Tag Archives: mental health

The Sparkly Feeling

28 Monday Dec 2015

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I just began the sequel to my WriMo, in which the cats (and I) consult a cousin chart and then more or less give up on the “once removed” and whatnot: They are looking for a missing cousin, leave it at that, and her wife. I have no idea what happened to them or how they are to be found; I have an image of Darjeeling in his panther form slinking through a field of wheat, but I don’t know if it actually occurs. I am in a place of mystery, and it sparkles.

I need some sparkle this morning; I had to leave a message with Boston Housing to tell them I am now essentially unemployed; I’ll keep leaving messages for a few days. I also filled out a tax form (badly), only just now spying the information which I should have put in a couple of boxes. I have other tax forms awaiting me, as now that I don’t have a child in college, I haven’t coaxed said child into filing my taxes for me. (I am so, so, SO phobic about paperwork. I’m not sure why. I’m pretty sure it began with poverty–very inconvenient of it.) Still ahead is knocking on the door of the food stamp people. Sigh.

But my brain is already feeling better about not having to Go Back There. It was all just so stressful, and I really do think that the “convenience” of having paratransit made it much worse. Paratransit is when you’re too disabled to use public transit well, so they send a car or a weird little truck to your door. It’s about twice as expensive as taking the train, but a fraction of what a cab would cost. When my right meniscus finally shredded itself to bits, I couldn’t walk up the half-mile hill to work anymore. Sigh. So not only did I end up waiting impatiently for their very random arrival and departure times, I lost some cardio and gained some weight. Grrr. More stress.

I’m also unsure about my fitness to continue working in what’s called direct service, which much of the time means dealing with highly stressed out people who have major life problems. It’s a brutal challenge to your patience and compassion, especially if you’re me and they have continence issues. I suspect it triggers me back to my unimaginably squalid childhood in the hands of a psychotic and alcoholic, which is my personal problem, but it wears on the brain nonetheless: I need to work somewhere where I don’t smell pee-pee. This all limits my options as a peer specialist, so the writing needs to take off.

At least that is still sparkly, although I have some horribly triggering stuff in Terry’s story to wade through. But I’ll wait til later; til my brain grows back somewhat. For now, sparkly.

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Unmoved

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

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I’m caught at work with nothing to do. Well, comparatively. I could be researching new groups; I could be working on my quilt block; I could even slip back to my office where I can do my tiny data-crunch of the people who visited the center in September. But I can’t concentrate on the first two and the third is awkward: I’m sort of invisibly babysitting a recovery group from the receptionist’s area.

I’m not part of the group officially for two reasons. For the first, it’s 90 minutes long, and that’s too long, even with coloring. (A perk of being a peer specialist is that people understand my need to focus on doing something like abstract artwork during meetings to hold down the wiggles and help me pay attention.) For the second, I’m not the official facilitator, but being Frau Direktor, it can sometimes be funky with group dynamics, and this group is new and a little wobbly.

But I’m here because earlier it looked like a peer would be present who’s been having a hard time recently. Last week, she threw a tantrum during a group–and that one was being run by an honest-to-john psychiatrist–and stormed out. The facilitator made it clear that it needed to be Handled somehow, if at all possible. So when I popped my head into the program to see how it was running and saw her here today mumbling to herself . . . uh-oh. So basically I stayed behind this afternoon in the role of possible official bouncer–but she’s not here after all. Just as well.

You may be thinking that it’s politically incorrect of us to have standards of behavior–after all, we’re all mad here–but I assure you, it’s necessary: People acting out can be frightening and triggering to other peers as well. Getting screamed at was one of the things they left off my job description during the hire (possibly because it was also done by the guy hiring me, who is thankfully no longer with the firm) but it is my job. As is calling security. Sigh. But not today. Today I try not to eavesdrop and sit here blogging to you. (Not a total loss. I’m able to touch base with building maintenance about the rock somebody threw through our window this morning. Sigh again.)

Meanwhile, back at my life: We still haven’t moved–but November 1 is now the ticket. It’s reached a level of unreality by now–the stress coating my soul has coagulated like the cheesy mold that coats a long-forgotten cup of coffee. I know on a purely intellectual level that it will be violently dug into by the cleaning brush of packing in two weeks, because by then I’ll be attending two 40-hour weeks of intensive training. In other words, I’ll be exhausted and cranky. I still haven’t finished the prop paintings I’m doing. Moving then would be a cruel joke, but we know the universe loves to laugh.

I’ve decided to participate in the zaniness of NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, which will force some sort of writing out of my head. I’ll link some bits here. And I haven’t forgotten about Damascus! m’ not dead yet! I’m getting better! I feel happy!

A Quick Catchup and Mumbling About Things Bought Over the Internet

25 Sunday Aug 2013

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Yarrgghhh. Where did that stressball summer go?

Let’s see:

My son is still on the couch and we are still waiting to move. What had been conceptualized as a July 1 move to a three-bedroom apartment has been beaten down by the realities of market demand and people dallying about actually moving when they tell their landlords they are. We are now looking at a damn-near-sure-thing on October 1, which would have thrown us all into hysterics had we known at the outset of this adventure. The new apartment is supposed to be bigger than this (other than just adding a bedroom, smarty-pants) and we are crossing our fingers.

But it almost definitely lacks a ferret room, which is to say a chamber which is far too small to be a bedroom by modern building code standards (else it would be marked as one and we would be charged accordingly). So in preparation, we got a new ferret cage, which has about a 3′ square footprint instead of the 10′ square they’d been in for the past several years. Nobody has come right out and said it, but this has been an epic disaster; an unheralded mustelidean misery which we are now stuck with. I’ll just leave you with the phrase, “Oh come on, they’ll figure the slide out!” and we’ll move on. (We ended up making them little fake staircases out of unloved textbooks.) But it looked GREAT online!

To add to the furry fun, the cats have fleas. So after the flea bath was the usual waste of time, my daughter ordered them flea collars, as for some reason our local pet store is in denial about cats in fact suffering from fleas just like dogs. The picture on Amazon said “flea collar.” What came yesterday was a calming collar, all covered in copious powder smelling like everything but the lavender it claimed it was. I wish they’d invented these back when I had the cat who chewed all of his own fur off because he needed to be an only kitty–but I really wish they’d just sent us the flea collar they charged us for.

My daughter’s laptop is dying and she is now sharing mine pending the probably dim hope that the guy in Dudley Square will fix it, unlike Microcenter, which smugly told us that they were only told to put in the part–diagnostics as to whether they put the part in correctly would have cost extra. (Really. Literally. I am not making that up. Never go there.) I am spending big wisdom points on not going all banshee on they ass.

Stress, stress, stress. On top of everything else, we had a personnel shakeup at work and I ended up being the only person on the team with Web skills. Such as they are. True, I was out carving out niches in HTML back when pappy was a brat, but over the last ten years, we’ve moved to the CSS Internet. So I went out and got a book which spoonfed it to me, and everything was fine, until the site which looked awesome on the Mac was broken on the PC, meaning that once again I had to break out tabling and faking a lot. But in the end my new site looks one hell of a lot better than the old one, which was put together by a committee of mentally ill people–and looked like it. (I’m mentally ill. I can say this stuff. Sort of like the N word.)

I offered to do a similar redesign for somebody else on the team, but communications broke down because I wouldn’t let her hang on the phone with me while she supervised me making her changes live. This woman, known henceforth as The Client because she flashed me back to my early agency days, is unclear on what the big megilla is making PDFs so different from Word documents and was miffy because I couldn’t edit one of her pre-existing PDF bits. (They wouldn’t spring for the $30 CSS book [“We thought you already knew all that!”]; there’s no way they’re getting me Acrobat–I’m just glad that the Mac does basic PDFs natively.)

She also put up a downloadable document in Word. And I used my nice words and everything, but no dice. Webmonkeys are webflunkies, and as soon as she realized she couldn’t micromanage the entire rebuild, she faded off to a corner. This is swell with me, as Clients get charged Real Money, instead of the we’ll-pay-you-for-a-sick-day method we use around here, and I already have *ahem* a job. THAT at least has been going smoothly, which of course now has my paranoia radar blinking.

So there have been days I’ve been holding onto my recovery with all my fingernails, and I won’t deny that there has been crying. (Crying’s OK. It’s when I start walking around randomly singing all the time that it’s time for the men with the net.)

Writing: Well, you’ve already noticed the lack of blogging. But I did *drumroll* finish the epsilon draft of Max, meaning that as soon as the beta team does this one last crawl, it’s time to figure out what to do next. I was planning on sending it out the old-school way, but I have to talk to an expert on disability before I do that–heaven forbid it actually sell for too much money and I end up shot in the foot. I might end up self-publishing after all, who knows?

Meanwhile, I’ve been plodding along on Max Draconum and lazily wondering what to feed you nice people next. I think I might just rewrite the rest of the Damascus thread after all, seeing as I’ve decided to simplify the book it used to live in and focus instead on another of its plots.  We shall see, we shall see.

But for now I wanted to pop on, tell y’all I haven’t gone back to the hospital yet, and now consider myself poked about the blog thang. Peace, y’all!

Because I don’t want to be fired . . .

22 Saturday Jun 2013

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. . .  I just redacted my last post. It talked about stuff at work, and in a sort of recursive fashion talked about how they have a somewhat slavering belief in Being Very Careful About Email. Seeing as this is a blog, and I’m sure the dead-curious can find out who I am, I figured better safe than sorry. Damn it.

I was fairly annoyed when I wrote the post, and now having to self-censor makes me even more annoyed. However, I am sure my lack of skill at office politics will bite me in the ass sooner rather than later; I just hope like hell the kids have jobs by then. But then I can publish without being damned, bwah ha.

It’s a toughie–for so many of us, work is such a big part of our lives. How do you handle this, folks? I change names and small facts and try to be as anonymizing as possible. But I’m pretty sure that anything other than a glazed-eyed, slogan-spouting chirp will be seen as some sort of tragic heresy.

The slogan I’m thinking of is “Recovery is Real,” and it refers to the fact that people with mental illness can and do recover, using a combination of therapy, medication, recovery planning, and alternative therapies. It’s a powerful and exciting thing–I’m living proof of it–but sometimes . . .

. . . like any new idea, it can be kind of culty, and in a sense, we’re supposed to act like ministers for a religion that frowns on any critique of the church because it might be snapped up by the Evil Opposition. I’m not sure of who the E.O. are, as the concept of recovery is spreading like the good news it is.

But I’m an INTJ working with ESFPs (if that makes sense to you) and I totally fail at being circumlocutory. My emails have been harshed on because I keep confessing the emperor to be naked in matters great and small. It would help if the only professional training available didn’t only meet once a year with 30 slots; I’m pulling a lot of this out of my butt as I go along, and because for five months they just dumped me alone at my center, I haven’t even had the benefit of more experienced people in the field until just recently.

But in general, I do love the job, and am going to be telling myself so all week as I pull together a proposal for my first conference (woot!). God alone knows how *that* will be critiqued.

Le sigh.

In Which Our Heroine Uses Her Mommy Voice

06 Thursday Jun 2013

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I run a Recovery Learning Center for people with mental illness, being in strong recovery from bipolar disorder myself. I got hit on by a full-fledged Dirty Old Man today at work. Complete with chair walker. Mr. Smith has earlier refused to come visit our center (unless I myself am there, which is only part of the time, needing to run about and do director stuff and whatnot). He has also claimed to “be in trouble there” but hasn’t satisfied my curiosity. (I have only been there for five months.) But today he wheeled himself in and was fairly personable. He inquired as to whether I was married? Engaged? Going steady? “No,” I told him, and then with all the iron I could draw, “I prefer it this way.” He desisted.

But then another staffer took the other peers for a walk, leaving me manning the fort. In comes Mr. Smith, asking if he can talk to me. Now, being Talked To is part of my job, seeing as peers either confuse me with a Mental Health Professional (that’s what we call them) or, as do random people in the street, realize that I’m a nice lady who’s a good listener. So I told Mr. Smith that he might do so.

“Can I close the door?”

Uh-oh. But we were in a pretty big room, and I knew I could take him without trying hard, even if he used the walker as a shield.

“Su-uu-re.”

He advanced (sans walker) up to the desk, and I realized my strategic mistake: I was sitting in the reception cubie, and what with the poorly-functioning copier taking up half the space, Mr. Smith now had me barricaded, meaning that at worst I would have to hurt him. (I am a well-muscled fat woman with a stock of normally well-behaved rage issues to use as rocket fuel as needed.)

He re-established that I was single; I re-established that the single state is what I live and breathe for; and then he reached out and patted my elbow. Mr. Smith is missing a fair number of teeth and it was as well that I couldn’t make out what he was saying at the moment.

“DON’T TOUCH. Back away, Mr. Smith.” (I also have a superlative Mommy voice, essential for anybody cursed with looking like a nice lady.) To my relief and some surprise, he did so, mousing off quite nicely.

I explained in Mommy voice that We Don’t Do Things Like That At The Center Because It’s Disrespectful. And besides, Women Don’t Like It. He was abashed, opened the door, and begged me not to tell anybody. (Guess nobody wants to be shot down, even if they always bring an emergency seat to catch themselves.)

I’ve been patted at by naughty old men since I was a then-terrified child and by now I have their number. (It undoubtedly helps that I can make them into cracker crumbs these days.) So I was a little amused and kept on puttering at my email (keeping an eye on him the while). Then something occurred to me.

“Mr. Smith, did you ever offer your interest to Jane?” Now Jane is my predecessor; I am told that being assaulted in her office was a large part of why she left.

Why yes, Mr. Smith admitted. He had asked her for a kiss, and as she had bent down to do it, his hand had brushed her breast. By accident. (Of course.)

Ah. This  explained why Mr. Smith “was in trouble at the Center.” It also explained why one of the reasons I was hired was because of my “strong personality.”

I’ve never talked to Jane about this (“Hey J, who grabbed your boob, anyway?” Awkward much?) but had frankly ascribed it to one of the people my superiors say I must describe as  “peers who have paid their debt to society and are in the recovery process,” who also wander about our large Department of Mental Health building. (The unenlightened campus cops regrettably refer to them as “Level 3 sex offenders.”)  Now, let me be crystal clear about this: I understand triggering and personal boundary limits. Some of mine are just plain random. So I’m not mocking Jane. At all. I mean, yuck.

But for my own sake, I’m just as glad that it was most probably Mr. Smith.