Which languages do you speak and how did that impact your life?
People in the US do languages wrong. We don’t teach other languages until junior high or high school, when children have more difficulty in learning them. I took French for two years in high school, and I barely know enough to get to the bathroom. I don’t know verb tenses, and I don’t know many verbs in the first place. But I have the first conversation in the French textbook memorized:
Bonjour, Guy.
Bonjour, Michel. Ca va?
Oui, ca va.
(My keyboard does not do cedillas.)
I also can say “Shall we go to the beach?” In French, which will come in handy perhaps never.
It disadvantages me that I do not speak other languages. Not only in international travel, but the fact that the more languages one knows, the easier one can learn new languages. So a lifetime of facility in languages has been denied me.
I went to graduate school with people who knew five languages. In many African countries, this is apparently the norm. I envied them their ability to communicate. I still do. The American Way is not ideal.
I’ve probably talked about this before, but not in detail. The time during and around the diagnosis of my bipolar is probably what I would call “The Hard Years”.
I think it was about 17 years ago — I am not good with time, especially during that time. It was not a typical spring semester — I had just learned that my department (Family and Consumer Sciences) was being disbanded, and my future position uncertain. I had tenure, but the university didn’t have to keep me. Most people in my department were losing their jobs. The whole situation was ugly because of how it was done outside of proper procedures for a reduction in force.
Meanwhile, I was not sleeping. At all. Days in a row of two hours’ sleep a night, going from project to project. I felt strung out and enervated. Yet I couldn’t stop myself.
My department chair told me I needed to see a psychiatrist for my sleep. I think she knew what was going on, even if I didn’t. I explained to the psychiatrist what was going on, and he informed me that I didn’t have a sleep disorder, but a mood disorder. He drew the sine wave of my moods onto a piece of paper, the highs and the lows, and described what I was facing.
He tried to stabilize me, and whatever he was doing didn’t work. I lived in the twilight zone of my lack of sleep and my fading mood. We tried sleep medicines on me, and I discovered that Ambien caused me to cook in my sleep, while the others (from tramadol to benzodiazepenes to Haldol) did not work. During this time my best friend died while I was on Spring Break, and it hardly registered to me. (I still don’t feel like I mourned her to this day.)
Eventually, I broke. I didn’t realize how sick I was until the evening when I got the twitches. I woke my husband from a nap and told him we needed to go to the emergency room because I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t feel typically suicidal — I didn’t really want to kill myself; I just wanted the jitters to stop. I just wanted the sleeplessness to stop. I remember lying on the table in the room they had sequestered me in, talking nonstop about my high blood pressure and the fact that I could not sit still.
The staff did a great job of handling me. They did not make me feel crazy at all. They didn’t talk down to me; they let me know that they were going to keep me for a couple of days to stabilize my medication. I felt surprisingly taken care of, even when I had to surrender my shoes for grippy socks (anyone who has been hospitalized for mental health issues knows what ‘grippy sock vacation’ means).
Inpatient care meant sitting through programming about how to deal with moods, art therapy, and discharge plans. The people I was in with had a variety of issues, although they all seemed pretty ordinary to me. The thing about inpatient treatment is that the patient no longer has much agency. You can’t bring your computer or phone. You can’t do work. You go to group even if you don’t want to. It feels like a shock to the system.
I spent a lot of time pacing the halls because of my jitters; I later figured out that I had akathisia from the meds. Akathisia feels like having restless legs in one’s whole body, and one has to move to try to get rid of it. It doesn’t go away except with time and the removal of the medication. Luckily that was only a day or two.
The emotional fallout of being in inpatient for psychiatry was a blow. I felt like I was no longer an ordinary person. I was mentally ill. The bipolar was no longer minor; it was a disorder. I struggle with this to this day, the feeling that I have been branded as other, even though I have not been to the hospital since. I have had a couple episodes since; a few mini-depressions, a minor hypomanic episode, but they have not put me back into the hospital.
I thought I was going to go back to work after my three days in the hospital. Human resources at the university disabused me of that notion; they made it clear that I would miss the rest of the semester and would not take on interns over the summer. That was another moment of reckoning that what I was facing was not minor. They were not kind about it.
In the middle of all this, my husband and I bought a new house. I did not help much with the packing or moving because the medications I was on were knocking me out. I was a zombie for much of the summer until we figured out that the Seroquel was not agreeing with me. My new psychiatrist put me on a new medication and that made me feel more normal.
That was my ‘hard year’. It has shaped who I am; has given me a sense of insecurity that has lasted to this day. I feel I could go back there at any time, if the stressors are bad enough. I feel as though I’ve never left, because the label ‘bipolar’ still applies. I question my past decisions, because I was unmedicated when I made them. I am still steps away from the ‘hard years’.
Chaos is the opposite of order. Order means predictability, knowing what will happen next because that’s what happens next. When life is predictable, our responses to life are predictable. We are in maintenance.
Chaos is unpredictable by definition. When life is unpredictable, we need to respond to it in novel ways, or else cease to function. Growth is possible, because doing something new can be wildly successful. It can foster growth. It can take us to a new place.
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
When I was in high school, I participated in various extracurricular activities. I tried out for school plays and musicals, I participated in the Madrigals group, and I even spent 20 minutes in track (I quit while I was ahead). I wanted to do these things and I found a sense of belongingness while doing them. They also helped me get into the University of Illinois.
When I was in college, however, I didn’t participate in groups or clubs. At the university, I was a small fish in a big pond and the size of the pond intimidated me. University of Illinois had about 40,000 students in 1981, and the groups were full of talented people with greater drive than I had.
As a professor, I encourage my students to participate in extracurricular activities, and I envy them their participation. I really feel I should have continued my participation in something during college, anything. Even if I was a tiny fish in the ocean.
So the advise I would give to someone younger than me is “get involved.” Whatever appeals — theater or chorus, political organizations or speaking clubs, sports or role-playing — participate.
It has a cosmopolitan feel and an extensive Chinese population, so the food is good. It has a little bit of a counter-culture feel, another plus. Because of its location on the seashore, it’s in Zone 7 USDA, so the weather is nicer than here. Politically, it’s Canada, and if I got my citizenship there, I would be covered by national health insurance.
The thing that’s stopping me is money. It takes a good chunk of money (or a high-demand, high income job) to become a Canadian. Otherwise, I would be convincing my husband to retire there. I think if we won the lottery, it would be only a matter of time before we moved to Vancouver.
My top tip to be successful in life is simple: Be curious.
Curiosity is what brings us to the things we are interested in; the things we want to do. I can’t think about success without interest; I can’t think of interest without curiosity.
Curiosity is what drives us to learn. I can’t think of success without learning, either. And I can’t think of learning without curiosity.
Curiosity is what gets me up in the morning and drives my reading, my writing, my experiences. I want to know. And everything I learn opens up an avenue. Some I pursue, some I do not.
Being curious moves me forward. Without curiosity, I am an inert lump on a couch. Which is the opposite of successful.
Sleep is very important to me. As someone with bipolar disorder, lack of sleep is both a problem in maintaining my mood and a symptom of a hypomanic attack. So I am very careful about sleep.
I have a set bedtime, and I spend some time lying in bed resting (not reading on the phone) before I drift off. I use a sleep mask to make the room dark, especially as my husband often stays up later so needs the light on. I maintain a comfortable temperature. Sometimes I play relaxing music, which seems to keep me from having nightmares.
Sometimes I have to take sleeping meds, and I take them particularly when I have restless thoughts. They don’t knock me out; they just seem to lessen the restless thoughts. I don’t take Ambien, because I once cooked some candied walnuts in my sleep while on it. I burned them and threw them in the garbage, then reseasoned the pan. In my sleep.
Sometimes, still, I have a night where I can’t sleep. My psychiatrist is not alarmed by occasional sleepless nights, but says if I have four in a row and still feel energetic in the morning, we need to talk. I generally do not feel energetic after a sleepless night; I feel lightheaded and groggy, a good sign that I am indeed not hypomanic.
I am very careful about sleep because I have to be. I don’t want a return to mood swings, even if hypomania is fun at first. It doesn’t end up being fun when strung out on sleeplessness and anxiety.
Some negative thoughts just flow through you — you think them and then let them go. Sometimes, however, they get stuck and you ruminate over them. Those are the negative thoughts you have to deal with.
Very often, the negative thoughts we ruminate on are thoughts whose negativity we amplify by cognitive distortions — unhelpful ways we frame the thought to “deal with it”. It’s not really dealing with the thought, however. Cognitive distortions are ways to manage the thought and get control over it, but often the thought is getting control of us because our rationale is itself negative.
For example, when the stressor of a job interview comes up, some people tell themselves that they “always fail job interviews” or they will “never get the job”. These rationales are two different cognitive distortions — in the former case, what my therapist called ‘awfulizing’ and the second ‘fortune telling’. Reality tells us that we can’t have that certainty about the outcomes. Uncertainty is scary, and some people manage it by projecting a negative outcome.
There are several categories of cognitive distortion. A few are (Therapistaid.com, 2023):
Awfulizing (the official name is catastrophising, but I like my word better)
Fortune-telling (predicting the future)
All or nothing
Overgeneralization (‘always’ and ‘never’)
Mind reading
Labeling
Shoulds
Emotional reasoning
We are trained to cognitive distortions, largely by family of origin.
Cognitive journaling is a way out of cognitive distortions. It consists of examining the triggering event and the thoughts that come up. In the thoughts, there will be clues as to the cognitive distortions there. Contradicting the cognitive distortions with more reasonable thoughts is the next step. (Brooklyn Center for Psychotherapy, 2026)
Understanding that one’s automatic thoughts aren’t reality can train your mind out of automatically giving in to cognitive distortions. That can help us to stay positive rather than ruminating on the negative.
I don’t know why I believed this, but it is breathtakingly stupid. I used to believe all dogs were male and all cats female. I was pretty young when I believed this.
Photo by Helena Jankoviu010dovu00e1 Kovu00e1u010dovu00e1 on Pexels.com
Maybe it’s understandable, because all the cats my family ever had were female. This was because my mother believed all male cats sprayed urine. They do, if they are not neutered young, but my mother wasn’t taking any chances. So I had never had a male cat till a few years ago.
I remember exactly when I was disabused of this notion. I was in the car with my parents and sister, and my mother laughed at me when I told her this. I don’t blame her — my belief fell into the category of ‘strange things little kids believe’, and it is funny.
Daily writing prompt
What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?
I hated vegetables as a child. All of them. (Except potatoes, and I don’t really consider potatoes vegetables. They’re a starch, like bread. I liked bread.)
I couldn’t bring myself to eat veggies. It was almost as if I thought them poison, which I probably did. I had a phobia about being poisoned as a kid, and vegetables were plants. Like mushrooms and poison hemlock.
Then when I was in high school, everything reversed. I craved vegetables, especially mushrooms. I ate vegetables raw, steamed, sauteed, juiced. I don’t think there was a single vegetable I didn’t like. My diet became more colorful and healthier as well.
To this very day, I’ve noticed a pattern. When I eat fatty foods or fried foods or lots of desserts, I don’t crave vegetables. When I eat healthy, I crave vegetables. This blog is making me hungry for a pile of broccoli.
Words Like Me 