in my 40s. It took a lot of therapy, and to this day I am what’s called a “stress crier.” It’s a pain in the butt, if only because my sinuses swell from all the mucus and I can get a migraine from the pressure unless I hit myself with four sprays of fluticasone, which tastes unpleasantly of an incongruous lilac but works well.

I still stuff emotions, primarily anger, but I’m working hard on that. I write the feeling words large and circle them in my journal. The result is something that looks a lot like cantankerousness: I suffer fools badly, and have started to show up for myself.

I am trying to turn into a cranky old lady; to further this end, I have stopped dying my hair now that I’ve buzzed most of it off. My face still looks ten years younger, due mainly to genetics, not smoking, and sleep and hydration, but the crop of silver on top is like a snake rattle: Step over my log with caution, because I’ve been here for a few many turns around the sun now, and I have learned how to bite.

I nipped somebody this morning over something small, and was amazed at the level of satisfaction it afforded. (There is somebody who has taken it upon themselves to walk the website I manage, and if they find a 404 link, they email all of upper management. It’s been annoying for eight years, and I finally had enough. I told him that this tactic just made me look bad, and I would appreciate being given a private heads-up, being the webmaster and all.)

I’ve been chanting to change my karma, and (coincidentally I’m sure) had the most stressful month since I was homeless. I thought meditation was supposed to mellow you out, but maybe the mellow has to clear away a whole lot of muck before it rests easy in your soul. What do you think?

Journalish Entry

27 Saturday Jan 2018

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inky hand

Who’s procrastinating? I am! I am!

My still foggy brain figured out how to add the photo and still have text next to it; faithful readers with sharp memories will notice this as a new skill. Yay me!

I’ve been depressed for most of the past two months–Christmas cheered me up, which makes me feel shallow and trite, but there it is. (Can a person be trite? Sure they can. We’ve all been trapped at that business dinner.) It’s not that I spend hours gloomily musing on Being and Nothingness, it’s more that I don’t know what to do. (As in, read a book or play a game. As far as Being and Nothingness goes . . . ) Worse, once I figure it out (if I do), I spend seemingly hours getting it done because I am far more easily distracted than usual. This is a common symptom of depression, but I have ADHD, so who can tell?

I am open to suggestions. I can’t take meds, because I either have a weird reaction to them, or they might make me manic. (Trust me–or trust those who’ve been close to me–you don’t want to see me manic. I don’t do anything amusing like start new religious movements, but I do end up in the hospital. Pity. Being manic feels great! Which is why it’s so hard to treat.) I am working my WRAP plan. But here’s the hell of it: If I am trying my best, if I am doing something borderline productive (like blogging), it means I’m having a good day. If I’m having a bad day, I can’t even focus on a video game. Arrghh.

In other news: Although I have been faithful to my protein shake breakfast, to the point where it now feels normal, I’ve only lost about five pounds. I had it pushed a little lower, but the holidays snuck two pounds back on. Sigh. (This matters because I am due for bariatric surgery this spring, and I must lose 16 pounds so they can maneuver around my massive fatty liver, cuddled around my stomach like a protective bloat of tick.) However, I have dropped my application off at the Y, and the guy who Does That will come back from vacation any day now. Sigh. Seeing as I don’t get a surgery date until I see their shrink (March) I have some time. It’s only 11 pounds, right?

Tribe of Tiger (this year’s NaNo and the third in the kitty series–Eureka, published here, is in the same world but is not strictly canon) is SO close to being finished it’s a bit scary. I’m at the point where the next two or three paragraphs will wrap up the main action. There must be a name for this feeling that I should kill somebody off for it to be good art!

I’ve been doing more visual art lately–got involved with an art journal challenge. Seeing as I wimped out on Inktober, I would have been more reluctant, but, golly mo, my daughter makes those blank books! So I begged one that had some invisible flaw, and have been having a great time. Sure, I’m behind, but it’s an improvement over Inktober’s 12-day performance. (To be fair, what slowed me down then was lack of scanner access; I learned from this mistake and have been doing just fine snapping pix from my phone.)

OKCupid (deliberately not linked because drive-bys) used to do this thing where they made you pick three words to describe yourself. So I guess right now they’re fat, depressed, and creative. I could do worse.

Colossal Lack of Insight! Film at 11!

13 Wednesday Dec 2017

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For the past couple of months, I’ve been getting the looming feeling that Something Big was about to happen. I was going to (moan) Grow. I’m not given to premonitions–historically, I’ve made most of the decisions in my life in the split second before they came out of my mouth, surprising myself well over half the time. (Work in progress, folks. Medication helps.) So I started to worry that something weird and horrible was going to happen.  Didn’t think it was the upcoming surgery. Then the thing just did, and I didn’t even realize it until a few minutes ago.

Yesterday I went to my shrink of the past seven years, and she told me she’d gotten a well-deserved promotion and was stepping away from clinical practice. Translation: I’m getting the boot. I have a couple more sessions; she suggested enthusiastically that she be the one to talk to the bariatric people; and then I take a two-month hiatus. I’m going to need all the support I get post-surgery, and I know that, even if I’m not anticipating the psychotic break some previously-blogged-about hospitals did. So I will be starting off with somebody new.

I said something about my premonition, and said in all seriousness that I would want to continue talk therapy when it hit. I said this with absolutely no self-awareness that THIS was it; that it already had hit. I mean, duh? This thought just wandered into my brain 22 hours later.

I owe a lot to this woman. Speaking broadly and with political incorrectness, I was still crazy when I got to her, and now I’m not crazy anymore. When you’re starting off with more than one major psychiatric disorder, that is huge. The process wasn’t as emotional as my previous therapy had been–you know the sort, where I ended up a small child coloring while sitting on the floor, therapist down there with me–but little by bit, she helped me tease out about a million little things, and my life became less chaotic. We did a lot of good work, and I am a happier and much more productive person for it.

In the novel of my life, a chapter (or a story arc) is ending. Something Big, indeed.

(But what was up with the premonition? Are they going to keep happening now? Noooo!)

The Adventure Continues

02 Saturday Dec 2017

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Sorry to have been AWOL for so long, but between Inktober (which I didn’t do very well on) and NaNoWriMo (squeaked by), my creative energies have been sucked dry. In fact, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m making this post because all I need to do is tell what happened, not pull it Athena-like out of my forehead.

Last post: I finally decided to go for bariatric surgery, and joined the program at Beth Israel, where I had my knees replaced last year. I ended with being about to join the new patient group.

Well, no, bunkies. That didn’t happen.

Instead, I got a call a couple of days beforehand from a social worker who wanted me to come in to talk about my *chord of ominous music* Mental Health. So I get there, and am told that my diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder scared the bejeebers out of their staff. My favorite line from this interview was the lady saying, “As it is, we have patients say they feel like an entirely different person afterwards.” (This sort of thing has nothing whatsoever to do with the alters experienced in DID.) In vain did I try to educate her, both about DID in general (spectrum disorder; not often as dramatic as Sybil) and my case in particular (well-controlled thanks to excellent therapy; don’t dissociate anymore). She managed somehow to combine “Sympathetic and on your side” with “Boy howdy, ain’t you the freak!” She claimed they’d never had a DID patient. (Well, if you don’t let them into your program . . .)

They kicked me out of the program. She told me (with the tiniest sneer) that there were over 30 programs in the city. I said, “Yeah, but my insurance sent me here.” She gave a cryptic little smile and suggested I call them back. Sheep you, honey.

Happily, said insurance covered the programs at the other huge local hospitals, so I steeled myself for a round of phone calls. I started out with Boston Medical Center, because I happen to work for them. I am a Certified Peer Specialist, which means I’m professionally qualified to deal with my fellow mentally ill and to be a Shining Example of Recovery. In other words, they hired me because I’m crazy, so I figured they’d have their nerve turning me down for the same reason, right?

I call and get the coordinator. I gave her the two sentence version of the BI story and said, “So BI thinks I’m too crazy to cut. What about you guys?” In an impassive voice, she replied, “We take everybody. Come on in and talk to the surgeon.”

Well now! I watch what by now is the third informational video, and pick the surgeon who seems most sympatico. I went in and talked to this very nice man, who has operated on people who were unrecovered schizophrenics. (Even really crazy people deserve medical care, folks.) The worst news I got from him is that my GERD means he sorta leans toward the RNY gastric bypass instead of the gastric sleeve, which is the procedure I want.

He had heard my story about Beth Israel and their weirdly creepy head surgeon before.

So why did this happen? Because what BI’s bariatric program is doing is called cherry-picking their data. This means that by refusing to treat people they fear may have less than picture-perfect outcomes, their end data looks amazing. They claim they’re the best program in the area, when all they are is a pack of hyenas who share the same level of accreditation with hospitals which actually (be still my overweight heart) heal the sick.

 

 

A New Adventure Begins

22 Friday Sep 2017

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Discerning readers will vaguely recall that I had my first heart attack the day before last New Year’s Eve. This surprised absolutely nobody, as my BMI is pushing 50 the way those guys on the Tokyo subways cram in the commuters. It wasn’t a BIG heart attack, feeling more like recalcitrant indigestion, but when they got inside with the widdy-bitty camera, my right coronary artery was 95% blocked. A little bit of titanium fixed that mo-fo, but in the recovery room, a nurse shared that they called situations like mine “One cheeseburger away.” (Hear that, Elizabeth? I’m comin’ to join ya, honey!)

Since then I have been on three new meds and had the dosage cranked on the Lipitor. And I’ve felt fine, except for a rather Victorian over-attention to my heart. I went in to see the cardiologist for the six-ish month check-in this Monday expecting only to possibly be released from a pill or two.

Instead, he scolded me for letting the baby aspirin lapse, and told me I was taking it for the rest of my life. And while he was on the topic of “the rest of my life,” he in so many words intimated that it would be a short story unless . . .

“Have you ever thought of bariatric surgery?”

Now, every fat person in the Western world has at least thought about it, so I parried by sharing my PCP’s aversion to the practice. (Malabsorption issues.) The cardiologist pooh-poohed this; said they had that under control, and went down the list: Diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and the ever-looming sin of having a heart-attack at only 54.

Now, I am something of a fat activist. People were saying stupid stuff to me about my weight back when I was only 170, which is a hundred pounds or so ago. *I* was saying stupid stuff to myself back when I was in high school, at 129. I got tired of it after I had the kids and found that the baby weight had come to stay. So I left myself alone about it–started buying jeans that actually fit instead of jamming myself into a number that I thought was more reasonable than reality. I started being nicer to myself, which was groovy, seeing as sporadic attempts to Do Something about it kept putting another several pounds on, topped with the five I picked up from being sidelined by the double knee replacement last year.

I now weigh 274; been told I carry it well, but apparently my coronary artery wasn’t listening to the compliments.

The cardiologist, a former Marine, doesn’t do bullshit, but he doesn’t do fat-bashing, either. He was just laying out the facts, and this week I heard him. (It didn’t hurt that the podiatrist told me last week that my clumsy attempt to continue cutting my own toenails wasn’t gonna fly and I had to leave it to the professionals, ’cause I can’t really reach them anymore.)

I got referred to Local Hospital, which my insurance told me was out of network, and then went to (sigh) Beth Israel, where I had my knees done, so at least I know them there.

I discovered that the road to bariatric weight loss is long and dotted with hurdles: Mandatory info sessions. Psychologists. Social workers. And of course nutritionists and exercise physiologists and about a billion nurses. I need to have tried (failed) at least two formal attempts to lose weight. This is a bit of a sticking point for me, as I’ve never done Weight Watchers or fen-phen or any other fad, because I already knew what the surgery people posted in their PowerPoint: Only 5% of the people who do them succeed. At least I had a little time with a personal trainer. Sigh.

I don’t know how this story ends, but that’s the sitch whenever I begin a new book, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. A big part of me wants to hide under the covers and pretend it’s not happening, but I know I need to be really social about this and have support. (Besides, it’s a Rule of the Blogosphere.)

Next stop for Beth Israel: I join a “new patient group.” Next stop for me: I tell my PCP on Monday. Yeep.