The ABC's of Mental Illness

Am I ever going to get better?

Breaking down the barriers.

Can't get out of bed.

Doctors speak a foreign language.

Ending my life seems like the best thing to do. 

Forget something?

God hates me.

Hallucinations.

Insomnia.

Joking around isn't so funny.

Knowing is half the battle.

Loneliness.

Meds for life?

News.

Only person in my family with this illness.

PMS or bipolar symptoms?

Quit pushing my buttons!

Religions say I'm demon-possessed.

Smoking helps?

Too much info?  (talking about at work, etc.)

Understanding allies are hard to find.

Violence.

What did I do to deserve this?

Xylophone purchase: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Yo-yo.

Zoning out.

Good Enough

I am an insecure person. I always have been. When I was a child I felt like my parents didn't want me. I even believed they wanted to kill me. I guess that was the mental illness already seeping into me. The fact is, my birth mother left me with her cousin and eventually that cousin adopted me. When I learned about this as a young child it made me feel even more insecure. I felt like my real mother didn't want me and that I was an unwanted burden placed on my adopted parents. As I got older my parents' criticism of me made me feel inferior and broken. I just couldn't see why I was even alive. It felt like I couldn't do anything right. I guess that feeling never really left. It has followed me throughout my life.

I'm not blaming my parents for my insecurity. In many ways they were good parents to me. And I have a good relationship with my birth mother now. I understand why she did what she did. I have never held the past against her. And yet I am still so hard on myself.

My first marriage failed because I allowed my mental illness to overtake me. I made a lot of stupid choices. I have lived with the consequences ever since. My second marriage was brief, but horrible. What little self esteem I had was destroyed. I was married to a very emotionally abusive person. I didn't even realize how bad it was at the time. I just felt like I couldn't do anything right and it was all my fault.

My current husband has restored a lot of what was broken in me. I will always be grateful for that. I know he loves me. That is a wonderful feeling.

And yet, those feelings of inadequacy are still a part of me. I don't know how to let go of my insecurities. I am so afraid of losing him. I'm afraid I will ruin things somehow or he'll stop loving me or someone better for him will come along. All irrational thoughts I know, but it's seemingly impossible to set aside those 39 year old insecurities no matter what the circumstances are.

I know I have to think better of myself than this. Most days I do feel more confidant than thisbut this evening I just started feeling really low.

Memoir Coming Soon

Is it just me or are most memoirs about mental illness written by individuals who had the means to get good, thorough psychiatric care? Maybe I'm just reading the wrong books 😂 I have to say my experience has been quiet different. Most of my life I've been too poor to obtain the best care. For the past few years I've been able to get insurance through my husband's workplace, but before that I was limited to the mental health clinic in our county because it was sliding scale pay. And let me say, you get what you pay for. I did have a few good therapists there (and a few really bad ones). The problem with a clinic like that is the turnover rate for doctors and therapists is so high that you barely get acquainted with one before they are off to greener pastures (that you can't afford). And the psychiatrists I had there left much to be desired. The first one and the last one I had there were pretty good, but the ones sandwiched in between were quite awful. Now that I have insurance, it's still a pretty hefty copay to see someone at a private practice, but we have unlimited visits with doctors and therapists for free on Doctors On Demand. The positives are, it's free and I don't even have to leave my house because it's a video call. Negatives, not the most well equipped doctors and sometimes I think I would be able to communicate better with my therapist if I was in the same room as her. But, ya know, get what you can get. I'm fortunate to have ANY care. A lot of people don't have access to mental health care for one reason or another. So far be it from me to take what I have for granted. But there is definitely room for improvement. If I ever complete and publish my own memoir I believe it will reflect the norm as far as healthcare goes. No fancy doctors. No dream come true therapists. Just the typical experience of a lower class woman going through an often debilitating mental illness. It will be raw and gritty and completely true. And the hope found in its pages will be genuine. You have my word. I hope you'll read it!

A Slew of Drafts

I just went through my old drafts and published a few. Many of them need work, hence the reason they are still drafts, but I just went ahead and posted them anyway. i didn't even bother to put the right date on them. Sorry! There was a reason for my journey through drafts. I was looking for some unfinished poems I had written so I could work on them. I found some, but there's one I couldn't find so I guess it got deleted. I've started writing again and am trying to write enough poems to self publish my own book of poetry. I know it won't happen overnight, but it gives me a means of expression, and I feel like everyone needs an outlet like that.

I know I'm not perfect, but I know who I am.  I know what matters most to me, and the lengths I would go to protect it. I can be irrational, overly sensitive, and a slew of other inconvenient emotions at times, but it's because I feel with my whole heart, and I love with everything I have in me.  I am not a half-doer.  I'm all or nothing.  So take it or leave it.

I know my best will never be good enough.  I will always fall into that same trap of living so wholeheartedly for someone, of trying so hard to please, only to disappoint beyond repair at any small slip of imperfection. Was I born to be this way?  Surely not.  And yet, this is me.  Lovable, but only to a certain degree.  I have terrible flaws in personality, in character.  But I also have scars.  Scars of being hurt, of being scared.  Of giving everything and losing so miserably despite of it.  That's why love hurts.  It is never enough.

Vertigo, The Elusive

Step inside a satire.  Make an unfresh pot of coffee.  Consider all to be a kaleidoscope of things to come.  Donate your savings to the breakdown of humanity.  Take a verb and run with it.  Slide down the ferris wheel.  Contradict the terms of living.  Speak with the dead and revel in the life they lead.  


stars turns to clouds.  Pour a cup of tea.  Enjoy a crumpet or two.  Or three.  The world turns as you stand still.  Maybe you should turn with it.  Hamsters on a wheel.  Become a fortune teller.  Predict the past.  Bite off more than you can chew.  Leave the scraps for others.  Test gravity on a balcony ledge. Smoke another cigarette.  Make promises no one remembers.  Lose weight.  Lose focus.  Lose another set of keys.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  It is all small stuff.  Maybe God is small too.  Find the smelliest bathroom stall.  There is no toilet paper.  It figures.  Mathematical delusions.  Try not to look bewildered.  Divert the noise of silence.  Listen how it echoes off the walls.  Paint a picture with the ugliest shade of yellow.  Compare it to stick figures.  It figures.  Pet a dog.  Pet your ego.  Look for new adjectives in the dictionary.  Break a few pencils.  Read another book.  Contradict the terms. Take another pill.  And another.  And another.  There is no hope in madness.  The constant spinning.  The leap of antifaith.  Go outdoors.  Take in a breath of fresh smog.  Light a candle in the forest.  Watch it burn.  Watch it falter.  Watch as dreams turn into nightmares.  Try sleepwalking for a change of pace.  Feel comforted by the hum of a refrigerator. Wonder why there is a “d” in the word fridge but not in the word refrigerator.  Pour a glass of spoiled milk.  Feed it to the cat.  Wonder why there’s no tomorrow.  Wonder if tomorrow was yesterday and you just missed it.  Go ask the doctor.  Again.  And again.  And again.  Take a Sunday drive on Thursday.  Don’t mind the honking cars.  Crash into feeling.  Compare it to numbness.  Realize there is no difference.  Detach yourself from the unavoidable.  Find pleasure in chaos.  Make a cage out of freedom.  Change the locks.  Change the channel.  Dilute the absence.  Create conscience out of air.  Talk to a gravestone and see if anyone answers back.  Turn 30.  And 40.  And 50.  Break a mirror for good luck.  Sift the lumps out of flour.  Grow mold in the frige, minus the “d”, mind you.  Pour out the old coffee.  Go to bed.  Begin again.

                                                         "Coming Back To Life"

Where were you when I was burned and broken

While the days slipped by from my window watching

Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless

Because the things you say and the things you do surround me

While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words

Dying to believe in what you heard

I was staring straight into the shining sun

Lost in thought and lost in time

While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted

Outside the rain fell dark and slow

While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the moment had arrived

For killing the past and coming back to life

I took a heavenly ride through our silence

I knew the waiting had begun

And headed straight..into the shining sun

Silent Night

It is quiet
I thought there would be noise

thoughts strum on my heart in battle song

between the hollow parts and the echo

I have been broken
I have done the breaking too

It is soundless
fearful
knowing

I made a decision a long time ago to at least try to accomplish a blessing out of suffering.  I am nothing special, and there are many who have endured a lot more than I have, but what I have experienced should not be a solitary battle.  For a long time I thought it was, then I realized, through others who shared their story with me, that I am not alone.  So that is part of my purpose, I believe.  I can't fix it for anyone, but I can let them know they aren't alone.  So I try to be open and honest about mental illness, and about all the wrong actions that occurred due to my struggle with it.  I won't pretend to know what some things are like for you, or for anyone else.  But the things I know, I will share.  Maybe that way, our burdens don't seem so lonely :)

You are great with people, but whether that interaction energizes or exhausts you depends. All interaction exhausts me. I love my family, but it's tiring to be ON all the time with no downtime to recoop. I get lonely, but not because I am alone. I get lonely because I feel so vastly misunderstood and ignored and unimportant. I often feel less lonely by myself than with people. I don't even connect with animals. I think there's something broken in me 

Give me a good book or a page to write on and I am home.  Give me a good song and I am home.  But put me in a crowd of people, and I am lost with no compass.

Sometimes it's hard to breathe, to adjust, to matter. I hear voices from the past in hues I've never known. I try to make sense of it all. And it's no use. No use.

I miss Daddy. I miss so many people, dead and alive. I miss who I used to be, and I miss who I want to be. I feel like I'm tethering in between, so close and yet so far away. I wish I could make sense of that as well.

I drink a lot. Not to get drunk, not to feel numb, but to remember. There are parts of me and my life floating here and there and I just want to make them stay, just a little bit longer. All I feel is grief, sober or not. But to make those lovely parts stay just so, that is what I want most of all.

I choose God when I have nothing left. I choose God when I have plenty. I choose God, but I also choose little human ways to deal with the pain. I'm not altogether centered. The intentions are pure, but the faith is failing. I choose to keep on when I feel like giving up. This is something at least.

I try to be a good mother, but I fail. I love so hard and so deep, and yet it doesn't transform into the right actions. I give too little, when all I want is to give everything I have. Why is this so hard for me?

I miss that little part of childhood when things were simple. I was loved by parents, by pets, by little childhood friends. And then I got older, and all those things seemed more complex and conditional. Why does this still make me cry?

*Stuck

The mentally ill are given a raw deal.  On top of what we are experiencing inside our minds, we are mocked and feared by society, and most often left to fend for ourselves on our own.  I suppose the rich have a few more options, but as someone with a low income, I have been dismissed by my doctor due to my treatment resistent illness and I have no where else to go.  I'm really stuck:  I am unable to work  due to my illness, but I have no insurance (I was deemed too poor for the new health insurance) so no medication and no doctor.  This means I cannot get accepted for disability (not that I wanted it, but I had finally reached the realization that I am not getting any better on my own, and at least the disability and insurance that comes along with it could potentially get me back on my feet so I could eventually start working again).  I am blessed because I am not homeless but if something happened to my fiance I would be.  There's no one else to help me.  We have tried really hard to prevent my reentrance into the hospital; I've been to the state hospital and I would honestly rather die than go back, it was THAT bad.  Conversely, I have been to a nicer hospital that actually helped me, but without insurance or any other means to pay, that is out of the question.  So I do what I can to get by, with the constant fear that one day that trying won't be enough...then what?

*OCD

Day two of no running water.  We are waiting on the county to fix it.  It could take a while.  I am not focusing on the inconvenience - drinking, cooking, washing dishes, flushing the toilet, bathing, a messy toddler - my mind has zeroed in on the real problem:  I can't wash my hands.

The ritual is not the same.  I always wash, use hand sanitizer, wash again, use the hand sanitizer again...for as long as I need to, depending on the anxiety of that day.  For as often as I need to, depending on the anxiety of that day.  It's a set plan; to veer off is to risk contamination, sin, death.  That's just the way it works.  I've come to accept it.  I've come to accept the laughs, the stares, the questions.  As long as it works, it's okay.  I just wash as much and as long as I need to.

But not yesterday.  Not today.  Perhaps not for several more days.

Makeshift handwashings are not the same. I stuck my hands in partially boiling water this morning but it's just not the right ritual.  Baby wipes, more hand sanitizer.  It still doesn't feel right.

*The Cracks

The world, to me, is grouped into different categories when it comes to mental illness.  Of course, it is the same with religion, politics, and any other Big Thing.  We all have our own set of beliefs, and those beliefs are most often nurtured out of personal experience than from anything a book or the Authority on the matter can tell us.  When it comes to mental illness, the very word screams "in your head!"  I really hate the term, actually.  I hate all the wisecracks about it, and I hate the shame it creates.  Mental.  Illness.  What does it mean, really, to be mentally ill?  Does anyone really know?  The history of its treatment in centuries past is something right out of a horror movie.  A lot has changed since then.  But now, in 2014, a lot is still the same.

Some don't believe in mental illness.

I thought acceptance would be the end of it.  Acceptance leads to treatment, and treatment leads to healing.  Healing leads to being able to sweep it under the rug and never look back.

But it didn't work out that way.  I know now that it rarely ever does.

I blamed the medication.  I blamed the lack of it.  I blamed myself.


Pieces of me.  Who I was.  Who I am.  The in-between.  Life breaks people in different ways, to varying degrees.  One person may soar through with little more than a chip on the rim; another may end up with quite a few cracks; another will completely break down, their once whole tea cup diminished to a pile of rubble.  And in all of these cases, the original shape can be restored, but the amount of time and effort to do so varies according to the damage.  And even then, the seams will always show, and it will be easier to crack at the same places, sometimes to more and more irrepairable degrees.  It will never be the same.

I will never be the same.  I still look for that little girl.  I see her face in my mind.  I hear her thoughts.  But she is ages apart from me.  Hiding under a table in Sunday school.  Already afraid of the voices she heard, the Shadowy men who visited her at night.  She already knew to hide, to pretend, to try to forget.  But they just kept coming.  She never fit in at school.  She never fit in with family.  But she tried.  She tried, despite the little chips here and there.  She grew older and tried even harder.  She married.  She had two daughters.  She tried oh so hard.  But that storm just kept building.  She prayed and she believed her prayers were heard, no matter how bad it got.  But the cracks got bigger, and the pieces began to fall.  And promises got broken.  Promises to be a good wife, a flawless mother.  She always wanted her children to know the joys of an unbroken home, never knowing she would be the one to do the breaking.

Bad choices were made.  And in the midst of them, doctors made their claims.  Bipolar disorder.  Schizophrenia.  Some other disorder.  This one.  That one. All of them.  She knew she was supposed to feel relief from this new knowledge.  To know what's wrong, that is the key that unlocks the door.  Take this pill, they say.  Take this one, and another and another. But some pills made the voices louder, and some made even her own voice stop. She stopped.  And started.  She blamed the diagnosis.  She blamed the medication, and then the lack of it.  She blamed herself.

I have tried to travel backwards instead of forward, as if to go back there in my mind could change something.  I still seek out that little girl who grew up to be a mother who grew to leave her little girls in the rubble.  I don't know whether to hit her or to hug her, I love and hate her so much.  I have never shifted blame onto anyone else for the decisions I made.  I know in my right mind I would have never made those choices, but I cannot say exactly why I was not in my right mind at the time.  I still come unglued from time to time, those cracks ever widening, and I am no wiser than I was before except that the breakage is a little more familiar.  The only thing in this world that makes me whole is my children, yet so many times I feel like I am much more of a child than they are.  I hate that about me, and I hate how I try so hard and seem to always break down anyway.  With or without medication.  With or without God.  With or without any inkling as to where this broken road is taking any of us.

I prefer to look at things in a logical, rational manner.  I like to be in charge of my behavior, in control of my emotions.  But I don't always manage this as well as I would like.  There are too many cracks, you see.  On the whole days I pour my heart and soul into everything I do, and on the cracked days I watch it all leak on through and dissolve into thin air.  It is a process.  It is a test.  And I hope I am passing.  I keep doing the right things to the best of my ability in hope that some day that will be enough.  The cracks get wider.  But so does my resilience.

Quotes

“Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.”
— Sylvia Plath

“You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve."

-J.K. Rowling

“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be” ~Marcel Pagnol

“The right thing and the easy thing are never the same.”
― Kami Garcia

"Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness." ~John Sterling

"Quiet people have the loudest minds." ~Stephen Hawking

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

― Maya Angelou

"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."

-Robert Collier

"I have a certain way of being in this world, and I shall not, I shall not be moved." 
-Maya Angelou

"I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back."


-Maya Angelou

"The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it’s a world, or a relationship… Everything has its time. And everything ends."

~Sarah Jane Smith, Doctor Who

“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

― Thomas Paine

"There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors." ~Jim Morrison

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
― John Wooden

"It isn't what we say or think that defines us, but what we do."

-Jane Austen

"There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself." ~John Gregory Brown

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent

Bon Dylan

    "I ought not to doubt the steadiness of your affection, yet such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest, and thus it is, that I always feel revived, as by a new conviction, when your words tell me I am dear to you; and, wanting these, I relapse into doubt, and too often into despondency."

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

Depression has found me, and it's making me feel very insecure and unlovable. I keep telling myself it's just the depression, these feelings aren't grounded in fact, but I still have this huge fear of losing the love of the people I care about, namely my husband and my children. I already have one daughter that refuses to acknowledge my existence, and that hirts me more than I let on to anyone. If one person I love so much can stop loving me in return, who's to say another won't, and another?  

Poem Fragments From a Dream

 And into the dawn I toss my caresMy heart only translates what isn't there.

Into the dark I wander 

I only see what isn't there 

West winds toss my hair and freeze my lipsIm reborn without a care 

My thoughts turn gray 

Made of wrong or write 

Black and white 

Into winter I toss my love 

Do or die, do or die 

Tongue and feathers without a cue 

I took the pen and slowly I drew 

Peel back the layers of frost and termite 

Fold my fingers around a pen 

And write the words I heard in the night 

Lonely

 I've been drinking and I just feel lonely. There's no one to talk to. Blah. 

I've been so so as far as moods go. Right now I'm feeling a little depressed. And alone.