Tag Archives: depression

Long damn walks.

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I had made it nearly to 44th street when the ambulance pulled over by me.

“Whatcha doing?”

“Walking home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Off of 100th street.”

“That’s a long ways.”

“I know. I don’t suppose you could give me a short lift.”

“We can only take you to the hospital, which I don’t think you need.”

“Makes sense.”

“Got any friends you can call or anything?”

“Yeah.” My phone was long dead by this point. “But I think I’ll keep walking.”

“Anyways, get onto division or something. It’s illegal to walk on the highway.”

I complied, climbing the embankment to jog over a street.

It’s interesting how steps add up. Being suicidally depressed for as long as I’ve been, the only way you get anywhere is to put one foot in front of the other. There’s no real determination to it. Just a sense of inevitability and futility. What else are you gone do?

Taking these steps that seem to go nowhere have an interesting way of taking you places, though.

Thirst drove me back to the highway. Raw, rasping desperation that dropped me to my knees in front of lawn sprinklers, just for enough hydration to get me to the gas station.

Despite my previous warning, I continued on the highway. I was nearing my exit when a late model silver pickup slowed to a stop, then reversed toward me. The man inside, middle aged, wearing a heather tee and whitewashed shorts that were just a little too long to be acceptable fashion, asked me if I needed a ride.

“Oh god yes.”

I climbed in. “So you’ve been walking for awhile.”

“Yeah, I didn’t say it was the wisest decision. I’m just obstinate.”

We sit in silence.

“Thank you, though. You’ve probably saved me two hours.”

“Your husband isn’t gonna be mad I brought you home?”

“Nah, I imagine he will be relieved.”

An edge creeps into his voice.

“You aren’t a cop, are you?”

I chirped out an abrupt laugh. “No.”

“Can you prove it?”

“How would you prove something like that?”

“Take out your boob.”

I laughed again, trying to defuse the subtle malice that such a request suggests. “It’s this brick house here,” I say as he passes the turn.

He reverses down the road a ways, claiming “Nobody’s coming anyways.”

He doesn’t pull very far into the driveway, keeping his vehicle shielded from the house by a large pine tree. I get out, thanking him as I try to get my congealed limbs moving again.

Long walks are good for you, I remind myself.

HOW-dee.

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A long talk on the phone with Buttercup usually means tears. Almost always, actually.

This time I beat him to the punch, and was already crying when I dialed him. I wanted to set up a formalized accountability partnership with him, to give me a bit more support in my attempts to stop drinking.

Buttercup is an unusually wise man, and prone to babbling platitudes with a twist. We spoke of my last blog, how baffled I was that four people had shared on Facebook. I laughed through the tears, but he went on. “People are connecting with it because they’ve found someone eloquent enough to put words to what’s on their heart. There’s value in knowing that they aren’t alone in a struggle. That’s what they’re seeing, that at least one other person can relate, that they aren’t alone. You’re influencing people. You’re benefitting them, changing them”

I was quick to backpedal. “Yeah, but that post was basically just me admitting that I’ve been drinking. How would that change someone’s life?”

“Just because the subject matter is dark doesn’t mean the impact is dark.”

That sentence may prove to be one of those that stick with me, like “You don’t get a soul until you’re 26” or “Learning is like boiling a lobster. Ideally they never know it’s happening.” Before this moment, I had never realized how similar that Buttercup is to Mr. Shaw, my beloved high school physics teacher. They are both whip smart, funny, and quotable. They even have that same nerdy white boy look, and I highly suspect that buttercup might also throw an electrified pickle at someone.

See, this is what blogging is good for. Putting words down can change your relationship to those words, and you can discover things that you wouldn’t have otherwise. I can’t say that the realization that Mr. Shaw and Buttercup are similar is particularly world shaking, but it’s something.

Just because the subject matter is dark, doesn’t mean the impact is dark.

I don’t know what it’s like to not be depressed. I live in darkness. I roll around in it. I wear it like a scratchy, asbestos laden blanket, and I know it’s not good for me but I don’t know how to go through the world without the bit of protection and solace it gives me. But just because I’m dark doesn’t mean my impact has to be.

That thought tasted a bit like hope. It felt like it the moment he said it, too. Which is why I scrabbled for a notebook and told him. “I’m gonna write that down.”

Buttercup preened a bit at hearing that, then went to his dejection cycle. There was proud of himself, flaunting how OF COURSE he’s worth writing down, a claim of getting written down all the time, and finally an aww, just kidding, nobody writes me down or ever takes me seriously. It was immediately back to me after that. This man has the quickest pity parties I’ve ever seen.

 

He ruminated on my support structure, I suspect because I had recently commented on how it seems like I never use it or reach out. “See, you’ve got this amazing support structure where you crack the door a little bit so people can see in, but you don’t let them in to interact. You rail on about how alone you are, but it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. As long as you’re holding everyone at bay, you’re alone. ”

I guess I’m opening the door a crack for him. I told him that and he said “I’ll wait for you to let me in, until then, I just need an eye hole. Hehe, eyehole.”

He went on. “Another thing you find as you spend more time with people and engage with your support structure is that we all wear masks. You know the masks.” It’s true, I can identify several of his very well. Other people too. I can’t say whether or not I’m any good at identifying someone’s real face, but then again, I don’t have any practice with that. I don’t think anyone does. “You have to realize, it’s not an unhealthy thing to put on the mask of a happy person. It’s like, laughter is the quickest way to… how does that go? A smile is the quickest way to become happy? Something like that. It’s only phony for a while and then you become it. Fake it til you make it.”

“Number one platitude, right there.”

“Well, you know, it’s what I’m good at.” He has a bit of a sore spot regarding platitude accusation, and I’m more than willing to take a poke at it here and there. “Anyways, play the role of happy. Surround yourself with things that make you happy. Do things that make you happy. You’ll become happier. I struggle a lot with the concept that I wouldn’t be able to describe myself as classically happy. But I really think that classically happy is an illusion.”

At this point, I see a car pulled over by the side of the house. “Oh, the dead people are here.” It must have sounded a tad strange. “I mean, they’re visiting the cross. Where the man got killed last year.”

“So the dead people are the people associated with the dead man, gotcha.”

I noticed the buoyantly affectionate Golden Retriever, Rusty, had crossed the line for the electric fence and was greeting the visitors.

“Go get your dog from the grievers.” Buttercup chastised.

“Not my dog. Gabe is coming. Besides, for all we know he’s helping them.”

“Holy crap, did you se how well you just reframed that? That was brilliant! Did you see yourself doing that? Wow. Learn from that, I bet you could get really good at-”

I was impatient enough hearing his praise that I interrupted and spat out the wisest thing I’ve said all day. “Of COURSE I thought of that. You act like I can’t see these things, I see all kinds of things, I just usually choose the bad.”

We both are actually a little stunned by how profoundly honest I was in that moment.

All he was willing to say to that was “Yeah. HOW-dee.”

We move on to talking about other random stuff.

When the call ended, I was laughing.

There were no more tears.

Doing and not doing

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I haven’t been blogging lately. Or writing at all, really. Or exercising. Or getting up on time in the morning. One thing that I have been doing is drinking.

Depression and alcohol abuse are really a chicken and the egg problem. I know the depression came first in my case, since the first time that I told someone I wanted to kill myself was second grade, and I certainly wasn’t abusing alcohol then.

Together, my drinking and my depression spiral with each other, in an elegant, lumbering dance to the shame pit.

My husband mentioned to me regarding my recent binges “I don’t know what happened, you were doing so well.” It was hard to hear my sobriety as a thing that I would or could be doing well at, or think that it has a moralistic view to it, not drinking good, drinking bad. This is because I like to pretend alcohol doesn’t have a grip on me, or at least not that bad of one. These are the lies I tell myself.

I know what drinking does to me. I know what it did to me, the damage it’s caused. A hundred pounds of weight gain, 2 institutionalizations, a brilliant mind that’s become twisted with doubt and fear, wasted time
wasted life
getting wasted.

Why did I write today? I don’t know. To be honest, I had given up on me writing. I guess it’s because I was thinking about the measures of success. For me, today was a failure because I didn’t get up on time and I had drank the night before. I viewed it as a failure before it even started. I’m crying right now at that realization, the standards I hold myself to. I know I wouldn’t want anyone else to think the way that I think, especially because today was a good day. I cut a lot of wood with my husband and my dad. I spent 6 hours with some of my favorite people planning for an Artprize project that’s bigger and more out of my scope that I would ever dream of accomplishing, and I’m honored to be a part of. But as we were packing up, I was overwhelmed by the sense of emptiness that sank in my chest. I don’t ever seem to remember the good moments, the laughter, the productivity, the engagement with the team. But I know I will remember that feeling of emptiness. In fact, it’s creeping in right now.

Maybe I’ll go have a drink.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll try to focus my self sabotage making me human, not a failure.

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.

Reconsidering CR, Part 2

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I went back to the Monday night group tonight and it affirmed that I should continue going to Celebrate Recovery.

We heard a testimony from a woman who told a story of hiking between two mountains in Israel. She was taking this path through the desert because she was told there was an oasis in the end. She likened it to CR; even though there may not be any signs of life, and everything still looks like desert, if you stick with it there’s a miracle in the end.

I also had a conversation with Dan, because it turns out that he heard about my blog post. The internet got real small for me that day.

It was really nice to talk to him.

I’m writing the following down so I’ll remember it.
He can tell I’m not a quitter by how many barriers that I have up. In a year, we’re supposed to talk again and see if I’ve figured out why those two concepts are related.
It sounded like an elaborate ploy to me. I mean, if you tell me to attend for a year so I can harass him about that question, then he’s just counting on my stubbornness. He insisted it wasn’t a ploy, though.

I guess I’ll find out this year.