Tag Archives: mental health

Forgetting

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My father called me, from inside the house. Asking if I knew of any zip ties. I reassured him that his guess what as good as mine. He asked me what I was up to. I said I was watching a show on Netflix with my husband. He replied “well that’s a priority.” before I hung up.

He called me back, a while later. Said that I was not to be forgiven for taking something as pure and light as thanksgiving and turning it into resentment. I had made it very clear that I needed to stay home and mourn Grandma in my own way. And then I went with my husband to the nursing home where his grandma stays, and endured the pain and vague atmospheric contamination of human feces to be, for a few moments, a member of a human family.

He called me again later and told me that he and my mother cried and stayed up at night, worrying about me and how I abuse them. That I should look for alternative housing solutions.

Which might be true. I used to think this place was all I ever wanted. But now it’s empty, and it exists as a pure vessel for pain.

He made an ultimatum during this last call. That I should come down there and talk.

He and I talk best during action. Neither of us are great at eye contact, and a helluva lot worse at seeing eye to eye. So I let him work on plumbing while I stacked wood. The only words he said to me during the half hour that I sweated? Asking where the air compressor was.

I left. I went upstairs. I tooled around.

I made a decision.

I heard him start to vacuum. I went out to my car and loaded my gun.

Today is the last night before my most hopeful treatment for depression, ECT. And I was ready to make it my last night.

I cried. And waited. And watched as his headlights flicked on and left.

It was the closest I have ever been to shooting myself.

If there’s any hope out there, it involves forgetting my family. I see that now.

Make it

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Go ahead.
Make
my decision
whether
or not
to commit suicide
about
you.
Make it
determine
if you’d like
to get close
to me,
since
you are so
spectacularly
against drama.
Make it
into the story
you almost told
about your life.
Make it
into a
reflection of you,
and then
let me break
that mirror
and cut you
with the shards.

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.

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.

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.