Tender God

Tender God,

you have seen my affliction,

and unbound my eyes;

you have bereaved me of the burden

to which I used to cling;

you have woven my pain

into patterns of integrity;

the wounds I cherished

you have turned into honors,

and the scars I kept hidden

into marks of truth.

You have touched me gently;

I have seen your face, and live.

Mary Ellen Ashcroft

Source: Spirited Women

"Now I Become Myself"

 

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton
Source: Collected Poems 1930-1993

What's More Important? Jesus' Life or Death?

Confession

I confess I'm a Christian, newly minted or "reminted" if that were a word. I have a new understanding of what being a Christian means, and it's not the one all the Christian assholes on the far right are trying to impose on us. It's the opposite really. I constantly have to defend myself against the hate and legitimate scorn and condemnation they've earned. I'm not them.

At the same time, the scorn and hatred and condemnation they "earned" are not Christian ways of acting them or anyone. I'm trying not to hate them, and I'm trying not to hate the people who lump me in with them. I'm trying to love myself, other people no matter how "bad" or unfair and insensitive I deem them to be, the natural world God created and Jesus and his "Way." In fact, his Way IS love.

Here's a quotation offered by the organization "Inward/Outward" and my comment on it. If you have any thoughts on this subject, please comment here! The whole point is that no one's "right or wrong." We're all seekers, not static "believers."

            *                 *               *              *              *                *               *                 *  

Sin or Separation? Sacrifice or Reunion?

"For Jesus, nonviolence is at the heart of the new dispensation, in which we are all called to love and forgive even our enemies…. The early Christian church, preoccupied with a cult of heroism, became enthralled with the violent death of Jesus, largely unable to grasp the dynamic power of a life radically lived to the point of death. They missed the message of the life and ended up exalting the death as the primary catalyst for redemptive liberation."

Diarmuid O'Murchu
Source: Catching Up With Jesus


"They missed the message of the life and ended up exalting the death as the primary catalyst for redemptive liberation."

I agree.

Jesus is actually offering a revolutionary "paradigm shift."

Sin and salvation are not the point of Jesus' life and death. I don't understand "sin" as doing/thinking evil but as separation from God and from each other. Jesus is the way to reunite with God and God's love for the world and everything in it including ourselves. We're not born bad - our "sin" is not original, not our very nature. We are children of God. How could he create evil people? Thinking that way is itself both a result of and a cause of separation from God. Guilt should not be what leads us to Jesus and to his Father.

The idea of Jesus' death as "atoning" for our sins is the old way of thinking that Jesus condemned and tried to transform. Thinking we need to settle our accounts with God through sacrifice is what the temple "money changers" were trading on (by selling sacrificial animals). That made Jesus so angry he literally "turned the tables" on the money changers - and on the very idea of people as fundamentally and unavoidably bad.

We don't need to "atone" through Jesus' bloody and tortured death, we just need to reconnect with God through the love Jesus showed for everything and everyone, even "bad" people,  even the people who killed him. We are to replace the old moral calculus with love, pure and simple. Love - for ourselves too - reunites us with God, other people, ourselves and all of creation.

It's a NEW covenant, not a new clause in the old one. Love replaces good/bad.

How liberating.

Breathing and Reading for the Rest of My Life

 
Today was a beautiful day, outside my house and inside my head. I have been trying to spend a bigger part of each day in reality, the physical world where you clean stuff and hug your dogs and sit outside under the trees and possibly even talk to another person, to be present for other people, rather than walking the labyrinth inside my head and on my computer screen all day and all night.

It feels good, it is good to be alive, to be at least a little more open to the whispers of infinity and completeness you can hear if you just stay still and listen. 

And I'm relearning how to read. I really thought I'd lost for good the ability to concentrate, and not stop after every word because I lost the thread or a thought or memory intruded. Maybe meds, maybe my bipolar brain, maybe age or loss of the ability to imagine someone else's feelings and the structure of a text - maybe they explained why I couldn't read anymore. 

But actually it's still there. If I put down the Internet and open a book of printed paper instead of being willingly held hostage and bombarded with 15 second flashes of "information" for hours and hours every day - my captor having trained my brain to crave this passing show of images and uncrafted words - I can actually still read! I can engage with another mind, follow a long and curving train of thought, and see with my inner eye Keats' "beauty that is truth."

I'm alive in the world and I can read. With love surrounding me too, my life is full.

And now I'm going to walk my dogs and feel the moonlight.on my skin. Then I'll read in bed with a fan turning over my head, and another day like this one will come tomorrow.

I brought someone - three  someones - into this world through my body. Now I'm ushering someone out of this world through her body - the same one that brought ME into this world. Spirit flows to flesh and flesh to spirit, like a river running both ways always and forever.

Rest in Peace

Dorothy (Dottie) Pottle 

July 9, 1921

June 22, 2014

Milestones, Millstones

Well, so I haven't been to sleep yet.5:30 a.m., My son is graduating today at 1 p.m. after a 15 year slog through the swamps of special ed with only shreds of his self-esteem left. My daughter and I went to my mother's this afternoon so my sister could go to the grocery store - they moved a hospital bed in last night and my mother is now practically immobile, on morphine, confused, in and out of consciousness. She is disintegrating and turning into dust in front of our eyes. Her eyes light up when my daughter comes. She tells her how much she likes her boyfriend over and over - she forgets she said it - and tonight she told her how pretty she is and that she wants her to know how much she loves her. My mother is not a sentimental woman. We all cried.

And all of that is swirling around my head, making my skull ache and my foot jiggle and my mind dream dreams of death, my mother's, my own, my husband's (but I can't go there), my kids, even my 4 dogs. The terrible uncertainly of when these utter certainties will occur ... 

For my sister, it is normal that a daughter takes care of her mother unto death. It's what is done. I could never do that, even if I had a close sunny devoted relationship with my mother - which I don't. So that makes me, what. Selfish. My sister doesn't lay this on me - I draw my own conclusions. It is true, I am a very selfish person, because I am so vulnerable to being hurt. I am "unstable" and I have to safeguard my equilibrium and shelter myself from turbulence. I hate that about myself, but there it is. I'm a de facto narcissist. If I don't wrap myself up in myself I would just bleed through my skin when you touch me, and crumble. Now I am thinking, well, I'm just going to crumble now. This is maybe what real life is all about. Crumbling, Disintegrating. Turning to dust.
 

Letters

Miss Manners answered a letter today about how to react sympathetically to a Facebook post indicating someone's sad or has sad things going on. Clicking "Like" seems rude or callous. Her reply: "To express sympathy, it is essential to demonstrate that you are thinking about the person." The computer interface is designed to keep time spent on any one thing or one person to a minimum.

So, she says, write a letter. If you care deeply about the person, write a letter.

I have all the letters anyone has sent me since it became incomprehensible to sit down and write one. There are only a handful. Before that, I didn't keep them because I wrote and received so many I didn't realize they were precious - and it never occurred to me that one day they'd be like extinct exotic animals. They're more meaningful than photos even because the person's mind and soul are uniquely present in them.

I still write letters when my heart is very full or when someone else has written me with a full heart. I'm curious: When was the last time you wrote a letter?

Living in the World

Today was a beautiful day, outside my house and inside my head. I have been trying to spend a big part of each day in reality, the physical world where you clean stuff and hug your dogs and sit outside under the trees and possibly talk to another person, be present for other people, rather than walking the labyrinth inside my head and on my computer screen all day and all night. 

It feels good, I feel alive, and I'm relearning how to read. I thought I'd lost for good the ability to concentrate, because of meds, because of my bipolar brain, because of age, but actually it's still there. If I put down the Internet and open a book of printed paper instead of being held hostage and bombarded with 15 second flashes of "information" for hours and hours every day - I can still read! 

I'm alive in the world and I can read; that is most of happiness for me.

And now I'm going to walk my dogs and feel the moonlight.on my skin. Then I'll read in bed with a fan turning over my head, and another day will come tomorrow.

Just Puke on the Page

Matt Zoller Seitz’s advice to young people entering the field of TV and film criticism:

I believe that ninety percent of writer’s block is not the fault of the writer. It’s the fault of the writer’s wrongheaded educational conditioning. We’re taught to write via a 20th century industrial model that’s boringly linear and predictable: What’s your topic sentence? What are your sections? What’s your conclusion? Nobody wants to read a piece that’s structured that way. Even if they did, the form would be more a hindrance than a help to the writing process, because it makes the writer settle on a thesis before he or she has had a chance to wade around in the ideas and inspect them. So to Hell with the outline. Just puke on the page, knowing that you can clean it up and make it structurally sound later. Your mind is a babbling lunatic. It’s Dennis Hopper, jumping all over the place, free associating, digressing, doubling back, exploding in profanity and absurdity and nonsense. Stop ordering it to calm down and speak clearly. Listen closely and take dictation. Be a stenographer for your subconscious. Then rewrite and edit.

Spring's Here

Gardening is the best exercise I've ever done because it lets me forget I'm exercising. I put aside my monkey mind and wend my merry way among the blooms and branches, daydreaming and talking to myself, remembering last spring's gardening - saturated heat and the smell of rain coming, my son digging out root balls for me and pausing to watch some dirt run through his fingers like he'd never seen it before, laying out a whole new bed and planting flowers and strawberries at midnight.

The next day my muscles and joints berate me for forgetting them, but what a fine dream I dreamed.   ( ~ _ ~ )

The Rabbit Died. Happy Easter!

The Day Before Easter, 2014

This actually just happened. I sat down at my laptop and fell into the Internet. Two hours later, I see from the corner of my eye one of the dogs chewing on something next to my chair, making a lot of crunchy noises. After 5 minutes I pull my eyes from the screen and actually look at her, identifying the red-purple stringy thing she's got in her jaws as a really big plush toy our beagle has, or had. It's eviscerated.

So I went back to the Internet.

More chewing- crunching, same red-purple pulp noted from the corner of my eye, but I'm thinking, still lost in the Internet, how many plastic eyes and squeakers could that toy have? (And no, I didn't stop to think at that point - as a responsible pet owner would have - that too many plastic eyes and squeakers might not be good for a dog.)

Twenty minutes later, the first dog leaves but pretty soon another one takes her place - same spot next to my chair, same chewing-crunching noises, still something red-purple but considerably smaller than before. I'm briefly and vaguely puzzled, but - back to the Internet.

Then the second dog left.

My husband yells from the family room: "Godammit! Drop it! Get away!"

And I said, not looking up from the Internet "Oh yeah, it's that toy of Augie's - they're all chewing on it....."

"NO, ACTUALLY: IT'S A RABBIT AND THEY'RE EATING IT" he stated calmly, but in all caps.

So I put down the Internet and run out there, following a sad little trail of gray bunny fluff to the family room, where my husband and I stare at each other in horror (and in my case chagrin) over the nasty little scene before us. Then I mumble something like "buh, buh but it looked like the toy ...  I didn't see any bones... I was, well, I was on the Internet! "

My long-suffering husband sighed and turned to the task at hand, asking for a whole roll of paper towels to clean up the red-purple remnants in the family room, then he headed out to the backyard to find the rest of the carcass.

And I went back on the Internet to tell this story.

So. ..... Happy Easter, I guess? And go with the chocolate bunnies, they taste better and they're a breeze to clean up - no bones.

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

~ William Stafford

Night and Day

I was crying my eyes out today after I ate "breakfast" at 12:30 pm and got on the computer. I’d started thinking about what a terrible mother I am because my husband had told me quite gently that I should stop teasing my son about his regular sleep schedule (mine's totally irregular, his used to be - I rib him about it). But whoa, I took that gently tossed ball and raaaaan with it! Got all the way to the goal post over where I had that first kid 25 years ago. Touchdown! I suck! I'm an evil witch and I didn't even know it till now! Now that all those scenes of my children's lives are clicking through my head in a terminal slideshow of recrimination, I see it all right.

My God, what have I done?.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.

Then I spent five solid hours on Facebook, trying to shake all that guilt and remorse by talking about something else, reading boring research, looking for images like the ones in my head to post on my wall, or for a joke that I could actually laugh at, but mostly just by being together with all the good people I know there and sharing our thoughts - the bipolar people especially, but normals too. You know, for ballast. Got to keep that boat afloat.

But things didn't really start looking up for me and my shrouded mind until about 7 pm when I called for takeout and the sun sank. By about 9 pm I’d sloughed off my slough of despond - as in every other depressed day/happy night combo I've experienced MY WHOLE LIFE LONG. When the sun goes down, my mood gets bright again.

This is not the way God intended us to be, is it? It's the "dark night of the soul" not the "dark day of the soul." There's a book about bipolar called "The Midnight Disease" meaning the disease that makes you come alive at midnight - and fight for your life with what another book dubs “The Noonday Demon.”

Touchdown! But how embarrassing! The wrong goal.

"What Do You Do?" I Don't Anymore.

Carolyn Hax had a discussion in her online advice column about how to answer the "What do you do" question when you are a stay-at-home mom. It got lots of comments. I weighed in with mine as both a stay- at-home mom and a person with a disabling mental illness.

My comment, revised:

You guys, you think you have it bad in the conversation department as a SAHM? Try being a permanently but invisibly disabled former SAHM! I dreaded the what-do-you-do question just like you do while I was a SAHM, because it truly did immediately and obviously reduce me to the status of dryer lint in the interrogator's eyes. They'd often follow it up with "When are you going back to work?" 

** Oh!! I just had an "I shoulda said" moment! "Oh, I'm not going back to work. I'm transitioning into a SAHG position when my kids reproduce." **

But now that I'm a former SAHM, I yearn for the good ole days when I at least had that true if disreputable  description to offer. As a disabled person who really doesn't do much work-wise or interest-wise despite having plenty of time on my hands - except for running a Facebook community page and dabbling as a blogger, which don't mean shit to the professionally inclined since they're strictly volunteer - I usually just go blank. Tensely, anxiously blank.

What should I say?
 
"I'm disabled?"
"I have a terrible mental illness?" 

"I used to be a SAHM? (Or that latest brainstorm: "I'm in training for a SAHG position?"
"Who are you again?"
"I read a lot?"
"I brood?"
"They just let me out on probation for knifing someone who asked me that question?"
"WTF?" 
 "WTFlyingF?"

I like the answer someone I read about always gave to the question "What do you do?" 
"For money you mean?" she answered.

Do you catch yourself thinking .......

Do you catch yourself thinking that somebody with bipolar who is really successful at something must not REALLY be bipolar? 

It's funny, but then again, not so much.

I don't like admitting to it, but I think this sometimes. From pure envy. Goddamn. Look what she did! I always wanted to do that! My bipolar has stood in the way of my doing it. So if she did it, she couldn't REALLY be bipolar. Right? Wait a minute  .....

If I had cancer myself, I wouldn't think a person with cancer who was in remission, or managing to live well with the disease, must not REALLY have cancer!

But with bipolar - it makes me feel like shit when someone else accomplishes something. Because, deep down, I still think I'm doing this to myself. I'm making myself bipolar. It's my fault. I could "overcome" it if I tried hard enough.

Bullshit. Bullshit, brain!

The Worst Thing About a Bipolar Mother

"You are officially a bad son. I give up."

I sent this message to my 24 year old son on Facebook after trying repeatedly to get his help with something and never getting an answer.

I was joking, being offhandedly "ironic" in the same way my mother-in-law threatens to "cut you out of the will" if you cross her. My other kids would have laughed it off, but my son exploded. He messaged me back furiously when he read it the next morning -- a long series of increasingly angry outbursts. He thought I meant it, and his reaction was volcanic. It spurted out of him like blood he was coughing up.

He was the child I was closest to.

It stopped me in my tracks. It was like a blow to the head and the heart at once. The worst of it was, it sounded as final as a door slamming shut so hard it shattered.

In my usual way, I freaked out, went to my crazy place and stumbled outside, where it was 13 degrees with snow on the ground, in my slippers and flimsy sweater. Then I paced the neighborhood sobbing and talking to myself. I couldn't think even one thought straight.

I finally calmed down (after crying for two solid days) - and read his messages again. They were full of rage, but anguish too. He not only took what I said literally, but did so right off the bat. That was the part that knocked me flat: he wasn't sure I loved him.

And now it seemed that I'd missed my chance to prove it to him -- that acute love that started the moment he came out of me, 10 lbs strong and bawling, and never faltered. It sounded like he'd washed his hands of me and walked away for good.

"You can't unsay it," he wrote.

I despaired.

But he called the next night. What? We weren't estranged? I was terrified. What if I said another careless thing? Could I handle his anger? I don't do anger well. But I answered the phone.

Instead of anger I heard a lot of pain. When I asked him if he had closed the door on me, he said "no" in a small voice, "I never meant that." Then he started crying. I don't remember hearing him cry since he was a baby. He was always watchful and shy, trepidatious of new people, but an incredibly avid learner always moving on to the next level, the harder thing, in a hurry to grow up. But now he was crying the way men do, as if they can push it back down their throats if they try hard enough, but of course they can't.

"Do you know," he said, "the hardest thing about growing up with you for my mother?"

I braced myself. There must have been many.

From the beginning, he said, he knew that he couldn't show his emotions or they would hurt me. I would fall apart. I would cry. I would get angry. I would act like his feelings were all about me. And he was trapped, he said, in our house. There was nowhere to go to get away from it. So he learned to not feel. He learned how to hold it all in because if he didn't there would be chaos. To make himself safe he had to take control because I had none.

"But it wasn't your fault! I have bipolar! Anything can make me fall apart, you know that! We've talked about this! It wasn't you!" It was my turn to be anguished.

"It's not about that now, Mom; guilt's not the problem," he said, "I've moved on from that. The problem is I got so good at burying my feelings it's become a habit, and I can't break it."

My son couldn't get close to anyone, I was thinking, because I'd failed him a long, long time ago, even though I tried my best not to. But no, wait. This isn't about me now.

"I thought I'd gotten better at it though," he said, still crying, "I thought I was making progress," still in that small sad voice.

But when my offhand message came through, the dam broke. All the rage he'd suppressed for years came flooding back. And when he called today and I tearfully asked if he was walking away from me, it brought back his fear of hurting me, and all the pain I'd caused by making him -- just a child! -- both the reason and the cure for my sadness, anger, sudden joy, and terror of being abandoned.

He couldn't find intimacy because an old and useless habit held him back.

We talked about all this for a while. I tried not to crumble, or yield to the spreading shock I felt at what had happened between us - so suddenly, so sickeningly. I tried to push it all down in my mind and focus on remaining present to him in the conversation, because if I couldn't do that it would mean I was still the same woman we were talking about, the selfish one who couldn't hear her own child cry without thinking how much it hurt her to hear it.

But as I sat there, I began to notice that several years were settling into my bones. I was a much older person than three days ago. Now if I looked in the mirror, I'd see this new version of me as a mother - this ugly one, who psychologically abused her child; this self-deceiving one, who managed to overcome all her best intentions, fervid self-awareness and desperation to do no harm, and still give her son the gift that keeps on giving: mommy issues.

Soon our conversation winded down. He seemed to feel better for talking about it - for finally letting out all those feelings he’d locked away from me, and then from himself. I hoped the insight he'd had into me as mother resolved things enough that he could move past them. Young people have enough future ahead of them that they can put something in the past and it will stay there.

Once I put the phone down, I didn't feel shocked or panicked anymore. I felt sad, and I knew this sadness would be with me for a very long time. But I also felt something new. The past was different now because I saw it more clearly. But I could live with this new version of me, selfish and blind to her own manipulations as she was. I forgave her. She had bipolar disorder, but she did all she could to love her children, keep them safe, and enable them to grow into good and happy people with many joyful memories. And they had.

I still had bipolar disorder - it’s lifelong - but with treatment, distance and self-examination, I was not that needy mother anymore.

All those years that settled into me as I talked to my son were enough to teach me what we all must learn to do if we are to survive. When we hurt those we love, we accept what we've done, ask for forgiveness, make amends, and then forgive ourselves.

The past had just changed forever, and miraculously I survived.

Emergency! Begin Rumination Now!

My very old mother-in-law falls one night heading for the bathroom. She calls an ambulance. At the hospital they say there's nothing wrong, no particular cause, and no injury from the fall, so back home she goes. When we visit the next day, she can't walk, her ribcage hurts and she's short of breath. Crisis. 

I act. I insist on calling her doctor. He asks some questions I relay to her because she can't make it to the phone, then he says if her breathing gets worse to go to the hospital. The next day it's worse, but she won't go. I call an ambulance anyway. (My husband and his siblings aren't taking this too seriously. I'm the only one ringing the alarm bell.) This time they tell us she cracked a rib and punctured her lung.

It turns out well. The puncture is small and the rib will heal on its own. She spends one night in the hospital (telling each visitor as they leave: "Remember, DNR. If it comes to that, don't intervene").

It would seem I handled it well, right?

But after a crisis has passed, within a short time my vigilance turns inward. I begin to examine myself - from every conceivable angle, in every conceivable light. And again I find plenty to ring the alarm bells about.

• Could I have prevented any of this?
• Did I do the correct thing at each and every step?
• Did I insult anyone?
• Maybe I contributed in some undefined way to it all happening in the first place?
• Did I overreact? Did I underreact?
• Was it really my place?
• Have I caused a rift in the family? 
• And, finally, how will I survive - not the crisis but the anxiety that follows?

When I consider every angle, from every perspective, in exhaustive detail, I find myself at the crux of everything. This thing I do, this anxiety show - it's like paranoia turned inside out. Instead of forces outside myself conspiring against me, it's me causing, directly or indirectly, presiding over, knowingly or unknowingly, and bearing responsibility one way or the other for every misfortune imaginable. I blame myself on each and every count, with no evidence or argument, and meting out no mercy. I even blame myself for blaming myself. The crisis itself is resolved, but for me it's just beginning. It's already gathering steam.

Yes, of course I didn't overstep my bounds! Of course I couldn't have prevented it! Of course I didn't cause it in the first place! Of course people weren't judging  me - they were busy dealing with the crisis! Of course I wasn't "wrong" because there is no one right or better way to handle things - there's just me as I am with my strengths and intentions. Of course I'm not perfect.

Of course to all of that.

But I don't believe it - not in my bones or at the bottom of my mind. I can't accept it. I won't let it rest. I worry; I ruminate. To ruminate is to chew the same wad of food over and over without ever breaking it down into manageable bits your throat can accept. When I worry, my mind chews on itself in the same way. Even when there's absolutely no point in it and I know it - especially when there's no point in it - my anxiety roars down the tracks like a runaway train. Except the runaway train is on circular tracks.  

It's a terrifying ride. It makes your head hurt, it keeps you up all night, it makes you literally pull your hair out and scream and cry. It makes you doubt your sanity. It makes you doubt you can ever get off and that you'll walk away under your own power if you do.

                                                *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Most people stay on that train until someone stops it or it runs out of fuel. For me, somewhere along the line I must have learned (by trial-and-error?) another way to pause the broken record. Sometimes when I've been on the same groove for a very long time, or the ride is especially rough, my unconscious mind tries to hit the brakes. It issues an imperative to create a new crisis, one that is about me, one I did cause and can control (well, usually). There will be no paralyzing uncertainties. No one else will be involved, much less endangered (except they will be, and it will hurt them terribly because they love me). I really will be at the center of this crisis and at every one of its turns because I created it and am carrying it out.

For me this imperative is usually in the form of incising my arm or thigh with a razor blade, or burning myself with a "safety" lighter - the kind you use to light a gas grill - or taking too many pills but not enough to kill myself. Sometimes I bang my head, sometimes I slam my fist against the floor or drive my leg into some furniture over and over again to watch it bruise in living color. The worse the anxiety, the worse the damage I do. 

Thus, a new crisis is born to take the place of the old one. One train pulls into the station, another one leaves. And pretty soon this new one's picking up speed. The needle's hitting the groove. I'm getting anxious.

                                               *     *     *     *     *     *     *

The crisis with my mother-in-law and what ensued was relatively mild. I didn't end up hurting myself. I white-knuckled it through. But it says something about anxiety, I think, that spending a good two days paralyzed by self-doubt, chewing my lips, balling my fists and hitting my head with them, spewing my circular "reasoning" all over some Facebook page (or no, please, not my own) and telling my husband long into the night that I was such a worthless piece of shit I'd do everyone a favor by being dead - that was a milder case of anxiety.

Bipolar cycling plays a part too - but a small one. This is anxiety's show, although bipolar sometimes sings backup. Everything starts with worry, continues with worry, and ends in worry - if  it ends at all. Obviously going over and over the past and future, obsessively and inconclusively (or all too conclusively) is futile. But it's also self-perpetuating and self-sustaining. It becomes me, or I become it. We swallow each other.

Psychiatrists call this kind of worry "rumination" for a reason. Cows chew their cud to digest. Some anxious humans chew their thoughts just as steadily and vigorously, but for us the cud doesn't thin or pass, it just gets larger. It lodges in the mind undigested. And sometimes it only comes loose when a new crisis emerges to take its place - even if we have to whip one up ourselves. 

Then we can start all over again, chewing our thoughts, wringing our hands, picking up steam.

How Depression Feels

"It's like drowning . Except you can see everyone around you breathing."
~ Anon.

You Wake Up Saying

“It’s not that you wake up one day, saying, I’m going to kill myself today. It’s that you wake up every day, saying, I’m going to try not to kill myself today.”

~ Deborah Treisman
(David Foster Wallace's editor)

Unfurl Your Fingers One By One

Nothing anyone can do will open it. It hurts all over to be frozen shut, and it seems final. I feel that way a lot. I can't let go.

All I think you can do is try to remember warmth. The more you remember, the better the chance your fire will grow. You have to thaw from the inside. 

And then it might be possible to offer your open hand to life again.

Change.org Petition to Fund Research to Cure Mental Illness

Change.org Petition

Organizations like change.org can command MUCH more attention and influence than individuals. So please sign this petition (no registration required - just one click) to increase funding for research on mental illness. We need better treatments, and maybe even cures.


http://www.change.org/en-CA/petitions/to-the-president-and-congress-fund-research-to-cure-mental-illness

Do You Really Want to Know Your Future?

A discussion is going on among my Facebook page's members about whether bipolar disorder is a "progressive" illness. Does it usually worsen over time despite medications, therapies, lifestyle changes, social support and all the other ways we've been told or believe will help? Is it possible to cut the number, frequency and severity of episodes? And if it is, could this eliminate or ameliorate the damage done to our brains' anatomy, neuronal function and cognitive skills?

Virtually all sources agree that UNTREATED bipolar disorder will worsen over time. And once a brain has had a manic or depressive episode, it becomes many times more likely to have another one. Left untreated, this process ("kindling") accelerates: more and more episodes, worse in severity, oftentimes rapid cycling and mixed states.The brain structure and neuronal function change.

But what about TREATED bipolar disorder? The impression most popular sources give is that if intercepted early and controlled with medication, bipolar does not have to be progressive or degenerative. Things will start looking up, they say.

But, as you know if you have this disorder, even started early the treatment is hit and miss. It works sometimes, others not, and there's a seemingly lifelong pursuit of the right medication cocktail. Does that kind of treatment -- the real world kind, what people actually get -- interrupt or stop the natural progression of the disease?

The literature is not clear. Some say the process can be halted; treatment will give us an outcome close to "normal." Personally, I have my doubts. It's an established fact that people with mental illnesses die an average of 25 years earlier than people without one. More is going on than just lack of treatment or lack of supports (or lack of housing, money and jobs). The 25 year life expectancy gap gets more disturbing the more you look into it, because it turns out that it is true even after controlling for suicide, co-occurring disorders and lack of health care (and those other "lacks" I mentioned). Mental illness itself seems to make you die earlier. You are more likely to die of cardiovascular disease or diabetes if you also have bipolar.Why remains a mystery.

People on my page, called Bipolar Over 30, talk a lot about how our bipolar disorder seems to be getting worse as we get older. Treated early and steadily or not, we still tend to have more and more episodes over time, and/or they are more severe and disabling, and/or we have permanent cognitive deficits and collateral problems that make life very difficult. We find ourselves more and more disabled by it even if we had and continue to get the best treatment. BUT NOT ALL OF US DO. There is wide variation among individuals.

What do you think about this? If you are middle aged, has this happened to you? Do you see a lighter or a darker future ahead for you?

I tend to believe the research that says bipolar worsens over time and so does our ability to function day to day, for "anecdotal" reasons: I see it in myself and others I've talked to. I think popular sources that say otherwise are whitewashing things, being "positive" in hopes of motivating people -- perhaps mercifully but not honestly, and perhaps not very helpfully in the long run.

But how should you handle this information if it's true? Does it rob you of hope and motivation to continue? What does it mean for your outlook, expectations, planning, -- and for your family or caretakers? Does it profit anyone to receive this information, earlier or later in their lives? Would you want to know in advance if your bipolar disorder will probably be a degenerative brain disease just like M.S. or Parkinson's, albeit with the same uncertainty about any individual's outcome? 

Personally, I want to know. But, knowing, I will live out the rest of my time on earth as if I didn't.

A Stash

I did something today that was strange and unsettling, but I'm not going to undo it. I there are others who understand why, and even some who've done the same.

Three days ago, I suddenly tripped and fell into a reeling depression. An incident among my family in which I played a key role - a bad role - devastated me. In just those few days I've gotten increasingly suicidal; in fact on the day of the incident I took a small overdose (small because I took them one by one and after seven I blacked out). My husband came home to find me passed out and barely responsive so he confiscated my supply of that drug. 

Today I woke up still feeling desperate and full of dread, so immediately, frantically, I searched my mind for sources of more of that drug. No ideas. But I made myself come downstairs, fed my dogs, ate breakfast, read the paper, went on the Internet and began to feel better. I even thought maybe that awful incident wasn't as momentous as it seemed. Maybe I hadn't caused a major irreparable rift. It could be just a bump in the road. But when I went to get coffee in the afternoon, I saw a bottle of leftover pain medication next to the coffee machine, enough to kill me.

So, without feeling suicidal or even depressed anymore, I STILL HID THE PAIN PILLS WHERE NO ONE BUT ME COULD FIND THEM. And it was such a relief. Even though my mood had just changed from really bad to okay, and I knew that happened all the time, and probably would continue to do so - I still wanted a suicide tool in reserve. Just in case one time it didn't and I stayed in hell.

In the end, all that matters to me is that I'm not trapped at the bottom of that pit with my suffocating hopelessness, flaming pain in every cell of my body, and screaming in my head that never pauses even for a minute and will never end. So I stashed the pills.

Does that make me brave or a coward?

We Die Too

 

Let's put aside all arguments about whether or not there is a clear statistical relationship between mental illness and violence for a moment. Doesn't it bother anybody besides me that no one gives a damn about the mental health care "system" until they need someone to blame for a tragedy? Then we all start talking about how to strengthen the rules on involuntary detention and commitment, how to identify "dangerous" mentally ill people and do something or other with them, how to increase "access" to mental health treatment (which often does not exist) and somehow restrict access to guns by scary and dangerous mentally ill folks whose futures we have foreseen to feature acts of violence against others and/or, secondarily, themselves.

We die too.

I live in the state of Virginia. After the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, in which 32 people died and 17 were injured, Virginia pumped $38 million into the mental health care system, a relatively large boost but not massive. Seven years later that's all drained away and things have returned to how they were before that tragedy. Until now. New bills will ramp the funding back up and try to "fix" the broken mental health system. Why? Because two months ago a prominent state senator, Creigh Deeds, was stabbed by his son, who then killed himself.

We die too.

This incident is tragic. Mr. Deeds is a fine man, who has now lost a son as well as suffered an injury. Today he acknowledged publicly that "the system failed" his son. He is right. And in response, bills to change and fund the mental health care system are on the table again. A large portion of them address the specific procedures, programs and legal restrictions that resulted in Mr. Deeds' son being released after two hours because he was not deemed a danger to himself. Those aspects of the mental health care system are some of many that are "broken." But there are others.

And we die too because of them.

Those failings and inadequacies of the system kill many more people than the ones in high profile tragedies. Mentally ill people do kill, as do people without mental illnesses. But mentally ill people themselves also die in droves -- by suicide, by illness-related disease, because of homelessness and victimization resulting from their illnesses, because of family dysfunction their illnesses contribute to -- and many of those lethal conditions are directly caused by a lack of basic mental health care.

Those are tragedies too.

Mentally ill people are dying by the thousands everyday but no one pays attention because they have not injured or hurt anyone else. Suicide killed 35,000 people in 2007. We are dying too, on a very large scale.

And that is tragic too.

Yes, we should increase funding for the mental health system. We should make access simple and immediate, we should give special attention to anyone showing signs of violence -- we should do all of the things Virginia is talking about doing, but we should do it not just in the name of the victims of high-profile shootings and assaults. We should do it in the name of the mentally ill who suffer greatly from their illnesses every day and seldom become violent. Yet violence is done to them every day by their illnesses, silently and invisibly. Their minds, their hearts and often their lives fall victim to painful and incurable illness.

We die too. And those deaths are tragedies. They are tragedies too.

Sign My Petition to Stop the Horrific Abuse of Prisoners in SC

http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/stop-the-abuse-of-mentally.fb43?source=c.fb&r_by=2290506

Here's the story:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/01/08/3137621/incarcerated-death-mentally-abused-neglected-humiliated-south-carolinas-prisons/

Stress Muscles

I'm beginning to see that it's not really such a good idea to remove practically all consistent stressors from your life when you're bipolar (if you are incredibly fortunate enough to do that). Your brainbody (just invented that word) recalibrates to the new baseline level of stress and freaks out when you exceed it, just like it does when your baseline is high and you exceed that. In other words, it takes much less to overwhelm you.

I'm thinking what I need is to exercise my stress muscles. Raise my baseline level of stress so it isn't so low I'm barely functional. I lowered my baseline drastically two years ago when I had a severe episode and landed in the hospital. Afterward, I couldn't get through half a day alone just doing nothing. Yes, being alone in my house doing nothing was too stressful for me. Now, I can handle that, and some more stressful things as well, but not nearly as much as before I had the episode. Many of the stressors I eliminated when I was sick I still avoid. I'm afraid I'll freak out again and end up back in the hospital (or sitting alone in my house too stressed to get dressed).

But I need to start exercising my stress muscles again. Take on some more stressors, a little at a time. Stop hiding out in the house. Try a new  experience: ride the subway to a new station, drive 95 (with a companion just in case), take an adult education class again. Stop handing off stressful tasks to others or leaving them undone. Don't depend on my family for so many things. I'll just tone my stress muscles, but not overdo it and tear one so I'm back to (safe but fragile) square one.

I'm thinking I'll have to tackle these one at a time. One at a time....Then maybe one more. ... Then see if another...And so on. 

Reps, it's all about reps.

Speaking Up

We should all speak up about stigma as far as we're able and whenever we find it. It's a matter of self-respect as well as social change.

Some people challenge the idea that there even IS stigma surrounding mental illness; I can only assume those people have no mental illness, have never known anyone with mental illness, or will only open one eye and "look on the bright side."

Stigma is on the dark side. With stigma, the old slogan is so true: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

End of speech.