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!!!!!!