All Art Requires Courage – THANATOS
February 6th, 2010
All Art Requires Courage – 140/365
February 4th, 2010
Who You Are – Laura
February 3rd, 2010People call me/I call myself Laura.
I see myself as scatter-brained but loving. And loved.
If I thought you cared and you were listening, I would tell you I have a bipolar depression and anxiety disorder diagnosis. Sometimes I wonder if the drugs are working, or if it’s a misdiagnosis because I feel pretty good these days. Then I forget to eat or take my meds or I drink too much and I fall down the hole again. Some days I want to do so many things, and others I want to do nothing but sleep. I can’t focus on getting good at one thing, or getting one thing done well. Why can some people manage and lead well but other struggle?
I am struggling with so much distraction. And I eat too much to soothe my anger and frustration. I want to get unstuck and feel untrapped.
Something I have been keeping a secret is how upset it makes me that I don’t have a child, and how I am so frustrated with my husband. I would like to adopt a child but he has said that is a deal breaker. I have examined, at length, why I want a child so much. Is it selfish to want a kid? Is it selfish to not want to raise a child? I’m not right with this. I put on a happy face to make my friends feel comfortable, my husband happy, and my parents satisfied.
I am trying to think positive and something I’m good at is connecting people. And I love learning new things and meeting new people. Pretty simple.
Where Do I Go From Here?
January 29th, 2010By Dianna
Where do I go from here? Once again I feel my life spiraling out of control and have nothing with which to stop it. I am a logical person. I know what I should do to make myself feel better, however I seem to have no way of stopping myself from doing what I shouldn’t do.
When I get nervous and feel disliked in a situation, I drink. When I am manic and feeling like the world is mine and everyone should bow to my amazingness, I drink. When I drink, I inevitable fail and the all consuming guilt spirals into depression.
This weekend I celebrated my friend’s birthday. Her friends don’t like me. Perhaps the best thing was not for me to point out how one particular friend of hers doesn’t even say hello to me and shoots daggers at me with her eyes. They make me feel uncomfortable and she herself, always seems to want me to act a different way, or be a different way, and I try to tell myself it’s all in my head and than I feel bad, but perhaps maybe it isn’t.
That night, I separated myself from the group. Instead of talking to them, I talked to strangers. People who didn’t make me feel disliked and uncomfortable. People who listened to me and didn’t tell me I was talking too loud or act as if I was embarrassing them. They left me at the restaurant and I had to find my own way to the bar. Then, they left me at the bar and I had to get myself home. No matter how poorly I was behaving, how can that be the way to treat a friend?
Here I go again. One more friend down. When you only have 3 left it’s a sad and lonely place to be.
Being bi-polar is not conducive to friendships, and those you do find generally are engaged in the same self destructive behavior you should avoid like the plague. It gets you nowhere real fast. Yet, no matter how many times I am told “it’s not my fault”, no one else seems to believe it or wants to take the effort to understand that. And sometimes I just don’t believe it.
Whose fault is it if not mine? I’m the one who chose to have sex with strangers, to put things up my nose that shouldn’t go there and to put that glass to my lips over and over again.
Today I made it out of bed, albeit late, and I will drag myself to the gym and remember each hour that passes is another chance to begin again.
Time for a change
January 28th, 2010How many people stop in their tracks some days and wonder just how in the hell they got to the particular point in their lives that they got to.
I’ve been doing this for a long time now. I retrace my steps, I inventory the steps I took that led me to where I am right now and wonder what will come of it all.
One of my closest friends recently told me, that while speaking to another person close to me, she told this person at that point, “she’s the most unhappy that I’ve ever known her to be”. I’m the she in that sentence. That was over five years ago. I asked her why didn’t she tell me then but she was uncertain.
I started crying when she told me this, knowing deep down that I was unhappy, and that I’ve been unhappy for a long time. I’ve been doing the “make the best of it and maybe it’ll get better”! I had some obstacles to overcome, some stuff that needed to be worked out and really hard life stuff that came in constant waves for a few years.
Life sure can take you full speed ahead down twisting roads and you have no time to catch your breath, much less your mind. With each new battle, I would pray for the serenity I needed in order to climb the next hill.
I did what was in front of me to do, I put one foot in front of the other, and I persevered. I stayed the course, I kept it together. Silently questioning what it was that I had to learn from these calamities. Why me God? WHY ME?
Much as I despise that question (because it’s screams of a character flaw I do not wish to emulate) I would ask anyway. Ultimately trusting that I was where I was supposed to be and sometimes the life you want and think you should have is not the life you get. Acceptance is what they call that I believe.
At what point should you stop convincing yourself that this is how it is supposed to be? At what point do you realize that being unhappy isn’t what you want out of life?
An answer to this riddle has eluded me for a few years now and I’m not even sure what course to take in order to change it. In fact, I’ve only just begun to speak of it’s truth, I’ve only just begun to realize that I have to change my course.
This scares me, despite my experience and knowledge that changing courses brings about blessings and clears away the things that no longer serve me, opening me up for a new adventure.
Painful, uncomfortable, sad, and hopeless are a few of the friends that will join me in the change, even though I know their counterparts of love, joy, serenity, hope and freedom are waiting on the other side for me with cookies and tea.
The Ones We Leave Behind
January 28th, 2010My mom has an incredibly annoying habit of starting conversations with me with the phrase, “What’s wrong?”
Example: It is the day after Christmas. I have been downstairs eating cake for breakfast in my pajamas. I walk up the stairs and see my mom. Startled, she looks at me. “What’s wrong?”
Nothing. I say. I was just eating cake downstairs. Everything is perfect.
Example: My mom calls me on the phone and leaves a voice mail. I return her call. She answers the phone—no “hello”—but “What’s wrong?”
It wasn’t always this way.
***
I don’t know what it is, what makes her do this. It unnerves me to no end, makes me feel like she’s always on edge. I have my theories, of course—that our relationship is forever changed by the knowledge of my mental illness, that she feels guilty that she didn’t know I had so many problems. Guilty because she discouraged me from getting treatment the first time around. Scared that it could happen again, a snap of the crazy finger and everything changed, or gone, again.
Once, when I was 21 and in the middle of the arduous task of being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I spent the night at home. It was Daylight Savings Time, the one where you spring forward and lose an hour, the same lost hour that started everything the year before. The boy and I were both upset—him with me, and me with myself. In the middle of the night, I slipped out of my bed and left a note saying I had gone to sleep at his house. Later, in the early hours of the morning, someone shot a gun outside my house. My parents awoke, saw I was out of bed, and immediately feared for the worst. I got my mom’s panicked call on my cell phone, out-of-breath and hysterical.
I’m here. I said. I’m alive.
But it was eye-opening, having a glimpse into the fears they had about my life and my illness. The fact that they thought it could have been me has always shaken me to my core.
***
An essay on suicide and its presence in my life:
In 2002, a month before starting my senior year of high school, one of my best friend’s fathers committed suicide in the woods outside their house while no one was home. Her mother, out of town and worried that she couldn’t contact him, called my friend on the phone and my father, brother and I drove home with her. While we were in transit, he was found dead. One of his employees knew me and knew that I was a friend of his daughter. Trying to track her down, they called me. We were halfway there. We pulled over in the rain and I got out of the car. At the age of 17, I had to tell this girl that her father died, that he’d committed suicide. And then there, in my arms, were the pieces he’d blown apart with his gun. I held the one who’d been left behind.
Last week, one of my closest friends called me—after a string of numbed-out half-started words, he finally choked out that he’d lost his college roommate. I went over to his house and we sat outside as he smoked cigarettes. He told me about the questionable nature of the death, about the erratic driving and an overcorrection of the steering wheel that flipped a car and left its driver DOA.
“His father told me that he’d been on pills, and I knew that he was having some problems. But nothing like this. And he never told me how he was feeling. He never told me. Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
He was asking because he knows about my experiences with mental illness, because he knows that I’ve been depressed.
So, I told him the truth. That sometimes we don’t tell the people who are closest to us because we don’t want to change their perceptions of us. We don’t tell them because we can’t bear the sideways glances, the frightened looks that make us feel crazier. That we can’t stand the thought of hurting and worrying the ones we love. That when we tell the closest ones, that’s when it really hits us. That’s when it’s real.
It’s easy to tell strangers and people you’ve just met. They don’t have any emotional investment in you or your well-being. They don’t worry at night or when you call them on the phone. They never will have to ask you, “What’s wrong,” and be scared of what the answer might be.
So he’s quiet and drunk and upset—all the things I’ve been before, when someone I knew unexpectedly died. And he looks at me, and repeats himself. “I just wish he had told me.”
And here I am, once more—holding in my arms one of the ones who’s been left behind.
***
It’s not my intention to proselytize or blame. I’ve been on both sides of the matter, flipping back and forth like a metronome from experience to experience. I know what it’s like to wallow in desperation and sadness that feels like it will never end. I’ve visualized it in my head a thousand times—what it would look like to rake a razor down my wrist, what my feet would look like hanging from a rope or the moment of clarity I would have just as I jumped. I’ve wished for cars to hit me in crosswalks, and I’ve thought incessantly on rough days of turning the steering wheel and careening into a tree.
But I know, too, about the ones we leave behind. Friends, family, teachers and acquaintances. The ones who will sit in doorways, mouths drooping with cigarettes and veins running with vodka, the ones who will ask “why” and “how” and blame themselves, no matter what anyone else tells them to the contrary. I’ve been there too many times, and the pressure of these times is always enough to push me back.
But in the light of this most recent experience, I feel guilty for being so frustrated with my mother. She asks “What’s wrong?” because she worries that the time she doesn’t is the time it will matter. I want desperately to tell her that she shouldn’t worry. That the truth is that, if that time came, she wouldn’t be the one to know. No one would. Our hearts are full of secrets and lies, of deceit and worry and fear, of questions that have no answers.
But I want to reassure her. I want to reassure all of them. “Don’t worry,” I want to whisper. And even if I can’t guarantee it, I’m pretty sure. If I could, I’d write them all promises. “No matter what, no matter how hard it gets—I won’t leave you behind.”
