Anyway...

I don't know how many people are reading my words.  There sure are a lot of page views showing up.     I hope someday I can write again and be creative and somehow participate in your world instead of being the butt of everyone's joke or recipient of harsh criticism.  I hope that I find real people who can help me, mentor me or simply just be my friend, even in dark times.

You can laugh at me for not always siding with your science, but I believe.  I don't need to preach or judge others or go tell it on a mountain, because it's sacred to me and my family and those closest to me.  I believe we are connected in more ways that science can comprehend.  How do I know?  Because I have seen some things.

The internet sure is a messed up place.  Technology has become an extension of everyone's self.  And unfortunately, many have chosen to use this tool for bad things and seething negativity.  Why not create a world of positivity and support for those who are going through troubled times?  What are you all chasing after?  And what for?

the psychology of being judged.

I still can't escape what happened during hospitalizations.  They are permenantly etched in my mind.  No wonder so many never get out of the mental health care system--being monitored and over analyzed to such extremes sticks with a person.  For life.

What began as an introspective journey of myself turned into a self-loathing torture of all of the ways in which I am not perfect.  I am haunted by the mental health 'professionals' who judged and spit in my face because, somehow, they determined that I was not 'Good.'

Don't get me wrong, for every bad encounter I had with righteous professionals, there was always someone uplifting who helped me along the way.  I remember after two weeks in a terrible hospital situation, not knowing when my dingbat psychiatrist would let me out, a very kind-natured woman walked past and uttered in that 'les murs sont des oreilles' kind of place:

"It's just a bad dream."

The problem with mental health treatments is the quickness to medicate.  Do These People Know What These Medications Do To One's Soul?  All of those times under analysis when I felt like I had to Perform Well to get out of there, those docs had NO IDEA how challenging it is to be 'normal' when one is so blocked and stifled by loads of mind medications.  They cloud, confuse, depress, sedate, stifle, zombify, and cause extended, further pain.  The docs don't get that.  Have they ever tried these drugs?  Hell no they haven't.

I know I need one pill to calm my mind when it reaches OVERWHELMED status.  My mania disrupts my ability to perform regular functions in life.  

But the EXCESS analysis, the judgment passed by others, the scolding....how does one expect someone to get 'better' with such harshness?  Gentility seems like a wiser approach to me.  Isn't gentility a more spiritual practice?  

I thank my lucky stars I now have a Safe Place to talk in a therapeutic setting. No judgment, no fucked up psychology prodding self-serving bullshit games, just a place to INTROSPECT once again.

Hopefully I can regain at least an ounce of CONFIDENCE one day.

Rest In Peace to my Grandpa.

He taught me so much about the world.

On writing...

I was talking to my therapist the other day about art-making.  I told her that I feel like I can't write right now.  Writing and my 'mania' intertwines frequently.  My brain starts thinking and thinking and churning and it escalates into more than I can manage.  I have to walk away.

And she said, That's Okay.

Painting is better for me.  And I don't have to worry about what people think.  Because I'm doing it to help me express what I want to say.  It's not healthy for me to paint for someone else, to paint to try and be part of something bigger.  I'm just going to paint for me.  That's where I am at in my treatment.

I do still love writing.  But I think I'm going to take a more 'journalistic' approach to my writing.  Not so much creative story-telling.  Essays and such.

Here is what I will slowly work on next:

blogcabinofmidwesternsensibility.blogspot.com

photo du jour

Expectations

I had another sleepless night.  I will pop an Ativan or two again today to get through today's storm.  Why?  Because I have enormous anxiety over the little, uh, intracacies of my day.  Part of my 'paranoia' involves people hounding me expecting GENIUS and PERFECTION from me.

I remember sitting in a professor's office years ago and he told me, "I think you're a wonderfully interesting person, but I am not seeing your true potential or what you're capable of doing."  I wanted to scream at him:  Let Me Learn Dammit!  I called him a few years later to ask his advice about returning to the university.  He told me: You Know, academia isn't always what it's cracked up to be....

I have work to do.  I know that.  But JESUS.  Let me breathe.

Back to sleep I go.

I have decided to stay doped up, for now.  I don't have a good feeling about going off of medication, and my paranoia tells me there are people out there waiting for me to mess up again.

Feeling hopeless.

trust

It's a tough world in which TRUST is an insecurity of mine.  I don't trust what students and interns did with my words and actions in hospitals.  I remember someone taking a video of me while I was lost in a hospital.  I wonder what they did with that material.  I really wonder what they did with that. I also remember some inappropriate comments from young 'students' in the field.  I don't trust their ability to keep confidentiality of patients a priority.

People get high on a lot of things other than drugs.   And the most powerful of 'users' get other people high on assorted substances outside of the drug realm.  People get high on Power, Religion, Art, Creativity, Intelligence,  GOSSIP AND RUMORS, Scholarly Material Of All Sorts.  I remember sitting in philosophy class in college listening to a lecture and solving logic problems in my notes.... And at the end of it all, I tilted my head to one side and wondered, "How Do People Get Back To Planet Earth?"

It's Valentine's Day.

I feel like I'm walking in molasses on this pill dosage change right now.  I couldn't dance last night because I felt like an awkward, drugged zombie.  Feeling this way does not make me happy.  It makes me very, very depressed in fact.

I'm also tired of the random people who appear every so often who Fuck-With-You-While-They're-Talking-To-You.  I know that doesn't make sense to the ordinary person, but some know what I'm talking about.  When I feel things are askew, I give myself three words of advice:

Be An Indian

...and I walk away from the bullshit.

The following painting was done in my twenties after a psychologist asked me to spell WORLD backwards and I couldn't wrap my mind around the letters.  Many of my paintings are very juvenile.  It's a way for me to escape the complicated, messed-up world of adults and their, uh, games....

D'oh!

Don't worry, I'm still geared up for the new writing sessions.  But keeping all these layers of mental health issues in this separate little folder has been helping me.  I know it's terrible, but it's like taking a lint brush to your favorite black worn-out sweater.  Funny analogy but it's so, so true.

I had a really rough day.

I went to an early morning primary care doctor visit.  My anxiety and blood pressure have been screwing up.  Got off the reliance on Ativan but my heart palpitations and stress triggers are resulting in sporadic blood pressures.  I like this new PCP but it's pretty obvious she doesn't believe in certain mental health issues.  And I hate talking about all this crap repeatedly over and over and over and over again and I LOATHE answering their questions trying to determine if I am bipolar, depressed, postpartum depression, blaaaaaaaah.  Slap about ten more on to that and make me a tshirt or a dog tag so the next doc can just read it for him or herself.  New BP meds added to my regime now.  Yes I know damn well I need more exercise and better diet.  I've been guilty of eating foods I love because I just friggin want to.  I want to be outside doing stuff.  This winter has completely dragged me down.  I need sunshine.  I am not a big beach person, more of a beautiful park with flowers and soft green grass reading books under a big sunhat.  Lakes.  I'm a lake person.

I am having a really hard time with medication.  I start crying if I think about something that I cried about yesterday.  My sleep patterns are awful.  My life can't be planned until I feel at least semi-ok somehow.  I guess I can't go off this medication.  I don't even want to try yet another drug!  I'm soooooo oooooooo soooooooooo tired of all this!  Do I go back to doping up and sleeping all the damn time and never shedding a tear?  Do I try something new?  Do I stick it out and get med free and will I balance out okay?  I don't know what to do anymore.  My intuition has been drugged out of me.

I know I need new people in my life, too.  I need people who have their own experiences with treatment and understand where I've been.  You know, the people who have felt dark depression so blackened and dense and layered and thick that you feel deathly.  But still get back to it.  I don't want any more nihilistic depressors who don't want help being more optimistic.

I know there are people out there who know pain.  They work so hard crawling their way out of it.  That's what artists do best.  If only I had the talent to do that.

Dear God, pleeeeeease let me sleep tonight!!!!!!

when the winds change directions

Hello.

I have decided to change writing gears and direction and continue my ponderings on a new blog with a new theme.  I have written here as a place of refuge through hardships and I want to make some changes now.  This has been a vague, stumbling effort.  I've worked out some kinks and am looking forward to something new.

The new blog is doing some warm-up exercises and stretching before its new marathon run.

Run, Forrest!  Run!

Who's A Pill?

I was wildly entertained by assorted books and music today on yet another Polar-Vortex-Shining-Typewriter-Trapped-In-The-House kind of a day.

I drank coffee all morning and afternoon and read the second half of Morrissey's autobiography.  I skimmed a majority of the courtroom dramarama pages, as money-ownership-art topics are far from what I want to read about.  But I absolutely loved his clever word choices and rambling insecurities and OVERSHARING of all the delightfully overbearing personalities who have colored the pages of his life thus far.  Except that ending.  MAN!  Did that FREAK me OUT!

And then I watched some television:

http://youtu.be/kzj_NG90V40

winter of hibernating

Eeek!  Another sub-zero day in Chicago.  I want nothing more today than to go for a long walk.  At least five miles.  Maybe more.  Ten sounds even better.  But it's freezing.  So I will enjoy yet another leisurely day at home.  I've been organizing and purging old stuff, getting ready for a move.  The 'creative self' doesn't always feel inspired, so it is resting again today.  Writing disciplines have attempted a regular, steady schedule, but again: No Inspiration.  All of the confusion in my life makes me stare at an empty page.

I had a horrible dream the other night that I couldn't move my legs.  I tried to get out of bed and I was stuck.  It probably signifies something like 'feeling emotionally vulnerable.'  Being stifled by emotions, you know, all that usual stuff.  

I have flashbacks sometimes of moments when 'mania' crippled me.  Specifically, I felt an overwhelming sensation of being under surveillance.  I was assured by doctors and family members that it was all 'in my head' and that it was part of a psychosis.  But I specifically remember interactions with other real, live humans during those 'episodes' and thinking to myself 'uh, this is not a natural conversation.'  I felt poked, prodded, judged, loathed and felt violently ill.  I remember not eating for days and nerves taking over my body.  And then I would wind up in the hospital again to only be fed loads of medications all over again.

I don't know what can be done to rid oneself of flashbacks like these.  I keep myself busy at work and don't have time to let my mind wander.  I fill my mind with books and movies so I can immerse myself in other people's worlds they have created so I don't have to be preoccupied with mine.  And music.  Music stills my mind.

the past

I have an old friend from long ago who went on to become a doula and builds her whole life around pregnancy and childbirth.  She is getting more involved in still birth, infant loss and miscarriage and introduced me to a website which honors the BIRTHDAY of babies who didn't survive.  It's really intense stuff, and I visit these thoughts and emotions when I can, but I cannot breathe it all in daily.  The poignancy of that particular website is that it honors and remembers lost lives, when the general population dismisses these lives and tends to say, 'Don't Worry, You'll Have Another...'

Many of the therapeutic approaches I've been thrown into involved shedding the past, forgetting about it, and just move forward from this point on.  Doctors had been quick to diagnose me and medicate me, telling me it was all biological brain chemistry.

But trauma is different.  I read this quote yesterday from one of the docs at the center I go to:

"...if the events have been recurrent or we are young and vulnerable or have inadequate support, we can be left with a host of intense responses and symptoms that 'tell the story' without words and without knowledge that we are remembering events and feelings from long ago.'

I grew up with violence, had a terribly violent high school boyfriend, and while I've risen above it and try not to live in the past, it happened.  I have come a looooooong way.  I remember fear stifling me any time I ever encountered aggression in the workplace.  All kinds of scenarios would trigger responses.

Now that I'm getting a better handle on my 'responses,' I feel like I'm on a more, hmmmm, what's the word....'steady' path.  But I still have a long way to go.

men and emotions

There is a great video on Upworthy detailing a man's struggle with depression in the form of a big black dog who overtakes his life.  (You can view it on upworthy.com, search 'depression'.) Opening up and discovering what ails someone is exhausting, which is why so many people hold everything together for so long.  I'm close with both of my brothers, who always suppress emotions, don't have romantic relationships and at times, drink away their sorrows.  They're fine, but there have been points in life where I've seen them collapse emotionally and I feel helpless that there's nothing I can do.  Our parents were so damn boxed up and cold and numb and going through the motions of life and marriage.  I guess it's gotten a bit better as time has gone by and life as retirees allows them another faction of life.

But that's how we were conditioned.

Communicating with men about 'big life stuff' exhausts me in the same kind of way.  They are not direct, they confuse me, they seem to change their mind or appear flippant, and if they reach a certain point of vulnerability they resort to frustrated anger.  I am far from a 'nagging' person, but I encourage dialogue in my relationship.  I don't want to be in a marriage where two people don't talk or make decisions together or discuss.  I don't want to live in an emotionally boxed up place.  

I've had other places to go in my life for emotional support. There have been aunts and longtime friends.  That all seems to ebb and flow as life often does.  I have new family in my in-laws, who are lovely.  But there is only so much to be said before that 'blockage' occurs again.  If I were some kind of surgeon of emotions I would put in a stent or whatever I could to open up the pathways.  But I'm afraid it's a 'condition' I can't change.

Bad medicine

Ugh.  Every time I hear of a suicide or drug overdose, I can't help but think back to conversations with people in the hospitals or outpatient therapy.  I've never touched drugs, even though I've been around them and encouraged by others to partake.  I haven't even smoked weed, even though I've had about a dozen people close to me swear that it would 'cure' my 'mental illness.'   I haven't touched it, but I've been around addiction at several points in my life.  No therapy or prescribed medicine could get those people away from the stuff.  They had/have pain to hide from, and talking about it would be absolutely devastating.

My mind has been to far off places without drugs, and further away places when a prescribed antipsychotic goes awry.  I don't want to complicate that further.  It usually has happened when stress was triggered, like some sort of coping mechanism my body does to kind of take me away from stress.  Now that I have a better handle on things, and much less confusion in my life, I hope I can nip it in the bud before things spiral out of control again.

I learned a lot about addiction and alcoholism from 'peers' that I met under mental health care.  I know that there are good people who get stuck in addiction's turbulence, and that many are incredibly talented individuals who just may be touched by a little fire.  I had a buddy in one hospital, we'll call him Bob, who couldn't get clean.  During some bored down time we drew me a picture.  It was a canoe, in a beautiful natural forested environment on a beautiful lake. There were three people in the canoe, one was me, one was him, and the third was our mutual friend.  Bob watched out for me while I was in that terrible place, like a big brother would.  I think of him every time I pass by the recovery house in my neighborhood and hope he's there.  But my heart breaks because I know he's probably not, and he's in another place far away.

It takes a healing hand to reach out to certain people.  I found many forms of therapy did NOT help me.  Drama Therapy and wacko role playing reverse psychology tricks made me worse.  I need TRUST and REALITY and a safe place to release emotion, not further mind fucks.  There are people who go into psychology for all the wrong reasons, and I'm grateful I've got a good bunch on my side this time.

fulfillment

A group of kids from the ol' hometown are in the process of coordinating a high school reunion.  It's fun to check in on the plans and catch up with some old classmates.  Everyone is in a totally different place in life and we've all taken many different paths.  I don't remember a lot of people and don't really get to my hometown too much, but I might go.  I've got some time to decide.

I was never a person who really had a clear vision of what I wanted to accomplish in life.  Except that I knew I wanted to explore and try different things.  I've done a little of that.  I obviously don't have the means to travel the world like I wish I could, but I'm grateful for the few chances I've had to go to a few places on the world map.  I have a friend who writes a budget travel blog and it's wildly inspiring.  We worked together at an art museum years ago and while the pay may not have been a whole heck of a lot, the vacation time and PTO was pretty darn amazing.

I find myself in another career at the moment where vacation time is almost non-existent.  But I try to focus on the positives as much as I can.  In this current position I can:

1.  Hire and create my own staff.
2.  Promote positivity between women (both customers and employees) where we SUPPORT one another and boost one another's confidence.
3.  Talk to a wide variety of people every day.
4.  Be creative.
5.  Be analytical.
6.  Teach.
7.  Be a mentor to young girls as they pursue their career and artistic goals.
8.  Be on my feet and active and not constrained to a cubicle.

So when I think of the word fulfillment, I can find ways to take pride in whatever I find myself doing.  And I know that my life is not over.  There are still "things" I can do.

I can still explore.  I can still try different things.  And the people around me seem to understand.  To a certain extent.