"Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights...

Ok, so, I probably ought to post something about where I've been for a month, and I probably will because it seems weird to drop off the radar and not say a word of explanation.  But for the moment I really wanted to post this link because I just about died laughing, and recently I almost died in a much less fun way (ok, maybe I just felt like I was going to die, but still), so without further ado:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piehigh22.jpg

Hey everybody - just saying hello briefly; I'm still here.  I did a major psychiatric faceplant last week, so I've been maintaining radio silence (not entirely voluntary: it was/is that kind of depression that results in near-coma).  Things are getting better with a little lithium on board, and the idea is that in a couple of weeks it all will be much more normal.  For now, waiting and watching and holding on.

Yesterday I turned in the last assignment I will ever have to do in my bid for the Master’s Degree in English Literature. Can I get a huzzah? Wait…wait…that was a Victorian lit class I just finished and I seem to have read myself back in time. We don’t use huzzah anymore, do we? Can I get a w00t?

 

This happened the last time I got a degree in anything, too. I started to enjoy it just as I was getting done with it. Pressure off, the light at the end of the tunnel visible, I can finally just pay attention to the work itself. I didn’t expect to really enjoy a Victorian short fiction class, but I like to take random classes in things I’ve never studied before. Like to be well-rounded, you know. So I took this class, and lo and behold, found that there is nothing new under the sun. As always, the stories dealt with the same things humans are always dealing with – love, sex, mortality, God, the invention of the steam engine and imperialism spreading at a genteelly viral intensity. 

 

We’re still pretty much dealing with all that today, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the Victorians’ stories could have been written in the 21^st century (except for the tendency of the characters to blurt out “huzzah” and call each other “governor” at random intervals. What will 23^rd century readers make fun of us for saying? Meh. Whatever). 

 

Anyway, here are links to a few that I found to be really outstanding. If you’ve never read anything by Tagore, get on it. I think he may be my favorite author.

 

The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore Especially read “Once There Was a King,” a very good, very short story that deals with metafictional analysis in a way I didn’t expect from a Victorian. “Chronological snobbery,” anyone?

 

Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling I recommend the story “They.” I always try to enjoy ghost stories, but since having my own ghost they’ve lost their allure. What I mean is, when you lose someone close to you it’s sometimes hard to forget that ghosts probably at one time had a family full of mourners. “They” is the ghost story for people who have known a little grief.

 

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens If you have seen the cartoon, the movie, the musical, the Christmas pageant or the broadway revue but you haven’t read the story, you don’t know “A Christmas Carol.” In fact, I didn’t know “A Christmas Carol” till I’d read it three or four times. There’s a lot more depth here than many will credit the story with. (Yes, the Disney version staring Scrooge McDuck is pretty good too, but it’s still missing a little something you can get from reading the original.)

For the longest time I’ve been puzzled and a little disturbed by the feeling that I just didn’t miss my mom as much as I should. I mean, she played a huge role in my life. We were close. That was true for all of her kids – even when we moved out, we talked to her nearly every day. 

 

I’ve noted a few instances in which I consciously really wished she was still here, and they were intensely painful (strange to want to feel pain, but I do; being bipolar, I experience precious few times when my emotions correspond appropriately and naturally to events). I’ve waited for more of what I’d consider appropriate expressions of grief, and now that we’re approaching the second anniversary of her death I’m letting go of that. Death is frightening, unknown, and particularly so for me as this was the first death I’d experienced of someone so close. It’s hard not to want to control things, but so many friends, therapists and spiritual advisors have offered the advice, “stop trying to control things,” that I may have to believe they have a point.

 

I know they have a point – I know they’re right – because every time I do begin to let go, things open up. Like the realization I had this morning that maybe I do miss her, in less obvious ways. When I wake up in the morning I feel lost, a new experience since her death. Why do I feel lost? I used to have a set routine in which I got up, ran a few miles, and came back home to talk to her (when I was not living at home, I’d call her). We’d talk about whatever, and after a cup of tea I’d get on with my day. Of course I have a new routine now, especially thanks to Sigrid: get up, work out, walk puppy, feed puppy. Even after that, there’s a feeling of…now what? And there’s a feeling of “now what?” all day long, no matter how much purpose I might objectively have. Wake up, work out, walk puppy, feed puppy…now what? Go to church, go to lunch, study…now what?

 

In the evening I’m faced with a corresponding mantra. I reach the end of the day, and I don’t want to go to bed. I realize I am thinking, “is that all?” Is it? Take care of the pup, take care of the garden, take care of the house, study, plan for the future, hope I’ll have someone to spend it with. At the end of each day, though, I can hardly believe no more has happened. I know life moves in inches as often as it moves in leaps and bounds, and I can be patient. But no amount of patience is going to bring her back or make death go away.

 

Which is not what I want, really, anyway. What I really want is to finally develop the faith to believe death isn’t such a tremendous, evil force, and with that faith to say it’s ok that she’s not coming back. I need, also, to find another compass. I can’t direct myself by hers anymore, at least not hers alone. I have to find the answers to “now what” and “is that all” for myself.

 

At this moment, “now what” is to play with the pup.

I seem to be full of existential angst these days.  But, you know what?  Only reasonably happy people have time for existential angst.  The depressed, unless they're making themselves depressed by focusing on existential problems, are too busy trying to survive.  So.  Here's to being full of existential angst, which must mean I'm not depressed. 

So, on the advice of friends, I'm founding a DIY veterinary clinic.  We'll provide pointers and pointy things - scissors, needles, pokey-proddy instruments - you do the work.  Cat has an abscess?  Bring him in - and bring the family too, because you'll need some cat wranglers to pin him while you lance, evacuate and place a drain in that puppy - er, kitty.  Bring your own boot, and we'll show you how to neuter him while you're at it.

In this economy, we can't afford not to be entrepreneurs.

On the other hand, maybe I ought to just try getting more sleep.  So far, the Abilify is working wonders and I'm experiencing hardly any side effects.  The one I am getting acquainted with is insomnia.  Or re-acquainted, I should say.  I was quite an insomniac as a kid.  I would wake up around one a.m. and play until I was too tired to keep my eyes open, then sleep a couple hours until it was time to get up.  Which is pretty much what I did last night.  Up at one, I tried to just read a little in the hope that it would settle me.  I read enough to get tired of one individual book, and started on another, then went to another, and then a couple hours had gone by.  I clearly wasn't going back to sleep.  At three am, I went outside and ran a couple of miles.  From four to six, I painted.  From 6 to 6:45 I managed a little shuteye, then was up for the day.  It's now eight pm and I'm not that tired.

I'd suspect this was mania except that it's so normal for me.  I don't have excessive energy and I'm not taking on too much, and I have a normal range of emotions.  All I have is the eagerness to be up doing things, and not much sleepiness.  So, I'll be keeping an eye on this.  And enjoying it.  It's certainly a fine compensation for years of dread in the face of getting up in the morning.  In addition to which, it gives me plenty of extra time for entrepreneurial scheming...

I’m still afraid of God. That fear is like kudzu. It tangles up with everything and it’s impossible to kill. And when you think you’ve cut it out completely, you wake up and there’s a little shoot peering up at you once again.

 

If God is so good, why is life so painful? Why is there so much at risk? When all we want is to make sure the people we love are safe and secure and healthy, why is that the one thing we can never have? Why is it that this uncertainty has to extend into the next life? I’m not just deprived of that security here – my mom got cancer and died; I can’t even have certainty that she’s safe and secure in the next world. And this faith that I love for so many reasons seems to send only mixed messages. God loves you, but your odds of feeling loved by Him are kind of narrow. 

 

That last line bothers me. My life is wonderful. I just found a drug that finally seems to be taking the edge off of my bipolar disorder. My mom may be gone, but I have my dad, wonderful siblings, friends, a great church community, a puppy (who’s great at drawing attention to how wonderful life is on a very simple plane). I should feel loved by God, since all this comes from Him.

 

But…why cancer? Why death at all? I know the theological explanations. But God is God. He can do anything. With so much at risk – eternal damnation, in the Christian paradigm – why mess around? If He loves us so much, why not make eternal life a sure thing? 

 

In The Last Temptation of Christ Nikos Kazantzakis writes, “to God, 1,000 years may be as a day, but to us 1,000 years are still 1,000 years.” Maybe I should hesitate to quote an excommunicated author’s blacklisted book, but it reflects my feeling. I know there’s so much we can’t possibly understand, and I have more hope in that ignorance than in what I “know,” which is not much. Maybe that is what “evidence of things not seen” means. But what I wrote above is my direct experience in this life. Unfortunately, it’s a lot more vivid than my faith is at this point.

Forgive me.

I went out to dinner with a vegan friend on Friday night.  I haven't seen her in a while, and so I was filling her in on all the stuff that's happened in the past month or so (see last post).  Hopefully it wasn't deadly boring to hear about, because it's hard for me to feel honest with people unless they know a few things - that I'm no longer vegan, that I'm bipolar, and that I'm struggling hard to find balance in my life right now, so my behavior may look odd to those who've known me for a long time.  We went to a vegan restaurant, which I still love (it amazes me what you can do with plant-based food: I had the "Sloppy Joseph," a sloppy Joe made with TVP, and I kid you not, it is better than the real thing).  But I felt uncomfortable until I fessed that I now eat animals.

I also had to fess to the Atkins Experiment, if only because I think it's grotesquely fascinating.  We spoke in the hushed tones in which an adolescent might recount ghost stories around a summer camp-campfire.  "...and they eat steak and eggs for breakfast...and in order to speed up ketosis they eat whole tablespoons of coconut oil - right from the jar!  The book actually recommends you take psyllium capsules, because you can't eat almost any fiber for two weeks.  Can you imagine?” (No vegan has ever had to look twice at psyllium capsules, for obvious reasons.)

 

When I was doing Atkins, I talked to lots of Atkins dieters, and it didn’t seem so weird.  What’s more, they lost weight doing it.  I don’t know how healthy they were, otherwise, especially considering somewhat recent findings that it’s really high sugar intake that probably leads to heart disease, and not high fat intake, which means Atkins people are safer than many vegans as far as cardiovascular health. 

 

Being with my vegan friends, however, Atkins looks like the diet from another planet.  You want me to eat what?

 

It’s funny that among my friends and family I have always been considered independent to a fault, yet when put with Atkins dieters I can easily be persuaded that the Atkins diet is the pinnacle of healthy eating.  Conversely, when put among vegans, veganism looks like the gateway to longevity.  I am actually swayed very easily, because the facts simply don’t speak for themselves.  I fail to realize how significant is interpretation.  Do you read “Akins New Diet Revolution” in the same tone as a grisly ghost story, or in the tone of a professional paper?  Something so subtle as vocal tone can make or break interpretation.  And we are bought and sold on interpretation, which is also called…advertising.

 

 In what tone did you read this?  It sounded sort of like someone smacking herself upside the head, to me.  Wake up, stupid.  Do your own interpreting.

I haven’t written much about The Mood Disorder recently because I haven’t got a clue what to say about it. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, including a very bad couple of weeks of depression, the worst I’ve seen in six months. Even Lamictal withdrawal didn’t rival this. From what I can gather, it was an example of genuine bipolar depression. K very accurately described it as a kind of depression in which you wake up and feel as if there is a fat lady sitting on you. Literally, if someone had held a gun to my head, I would not have gotten up. I simply did not care.

 

This explains – apologies to the neighbors – the presence of an entire unit of compost sitting in our driveway for close to three weeks (it may have been an entire three weeks – I lost all sense of time during this episode). I’ve been an utter recluse, barely speaking to anyone even when I forced myself to go to church and keep engagements. God willing, Sigrid’s puppy training isn’t irremediably damaged as a result of my apathy. To be honest, if apathy was the worst she received, she’s fortunate. It wasn’t just a deep depression, but mixed, with definite periods of rage. How does anyone live with a bipolar person? If my moods are this confusing to me – and I know what I’m thinking (you are a FREAK chewing gum that loud / why the **** would you tie your shoe in THAT spot on the sidewalk / did you get your hair cut like that JUST to torture me?!) – I can’t imagine what they must be like for people outside my head. 

 

So, in desperation, I did something I still regard with ambivalence. I’ve done it before, and for the same reason, but I’d recently concluded it was wrong for me. That decision notwithstanding, I decided once again to give up veganism, and this time to give it up for the extreme opposite: a ketogenic diet. There’s research suggesting ketogenic diets, which sometimes are therapeutic for epileptic patients, may also be effective for those of us with bipolar disorder. (There is a precedent here – anticonvulsants, obviously effective for epileptics, also stabilize mood in bipolar sufferers. Ergo, perhaps other things effective for epileptics will help bipolar patients.) The Atkins diet is a popular version of the ketogenic diet, but the medical treatment tends to be a bit more strict.

 

I tried it for two weeks. Mostly, I tried hard not to think of my ethical position. I don’t forgo eating animals because I believe they should not be eaten, but because the way we farm and slaughter them in the US is abominable. The problem is that I can’t afford to pay for organic, humanely-raised, humanely-slaughtered meat. I might be able to afford it for myself alone (though not while eating it in the quantities I consumed for this diet), but I feed Sigrid a raw diet, which means 2 lbs per day of animal parts (meaty bones, organs and muscle meat) for her alone. I can afford to feed her this if I keep my cost at $1 per pound or less. I have yet to find organic, free-range meat for that price with any reliability. Therefore, I mostly had to avoid considering all the reasons I find consuming meat a horrible prospect.

 

I felt calmer. The mental chatter, my constant soundtrack, diminished. I assume everyone doesn’t experience this, the barrage of thoughts that plays like elevator music in my skull. I’m not talking about voices; I’m not schizophrenic. Usually they are loops of anxious thoughts, the same ones over and over, which never really develop into anything more. “What if something happens to my dad? What if I don’t have a place to live? What if my puppy gets parvo? What if…” Repeat. After a while I hardly hear them in a conscious way, which makes them very hard to address. If I could, I could examine them and respond. “Sigrid has been vaccinated multiple times. Sigrid doesn’t play with dogs we don’t know. Sigrid is generally healthy. In the end, whether she gets parvo is out of my hands.” Rest.   I assume everyone doesn’t experience this because when I am not depressed, I don’t. I still worry at a normal level, but it isn’t like this endless, pointless chatter.

 

My mood, however, continued to fall, and my anxiety rose. Additionally, in order to bring those things back into alignment, I usually apply a hard workout, which was impossible without carbohydrates to fuel me. My endurance was halved, and with it my endorphins. This was the deal-breaker. 

 

Meanwhile, a therapist has been working with me on mindfulness. This is the effort to stay in the moment constantly, to observe without judging, always accepting, and only questioning to examine the effectiveness of my responses to what life throws at me. This was a God-send, but with one more addition it became something spectacular.

 

Last Tuesday I started taking Abilify. I almost didn’t. My doctor prescribed it, I went home and researched it, and sat staring at the sample pack dully. In the world of psychiatric medications, struggling to comply is par for the course. Most of us just don’t want to take crazymeds. They often have untenable side effects, and we may even feel ambivalent about a medication’s main effect (consider bipolars who have to give up euphoric manias in order to avoid psychoses, or in my case simply a feeling of inauthenticity when I think of a chemical altering my mental responses). At the prodding of a therapist and another friend who takes the drug, I decided to give it three weeks, the length of time my samples will last. 

 

The compost pile has been moved. I am reading again (something I do only with great pain and reluctance when depressed, because it takes hours, I have to read and re-read, and frequently retain very little. I now remember why I became a literature major. Oh yeah – I like reading. I read pretty darn good. I remember stuff. I like thinking about the stuff I remember from my reading. Welcome back, Me.). I am excited to get out of bed in the morning (Sigrid woke me up at 3:30 this morning and though I didn’t have to be up till 4:30, I got up and did some…reading. J ) I cleaned the whole house yesterday and made bread this afternoon. Listening to music I’ve heard a thousand times, I heard new riffs and picked out nuances I’d never previously spotted. 

 

So, I am cautiously optimistic. Too many things have gone wrong with my meds in the past for me to offer more, but I am enjoying this so long as it lasts, and I hope it lasts forever. I haven’t felt this alive in a long time. 

Last night, I dreamed that instead of my mom being dead, my parents were just divorced.  My dad said to me, "I'm going to stop living as if I was married.  I'm going to live as if  I was never married."

Weird, especially if you knew my parents - they were married 43 years.

Ok, so, twice-a-month updates may be the norm for a while here.  Sorry.  I'd love to write all about the pup but I'm spending so much time entertaining her that I don't have any left for recording!  Today we walked in the morning, had a training session, went for a hike by the river, and spent some time at church visiting Auntie K.  We also both had our first close encounter with stinging nettles, which are fascinating.  "Stinging" is an overstatement - it's more like "itching/irritating/hive-eliciting" nettles.  What's cool is that the "sting" happened around 2 pm, and now there's just this mild tingly feeling that's almost pleasant.  I see why some people use them therapeutically.  Ahem.  And erotically.  Bah!  I did not want to think about that - sorry.

I'm having an interesting vegan experience, too.  Currently my refrigerator contains, for the first time in our life together: 2 whole chicken fryers, a tub of chicken livers, a Costco-sized package of chicken thighs, 1-lb packets of pork shoulder, and 1.2 lbs of hog skin/subcutaneous fat.  Those last two items I cut down and packaged up, myself.  I hope the pup is enjoying her diet.  I'm not.

I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to meat shopping.  What part of the animal is that?  What animal did it come from?  Is that a good price? 

I once posted about the nutty things veterinary people do when they have too much time on their hands.  I thought it was confined to the workplace.  I was never really tempted to personally sample pieces of dry dog kibble when alone.  Today, however, I proved that you can take the girl out of the vet clinic, but you can't take the vet clinic out of the girl.

Ever tried "Bitter Ick" spray?  It's the new and improved version of bitter apple, which people have used for years to spray on things they didn't want their puppies/dogs to chew.  Never wanting to inflict on my troops anything I wouldn't want to experience, myself, I thought...  Well, you can guess. 

Honestly, sucking on an aspirin for an hour would have been more pleasant than tasting "Bitter Ick" for a split second. The only worse thing I've tasted - also in a veterinary setting, coincidentally - was liquid metronidazole.  This medication gets prescribed for humans from time to time as well, a fairly effective antibiotic (Flagyl is the common drug name for metronidazole).  Try it some time.  Just suck on a tablet for a minute.  It's an experience you'll never forget.

I'm not sure how Sigrid feels about it.  She has to taste the cord it's on in order to experience "Bitter Ick" and be deterred, but it takes a second for the taste to kick in fully.  I'm certainly sitting right her with her the whole time - she's never alone in a room where electrical cords can't be put out of her reach.  But it seems to be taking her a minute to catch on.  In fact, just a minute ago she was staring right at me and putting her choppers around the lampcord.  It's entirely possible that she'd even endure that taste just to get a rise out of me.  I'd believe she's that ornery.  That, or she likes the stuff.  Great, my dog is a genius and also a nutcase.  Just call her Dr. Evil.

Ok.  I have to go feed Dr. Evil now.  It's the only humane thing, considering the taste she must have in her mouth right now.  Then again, I can't imagine how awful some of the things must taste that dogs eat routinely.  I am NOT going to be sampling dog poo just for the experience.  I have to draw the line somewhere.  Science diet, "Bitter Ick," metronidazole - ok.  Dog poo - I'm not that nutty yet.  The troops will fend for themselves on that one.

I do not know how people raise puppies while working.  I feel like Sigrid and I are joined at the hip.  No, I'm not going to raise a dog with separation-anxiety - we do spend some time apart.  But I get the impression she sleeps during that time, because  she's commandeered Augie's bed and always looks groggy when I walk in the door.  When I'm around, she's constantly going - chewng this, biting that, pulling towels off the rack, biting Augie's feet, getting under mine, peeing on that... 

Don't get me wrong.  In so many ways she is frighteningly good.  She sits perfectly before I put her food bowl down and doesn't move until I give her the go-ahead.  She sits before going through doors (I was so grateful for this when she ran through the muddy yard up to the back door, giving me enough time to catch her and clean her up before letting her in).  She pees outside on command (she pees inside, too, without any direction at all!).  I can tell that it just kills her not to chase the broom while I'm sweeping, but after a bit of work we reached an understanding that grabbing the broom out of my hand was not acceptable behavior.  She almost understands "leave it."

She's definitely a puppy, though, which means I have to be there to hand her a toy to chew when she wants to gnaw on the cat and a snack to munch when she wants to eat the chickens.  She's a Shepherd, too, which means that socializing is of the utmost importance if I want her to be friendly as an adult dog.  She's giving me a run for my money.

She's reminding me why I love dogs the way I do, and making me question my career choice once again.  Since I began the MA in Literature, I've questioned whether I made the right decision.  Do I really want to become a teacher?  The only job I've ever felt obsessively passionate about was working with animals.  I was an unlicensed veterinary technician for 3 years and a hospital assistant for 2 years before that.  I loved every minute.  I worked up to 12 hours a day and didn't mind.  Just this last Saturday I killed 5 hours learning everything I could about parvovirus and didn't even realize how quickly the afternoon flew by.  Does this mean anything? 

PCC has a veterinary technology program.  It's an associates of applied science.  Part of me can only view it as a step backwards, from the master's program.  It's work I love, however, and what if it leads to something else?  They're always saying "pursue your passion..."

Wow - last posted 2 weeks ago.  A lot happens in 2 weeks.  But the most imporant things are significant improvement of those withdrawal symptoms and...PUPPY!

That's right, I adopted a puppy last Monday.  Sigrid is an 8-week-old purebred German Shepherd Dog puppy.  I picked her up in White Salmon, WA, my birthday present this year.  At 12 years old, my Augie-doggie is getting a bit codgerly.  He hears things that aren't there and doesn't hear things that are, and until now I didn't realize how much I relied on him for information.  Should I be worried about that noise or not?  Was that a racoon or a mountain lion?  Is that person friendly or is he/she going to hijack me?  And if he is going to hijack me, could you scare him off?  Thanks.  But he's old and arthritic now and I can't take him camping with me, and even at home he can't quite do the protection job he used to.

Enter Sigrid.  At 8 weeks she's only 18 lbs (only!), but she'll grow into 65 to 95 lbs of very intelligent protection.  A friend told me the story of a Shepherd he knew who was a retired police dog.  When someone came to the door, the dog didn't bark.  He sat by the door, pressing his chin against his tags to keep them from jingling.  I don't know if anyone got far enough for him to surprise them.

Sigrid promises to be pretty smart herself.  After a week of working on housebreaking, she still might have an accident in the house, but if I bring her outside and tell her "get busy," she'll go on command.  She sits, without moving, before I put her dish in front of her.  She sits before she comes in or out of the house.  Her recall is a little unreliable - I have to make my voice really excited-sounding to get her to come when I call her.  Seems like "come when called" is the sticky lesson for most dogs.  It assumes the circumstance that the dog is free.  Who'd want to give that up?  I completely understand. 

So far so good.  It's a little scary having a dog that seems this smart.  It's like driving a car with too much horespower.  Too easy to make a mistake.  I do love her, though.  She's really something else - looks and brains.  And there's nothing like having a puppy around.

A lot of you know I've recently gone raw on top of vegan in an attempt to bolster my general health.  Lamictal withdrawal made me feel awful, and without being on meds I can't afford not to take care of myself lest any physical issue jack with my bipolarity, so I'm getting all responsible.  Lots of veggies, lots of fruit (maybe too much), some seeds.  I used to be a peanut butter junky.  Now I'm turning into a monkey.  It's all bananas.

In response to all the inevitable questions about protein (which flooded in when I became vegan, and at least then I was still eating nuts, legumes and tofu):

The China Study

The findings suggest that only about 5-6% of your caloric intake need come from proteins.  A gram of protein = 4 calories.  Yesterday I got 40 g of protein, which equals 160 calories from protein.  For a woman my size, 1800-2000 calories of daily intake, that still makes 8-9%.  I almost couldn't avoid getting enough protein if I tried.  That was all from veggies, fruits, seeds and a serving of edamame (yes, technically a legume, but still rawish - it doesn't have to be boiled to be safe for us to eat).  I don't think I even at 1800 calories yesterday - just not that hungry - so on a normal day it's probably quite a bit more than 40 g.

Technically I should probably call myself a whole-food vegan rather than a raw vegan because I don't buy most of raw philosophy.  I do heat my edamame, I still prefer my spinach steamed, and I'm not about to eat a raw sweet potato (and I am NOT giving up my beloved sweet potatoes). I'm mostly interested in making sure I get as much fruit and vegetables in me as I possibly can.  I want those antioxidents and freaky phytochemicals, especially the ones medical science doesn't yet know will help me.  Maybe one of them will help my bipolar.  At the very least, the consensus is that dark leafy greens are fabulous for depression, and no one has ever warned me not to eat too many vegetables. 

I should probably eat fewer bananas, though.  They're becoming my new comfort food.  Leave it to me.  Even as a raw vegan I can find a food to be addicted to.  Hey - that's another thing - I've been on this diet for about a week now, and the cravings are gone.  I hardly think about junk food anymore.  I just need to learn how to stop fantasizing about bananas - especially in the following form...

Raw Vegan banana "ice cream":
Freeze 2 bananas until hard but not icy (if they are icy you can stick them in the microwave for a sec until they're sort of...al dente?). Place in blender with as much avocado as desired (I use 1/4-1/5 of a big one, 1/3 of a small one). Blend until light and creamy.

God's honest truth - I like this better than I ever liked real ice cream.  I has a mouth-feel almost like Cold Stone Creamery's fattest.  Uncannily smooth.

I have never been this disinterested in anything in my life.  Is this what anhedonia is really like?  I mean, I'm not even just "failing to derive pleasure from usually-pleasurable activities."  I wish I was asleep.

It’s hard not to berate myself for being so inactive. I’ve gotten some things done – I went grocery shopping, but that’s never much of a challenge. I haven’t worked out since Tuesday, but I didn’t feel well after and I’ve been feeling physically unsteady again, so I’ll try again tomorrow.

 

I’m doing what I can. I’ve gone from being simply vegan to being 90% raw vegan, which means I’ve eaten an ungodly amount of fruit and vegetables in the past two days. They say antioxidants are good for your brain. I need every weapon I can muster. I do feel better. For one thing, the struggles I’ve had with eating are greatly diminished. It’s easier to polish off a package of Oreos than a 4-lb clamshell of strawberries. Somehow, I don’t feel inclined to do the latter.

 

School continues to be a challenge. We were issued our take-home midterm yesterday, and while I’ve kept up with the reading in my English class, writing a 5-6 page paper on Orwell’s assessment of early 20^th century British authors feels a little beyond me. It isn’t due until Monday. One tiny reach at a time I’m sure I can do it, so long as I don’t look down.

 

I feel sidelined from life. The trip to the grocery store wore me out. I can’t handle being around people – I can’t think quickly enough to converse and I feel completely defenseless emotionally. I’m hypersensitive to light, sound and motion (I almost unleashed my fury on my laundry basket yesterday because the way a pair of pants was hanging over the side made it look like a person. #$%& laundry basket, why can’t you be happy with the role God gave you?).

 

It’s been five years since I was in this position. Five years ago I had my last serious encounter with suicidal thinking (I'm not suicidal right now, which is a testament to the benefits of therapy, because many of the characterstics of this depression are the same). I was commuting 45 minutes to school via I-5 twice a day. I’d had several weeks of deepening depression, and one morning, after making myself drive to school, I concluded that the best thing I could do was turn around and hope I made it home. I spent 45 minutes fighting the temptation to drive into an overpass support. Once I got home, I sat in a chair for most of a week and didn’t speak to anyone. I wasn’t catatonic. I just couldn’t handle being in contact with the world. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. After that I found a good therapist, and I’ve experienced an incredible amount of growth. If not for him, I probably wouldn’t have completed my BA.

 

I hope that I’m not really in that position again, though. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m withdrawing from a substance. This isn’t my general condition (though it can be, and maybe that’s what creates the anxiety). It’s difficult to be patient, and it’s difficult to know when to be patient. Should I make myself go to the gym in spite of my worry that it’ll again make me feel sick, and in spite of the pain loud noises are causing me? Tomorrow morning I will, either way. Today, I’m being patient. 

 

It really is like having a bad case of the flu without most of the physical symptoms. I’m tired, but other than that I’ve got the mental fog, hypersensitivity (to both emotional and physical stimuli), apathy. If I had the flu, I wouldn’t be jumping all over myself for not mowing the lawn. It’s just that I don’t know how long this is going to go on, and I’m very tired of it, and it’s very boring. 

I just found out that the feeling of coming out of my skin has a name: "akathisia."  Good Orthodox and anyone with an interest in Greek word roots will recognize "a" and "kathisis" (like "kathisma"), the inability to sit.  It's a common side effect of psychiatric medications, particularly SSRI's and neuroleptics (not anticonvulsants, I guess, because I've had akathisia before and after the Lamictal but didn't have it while I was taking it).  It's also a common symptom of bipolar mania.

Jack Henry Abbot (1981) described the effects of akathisia produced by antipsychotic drugs:

These drugs, in this family, do not calm or sedate the nerves. They attack. They attack from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain ... You ache with restlessness, so you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you; you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down you go in pain you cannot locate, in such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed, because you cannot get relief even in breathing.

—Jack Henry Abbot, In the Belly of the Beast (1981/1991). Vintage Books, 35–36. Quoted in Robert Whitaker, Mad in America (2002, ISBN 0738207993), 187.

That's why I left my class early today.  Right there right there.  This is what tempts me to flee civilization.  I can not wait until this @#%& Lamictal is out of me so that I can work out again more reliably.  That is how I always dealt with it before, but at this point I alternate between feeling fine (and akathisic) and feeling fluish and flattened (and akathisic), so workouts have been hit-and-miss.  Once the Lamictal is gone and I feel strong and stable (not weak as a kitten and with all the stability of an centenarian), I can get on my crazy miles again.  Maybe I'll do Cycle Oregon this year. 

 

So I left off the last post with a promise of part II, for anyone with the interest to keep reading. Given how short-sighted I am right now I’m impressed to find myself already writing this, with the thought of record-keeping, which is one reason I keep this blog at all. 

 

I’m disgusted with myself. I don’t feel as if the person inhabiting this body is anyone I know. I’ve gained weight (this is a big deal to me, given a history of eating disorders in the past – see previous posts if you can find them in this very poorly-organized blog). I keep eating in such a way as to make myself gain more weight. I’m working on this, but it’s slow going. I lost 120 lbs over the course of three years. I’m working on putting it back in one, maybe less. Yes, you can be a fat vegan, and I’m going to prove it to the world. I’m getting back into exercise, and I have to remind myself that over the past nearly-three weeks I haven’t worked out – not because of laziness, but – because of ungodly fatigue due to the Lamictal withdrawal. 

 

I am able to sleep as many hours a day as I am awake. This, from the girl who couldn’t keep a graveyard-shift job because she was incapable of sleeping during the day (I worked three nights a week, and would be up for four days, only taking one- or two-hour naps here and there). TV actually entertains me, if only in the sense that it’s about the right level of interest to occupy my brain without overwhelming me, thereby making me feel as if I’ve done something other than sleep away an entire day. 

 

I don’t know whether I’m too hard on myself or too easy on myself or whether it’s worth thinking about. I’m beginning to believe I’m bipolar. It can’t be normal to experience these rages and the feeling of burning up from the inside. It can’t be normal to care so little about life and have so little interest in anything. It can’t be normal to always feel as if someone has just died (and let me qualify that, because I still have the feeling that my mother just died, as in, five minutes ago, but this is funny: when she did die – the first person close to me ever to die – I recognized the feeling of grief because I’ve felt it since I was six, when I first experienced depression). It can’t be normal to be this much a victim to my emotional state (despite my self-accusations of indiscipline: as a friend constantly reminds me, it can’t be that I’m undisciplined by nature, or I’d never have run marathons).

 

I don’t know myself. Not only because of these characteristics that have been blown out of my control, first by the meds and now by withdrawal from the meds (and I suspect I’ve also lost some control due to the upheaval my mother’s death created – I’ve since read a lot about people suddenly recognizing new traits in themselves, in the wake of bereavement). I don’t know myself because of this diagnosis. It caused a feeling of fragmentation I can’t begin to survey or identify. This is me. What do you mean it’s illness? I’ve always been this way. Where does the illness end, and my self begin? 

 

It’s impossible to ascertain. I’m integrated. I can’t just neatly pull aside the part of me that is pathology and disentangle from it everything that has been built around it since I was six years old. I can’t say, “oh, that’s a behavior I developed in response to the depression and now I can stop doing it,” because I developed a hundred other behaviors in response to that, in an ongoing chain. No wonder I felt like I lost myself when I became medicated. 

 

To a certain extent, accepting the diagnosis of bipolar disorder means giving up a little of my authority over myself. I admit that I go through periods in which my evaluation of reality is inaccurate. Who is to say when I am in one of those periods and when I’m in my right mind? It’s difficult even for me to know. Today I had to make a personal judgment call as to whether I’m slacking and can buckle down and pull this term out of the hole or not. My choice was to get some counseling at the financial aid office and not make this call on my own, which I feel good about (mania is characterized by impulsivity, and I’m sure I’d have gone ahead as impulsively as ever and done what I wanted if the Financial Aid Officer didn’t give me the answer I wanted, but I made a stab at it). I was told that I could drop one class without affecting my financial aid or my academic standing, so I dropped Spanish, my most demanding class. I still need 203-level Spanish in my head, whether through taking the class or through studying to that level so I can take an exam, but I’ll think about that later. When I’m able to think.

 

I’m trying to remind myself that I haven’t had this diagnosis for even a full year yet. I’ve had the condition for much, much longer, but I thought that was just me, so I wasn’t worrying about these existential issues. It will take time to figure out what is me and what is disorder so that I can make judgment calls like the above with any accuracy. And maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it, anyway. Before I knew I had an illness I still had to ask the question, “can I really do this, am I cutting myself too much slack, am I driving myself too hard?” It’s so hard to figure out from the inside, and it’s so hard to know who to listen to that might make a more reliable call from the outside.

 

That is one of the more difficult parts of losing my mother. She and my dad are the two people in my life who I can say genuinely had my best interests at heart. And my mom was not one to baby or favor anyone, including her children, so I rarely had to worry she was going too easy on me. One of her last statements to me was, “you work too hard. You do too much.” I grapple with that a hundred times a day.

I was up at 3:30 this morning unable to sleep.  I feel like I have the flu, at least mentally (and sometimes physically - I've got the aches and nausea as we speak).  My brain is too fogged to do much with, and all I want to do is sleep, but my body isn't always adequately fatigued enough to allow me as much unconscious time as I want (I hope something of these recent blogs is intelligible). So I’ve been sleeping and watching TV, and driving very carefully to the engagements I can’t miss (it’s likely I shouldn’t be driving at all, much of the time). The most telling evidence of my mental state is that TV is interesting to me right now. I have become the answer to the question, “who watches this sh*t?” Young people with too much time on their hands, elderly with nothing else to do, and unemployed graduate students in withdrawal from psychotropic drugs.

Everything reminds me of my mom.  I thought I should go out and take a walk but even the @#$& sunshine reminds me of my mom.  I thought I should eat some Amy's No-Chicken Soup for dinner, but it reminds me of my mom.  My mom wasn't vegan.  She'd have eaten the chicken soup.  It's the fact that it's soup that's the problem.  My mom would eat the same thing for lunch almost every day.  Either a plain peanut butter sandwich (butter and peanut butter on white or whole-wheat bread) and a glass of milk, possibly with chips, or a bowl of soup with a piece of buttered toast. 

Because everything reminds me of her, I can't stop thinking of her, and last night as I was going to bed I thought, "tomorrow I'll go home for  a few minutes and see mom."  I wasn't even on the verge of losing consciousness yet; except for being very tired I should have been in my right mind.  I'm still house-sitting for my brother, which means that the house where I ordinarily live, which is her house, in my mind assumes the condition in which I best remember it.  It is the place where mom is. One side effect of abrupt withdrawal from Lamictal is psychosis, but I feel as if I’m having the opposite problem these days: reality is just a skosh too real.

Reality seems too real these days, but I'm trying hard not to shy away from it.  At the same time I'm trying not to be too harsh with myself, because I'm clearly getting hammered by this withdrawal.  I needed a new water bottle so I went to GI Joe's this morning.  I didn't know Joe's was going out of business.  I didn't know that until I saw the "Going Out of Business" signs on the building as I drove up, and burst into tears.  Joe's is a fixture.  We used to rent our skis there when I was a kid. 

 

It’s a fine line between not shying from reality, and confusing harshness with reality. “Not shying” implies reality is something unpleasant. I often create a mistaken syllogism out of that: reality is unpleasant, therefore what is unpleasant must be reality.  At this moment, I do not want to shy from the reality of my school situation. I do not want to see myself as a lazy bum because I’ve missed so much class lately. That is an unpleasant possibility, and therefore, a lazy bum I must be. I’ve been known to be a lazy bum at times, so such a hypothesis is not beyond the pale. However, in the past I’ve maintained good enough discipline to get to class and study and do assignments, to the extent that I gradated college and am almost done with graduate school. (“’Almost’ being the key word,” says my inner critic. “You’ve been ‘almost’ done for a year now, with just this or that between you and the degree. Are you ever actually going to be done? Really?”) The key difference is that at the moment, I’m under the influence of psychotropic drug withdrawal. Abnormally poor attendance and motivation that coincides perfectly with the beginning of my withdrawal: lazy or struggling? 

 

Now, granted, I’m working hard to write this blog but I’m interested in it on some level, so it’s getting done. I’ve been trying to get myself interested in Spanish the same way, but without success. Add the lack of concentration, poor focus, difficulty with social situations, and tendency to burst into tears every ten minutes, and being in class is a tall order. It isn’t how I want it. I want to be able to say “I did this, even though I was coming off of this drug and it was horrible I still did it!” So far that’s not happening.

 

Meanwhile, the whole thing seems terrifically melodramatic and I have a hard time crediting any of it. I’m ashamed to say that if it was someone else going through this, I probably wouldn’t be very sympathetic. That’s humbling. More humbling still, I continue to have so little sympathy for myself that I’m fairly sure that even in the midst of this, if someone else I knew was going through something similar, I’d still have relatively little patience for it. “Get your ass in gear, figure out what you need to motivate you, get it done.” This is what I tell myself. Sometimes it works and sometimes I pay for it. I made it to my tutor practicum both days this last week, and without divine intervention (which I do not hesitate to say I received) it would have been disastrous. The thing is, it wasn’t disastrous – it was provided for. Yesterday I worked out, and felt like I had the flu in the evening, and had a very hard time doing what I needed to. 

 

Everyone is all over me to go easier on myself, but as far as I can see, I go too easy on myself already. If I were a little harder on myself maybe I wouldn’t be so far behind in school right now. Maybe I wouldn’t have gained 15 lbs on the Lamictal. Maybe I’d have a more certain plan for my future. Maybe I’d have a reputation as a more reliable person. That goes into part two, though, which comes with the next post…