The Year I Lost Myself

Daily writing prompt

What’s a chapter of your life you’d title "The Hard Years" — and what got you through it?

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’.

My Biggest Challenge

Daily writing prompt

What are your biggest challenges?

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My biggest challenge is my bipolar disorder. Right now, I’m on an even keel and have been for a long while. No rages, no glitches in judgment, no loss of conscientiousness, no desire to sleep all day, no weepiness. None of this despite a change in medication. But I feel like I’m overdue. Maybe it’s just superstition.

Hypomania scares me more than depression; I have gone to work despite deep depressions in the past. I can work through hypomania, but I’m more likely to do something I find embarrassing. One time I CC’ed an email when I should have BCC’ed, which sounds minor, but I broadcasted the mailing list for an anonymous survey. And I did it again to apologize; the apology itself bordered on emotional meltdown. The reverberations went all the way up to the Board of Regents and I had to go through a disciplinary action (some training and a “Don’t Do This Again”.)

My bipolar could be so much worse. As a Type 2, I don’t have the level of mania that truly disrupts life, but I have all the depression. That’s bad enough. The hypomania is bad enough. It’s the biggest challenge in my life.

Mental Illness and the Gun Question

To those whose only solution to school shootings is to prevent the mentally ill from getting guns:

Let’s forget for a moment that we often don’t find a shooter is “Mentally ill” until they’ve killed 15 people.

Let’s forget that the mentally ill can get guns from other people if they want them.

The fact is, you want me to be a second-class citizen.
You see, I’m mentally ill. I have bipolar 2, which means sometimes I’m a bit hypomanic (even with my meds) and sometimes I’m very depressed. I am the person you picture when you think of the mentally ill, even though if you met me on the street you wouldn’t know.

How would you make me a second-class citizen?

Think about how the government could keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. A voluntary admission that one was mentally ill? How could that be enforced? Some people will lie. Some people don’t know they’re mentally ill. Some people believe that their mental health status is not the business of the government, and they are correct. According to HIPPA (the health insurance patient protection act), the government is not allowed private health information except for research, with the patient’s name kept seperate for confidentiality. This information would also be accessible to gun shops, whose owners have no interest in keeping private health information private.

This has nothing to do with gun ownership and everything to do with violating the rights of the mentally ill.

Let’s go one step further, because we know people could lie on that form. Let’s make mental health status mandatory reporting, such that doctors have to report their mentally ill patients for a national registry. The very nature of a mandatory national registry should evoke the specter of other groups who have been singled out and registered — such as Jewish individuals in Germany in WW2.

As for detection and treatment — in the country as it is now, there is a shortage of treatment for the severely mentally ill and those without health insurance. Recent budget cuts by Trump have decimated what had been available. The current state of mental health treatment — inpatient and outpatient — ranges from excellent and expensive to frighteningly lackadaisical.

And what if the person doesn’t believe they’re mentally ill? If school shooters are mentally ill, why don’t we make outreach available to those people who show clearly identified warning signs — white supremacists, domestic abusers, heavily armed teens — before they strike?

Because it’s easy to stigmatize the mentally ill. Everyone else is doing it.

Eulogy of My Husband’s Mother, Whom I’ve Never Met

My mother-in-law died a week ago at 83 from complications of uterine cancer. I will go with Richard to Kansas for a memorial service in March — possibly March 17, our wedding anniversary.
This seems oddly fitting, because Dorothy Steffens died believing her only son had never married. I will meet Dorothy for the first time at the internment.

Obviously, there is a story behind this. Dorothy Steffens suffered from mental illness and dementia. She was, Richard said, alternately demanding, doting, and delusional during his childhood. Richard was the only son of a Chinese mother and her farming husband, so he got more of his share of the doting — even smothering — behavior. His sisters weren’t as favored.

Dorothy became a divisive character in any household she lived in, setting spouse against spouse with frightening accuracy. Her cognitive decline added to her emotional turbulence, complicated by Type 2 diabetes and poor self-care. Soon the sisters realized that the only way Dorothy could be cared for was to place her in a nursing home.

In the nursing home, Dorothy became fixated on a savior who would sweep her from the nursing home and take care of her forever. At one point she had targeted the doctor at the home. When Richard and I were planning our wedding, however, she had pegged her own son as her knight in shining armor.

Which is why, when Richard sent her a wedding invitation, Dorothy tried to break out of the nursing home to stop the upcoming wedding.

Richard’s sister Linda called Richard — “How could you send Mom a wedding invite?” Richard had assumed that he should give his mother another chance to be the mother he’d wanted; it hadn’t worked that time either. It was agreed that Richard would fly down to Texas and assure his mother that he had broken up with me.

Of course I had fantasies that I would meet his mother and that she would bless our marriage. On the other hand, I am pragmatic, so I sent Richard to Texas to break us up in the eyes of his mother.

I had never met Dorothy E. Steffens when she died. She never knew I had married her only son. From all accounts, she would have tried to break apart our marriage either before or after the fact, and she might well have succeeded.

Strangely, though, I think I understand her. Sometimes, a child grows up in desperation — perhaps during the Chinese-Japanese battles of WWII — and no amount of safety or security will be enough. Because there’s never enough love, never enough food, never enough reassurance, the child demands more and more. The child who struggles with mental illness loses bits and pieces of their safety to the disease and needs even more to cling onto, and it’s never there because we don’t understand the broken glass of their perception.

For the bipolar book — and for your understanding.

The things you don’t do while depressed:

· You don’t drive alone on deserted country roads where there’s no speed limit.

· You don’t stay alone. Even if you want nothing more than to be alone, complete solitude allows nihilistic thoughts to take hold. Coffeehouses remain a favorite refuge, even though you have to make small talk occasionally.

· You don’t tell acquaintances you’re depressed. It makes them uncomfortable.

· You don’t pick up broken glass without a sturdy pair of leather gloves.

· You don’t smash the things you love. You don’t delete all your writing or destroy next summer’s garden under the grow lights, even though your writing and plants are living things and you are not.

· You don’t give up your livelihood. You do not stay home from work no matter how bad you feel. You do not slack off on your work even though you’re sometimes so confused you don’t remember what to do next.

· You don’t do anything that would put you in a behavioral health ward, because it will wipe out what little self-esteem has not been scoured away by the depression. The things the behavioral health ward does for your health and safety – taking away your phone, prohibiting you from doing work, taking your shoelaces, leaving you almost no alone time – depersonalizes you. Being in the ICU seems almost cheery in comparison – at least the nurses talk to you in kind voices there instead of flat parole officer voices.

· You don’t let yourself eat or drink too much, do anything too reckless, or even speak the desire to flip your middle finger at an uncaring world.

The things you do while depressed:

· You read the inspirational quotes your friend posts on Instagram and Facebook and assume that they’re not for you.

· You answer, “How’s it going?” with “I’m doing pretty good”, even though you’re not.

· You push yourself, push yourself, push yourself – until you can’t push yourself any more for that day, and then you sleep. Sometimes dreams are the best part of the day.

· You try to find value in yourself and come up empty. The encouragement people give you seems to have come from a different world with different rules than the one you now live in.

· You look for one thing, just one thing, to go well, knowing that your mind will merely dismiss it as irrelevant. You experience all bad things as the world’s way of telling you your demise is near, death by a thousand papercuts.

· You call your psychiatrist, of course, and make an appointment. You feel like a failure doing so, even though you took your meds as instructed. You feel like a failure even needing to call your psychiatrist.

· You wonder if you were being delusional all the times you felt you were accomplished, literate, and likeable.

The part I’m most proud of today

I wrote 3600 words today to make up for the 2500 words (yes, I’m aiming for 3000 words, 4000 words on weekends) yesterday, and probably to make up for the fact that I didn’t win NaNo last year. 29,000 words so far.

Here’s my favorite segment of the day — an indigent with mental illness tells a story. Remember this is a rough draft. Really rough:

*********

Pagan paused again for a long time, cocking his head. Then, his voice became that of a child’s, and he spoke:

“I am supposed to be one of them, but instead I got put into the hospital. It was after I woke up, after I started existing. I woke up in a room, and a woman started screaming. I ran outside, and all these big machines tried to kill me, and everything was loud. I started screaming, like the woman. They took me to this white place, the hospital, and tied me down. Then she told me she was like me, and we were their abandoned children. That’s what she told me, the one who talks in my head.

“‘Who are they?’ I asked her in her head.

“‘The ones who wander. Sometimes they make us by accident, sometimes on purpose. We are them and we are humans, so they abandoned us.’

“The people who tied me down asked me questions I couldn’t understand: What my name was, where I lived, who my next of kin was. All I could answer with was ‘I’m them and I’m human,’ because those were all the words that I had.

“They untied me, but they kept me in that bright room, and occasionally something would make their name known to me. Someone in white would come into my room and ask me if I wanted the lamp turned on, and I knew ‘lamp’ and ‘on’, and then ‘light’ and ‘food’ and ‘bathroom’

“But I understood the voice from the moment I heard it, because it didn’t talk in words, but in meanings, and it was words I didn’t understand.

“’Who are they?’ I asked again. ‘Who are the ones who wander?’

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“She would not answer me.”

******
This will become important later.