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.

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.

It Only Takes One Remark

It's probably the thing I hate and fear most about having bipolar disorder combined with social anxiety and borderline personality. It upends my life. It pulls the rug out from under me. It hurtles me from place to place, from time to time, from person to person, from one trauma to another without warning. It makes me liable to lash out, to feel mortally wounded or ashamed, to confront, blame or otherwise alienate my loved ones and even myself.

And it lurks behind any corner.

On Sunday, I went to a potluck at the tiny church I'd started going to exactly one week before. My husband and daughter decided to come along. I avoid most social situations, and this was exactly the kind I fear the most: a small group of people who all know each other but not me. It sends my self-consciousness and fear of appearing odd or sick or pitiable skyrocketing. I don't know why I went really. I guess I just felt comfortable enough at the first service I attended to take the chance.

It was going pretty well. All three of us "fit in." I was pleased. I was relieved. I felt like part of the group.

My daughter sat next to me at a big table where everybody was eating. We were talking about their children whom they'd home-schooled together, and about plays they'd been to lately, the kind of ordinary interactions which weren't exactly ordinary for me, but I was handling it, even feeling pretty good.

Then my daughter made the remark.

She asked me (apart from the others, thank God) if I was going to have Thanksgiving at our house again this year. I said maybe, I hadn't thought about it, depended on what others wanted to do, etc.. But she had to pin me down. She insisted.

Considering it more closely, I said "Well, it stressed me out the last time but I got through it."

"No you didn't!" she said, eyebrows raised.

Flustered, I ventured "Oh, it wasn't that bad, was it? No one noticed. I pulled it off."

"You were flipping out!" she said. "It was obvious! You were a mess!"

No I hadn't! Had I? I cooked, I decorated a little, I put the food out, found seats for everyone, kept everyone's glass full. I didn't recall exchanging anything but pleasantries with anyone. People stayed around afterward, seemed comfortable enough. But none of that mattered as soon as she said it.

Because suddenly, I zoomed out. I was looking down at this dinner but also at last Thanksgiving, at other dinners, other occasions; other times I'd  had to be with others who weren't my immediate family. I looked down at all the times I had pretended I was not as stressed as I was, not as emotionally vulnerable as I was, not as self-conscious and judgmental of myself as I utterly was. And I looked down too at the times when I was not nervous at all, not stressed at all, times I felt totally "normal."

My brain started churning out poison: Everybody at that potluck dinner, just like last Thanksgiving's dinner and every other dinner or event I'd ever been present at,  probably saw me as strange and volatile, even if I felt perfectly fine at the time. They could see through me -- and into me, where the crazy parts were. They felt sorry for me, but didn't want to embarrass me by showing it. Maybe they were afraid of me. In fact, every stranger I'd ever come into contact with probably knew instantly that I was "different."

So every social "success" I thought I had -- like that Thanksgiving dinner I thought I'd pulled off -- was really a failure, a sham. People had just pretended they didn't notice me "flipping out." There was a giant secret all right, but I was not the one keeping it from them. They were keeping a secret from me: that they all knew I was "crazy."


I felt sick to my stomach, "punched in the gut" where all that poison was churning. I tried not to cry. I looked at my daughter.

"Really? Wow. I didn't know. That's embarrassing. Now I feel like shit."

Her face turned red. I said so.

"I'm embarrassed," she admitted. She knew she had hurt me. She didn't mean to.

Actually, I was worried I'd gone beyond being hurt to maybe losing control. I was afraid I just might "flip out" again, right there at the potluck dinner with a bunch of strangers whom I really wanted to find fellowship with. Self- hatred washed over me again like a stain, soiling every memory, every lovely moment, every triumph, every relationship I'd ever had. It got out of hand fast and bolted like a wild horse. It always did.

I was angry and disgusted. Angry at her for carelessly "hurting my feelings" when she knew it could derail me, and disgusted at myself for having such hair-trigger emotions. By now, at my age, after going through this since childhood, shouldn't I have "resolved" some of this mess? Shouldn't all the therapy and meds, and the love of my husband and family, have shown me at least a few ways of interrupting this process of self-recrimination, so that sometimes it wouldn't end in things like self-inflicted 3rd degree burns? For God's sake, STILL?

By the time we got home, my mind was rehashing my last hospitalization, a year and a half ago. It only lasted two weeks, but it felt like my whole life. It had all the elements of my worst nightmare, traumatic as traumatic gets, all my flashbacks brought to life.


So who did I lash out at, sitting at home so many months later, with all of it behind me? My husband! He let them admit me! He left me there when I begged him to get me out! He didn't demand they transfer me to another hospital with a doctor I knew and trusted. He even let them set the commitment process in motion, knowing that would be the final nail in the coffin of my self-respect, something I had never let happen in 40 years.


But we'd been over and over this. I'd forgiven him. He'd explained how stressed he was, that he didn't know what to do so he did what they told him to. I understood how sad he was, how powerless he felt. And to reassure me, we'd drawn up a psychiatric advance directive, so that I'd get the right treatment next time. (Please, don't let there be a next time.) Yet here we were again. Here I was opening old wounds that had healed over, reliving my worst memories and forcing my husband to relive them too.

One small innocent remark about a long forgotten dinner had that much power over me.

My mind is deeply grooved with painful memories, awful depressions, intense self-consciousness, loneliness, self-hatred, anger and fear. The grooves for pain are deeper than those for pleasure and love; I don't know why. My mind can't seem to get past its wounds. It can't heal. However much love and happiness grows over them, the old hurts will still open at a touch. My mind can't talk to itself and pull itself back from the brink. Once it's triggered, my mind can run away with me as fast as a bullet and ruin my life.

So that's what I hate and fear most about bipolar disorder combined with social anxiety and borderline personality disorder. At any moment, in any place, for any reason and sometimes for no reason, some unexpected tiny blip on the radar could be the missile that explodes in my face and sends me to hell. I know hell: I'd rather be dead than there.

Suicidal because my daughter said I'd seemed stressed a year ago? Welcome to my world.