Many things are difficult right now.
Oddly, it’s not difficult to write here at the blog. It’s not difficult to write to you.
It’s peculiar to write to you, sometimes. I’ll say that. But I feel you listening, I feel you reading between the lines. I feel your warmth. I appreciate and value it immensely.
*****
The phone, well, you know by now—personally or by reading this blog—the phone is gut-wrenching for me. The phone breaks my heart before I even pick it up. Because someone will have a question. Questions are killers right now.
I make lists of all the questions people have for me. I make lists of all the questions that I have for myself, so if anyone questions my dedication to trying to beat this, I can say, But look! But look! I’m asking! I’m trying!
I try to come up with as many answers as I can for the people I love, for the people who love me. Then I try to guess what the next batch of questions will be. I try to come up with answers for those, too.
My answers are tedious. Rather, they make me feel tedious. I hear myself, and I feel my voice must be unbearable to whomever is on the other end of the line. I gag on my words. Sometimes, to make matters worse, I cry as I struggle to answer, and then I really can’t stand to hear myself aloud.
Yes. Yes. Definitely. Absolutely. Doing that.
Yes, he’s aware. He’s aware too. Yes, she’s aware. So is she. No, I don’t think you need to call her. What?
Well, I guess that’s something the doc and I will discuss. No, I don’t think you need to be there for that. No, tried that one, that had a bad outcome.
Maybe, trying to look into that. The forms are scary and make me cry.
No, I don’t know where the glass is for that door. I know, I know, I know, I’m losing heat.
Yes, the unemployment runs out soon. Today, actually. Funny, right? No, no, of course not. Not funny! Sorry! Yes, I know, I was doing it again. Maybe, I hope so. They told me to call back on Wednesday. Yes, I did my best.
No, I don’t want to be a massage therapist. I never said I wanted to be a massage therapist. I did? Oh. Vet tech? Maybe, yes. Physical therapist, yes. I have to go to school for something fast, so I can get another student loan deferment. Ironic! No, I didn’t say funny. No, I’m not smiling.
What’s changed since I was ‘better’? I don’t remember what ‘better’ feels like. No. I’m not kidding.
No, I’m too responsible for that.
Yes, of course I miss it. I think I miss who I was. I don’t remember her. No, I’m not sure, don’t know when I’ll be sure.
Girls? I think fine, although who can say? Oh, you want me to say? Right! Yes, fine! I got them ready for school, had their lunches made the night before! How about that!
I would like to be well. If I got as far as ‘well’, then I would like to be the carefree, phone-loving friend, relative. I’d like to inch closer to that. It may never be me, the happy-go-lucky phone chatter. I am a scared dog, straining at the end of my leash, ready to bolt. Can we go? Are we through here?
*****
The sense of failure that comes with recurrent mental illness is profound and all-encompassing. I will dare to call it mental illness because that’s one brave thing I can swing. It’s illness, man, like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure. It needs daily attention.
Truly, you’d be better off with gonorrhea. Clap—ho ho!—if you’d rather have gonorrhea than mental illness! Yup, trust me, you would. A few antibiotics and an embarrassing email or three, and you’re on your way, clean slate.
But mental illness requires more of you. Depending on your flavor of brain ouchies, you’ll need to dig deep. You will have ups and downs.
But you buy it now, what you didn’t buy in, say, 2005: This is something you must learn to live with.
Worse, this is something you must then teach the people you love how to live with. You must help them understand what it is, and what it is not. You must remind them what is still authentically you, and what is pathology.
Tall order, when you can barely get out of bed, or your toiletries are singing to you in the shower.
Some won’t agree with that assessment, that you’ll be shacking up with mental illness for a lifetime (the optimists). Some will agree with that assessment too vehemently (the pessimists). You don’t really care who agrees anymore—you just want to be as well as you can be, and content.
You don’t care who agrees anymore, and you don’t care who knows anymore.
This, you suppose, is progress.
*****
How did you define ‘contentment’ before? Impossible to say.
You checked three things off your list today. You took a shower last night. You had yogurt for breakfast. You sent the girls to school in clean warm clothes, matching clothes, with brushed hair and brushed teeth. You tried to get someone on the unemployment phone line to extend your benefits, but they told you you had to call back on Wednesday. You freaked a little at that, but stayed upright. You got dressed. You renewed one prescription. You checked the 48 phone messages that were waiting for you. You put the phone on speakerphone. It’s better when the messages are not right in your ear. You listened to the 48 messages, hyperventilating, but you did it. You took notes, then erased them all.
And then you called your doctor. Because You Are Proactive. And it is clear that something needs to be adjusted. Because the slope is getting steeper, daily. Still.
*****
I don’t like to call it ‘depression’, because 1) it’s a crap word, a slug, as William Styron wrote,
and
2) it’s depression, and more.
There are many shades of gray, many tough-looking, bruiser diagnoses all hanging out and smoking on the playground together, arguing over who should get the last word, the last cigarette.
Ultimately, the diagnoses, when there’s a slew of them, don’t matter. They’re all proposals. Like that one? No? Don’t want to marry it? Have you tried this one? Handsome! Creative! Popular! Too popular? Got it. Take away the 2 and add a 1. That one has a nice urgent ring to it! Yes? Perfect! You look wonderful together!
Who cares? All you know is that you’re sliding. Your fingernails are long gone. Your fingertips are bleeding from trying to scrabble up a rocky slope that pitches more steeply all the time. At least, it seems to. It’s hard to know what is real.
Others reassure you that it will not always be like this, but you wonder if they have the right to make such reassurances.
Do they mean well? Absolutely. Do you want to believe them? Absolutely positively. Do you believe them?
No. Not right now.
*****
When you looked around, you used to be baffled by the ratio of upright people to prone, devastated people. Sure, you understood your math was off. You knew the prone, devastated people were hidden behind locked doors, if they could help it.
But still: There seemed to be a LOT of walking, functioning, smiling, grocery-shopping, 401-K-stuffing, married, baby-having, employed, vacation-planning people in the world, compared to, you know, YOU.
It’s still hard to shake.
Self-loathing creeps in and sets up a bitter lemonade stand. You can laugh it off in public, you can smile at the worn-looking checkout lady, but you cry when you climb inside the empty car and lock the door.
You can’t get it RIGHT. What the hell?!? What happened to the A+ grades, the glowing reviews, all that promise? Apparently, you had dreams once?
They always meant well, telling you that you were ‘special,’ a word you detest almost as much now as the word ‘depression.’ So when did you become a different kind of ‘special’? When did you become the person who drones on and on about sadness and meds and doctors? Even with the help of docs and medicine and exercise and two baby girls you love with your whole heart and then some, you still can’t get it RIGHT.
Why the f**k can’t you just get it RIGHT already?
You’re thinking it, and you’re sure somebody out there is thinking it, too. Alack. Catch and release. Nothing to be done.
You are trying. You are TRYING SO EFFING HARD, and still, when the sun comes up each day, you think, God, no WAY. You have got to be kidding, Lord Almighty. The human lifespan is too long, and it’s all your fault.
Why aren’t you BETTER? After all, you went to the hospital! You went to THAT place, the place that sounds to your ear like a sports stadium or a fabulous botanical garden where perfectly tasteful weddings are held.
It was neither, of course.
*****
You were allowed as much ice cream and peanut butter as you wanted there. The sweet, very sad girl with IV bandages and a gray sweatshirt showed you how to mix the two for a little gourmet fun. The Saturday-evening psych nurse made his famous homemade pizza for Movie Night, which you appreciated (although you weren’t allowed near the hot stove, because that’s how it is, precautions, precautions). You were glad they didn’t go with Benny & Joon as planned, and opted for Get Smart instead.
Can’t make this stuff up.
You watched Comedy Central behind the locked windows with an angry, suicidal young man with broken blue eyes who was shocked that you were laughing at the redneck comedians’ filthy jokes. A chick.
Later, the same young man insisted you sit down and play Gin Rummy with the suicidal posse. When you said you didn’t know how to play Gin Rummy, he said, Are you freakin’ kidding me? It’s so easy, even a bipolar retard could play it.
You pulled up a chair. I guess that’s my game, then, you said.
Oh, snap! They’re a tough crowd, but get a laugh out of the suicidal posse once, and you’ve got friends.
Later that night, the broken-eyed angry boy made a noose out of socks. You had wandered out of your room, sleepless, around the time of the discovery.
I’m in trouble, he whispered gruffly to you.
While the nurses prepared an observation room for the night for him, you asked him to set up Solitaire for you. You can never get the piles right. He shook his head affectionately. You moron.
Then you asked him to write you a poem, to take his mind off things. He did, apologizing for his terrible handwriting, which turned out to be beautiful, looping cursive—Victorian, almost. He then allowed himself to be led away, a fierce, sad sheep.
You still have the poem. A perfect circle of thought.
The other day, you saw him on the street, walking with a girl. He is upright. You hope he stays upright. But now you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is possible to be upright and devastated, at the same time. He knows, and you know.
And maybe you know, too.
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