Sanity

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The question that got me tonight was “What is your definition of sanity?” It’s a question almost too simple and too complex at the same time. I didn’t want to answer it at all because I was sure my response would be way out of bounds from normal, so, naturally, I volunteered to go first.

I don’t think there’s any such thing. I think that everyone’s got some things that are seriously dysfunctional in their life. I think you can’t look at anyone and declare they are sane or not. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a sane person. I’ve seen some that are radically not, but that tends to come with the fact that I’ve spent a combined 5 weeks in psychiatric facilities over the last two years. I’ve seen some crazy people, but I’ve yet to see any sane ones.

One of the ladies made the observation “If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then sanity must be the opposite; learning from mistakes and correcting behaviors.” I like that a lot, it’s better than the definition the book provided. “Wholeness of mind, making decisions based on truth.”

I still stick with the idea that there’s no such thing as sanity. There’s just insane that’s thinly veiled.

Long day.

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I woke up early, under the advisement to see the day as an opportunity to create. The night before, Denise had been teasing me lightly about my last blog post via text. Very shortly, I was in her car, driving to a storage place as a GRMakers field trip. At one point during our conversation, I turn on my hippie voice and declare “I’m just one of those artist types, man.”
Quick and devilishly observant as ever, Denise replied “So you need constant reassurances and validation?”
She had me. “I don’t know abou- Yes.”
As we laughed and I made faces to exaggerate my hurt, I was actually feeling a little stung. She was quick to reassure me. “It’s totally okay, I am too.”

We reached our destination, a large brick building with an entryway of swooping curved metal. We were there to meet a guy who buys up the fixtures and furniture of businesses that close down and resells it. His warehouse is massive. The downstairs is rented out, and we passed factory workers, who would look up from either their phones or their work and watch us curiously. There were rows upon rows upon rows of racks filled with racks or barrels or little metal tidbits. The place seemed endless. Then we got upstairs, where we could really dive into the miscellany that we were there to look at.

~

As I walked up to rest of the group(inspecting desks), Buttercup broke from the herd to say hi and pulls me aside. “You know, as you were walking up here- today is the first time I can like SEE that you’ve lost weight. You’re like a different person.” Sometimes I think he says these things just to perplex me. It’d be within his personality to drop weird statements to throw me off. He’s one of my truest friends, but about 12% of the time he’s an asshole. There’s the 88% of the friendship where he builds me up and we joke together and muse about people, but the 12% can rip you right down(hence the nickname Buttercup). I didn’t get his motives, he had a funny look on his face and we’ve got enough history of us pushing each other that I’m generally second, third, and fourth guessing anything he says.

I don’t usually see the lost weight(about 45 pounds), I just see how far I have to go to. And I’m certainly not a different person. In fact, that’s the wall I keep bumping into with my mental health. I know that no matter how I progress or what changes I make, I’m still me. And I’d still be living my life. But the real key of this whole experience was that it’s winter. This is the first time he’s seen me without a hoodie or jacket on in months. Of course I finally look like I’ve lost weight.

~

As a fledgling makerspace, this place was ideal to outfit the place. We eagerly plotted about desks, chairs, materials racks, transformers, carts, saws, dust collectors, fans, cables, shelves, and a welding table. The two things that interested me most were the barrels of chain(for my chain horse idea) and these great big metal spoke wheels that were pulled from an overhead conveyance system. When I saw them, I saw Giraffecycle.

Giraffecycle is a very old idea of mine, I’ve wanted to build her since I was a small child. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A pedal powered vehicle in the shape of a giraffe. Preferably life size, and with an articulating neck.

Building her would be a dream come true.

Eh, probably never gonna happen. But there’s power in dreaming, and I was basking in that joy for the rest of the day.

~

 
After that I went to work. The slightest task can become a festival of tangents there. All I had to do was assemble two more parts to fill an order. I made the argument for setting up a machine to make new parts for an order, but my father insisted that I sand some polished display hinges to send them out, he’d rather get the order out ASAP. I didn’t want to throw away the work that someone had already put into polishing them, but I did as he asked. It involved chucking up the little lathe with a thin rod wrapped in sandpaper and center drilling one end. Then put the rod between the chuck and the live center support, and after more fiddling around, flipped on the lathe and started to sand the tricky inner curve of the part.

The sandpaper immediately shredded. We had center drilled the wrong end, so the sandpaper was wrapped wrong. More fiddling around, cleaning the rod and replacing the papers. But I got it done, went to the other buffing jack to sand the rest of the part, and reassembled the hinge. Then we realized there are no more flanges, and my father decides that if I have to make 2, I should make eight instead, that way the whole order will match instead of some having a zinc finish and some plain.

So I start welding flanges. At one point, I notice some moisture on my glove. I was baffled. I looked at the ceiling for a leak, I wonder if maybe I had wiped my nose or something without remembering. Then I look at the torch. The water cooled TIG welding torch. There was a leak.

I only had two more parts left, 125 amps of electricity and a leaking torch, bad idea, but surely it could hold out for two more parts? The next arc strike makes my hand tingle. BETTER NOT.

I watched for a moment as my dad repaired the leak. “I guess I’ll go vacuum or something.”
“Don’t you want to know how to do this next time it happens?”
“Yeah, but I also feel bad for not being productive right now.”
I stayed standing right there, productivity be damned. Learning is important too.

Repair complete, I finish the parts and my father and I had another discussion, where it was determined that we should indeed set up the CNC machine and run more new parts. Turns out that the 2 pieces I had worked so hard on had a different hole pattern than the rest. It took until after I sanded away the nice polished finish that I was so keen to preserve earlier. Sigh.

~

My evening was spent at Celebrate Recovery and ended with squeezing arms wrapped around my ribcage. Trudy came to visit me and brought with her a hand lettered card for me with a quote from Sir Francis Bacon. It represents our shared struggles and was really very sweet. It’s going on my wall.

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”

Right now I am certain of only one thing; that it’s time for bed.

Call it good.

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“I’ve been treading water.” I came into therapy with an immediate admission of guilt- I’ve not been writing. I’ve been sleeping instead of living. I lamented my laziness. That’s what it’s always been treated as.

Kathy immediately countered with “What if you’re not being lazy? What if it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism? Someone that’s abused has a hard time envisioning a life where they aren’t abused. So they seek out familiarity. You’ve said yourself that you don’t know what it means to be happy. It’s very normal for people to have a ‘default mode’ that they switch back to.” She alluded back to my first words. “You’re going back to your default to avoid having to swim.”

“If you don’t know how to move forward, you’ll seek familiarity. You’re learning how to be a new you, to be happy.” The shaft of light that’s been progressing across the room is getting closer to hitting her eyes and I wonder why she doesn’t shift to run away from it, at least for a little while.

I don’t know what a new me will look like. I don’t even really know what the old me looked like. Pretty sure I hate them both. I asked “How will I know that the me I am, the me I’m becoming, the me I will be, is a worthwhile one?”

“Good question. How indeed?”

“I guess I have to look to others because people that fall short of the standards that society sets, or the ones that aren’t contributing to the GDP or whatever, I still think they have worth.”

Her reply was a rigorous batch of finger quotes. I don’t think her fingers stopped wagging at any point. “Those that don’t ‘Measure up’ or ‘have value’ by ‘societies standards’ of ‘worth’ are still worthwhile and you know that. So on some level you must know that about yourself.”  She gives me a gentle smile. “I think you just give up on yourself too quickly.”

“Grandma saw your value, right?”
“I don’t know that.” I tend to view it as a sort of “gotcha” technique when she invokes the name of my recently deceased grandmother, but I don’t argue with the fact that it’s highly effective.
“Would grandma have wanted for you to give up on life? To kill yourself?”
This is an easy question. I actually start laughing through the tears. No, she absolutely would not have and several times she was the reason I didn’t.
“So you know that, even if you can’t quite put it into words. And if you can know that, there will be other knowings.” She finally shifts to avoid the beam of light. It was driving me crazy.

We transition somehow into the topic of creating.
I ask her if she tells all her clients to create or if I’m special.
“Yes, we are all creating. It’s what we’re supposed to do. I’m a person of faith, I don’t know where you stand with that, but I think God created us to be creators. To create with him. When you create, you are bringing yourself strongly into the world.”

“If you’ve stopped creating, if you’ve given up to just lie in bed, of course you aren’t going to feel purpose and joy. People create with words, things, ideas. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s like God says ‘I gave you this huge big world, enjoy it!’ Look at it from the perspective of ‘How can I go out in the world and create today?’ Co-create with God. Have fun. Enjoy life.”

“Some people like to live in very prescribed ways, they don’t want to be challenged. It’s safer living that way, though it limits their creativity. You are not one of those people, don’t try to live like you are.”

“Poets, prophets, artists, musicians, they are on the fringe of society because they think outside the box. Artists challenge society. But we can’t force them to think the way society does. You’ve been dealing with being different by assuming you are flawed or broken. I don’t fit in, therefore I’m bad. What you don’t see is that you’re brilliant. You have the ability to see beyond what’s there. You’re not bad, broken, lazy or flawed. Those are labels that you’ve accepted. I’m challenging that, I’m suggesting that it was never true.”

“Maybe you’re buying into those thoughts because you don’t fit into somebody’s idea of what it means to be productive(I use that word a lot). I wish I could just shake you!” She looks visibly exasperated while she gesticulates at the writing I’ve brought in to give to her.

“Van Gogh was never appreciated in his time and it caused him to be very depressed. I just wish that he could have listened to his critics and talked back to them a bit. ‘That’s not how you do it. Clearly it’s not. It is the way that I do it.’”

“So have your voice. Express what’s inside. Maybe people will judge, because that’s what society likes to do, but you have to remember that those are the insecure people who like to live in very prescribed ways. I have no intent of doing that or aspiring to be that.”

“Approach every day as an opportunity to create, and it brings with it a sense of peace and happiness.”

“There’s still our prophets, our creators, our edge live-ers. I’m okay with that, because they’ve got something to say.”

“You have a voice, you have creative abilities, please don’t stifle it. Please don’t take yourself out of the game. That’s what you are doing when you just stay in bed.”

“God made some crazy things, and he called them good. So create, and call it good.”

Blank

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I remember frantically scrabbling around the house, looking for a bible. I was at a low point and looking for some words of wisdom, or perhaps salvation, in my final hours. I’ve had a lot of final hours and conversations with guns, little blocks of invincibility where you are prepared to die and nothing can hurt you but yourself. This time, I needed God.

I saw a bible atop a pile of clutter and checked it. There were several pages of notes about horse training, and then nothing.

Boxes of books were in another room. I had my husband help me stack and re-stack the boxes as I looked through each in turn. I found another one.

This one had a few meager sketches from a multicolored pencil in it. Otherwise, it was blank.

The house was torn apart for a renovating project. That giant bookshelf in the middle of the destruction zone, covered in towels and plaster dust. I lifted up a wrinkled sheet and thumbed along the dusty spines. I found a bible.

I opened it. Blank, every page blank.

Not again.

I could not find a single real bible in the apartment. The place was littered with fake ones from my sister, she used to work for a publisher and she’d commandeer the binding sample copies whenever she could. They make great gifts.

I once gave one to a friend of mine who is a professor of anthropology, and his eyes positively sparkled. “It’s like, it’s so beautiful. I don’t even know what I want to do with it, there’s so many possibilities, it’s just pregnant with promise.”

I laughed and took a swallow of my craft beer. “I’m sure you’ll think of something good.”

And then here I was, searching desperately for the word of god and not finding it.

Seems to be a metaphor for my relationship with religion. I seek for something real, tangible, and useful to grasp hold of, and every time I think I’ve found it, it ends up being empty.

I never did find a bible that day. But I did borrow one later. The promise of it was good enough to get me through the night, and that was good enough for that night.

The things you find

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I was looking for a spool of jewelry chain. See, I had an idea for a sculpture, actual inspiration! I’ve been so lacking in inspiration lately, it’s seeped away and taken my motivation for living with it. I knew, I just knew, that I owned a spool of fine aluminum chain that would be perfect for prototyping my idea. Trick is finding it among the scattered remains of 3 household and 5 buildings that my life is divided between. I looked through stacks and boxes and tubs and piles and simply could not find my bin of craft supplies that I would have expected the chain to end up in.

But I found a lot more along the way. I gave up on finding the chain and resigned myself to buying a length of chain at the hardware store. I stopped by the freezer to grab a pizza for lunch, and my eyes landed on one last box- a box out of place, out of order. I set the pizza on the punching bag and started rifling through the box.

There was lots of stuff in there. Pounding board for leateherworking, a number of books, a ream of paper, paintbrushes, a computer monitor, an unopened package of lip glosses that had been a gift, and one item that ended up being the greatest girt the box had to offer. No, it wasn’t the spool of chain.

It was a sketchbook, unblemished except for one page. I have this tendency to hoard art supplies but then never use them. Before they are used, they are nice and clean and have the utmost of potential. They could turn into anything. After I touch them, they tend to have turned into trash. At least in my head. However, this sketchbook had a To-do list written on it.

Start load of laundry

Finish load of laundry

Bucket to compost heap

Get over yourself

Get over yourself.

GET OVER YOURSELF!

Do NOT take a pill

Bucket back to house

Throw away booze

Put seeds in pile

Fucking plant them

Throw shit away

Cough drops back downstairs

This was probably the last thing I had written before spending three weeks of May 2012 in a mental institution. I was living in squalor and shame, I was trying to stop drinking a fifth a day and had chosen to get anxiety meds to help in that goal. I just needed to get to my first counseling appointment on Sunday with my parents, I just needed to make it til them. Ativan, twice a day, no booze. Seems like easy enough instructions, but I had failed to tell the nurse practitioner how entrenched I was in the drinking.  I remember him asking if I felt I could take the pills as prescribed. I didn’t know. Did I live alone? No, I had my grandma. She was in the waiting room.

Of all the appointments that I brought grandma too, this was the only one for me. I was nervous and I wanted her with me, I don’t know if that was selfish, at the time she was fighting some persistent infections and was fairly weak. I sometimes wonder what she was thinking that day, as she waited for me in  my appointment. As she was called in to consult about holding my medications for me, I remember thinking that she wasn’t the right person for the job. She was having a hard time remembering what she had done in the morning by lunchtime, it would be too easy to lie to her.

We went home, freshly re-diagnosed with depression with anxiety and I felt victorious over my baser instincts. Here I was, choosing the medically sound way to start handling my demons, instead of drinking to forget. Surely this was the path towards pulling myself up and out.

It’s too bad it wasn’t.

Making sparks

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benrouschpic

Just one of the many reasons that I love GRMakers.

The people there are an astounding community of thinkers, tinkerers, and do-ers. I can honestly say that I don’t know what I would be like without GRMakers, it’s been a year of learning, growing and connecting. Some of my most trusted friends are people that I have met at makers.

If you consider yourself a maker in any way, I encourage you to check out https://www.grmakers.com/ and see how to get involved. If you are in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, come out to the space for the free social on Wednesday nights from eight to midnight.

Unintentional body image humor

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My mom shows my sister and I an ad of a young woman in a tiny blue bikini with dangly fringe. “That’s gonna be my swimsuit this year.”

I stare blankly at her. “Okay.”

She steps back, grinning with exasperation. “It was supposed to be a joke, it’s funny, laugh!”

“I’m trying to not make assumptions about your comfort level with your body.”

That got laughs.