Hoss is working really hard at being in control, even dropping his afternoon ADHD dose on days when he is just hanging out. His meds have been steady for some time, his appointments are now spaced out more than before, and we are not dreading the return to school. The administration stacked the cards in our favor this year- the fifth grade had a vacancy, so Hoss’ fourth grade teacher rose to fill it. And, in a totally unexpected move (and by ”unexpected” I mean “totally expected,” a la Professor Doofenschmirtz), Hoss was assigned to Mr. G’s class again this year. Hmmm, a teacher who my boy totally connects with and loves more than anything, and a special educator who gets his humor. What more can a mom ask for?

This, I think, is the year of Little Joe.  The quirks and routines are starting to become more noticable.   I forsee testing, and am going on record with a prediction of PDD/mild Aspergers with a touch of OCD. I hope that any issues can be dealt with by behavioral measures, since the possibility of Little Joe swallowing even the tiniest of pills or anything liquid that is not milk is…let’s just say it would be a challenge.

My goal for the school year? No hospital stays. It’s not so much to ask.

It’s big, it’s heavy, and it hurts.

I keep waiting for a break, a lift; a moment when it’s not there when I don’t have to focus or operate under it’s influence.

Sometimes if I’m lucky I’m able to cry; most times I’m not lucky.  I know the tears will help ease the burden but they stay deep down tucked away.

My head keeps asking me when it will be time to stop all of this hurting nonsense, when will I get out from under this rock of despair, will there be a happy ahead, where the fuck is the carrot?

Perhaps the happy is just an illusion, something that we’ve bought and sell our souls for on a daily basis.  Happy is an overstatement, I’m just looking to feel balanced and relatively happy for longer than one day, a week even.

I’ve been emotionally running from the final impact that I know is my due.  I doubt anyone could blame me for this after the last 10 years of the up and down, heart being ripped from my chest; beat up and ripped and hung on the outside of my body to dry.

Resisted writing this, not looking for condolences, I know it’s a part of the process (I’ve come to despise those three words).  I’ve been holding it in hoping it would pass, that I would be released magically.

I know better, I do.  Yet, I never stop bracing myself for impact.  It’s a primal reaction built in to humans.  Some are lucky enough to keep it under the rug and hidden.  That’s never a choice I’ve had, or even been successful with my attempts.

Back to where I always land, writing about it and posting it here releasing it into the safe place where others understand and will sigh as they read; nodding their heads in solidarity.

This too shall pass.  I just wish it would hurry the fuck up because my heart, mind, and body are weary.

Tonight was back to school night at Princess’s school. It was not an easy night, since I didn’t know what to expect from other parents or from the teachers regarding Princess. Many of the parents seem not to know that anything has gone wrong. The only parents with whom I talked about her recent hospitalization were the parents of one of the girls who reported to the counselor that she was talking of stabbing herself. I thanked them, and their daughter, for starting the process to getting better. I tried to hold back the tears, but…well, that isn’t so much an option for me sometimes. I apologized for putting their twelve-year-old daughter in such a tough spot.

My tears brought some tears from this girl’s mom. She and her husband admonished me for apologizing, and said they are keeping Princess in their prayers. They wanted to pass along to their daughter our appreciation for having done the right thing. She told me that her sister had struggled with depression and talked of suicide, and that her husband lost a friend to suicide.

I still feel like a shell of myself. I’m sleeping more than typical yet not feeling rested. I eat because I know I must, not because I have a taste for it. Our priest, the school staff, Princess’s therapist, the executive assistant for my department are keeping a close eye on me, I think, not sure if I may shatter at any moment. But for Princess I am holding it together, I take deep breaths and I focus on how to move forward. One small step at a time.

When I picked Princess up from her aftercare program on Tuesday, I had a message that the school counselor wanted to see me. Princess and I gathered her things and sat down in the counselor’s office to talk. The counselor relayed that another student came to her to say that Princess had indicated that she was planning to bring a knife to school for the purpose of stabbing herself or cutting her throat. She’s never articulated a plan before, and never expressed thoughts so boldly violent. The counselor advised me that she would need written confirmation from some mental health professional regarding Princess’ abililty to return to class.

We made an appointment with the therapist, and Princess was vehement in saying she did not want to go back to the hospital. She later had an outburst that culminated in her locking herself in the bathroom, refusing to speak to me, and I told her through the door that if I could not get the key to work, I would call 911 and have them break the door down and take her to the ER in an ambulance. She came out, and finally admitted that her thoughts were too overwhelming to handle alone, and she thought she needed to go back to the hospital.

We arrived at the pediatric ER around 2:00. We met with the intake nurses and pediatrician and social worker. We waited for word about which hospital had a bed and would accept her into the program. I called and texted my husband (who was home with the boys) and my parents and my siblings with updates through the night. The food service people delivered Princess’ dinner to the adult ER, so it was cold by the time we hunted it down, but she ate it anyway. They fixed another dinner for her, so I ended up getting to eat something, too. The ambulance transport came just before midnight. I took my car and agreed to meet them at the hospital.

About halfway to the hospital, my car blew a tire. I sat at the side of the highway, sobbing so hard I thought I would vomit. My  husband called the pediatric ER staff, who called the transport company, who contacted the ambulance driver to  have him come back to get me. Another bus from the same transport company arrived a few minutes after we did, so the drivers kept me distracted with their chatter. I barely remember filling out the paperwork for the intake. The coordinator on the unit asked me if I had a ride home, and I asked her to help me call a cab. She did one better- she arranged for a transport voucher for me, since I wasn’t sure I had enough cash on me to pay for the 40 minute ride home.

I got about 3 hours of sleep before taking the boys to school and coming into the office. My boss is wonderfully understanding and supportive, and is allowing me to make my schedule day by day depending on what I feel I need. I don’t know what it is I need, though.

I am still standing, and I know that Princess is getting the help she needs. This is a different hospital than the one she was in during May. That program seemed to work then, but the doctor’s willingness to dismiss my suspicions of a biploar disorder bothered me. This hospital seems more open to the possibility that there is more going on than her anxiety/depression. And we will once again find our light at the end of the tunnel

You’re going along, not thinking about how things are getting incrementally harder because you’ve always had days that are harder. And then get better. And then harder again and then better again ad nauseum until you are pretty much used to the ride. You don’t consider it remarkable anymore because it’s your “normal” life.

But the black hole is sneakier. The days get harder and harder. You’re waiting it out. You know if you just get through another day, things will get better again. So another day passes where you’re holding on with both hands. Then one hand. Then a few fingers. Then you notice your fingernails are torn and bloody stumps and finally, FINALLY, you realize you’re not going to be able to get back up. You are losing your grip completely and it’s too late to take precautionary measures. Way to late for that.

It becomes a life of lying under the water, looking at the world through goggles and trying not to think about all the ways you could die. Accidentally, of course.

And then it becomes a life of trying not to think of how to die on purpose. And you can’t even see out of the water anymore. Someone turned out the lights. You can’t hear or see or feel anything but extreme sad and bad and guilt.

“I’m trapped!” I yelled at the psychiatrist yesterday, “I can’t stay here and worry everyone while my mother-in-law has stage4 cancer and I should be taking care of her! I can’t go see family because they would worry the whole time I’m there! I can’t stay alive because this is how things will be the rest of my life – up, down, up, down – I can’t do it anymore! And I can’t kill myself because my kids would never get over it!”

It feels like I’m trapped in hell.

A med change is underway. I don’t feel better, I feel weird. Even more distant from my surroundings and I care even less.

I can write this because I’m a writer and this is what I do. I can’t change anything in my brain because this is how I am. I haven’t stopped crying for over 2 weeks and I shake all the time. I don’t want food. I only want to drink and fall asleep. But I don’t. I just think about it. Because maybe I won’t wake up. That would be nice.

My husband says, “There are lots of people who want you around, and alive. I love you Leah. You are valuable and precious.” I hear it but I can’t hear it because it feels like a lie. I didn’t think I would get married again after my divorce in 2002. I figured no one should be married to the mess that is me. But, I did marry. And he’s wonderful. And I fill his life with stress and drama and worry. In loving him I’ve ruined his life. If I really loved him, I would leave him.

This is the black hole talking. In this flash of sanity, I know it. But, sometimes the black hole just takes over everything and reason and sanity are nowhere.

Originally posted on Leahpeah

My heart broke when the truth revealed itself to me.  I tried to hide from it, bury it deeply inside of my body, I didn’t want anyone to see it.

That was successful for a long time.  I tried to blame you, the reasons were all turned around and put back into my court and I couldn’t deny this was a truth I could not hide.

Looking for things that were wrong for so long until I found them, then I looked for ways to put them up high so no one could find them.

We’re in too deep, it has to remain as it is until one of us dies.  It will hurt too much, I can’t take much more hurt.  It will bury me eight feet under next to my Dad.  What have I done wrong?

I dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s, I checked and rechecked, went to the Doctor and went to God.

To stay in the condition would mean choosing you instead of me.  I thought that choice was the answer for me and I forgot who I was, what strengths I had, the hurdles I’d climbed before, and that I can overcome adversity no matter what’s on the table.

I sat, I cried, I wrote, I lied to myself.

I thought of him and how he did the same, exchanging his life for another.  It made him happy to do so, or it was what he wanted us all to believe.

A message from somewhere deep, rose up to greet, whispering in my ear, “don’t do that”.  “Right or wrong, it’s been so long, don’t walk the same road you saw me on”.

I love you, my heart would burst to prove to you if it could.  It’s time for me to sever that tie and find myself and I don’t even know why.

The beyond this will be beautiful, the beyond will be better than any of us could have hoped for.  I hate to be the one to change the tracks, it was the last choice, and when everything turned to black, I knew then it was only choice to bring my life back.

This hurt, this particular hurt controls me.  Maybe I let it control me.  I expected you to protect me, to protect her, protect the ones you love.  My expectations getting in my way again, causing me to have resentment.

People cannot give what they do not have.

I thought by taking care of you that it would take care of the all of us, maybe I’d even learn to let you take care of me.  I know I’m not perfect, I have my own issues.  This really is my issue, because I am no longer able to deal with it.

I thought you were ready to do that work too.  It’s ok that you aren’t, I understand that knocking down walls isn’t for most people.  I also realize that I’m probably not meant for a long term commitment.  Not because I can’t commit, I’ve certainly proved that to myself once and for all.  Maybe I expect too much from my partners.

A Doctor recently told me after hearing my story, “You’ve come too far to settle”.  I nodded my head and agreed with her.  Not in some “superior” way, in a way for my own journey.  I HAVE come a long way from my humble beginnings, and my fucked up scars.

My heart aches for the loss we’ve suffered, and I’m not sure that it’ll ever stop aching, it goes really really deep.  It’s attached to some major core stuff for me and I’m powerless over it.  I’ve tried to make it something other than what it was.  Truth seeker that I am, I wasn’t successful.

Just a simple call or text can send me spiraling out into crazy land.  I love her, I love her so deeply it’s alarming even to me.

I can honestly say that I tried every avenue possible.  This isn’t me running away like it used to be.  I dug in my heels and willed it to get better, then I sought outside help.  I can comfortably say that I did the very best I could, tried everything I could, experienced heart wrenching pain for the both of us but to no avail.  A partnership only works if both are willing to work at it.

There are two sides to you, and 99% of people only see the one side.  I’ll be the “bad guy”, I know that’s important to you.  I’ve carried that title for many years now, and was blamed for things that I had no involvement in.  I let it be like that because I didn’t know another way and I thought it was the solution.

I’m not a bad guy, I’m just a regular person trying to survive just like everyone else.  And I can only take so much medication before I become a zombie.

I’m worth more than that and I’m grateful that I finally saw the truth, before I lost myself forever.

I love you.

With each contraction a sad reminder that even more eggs are escaping, never to be developed into another human.

Heart sad, heart broken, had to put my best friend to sleep.

He served me well, watched over me and bit the ones that needed to be bitten.

Machines are breaking, money needed to fix, money not available.

Life goes on, churning each day running to the next.

People smiling to cover their sickness, people laughing when they should be crying.

Pretending to be something they aren’t, rotting corpses behind their smiles.

I need a break, a break from it all to remember who i was before i fell.

Fell a long way, deep down into the hole of what I thought was the “right things to do” drain.  i knew better, yes I did.

Roads less traveled are not for the weary, the weak or the frail.  I chose this road.  Knowing, it would throw me out of my glass house.

Windows are broken, blood spattered on the walls, water damage from the tears, backing up in the pipes and threatening an explosion of epic damages.

Life is what this is.

Life.

Mental illness is what I have; seen as a disability, maybe it’s just the way some of us are.   The way squirrels are nervous.

Some choose not to be here, some choose to leave early, some walk with me shadowed by their own distractions of their own path.

Grateful to feel, grateful to live, grateful for the opportunity.

All that appears to be “in the way”; simply the scenic route.

Lessons to be learned, beauty to be admired, love to be tasted.

Above all, I must remember.

This.

This, is a life NOT wasted and there are no magic answers.

I call bullshit on people saying, “You’re so brave.” Look, I know it’s a nice thought, and nicely meant, and I should be flattered and all, but the truth is, there’s no bravery involved when you have no other choices.

I simply had to find my way out of depression. Even though I was productive while I was depressed (almost freakishly so), I knew I couldn’t continue at the pace I was running at for too many more years. I’ve never had a backup plan—no parents to swoop in, no partner to stave off the hand-to-mouth scenario.

(Believe me, that’s not a complaint—you can’t buy motivation like that.)

For a not insignificant number of years, I tried to be gentle with myself. I reconciled myself with the obvious conclusion that I was doomed to be a writer-slash-artist. Rather than hide that, I tried to let it grow strong. This was when I was just beginning to get an inkling of how messed up things were; luckily, at the time, I had no inkling of the work that lay ahead. I cried to friends. I cried in therapy. I cried during massages. I cried in the car.

Oh god, all those poor ex-boyfriends.

It was all about Releasing and Getting In Touch With My Feelings.  That sounds trite, but it was what it was. Spade called. Then, after a few years, I realized that, even though I was making incremental progress in my behavioral choices, the pain I was in just wouldn’t budge.

So I manned up.

As hard as it was, I forced myself to shut some parts of my healing process down. I had to move on. I had been trying to wait ‘til everything resolved itself organically, but all of a sudden I knew that would take years longer than I had already spent. I was living with my mother, and that had to stop before I could truly get better. In order for that to stop, I had to get a better job than teaching four-year-olds how to make tiny boats for Thumbelina in the afternoons. In order for that to stop, I had to become a less cryey person in the mornings. In order for that to stop, I had to shut down. What kind of job was I ever going to get that had flexible hours and time off for uncontrollable sobbing?

So I did the corporate dance. And I liked a lot of it—it was social and I liked working hard. It seemed healthy. Made me forget my sadness a lot of the time. I got promoted time and again. But I gave too much, and so I’d burn out and feel like a failure again.

So I became a Pilates instructor. It was social, it was movement-based, it was something I loved doing anyway, and it could happen on my own schedule, around my writing and teaching artist jobs for several non-profits. It took me three years to realize that, while I loved all of those jobs, none of them paid enough, or had regular schedules, or any sort of reliable income.

So I became an Office Manager.

Except this time, instead of straight-up corporate America, I worked at a non-profit. Non-profits organizations are great to the artists who work for them, because they don’t care what you wear and there are no meetings. There’s no paid vacation, but they give you comp time. This was in early 2007, when I was first diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and all those other things I’ve blogged about before. And this was the job that supported me while I opened up all those messy things I had tucked away and worked through them. I had been blogging about them for five years, but I hadn’t actually been working on them with someone.

I was ready.

I was so ready that it actually didn’t take very long to unplug myself from the destructive and misguided thought patterns that were making me depressed. In a way, I was lucky, because my depressive behavior was caused by external events that had happened early and had sent me down the wrong path. It was like I had been working my way through a massive video game for decades, only to reach a dead end.

“Sorry, your princess is in another castle.”

When my therapist said she thought I was out of the woods, I asked if I’d have to stop coming there. I was only paying $7 a session on a sliding scale, and I pictured a long line of unhappy people on the other side of her door. She said, “Oh Hell no! We’re just getting started.”

Turns out it takes a bit of work to be not depressed. It’s like you *thought* you knew how to use a bike, but what you’d been doing all along was hoisting the bike over your head as you waded through water. Sure, it’s technically easier to ride it on pavement, but you still have to learn from scratch. You need the training wheels and the encouragement. So for the next year, once a week, I’d report back as to how things were going, and my therapist helped me calibrate my responses and find my balance.

Now it’s easy peasy.

For those of you who’ve been reading my blog since I moved to New York in late 2008, you know it’s been logistically tough. The biggest challenge was moving three times, each time leaving behind stolen possessions, leaky apartments, or a pantsless roommate. But the counterpoint to that was the good job I found at the start of the recession. And now, after almost a year and a half of uncertainty, it seems I have some slightly more solid options before me. I’m one step closer to maybe someday being a full hire with paid holidays/sick/vacation and health insurance. Maybe even two steps closer, hard to know.

What I’m trying to say, in a thousand words or less, is that if there’s a big difference between carrying a bike through water and learning to ride that bike, there’s an even bigger difference between learning to ride a bike and riding that bike well.

You remember how it feels, right? You’re wobbling along, afraid of every pothole or stick in the road, when all of a sudden you look up and realize that you’ve got this, you know this. You’ve known this all along. It’s easy. Just go headfirst, into the wind. The bumps will work themselves out.

Now that I’m no longer fighting with my bike, I find myself zooming down a wide, flat road on which there are some choices coming up. For the first time ever. Kind of. Yeah.

Now we’ll see if I’m brave.

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.”