Lease's Pieces

I cannot even begin to go over all that has transpired in the past year since my last post. I was incredibly sick in 2019 (really since 2018) and eventually deteriorated to the point that I had to go on disability from work for 4 months. I underwent a partial hospital program for intensive outpatient treatment. And really, that’s because I “missed” the opportunity to go inpatient.

So, of course, the impossible task of writing an effective blog post ballooned to the point that I couldn’t face the idea of writing anything. So much procrastination. So much.

In an effort to get things going over here again, I have made a deal with myself that I will write up some perspective posts and other essay type posts and publish them here.

So, uh. What can I answer for you? What topics are you interested in my opinion about?

Welcome to any who have found this blog through the #SEAofVisibility event that took place at the Hunting Cinema Arts Center yesterday! It’s exhilarating and terrifying to suddenly really be noticed as a mental health advocate blogger!

I was honored and yes, embarrassed when Anu pointed me out in the audience at the Q&A after the film, Kusama: Infinity. I unfortunately missed the movie due to scheduling problems, and some difficulty getting going in the morning, but I made it to the event just as that part was finishing up. I have added the film to my Prime queue and plan to watch it soon, especially given the strong feelings that it evoked in the viewers at the event yesterday.

From the comments and questions at the Q&A after the film, I realized immediately that I was among “my people”. Mental illness is overwhelmingly isolating, and due to the stigma, it’s very hard to connect with others who are traveling a similar path. I have found tons of support online, but even my regular friends who know what’s up with me leave it to me to broach the subject in person.

I feel incredibly honored and humbled to be invited into this very special intersectional community of artists exploring their identity and living well with mental illness. I had SO many emotions and feelings walking out of the event yesterday. I am still trying to process the entire experience but I know that I’m incredibly hungry for more and want to participate more fully the next time around, if the community will have me!

I am astounded at how thoughtful, honest, vulnerable and authentic this community is. I truly feel that if given more visibility we can change the stigma to support (the slogan of the SEA of Visibility) and get the understanding that we, as individuals living with mental illness, so desperately need.

I was blown away by the incredible talent that I witnessed in the performances and the art show. I honestly had to walk away from the art show because it was stirring so many overwhelming emotions in me. I was vulnerable yesterday and I had to protect myself a little bit.

What I found especially moving was the panel of mental health professionals, who are also artists, who were so open and straightforward about their experiences and their struggle to balance their professional and private lives, particularly the issue of self-disclosure.

I am dizzy with possibilities! This is honestly not the sort of event I’d normally go to. I always envision my husband and daughter as the artists of the family. I just share some words in the hopes of letting others know they’re not alone, help is available and recovery is more than possible. But I’m incredibly grateful to have been invited to attend and absorb the experience.

I have a LOT to catch you guys up on that’s been happening with me, but that will be a separate post. Meanwhile, welcome to any newcomers!

I know I’ve told this story before but it’s particularly salient for me lately. I need to process a little so please bear with me.

(Let’s remember that during my first year of college, by October, I was so deeply depressed that I wanted to die and had to seek help at the Student Infirmary. I had told my parents over Thanksgiving break that I was suicidal and they said, “Let us know how it goes” when I said I had an appointment at the infirmary for my first appointment after the break. WE HAD INSURANCE. I will never understand the lack of help or support I received. Also, sidenote: they never told me at the student infirmary that I had bipolar disorder – they just slapped some depakote on top of my SSRI when I predictably switched from depression to hypomania a couple of weeks into taking the SSRI.)

When I was in between my 2nd and 3rd years of college at Stony Brook, I got kicked out for basically failing a ton of shit.

I told my parents that I was having trouble focusing and getting things done (but not that I was discharged from the university). My mom took me to a child psychologist that she had taken my brother to many years before, and who I think was also treating her. Yes, this is inappropriate on a number of levels.

Anyway.

This child psychologist I saw did some kind of evaluation on me for my inattentiveness and consistently fluctuating moods, and said that, given my history, I either had ADHD or maybe Borderline Personality Disorder, but no one wants BPD so he was going to diagnose me with ADHD. AND, he said, I definitely did NOT have bipolar, according to him.

Look. I do have ADHD. But I also do have significant “traits” of Borderline, which, forensically as I piece it together and learn more, I probably have/had BPD, TOO. And treating the ADHD with ritalin lead to the most hypomanic, hyperfocused semester of my LIFE. I decided to go off the meds at the end of that semester.

I hate to play the regrets game, but I’m starting to think about what might have gone differently if my Cluster B pathology had been addressed at a much younger age, because there’s still bits and chunks of it leftover from all the other work I’ve done on myself (even now, at age 42) and I can’t for the life of me (haha!) figure out how to tease things aparts into buckets, or if it’s just a matter of treating the acute symptoms and hoping for the best in the future.

I’m not TRYING to collect all the DSM diagnoses like they’re Pokemon (gotta catch ’em all!) but it seems to be going that direction.

This is more curated content from my FB. This whole post basically just poured out me at nearly midnight. I didn’t spend all day ruminating on it, it just came together out of nowhere, because while I was busy distracting myself with very mundane life stuff, my brain was working on this in the background.

Background information since our last post: I’ve been in a terrible downswing depressive episode that started in April and really intensified over the course of the month of May until I hit the point of active suicidal ideation and started to ‘come up with a plan’ about mid-May. I saw my pdoc every week in May. I very nearly went into the hospital inpatient, but I stuck it out in the “real world” with the help of my amazing partner and some great friends to keep a very close eye on me.

I started DBT group at the end of March finally, but an individual provider still eludes me. I crashed into a wall of despair and hopelessness, despite working to use my new skills. It was all just too much.

I’m currently at home on leave from all paid and volunteer work for the time being, and I’m taking it a day at a time while I wait to get into a partial hospitalization program at a local hospital. Once I’m in the program, I go to the hospital from 9am-3pm every weekday where I engage in group activities, group therapy, individual therapy and medication management.

My online therapist went on maternity leave from mid-April until today, and I had a really great session with her. I did try some other providers in the meantime, and they just weren’t a good fit.

The actual meat of the post follows here:

What if I had hit “the wall” sooner? What if I could’ve seen this horrendous depressive episode coming sooner? What if I didn’t believe in my own impressive ability to “bounce back” pretty quickly? What if I took myself and my health seriously and said, “I can’t anymore. I need a break.” before I almost went right over the brink? Could I have prevented or dodged this episode if I was more vigilant?

But then I thought about it some more. I used to be hypervigilant about tracking my moods and symptoms and trying to cut it off at the pass, because I thought I had “everything to lose”. I clung to a version of reality that demanded SO MUCH of me, and the brain weasels assured me quite firmly that if I let go even a tiny bit, everyone would leave and I’d lose all my physical possessions and I’d never live to see my kid grow into an adult, and every other catastrophic thing you can imagine.

I had convinced myself that everything was “perfect” just as it was, and I just needed to hold it together as much as possible to be able to enjoy it just a tiny bit on the weekends and in the brief moments where we got a holiday or something and that my ongoing mental health wasn’t worth it to NOT sacrifice myself.

I am reminded of an article in the NY Times that was basically, “You don’t want your employees to do mindfulness meditation on radical acceptance at lunch time because your movers and shakers will lose their drive to push the envelope and make a better world.”

There’s a balance to be struck, and it can be tricky. Contented people do not innovate. But then again, neither do people in toxic, stressful situations who cling to any sense of order in the chaos because if they give up the familiar things that they consider safe things, what do they have left? Safe, supportive, collaborative environments where people are challenged grow the best ideas.

I cannot keep half-assing my recovery. I cannot make myself into something I am not – it will not stick long-term. I need to find a path through the haze to a fully realized, fully functional person who knows her strong and weak points, and how to best make use of both of those.

So, I have had an outrageously up and down month.

The winter really, really beat me up there right towards the end. I got super depressed, got on some additional meds, got too many side effects, went down onto a lower dose, stabilized and now I’m feeling a LOT more like myself. I’ve also been super busy with Life stuff – some dental stuff, physical therapy for a neck/shoulder problem 3x a week because of sudden headaches over the past 2 months or so, just STUFF and trying to cram it all in.

I’ve been waiting for awhile now (since Decemberish?) to get into a different therapy program. My pdoc has specifically told me that I need a structured DBT program to work on my day-to-day emotional instability and distress tolerance. I did my intake interview in January 2019, and I am going to start the “group”/didactic portion of this program March 27th. Some of the other places I called haven’t even gotten back to me, even if I was able or willing to pay totally out of pocket for it.

It’s going to be an indeterminate amount of time until I get individual therapy from the same provider giving me the DBT group program.

In the meantime, shortly after my last post, I started online therapy through Amwell because I was really feeling the lack of that weekly reflection in my life. It’s not covered by insurance and I pay out of pocket for it (I’m using my FSA benefits from work to cover it) and I lucked out and got an AMAZING therapist that I see through my computer or phone or tablet or whatever. I schedule my own appointments through the website, so I can easily swap around appointments when life interjects (see first paragraph).

I’m working with my new, online therapist on anxiety management. Which, to be totally honest, I always treated as a secondary thing in my life, and I’m finding out that treating that FIRST might actually make everything else much easier to handle, because anxiety leads on a straight line to depression for me.

I have a slightly different topic today.

Last Friday, I underwent some testing that included a detailed history of my whole life, from birth to now (well, as best as I could recall it or piece it together). I’m having an unexpected reaction to it and I want to share some of that with you.

I was precocious. I did everything early – walk, talk in whole sentences, etc. I was in gifted and talented programs all through elementary school. I was on a hardcore science track from 6th through 12th grades. I got into a competitive selection program for research science in High School. I was kind of a slacker so I didn’t personally do a Westinghouse project, but I certainly had the opportunity to do so.

Then, when I got to college, I thought I was going to go pre-med. I dove into Honors Chemistry and that was the semester I slammed directly into a wall of suicidal depression. I swapped to computer science, and pretty much failed at that, too within 1 semester. Ultimately, I scraped through 4.5 years of university and earned my B.A. degree by the skin of my teeth. My GPA was high enough to graduate, and low enough not to guarantee me entry back into the same school for any kind of graduate program.

The doctor who was doing my assessment was like, “What was your major in college?” I told her it was Philosophy. She said, “Wait. Hold on. Back up. I wrote it down but I don’t believe it. Why philosophy?” I explained the whole situation, with the mental health aspects and the previous trauma and all the everything, in brief terms. Freshman year was basically when my life began to fall apart around me.

But I’ve been ruminating about it for almost a week now, on and off. In some ways, I failed. I failed to “live up to my potential”, whatever that means. I had such opportunity at my disposal and I took it for granted and didn’t seize it by the horns. I let it pass me by, and I think I feel the emotion I most despise: regret.

I’m not actually disappointed in where I am right now, though. I have a loving, awesome family (both of origin and of choice). I have a successful career (that I keep panicking about losing, to be honest) where I make “enough” money. I have active hobbies where I make a difference. Objectively, my life is pretty freakin’ awesome.

But, I have this intense, internal drive to grow, to do better, all the time, to the point that I can hardly relax, or really be grateful for what I have RIGHT NOW without a thought for the future being better or worse or indifferent.

It’s exhausting. And I hope I didn’t infuse my kid with it.

I have to keep telling myself: I am enough. I am worthy of love, from people in my life and from myself. I am only human and have limitations that other people have and some that other people mostly don’t have. I don’t want to be egotistical, but I’m routinely reminded that my half-assing is a lot better than a lot of other people’s whole-assing.

I took an online survey screener intake thingie today for the DBT therapy program I’m trying to get into. (As a patient, not a student, alas.)

I recognized some, but not all, of the diagnostic instruments that they used.

I realized that given the directions, “Be as honest as you can”, I vacillate between extremes, picking almost nothing in the middle. Either something is really fine, or it’s a total disaster.

How would you interpret “be as honest as you can”?

I have an interesting thought exercise that’s another intersection point between my philosophy interests and my mental wellness concerns.

I’ve often remarked that “it’s just a little harder to be me”, mostly in reference to my ongoing mental issues. I delivered this Lease-standard line to a relatively new friend over the summer, and consequently, we had a more in depth talk about it.

I woke up before my alarm went off this morning. My heart promptly started fluttering and my whole body buzzed with panic. I did some deep breathing and tried to calm myself and tried to enjoy waking up with time to spare. Lenore hopped up on the bed and I called her over for a snuggle and she indulged me.

Usually (and I say usually because this has been going on for about 3 months now, occasionally) once I start moving for the day, it totally dissipates. Today, the anxiety and panic lingered.

I got dressed in some comfortable clothing and my favorite socks, took my meds, got out of the house, got to work. I ate my breakfast, drank my coffee, hydrated. I took it slow, but forced myself to do the things that needed to be done and I was able to push through the haze. I tried some music. That music made me feel under attack, so I changed it to something more mellow and soothing.

Today started off pretty rough, but it’s smoothing out. I’m taking care of myself in little ways that add up.

October is the best and worst time of year for me. It’s laden with landmines –  my grandmother passed away in October 2002 (which was the fuel behind my first full-blown manic episode), my son passed away in October 2004 and my mother passed away in October 2014.

I have a “seasonality” to my bipolar disorder, and I typically get Seasonal Affective Depression (SAD! Haha! Get it?!) starting in late October. I think a lot of extra stress this year has lead to increased suicidal ideation (that means thinking about killing yourself, mostly, though I don’t have a specific “plan” in mind). 

My depression is not usually as severe or sudden as it was this year. Shit got really dark, really fast. I want to share a sampling of my internal monologue or “self-talk” as the pros call it. 

These are real thoughts that I was having from last Friday through pretty much Monday. Thankfully, I’m feeling tremendously better today.

These thoughts are all 100% BULLSHIT and if you’re having them, or similar ones, there is help and hope for you! 

“Cognitive based therapy (CBT or even DBT) is never going to be a long term solution for me because it doesn’t relieve my distress enough to be useful in the short term.”

“Why am I so broken that all the usual methods of fixing this shit don’t pan out for me?”

“What the actual fuck is going on with me that I’m suddenly having so many feelings and they’re uncomfortable and intense?”

“Maybe everyone really would be better off without me around to bring them down and fuck shit up over and over again.”

“Maybe I just have recurring thoughts of killing myself or hurting myself because I’m stressed out and want a relaxing stay at the mental hospital. Cut it out and grab those bootstraps, Lease!”

“It’s never going to get better or be under my control anyway. Why not just let it happen and/or try to fake being happy and contented with life so everyone stops worrying about you?”

“Offloading all these tasks to my spouse will be helpful when he’s a single parent without me around.”

“People with bipolar have, on average, 15-30 years reduced lifespan. If I was going to be 72, then my clock is up pretty soon.”

“My husband can’t afford the house by himself when I die.”