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

I'm working on the idea that I am not my ego.  The thoughts and feelings and even the things I do are not me, and are often not even important.  This is tough to get used to, and I'm not sure I fully understand all the implications yet.  Bipolar disorder is bound up in it somewhere, too. 

I suspect that if I could examine it closely I would find that bipolar disorder makes it even more clear that I am not my ego.  Depression tells me I'm worthless; mania tells me I can do anything.  Neither is true, but both are beliefs that I could closely associate with myself if I chose to.  Now that (I believe) I am neither depressed nor manic, I can also see that there is some kind of core here that is stable beneath the surface of mood swings. 

It may be telling that I have to write "I believe" in parentheses in the paragraph above: "Now that (I believe) I am neither depressed nor manic..."  While there is apparently some core beneath all the changing patterns I mistake for my Self, I am not at all sure where it is, how to get to it, or how to hold on to it when the false Self becomes tumultuous.  Where is the part of me that knows what stability is, that knows the difference between lying thoughts and the sober, certain truth?  I would kill to be able to find my stable core when depression and mania are lying to me.

I was taught, though, that even if I can't hold onto that stable core, I don't have to be tossed around by the storm.  Orthodox Christians answer this need by repeating the Jesus prayer over and over ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner").  For those times when depression has your brain fried, a monk (who in another life had been a psychologist) suggested this: feel the chair you're sitting in, get out in nature and feel the breeze, touch the leaves, play with the dog.  Do something that roots you in physical reality.  These are the things that have gotten me through.  It's too easy, especially in mental illness, to forget that there's a world outside your mind.

If I didn't know better I could easily be fooled into complacency, with this peaceful period I'm currently experiencing.  I'd love to believe that this is the true me - peaceful, happy, laid-back, hardworking - and that once you take away bipolar disorder, this is what you're left with.  Knowing that moods lie, I don't believe it for a minute.  This is nice, and I could think of it like visiting a tropical vacation spot, but I don't think it can be any more trusted than can depression or mania. 

I didn't think I would feel this way.  I am joyful, yes.  My God, am I ever grateful for the vacation spot!  There are no words to describe it, and if I think about what depression was like, I could cry tears of joy not to be there anymore.  I feel no suspicion, as I have before, that this is simply pre-mania, or that this is a drug-induced high (ahem, strictly legitimate pharma, I swear).  I feel grounded.  I am happy to enjoy my vacation.

But I don't want to mistake this for my Self, either.  I've spent a lot of time and gone through a lot to get un-depressed, but it was never the goal.  Losing the depression is a means to an end, an attempt to get rid of a painful distraction from actually living my life and finding my true self in God.  I am feeling a lot of relief right now, but if there are things to have learned from having untreated bipolar disorder, I also don't want to forget them.  If I have learned anything, it's that my thoughts and feelings are not an entirely reliable guide to reality.  This may not seem earth-shattering, and it really does look like common sense, but I'm amazed by how many people seem not to know it.  Don't rest in your ego.  Its arms are only comfortable until it throws you over a cliff.  :p

I'm going to start out by saying that I think, unless my manic states have become stronger than they've ever been before, I am not manic, because I'd have to be manic through 1050 mgs of lithium if I am.  Still, I'm so happy, I don't know what to write.  Consider this proof that my writing is mostly a list of thinly-veiled complaints - now that everything is going well, I've got nothing to say. 

Well, maybe I can dredge something up.  I can complain about how things used to be!  Yeah, that's it.  Did that suck, or what?  No, really: on behalf of depressives and bipolar folks everywhere, depression sucks.  I didn't fully comprehend this until I was not depressed anymore.  I find myself compelled to write this quickly before I forget what it was like, because in retrospect it was so awful that I never, never, never even want to remember what it was like to be depressed.  Ever.

It's a diabolical disease.  Name one other disease that actually talks back to you and says, "not only are you in a lot of pain, you are weak and lame for being in pain.  Only people who suck get depressed."  You're already weakened; if things are bad enough you can't work or accomplish much, so things you'd do to shore up your self-esteem are impossible.  So you start to believe that voice.  Your hope begins to wane, and your despair begins to wax.  From here, it's not hard to spiral deeper and deeper. 

Then there's a whole big group of people out there who are puzzlingly willing to join that voice and say, essentially, "only people who suck get depressed.  Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  You're as happy as you make up your mind to be."  Somewhere in you, you know those things are true.  Your mood is a choice.  Only, something isn't adding up.  As many happy thoughts as you make yourself think, as hard as you work to bring your mood up, it just isn't working.  Now you feel powerless, maybe a little stupid (why can't I figure this out?  Everyone else seems to be able to), as well as lame and sucky.  You might also feel like a little black rain cloud who people would rather not be with.

You don't know what to do.  You might have tried medication after medication, and therapy after therapy.  You pray, because you can't just not do that (at least if you're Orthodox), but even God thinks you suck.  Medications make you gain weight, some therapies pull up problems you didn't know you had (crap: I'm depressed, AND I have incestuous feelings toward my opposite-gendered parent?!).  Different doctors give you different diagnoses, some of them conflicting, with treatments contraindicated by one diagnosis or another (how did you like finding out you were bipolar when antidepressants suddenly made you floridly manic?).  You long for the days before you heard of psychology or psychiatry.  You begin to suspect you weren't as sick as you thought, at least not until you encountered crazy meds - you're now taking adderall to counteract the scattered thoughts caused by your lexapro.  And you never had an auditory hallucination until you tried to stop taking lamotrigine.

By now you've been sick so long - either with the stock depression that got you into all this, or with drug withdrawals, or with any of the crazy behaviors (overeating, substance abuse, etc) you've used to cope - you can't remember what "normal" feels like.  Maybe this is "normal" for me.  It doesn't matter: if this is "normal," my normal life is unliveable.  You step to the edge, to the outer limit of crazyhood.  Either things get better, or they have to end.

Hold up there.  I don't know how long this feeling of stability and peace I'm currently inhabiting will last.  It's the nature of bipolar disorder to throw you from one extreme to another, and be constantly changing.  I would say, however, that what I am experiencing now is worth every day I spent in the above situations.  I had forgotten it could be like this.  Very simple things - the feel of wind on my skin, the color of a gray sky, leaves budding from a willow branch, the smell of incense - make me giddy.  Waking up in the morning without a feeling of dread, without a physical sensation of burning and aching throughout my body, is enough to make me cry.    I feel as well as I have ever been in my life. 

I didn't know it could be like this.  All the doubts above - that depression was "normal" for me, that I was doing it all to myself (by not thinking positively enough), are totally expunged.  It has taken several months on lithium to bring me to this place of peace, and it was only experiencing this that could convince me how abnormal and unneccessary it is to live with depression.  It's also validated for me just how painful that was.  This is the first time I've ever felt angry about experiencing that pain.  I feel frustration that so many people suffer from this without getting help, and they often suffer from it without receiving any understanding from the people around them.  I was fortunate; many people around me, even if they could not really understand, tried very hard to make sense of it.  It's the lack of understanding, I think, that makes depression isolating in a way other diseases are not.

Whether you understand it or not, try and find out as much about your loved one's condition as possible.  Even if you believe it's a moral flaw, or laziness, or anything besides a medical issue, ignoring it or chiding isn't going to help him or her out of the pit.  If you've never experienced serious depression, believe me when I say there's almost nothing you wouldn't do to pull yourself out of it if you could: your loved one IS trying.  Find out about therapy, find out about medications.  If they don't work, at least you've eliminated an option.  Depression and bipolar disorder are potentially terminal illnesses.  Do not screw around.  Besides, if you're depressed, your life is waiting.  It can be so, so, so much better.

Having just told a fried at church on Sunday that "I really never dream about my mom," I proved myself wrong last night.  It wasn't an earth-shaking dream or anything, but it was kind of nice.

I dreamed I'd been housesitting for my parents who were on vacation somewhere, and when they came home we were going to have a nice dinner together.  So my parents - both of them, including my mother, who has been deceased for two and a half years - walked in the door, and we started to make dinner.  My mother was making an orange jello salad she used to make, only she wasn't doing it in the way she always used to.  She was pressing squares of finger jello into a green collander, and then she covered the collander with foil and set it aside for later.  "That must be a way of doing it she never showed me," I thought.  Meanwhile, I had accidentally dropped a mason jar full of red jello, shattering it, and started to clean it up with a straw broom.  As I did this, I mused, "well if this is what being dead means, it's not so bad.  She's still here making jello.  'Dead' must just be a census category or something..."

I told my sister about the dream and she said, "well, she sort of IS still here making jello...when you make jello..."

I'm vegan.  I don't make jello.  The only reason I make jello for the non-vegans in my life is because she isn't here to make it.  But I did enjoy the dream.  That DID sort of make it feel as if she was still here.

My brother, sister, niece and I had an interesting discussion over beers at the pub last night.  My brother and I both euthanized our elderly dogs last week, within two days of each other (it's an inauspicious time to be a dog in the Dawson family), and I asked him how he'd opted to dispose of his dog's remains.  I worried a little about what to do with Augie, because I'd have liked to bury him, but it would've been a challenge to properly bury 90 lbs of dog in our suburban backyard.  The other options were private cremation (you receive ashes back afterward), general cremation (your pet is cremated but you don't receive cremains), or, to put it delicately, "other disposal."  "They go to the landfill," the receptionist explained.  My brother and I had both opted for general cremation.

But, he added, he hadn't known about the other options, and it wasn't really important to him where his dog's body went.  It wasn't her, he said, so it didn't matter.  I know a lot of people feel this way, and my sister seemed to agree with him as well.  My 20-year-old niece has better sense than the rest of us, and tends to keep her opinions to herself. 

I have never been able to feel this way; the body has always been terribly important to me.  I'm not sure how old I was when I began to think about it - maybe when Oliver the guinea pig died when I was 6 - but the physical body of a dead creature has always seemed important to me.  This hits me on a deep visceral level when I consider our mother's death.  I used to rest my head on that lap, and hold those hands, and dammit, that was MY mother and don't you touch her!  I sincerely don't know how to explain why I feel that way, and not as if she were a "shell" as my sister would call her body.  I can't explain it any more than I can understand why someone else would not feel that way. 

That's on the visceral level, and if I were a better and more sincere person it would be that level that fueled the irritation I felt in the discussion with my brother last night.  Instead, as is often the case with me, it was the illogic of his position that really pissed me off.  It just doesn’t make sense. If you were alive and I punched your shoulder, I probably wouldn’t try to excuse it by saying, “well it didn’t hurt YOU – YOU aren’t your body!” 

How do we decide what "you" is?  When I interact with my dog or my cats, I think they believe "you" is my face - when they really want to get my attention, they get right up in it, and Sigrid will stand up on her hind legs to be close. Or maybe “you” is the part of you that does stuff – makes decisions, does the thinking, the emoting. That’s a bit of Enlightenment-era thinking I thought we’d gotten past. Anyone who has gotten seriously hungry knows that the body affects the decision-making/thinking/emoting part of us just as much as the reverse. 

In addition to this, it simply seems arbitrary. I mean, why would we assume that the part we can’t even see (which gives a lot of us trouble – believing in stuff we can’t see) is the part that is “you?” At least, why would we assume it’s “you” any more than the part that we can see is? Wouldn’t it be – strictly in a logical sense – more reasonable to say that the whole thing is “you” and that when the body stops moving, some part of what made it a “you” is now gone, but it forgot something? Part of the “you” is still here? To me, that seems a bit more honest. But just to decide that one part or other of the living organism is inferior – is, in fact, not even important so long as it’s missing its other part – isn’t even logical. And considering how materialistic we often are in other respects, it’s also kind of ironic. Only in this case do we decide that the invisible thing is the important one.

My brother is an agnostic, so he’s working with less information than some – I say this as an observation of fact, simply that he doesn’t acknowledge certain information as being valid, and not a criticism. But as Christians we have an advantage. We know that God considered the physical important enough to actually take a body Himself, and then to resurrect that body after it had died, and to take it back to heaven with Him, where He now resides eternally with a body. If I had come to Christianity not believing in the importance of the physical body, this would be enough evidence to change my mind. 

Do people who say they believe the body is just a shell really believe it? Then why is desecrating a corpse a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison?  Why do people spend up to $10,000 on funerals, choosing leak-proof caskets lined with satin (I am not saying this is a good thing, only that it may reflect many people’s true feelings about the issue)? Why is the idea of the disintegration of our loved ones’ bodies so disturbing? Why is it horrifying to throw even a Labrador retriever’s body on a landfill pile?

I don’t mean to emphasize the body over the soul either; don’t misunderstand. But I think the importance of the physical has been given short shrift in our culture, and I hope this sheds light (better than I could at the pub last night) on why I feel that way.

By the way – I’m curious. Is there an advantage to believing the body is “just a shell”, or is it simply a considered position?

This has been a pretty eventful week, for good and for ill.  I had a wonderful roadtrip to an Eastern Orthodox monastery in northern California.  The drive down on Monday was beautiful, and I spent two full days there.  After liturgy on Thursday morning I began my drive home, and decided to take an extra day and drive up the coast.  I drove north as far as Coos bay and got a hotel room for the night, where I found I had a couple of urgent messages on my cell phone (mostly, reception had been really spotty during the whole trip, and I'm no fan of the little nags anyway, so I hadn't checked it till then).

The messages were from my sister and niece, who were house/dogsitting for me while I was gone (my dad is out of town at the moment also).  When they went to bring my older dog, Augie, in from the backyard for dinner, they found him lying in a corner, not able to get up.  His head was tilted to the side and tossing back and forth, his eyes rapidly darting from side to side.  He wouldn't eat or drink.

At 13, Augie wasn't in particularly good shape anyway, suffering from arthritis and moderate senility.  A 90 lb mutt, for his size, 13 was getting into the upper limit of his life expectancy, so I wasn't terribly surprised.  I hadn't really expected it to happen this way, though.  There were times I wondered if his arthritis wasn't getting too severe to allow reasonable quality of life, and cancer isn't an uncommon way for a geriatric dog's life to end.  Mostly, I thought I'd know a bit in advance that was going to happen, and I thought I'd be there. 

My sister didn't think he'd make it through the night, so the hotel kindly refunded my fees and I got back on the road toward home.  Glory to God for GPS systems, and I take back everything I said about them being...well, ahem, anything disgraceful I might have said (forgive me; I am not a tech-head).  It found me the quickest route and I was home by 12:30 am.

They'd gotten him inside and onto his bed.  He drank a little water when I held it right under his nose, but had no interest in the peanut butter-wrapped pain pill for his arthritis.  He continued to toss his head like a drunken Stevie Wonder, and his eyes bounced back and forth (nystagmus).  He couldn't get up to go outside, so he urinated where he was.  This is idiopathic vestibular disease, which is common in older dogs (sometimes called "geriatric vestibular disease").  It doesn't kill dogs, and in fact in two weeks they usually recover.  But given his other issues, the doctor seemed to think it was time to let him go. 

It's so hard to be sure.  I remember, when I was working for vets, agonizing with the client over whether or not to euthanize a pet.  Ethically, doctors can't say "I think you should do this."  They have to be careful not to influence decisions inordinately.  With some cases, however, doctors and technicians would wait in the back room to hear an answer and just pray that the client would have the guts to let go.  

I wonder.  I have mostly resolved my questions over animal euthanasia.  When it's necessary, it's necessary - I do not have a problem with it.  Endless surgeries to recover an animal who has been hit by a car can be cruel.  Elderly cats in liver or kidney failure do not need extensive amounts of IV fluids, stomach tubes and force-feeding - they need to, as we used to say, "go to heaven."   Animals haven't sinned, so I suspect they have many fewer end-of-life qualms than we do.

The problem, here, was about me.  I had to ask myself if I was keeping him going because I didn't want to let go.  Augie and I have been together since I was 17.  It was my mother who let me (after a lot of convincing) keep him.  He was the dog I came home to while I was in college.  He was my companion at work when I was working in veterinary clinics.  I had to ask myself, also, if I was letting him go because I was tired of taking care of a geriatric dog.  Should I have nursed him through those two weeks?  Where would that have gotten us?

Because I'd been a tech, the technician doing the euthanasia allowed me to assist.  This was good, because it requires one person to reach over the dog's back and essentially hug him while occluding the vein, and this is much easier on the dog if it's a person he knows and trusts.  The technician did a fantastic job, and it was over in less than thirty seconds.  So quick, to excise from the world someone who was so important for so long.



 

I am trying hard not to make sweeping generalizations in reference to how I feel.  On average, the past two weeks have been rough, to put it mildly.  But I find that if I pay attention to what's happening right now, my attitude is better.  My theory is as follows.  Studies have shown that your mood significantly affects your memory.  When you are happy, you easily access happy memories.  If you are sad, you more easily access sad memories.  I surmise that when you are depressed, you access negative memories, which in turn negatively influence your predictions for the future.  The world begins to look bleak.  But if I stay in the present moment, I can see what's actually here, no spin involved.

But I'd like to make a sweeping generalization at this moment anyway and say that today was a frippin' good day.  That's right.  Frippin'.  I accomplished a lot.  I even threw Sigrid in the bathtub, which I dread because she hates it.  I just have to remember that if I make meowing noises, she's hypnotized into good behavior.  She looks at me in total bewilderment, but whiles she does so, she remains still.  When I cut her nails I feed her cheese cubes and sing the Mission: Impossible theme. 

I also am now on my way to beginning DBT - Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.  I have a lot of hope for this.  It's supposed to be very effective for managing bipolar disorder.  Furthermore, my insurance doesn't always cover it, but my current therapist made a very good case to my care manager, and I have been approved for complete coverage.  It feels like a door has been opened for me.  We'll see.

I'm getting a little worried about my scholarly pursuits, however.  I've been sidelined a lot this year.  My therapist actually showed me a graph of my progress in 2009, which is based on symptomology questionnaires I filled out every week.  I wish I could post it here, because THAT was enlightening.  I have my doubts about trying to quantify mental illness, or score my depression symptoms on a 1-5 scale.  But even if it's a blunt tool, it was still somewhat revealing.  I've spent at least as much, if not more, time depressed as I have either manic or "normal," and I've spent much more time depressed or manic combined than "normal."  In fact, normal does not often figure on this graph: I tend to swing straight from one extreme to the other.

When manic, academia is usually fine - well, when I can sit still long enough to study.  During August and September, I got up every morning to run at 3:30, came back and sat in front of my light box while I studied for a few hours.  Then I went to work.  Then I studied until I was too tired to see the words anymore.  Repeat.  (Note: it's dumb to use a light box when you are manic - light boxes make bipolar people manic if they're used too much.  In this case, I'd have called it a "mixed" episode, which is the joy of experiencing depressed symptoms and manic symptoms simultaneously.  I think that's why I thought it was a good idea to use the light box.  Sometimes I fail to accurately identify the mood I"m experiencing.  Roll eyes here.)

When depressed, however, I can't focus, even if I do care.  My memory is terrible.  In addition, the lithium I'm now taking - which is really giving me some relief in many ways - fogs up my brain. 

I guess my intent now is to throw everything I've got at it, study as hard as possible when it's possible, and shoot for that master's exam on April 16.  If it comes time to commit to it and I'm not ready, I won't, but you never know until you try, right?  I'm not going to put my life on hold for this.  Maybe I need to entice myself with cheese cubes.  It works for Sigrid.

One issue I'm working with is the question of whether I want to get well.  Sometimes I suspect that I hold onto depression because it's what I know, what's comfortable for me.  I counter this idea with the knowledge that when I'm not depressed, I fear becoming depressed again - it isn't where I want to be.  Getting well still frightens me a little, though, and the reason why might be beyond my ability to self-examine.  (Once again I run into the problem of needing to examine my faulty brain with the only tool I have at hand - my own faulty brain.) 

The past year has been one long depressive episode interrupted by bright periods of a month or less in length.  It's only been two weeks since the end of the last bright period, which did last a month, but I feel as if I've already lost my grip on the positive, unified person I think I am when not depressed.  (I have to say "the...person I think I am," because if there's anything mental illness jacks with, it's your sense of who you are.  I am simply never sure anymore.  Whoever it is, she's still able to do stuff, so I don't find this a cataclysmic condition, but it's sort of confusing at times.  Probably at least as confusing as this must be to read.  Apologies for all the parenthetical digressions.) 

Even two weeks is long enough to forget what it's like to not be depressed, and long enough to drop the ball on most of my personal projects, and long enough to forget that at one time I was not completely terrified of the future.  At the moment, "getting well" looks like getting eyes to see the destruction depression has created in my life.  As long as I'm depressed, I can see it but not very well, and I'm usually too painful to care about it.  More to the point, as long as I'm depressed, I can remember why I dropped the ball, why I was afraid of the future, and why it sometimes seemed reasonable not to get out of bed in the morning.  I can remember that even when I managed to do things I'd committed to, it took me three times as long to do them as normal, and not for lack of diligent perseverance. 

On Tuesday, a project that reasonably should have taken two hours took nearly five.  What filled the time?  Generally slowed movement, frequent pauses to remember what I was doing, and lots of moments of "waking up" to realize I'd been standing in the same spot neither moving nor thinking for the past fifteen minutes.  Yesterday, I sat for two hours doing nothing.  I was aware that I was doing nothing, but I couldn't bring myself to care.  This, from a girl who all her life has hardly been able to keep still for two minutes.  Maybe my career as a Living Statue will take flight after all!  But when I feel well again, my talent for holding still will vanish, and I will probably accuse myself of laziness.  If I'd just worked harder, I'd have gotten that work done in much less time. 

Undisciplined, lazy princess.  Drama queen.  When I get well, that is what I will call my depressed self.   If I am at all afraid to get well, I think this is why.  I suppose the question then, is, "is that wellness?"  Maybe not - it obviously still reflects very low self-esteem.  Maybe I am not thinking big enough.  I'm thinking from the realm of bipolar experience, in which it has been more common for me to live at one extreme or the other, but rarely with a reasonable balance.  Perhaps in my thinking "well" simply means "depression-free," and this is not accurate.  I need to make the pie higher.  There has to be a way to achieve actual wellness, and not a fear of falling from mania or of rising from depression.

This is so hard to write about, because I can never write enough to make anyone else feel what I am feeling.  I always feel as if I have left out too much for my writing to convey anything with any accuracy.  I know that good writing does not always lie in the volume of words, but there is so much for you to know - not that you need to know so much about me, but you do need to know about mentally ill people.  I'm sorry if it doesn't go far enough.



 

I think I need an attitude adjustment. I assume I'm just feeling the effects of holiday stress and that missed lithium dose (though I didn't think it would have that much impact; this may just be coincidental).  The entire week has been full of tension and oversensitivity.  Today I surprised myself: I actually threw my cell phone to the ground (concrete: that is one well-made phone - the battery cover flew off and the front separated from the back slightly, but it works just fine).  That wasn't good enough, either, because in my other hand was a can of diet pepsi which I proceeded to hurl down the driveway.  The anger was welling up like geyser, and I'm not sure where from.  I'd just hung up from speaking to my dad, and he didn't say anything to infuriate me to that degree, certainly. 

Besides, this was not an isolated incident.  On Christmas eve I kicked one of the kitchen cupboards so hard, I'm surprised I didn't put my foot through it.  As it is, I left a nice black mark on it.  No one seems to have noticed it yet.  The anger is always accompanied by tears, and it's more like frustration than just anger. 

Tonight during Vespers I looked at the Christ icon and suddenly thought, "You are the worst part of me."  This statement probably does not make a lot of sense, in addition to being untrue at face value.  But when I consider that very often, the Christ I'm praying to isn't the real Christ but rather a straw man of my own creation, it begins to make sense.  In that sense, it's also sort of true.  That straw man Christ is associated with the meanest, most critical voice in my head, and that voice gets loudest when my depression is at its worst.  So, that voice is part of me, and what could be worse than having part of me masquerade as God, making me think He hates me? 

I hate attending church services when I'm depressed, because all I do is cry.  Once again, tonight, I cried though Vespers, especially after having that thought.  It compounded the frustration ten times.  I wanted to kick an icon, and that made me cry, too, because I love the icons and the last thing I'd ever want to do is harm one. 

I'm terminating this rambly post here before I sound even crazier than I am.  Please pray that this lithium will start working again, soon.  There are just too many people in my head when it isn't.

Did I mention that sometimes Lithium really interferes with your memory? Ironically, so much so that tonight I can't remember if I took my dose or not. Which means I can't take it, because Lithium overdose is Seriously Bad Business (like, Experiencing the Worst Flu You've Ever Had and Subsequently Requiring a Kidney Transplant Bad Business). I'm not sure what effect simply skipping a dose will have on my mood, if I actually haven't taken it. I'm really praying that it won't be anything, because the last two weeks have been incredible. I've had energy, the tightness in my chest is gone, my anxiety has been halved, and I have felt really happy (and I can feel happy when depressed, actually, and I often do - but it always feels like a glaze of happiness over a heart of sadness and fear). In addition, unlike all the other drugs, I'm also not an emotionless zombie. It has always seemed like I could cry all the time (depression) or not at all (antidepressants). With Lithium, I can both laugh and cry when appropriate. I really don't want to lose this. But the joy of bipolarity is knowing that what goes up must come down (and certainly, vice-versa). No one claims even Lithium will cure it - the most anyone will promise is fewer episodes, and longer periods of normalcy in between. So, it sucks if it's my fault that I fall out of this period of normalcy, but it will probably happen sometime anyway.

For the record: everything right now is going bloody frippin' well. 

Evidence: I got out of bed on time.
My puppy did not eat the house while I was at church.
I was at church this morning and sang in the choir.
The choir got to eat baklava at a post-liturgy lunch.  Being in choir, I also ate baklava.
I swam a mile at the gym and enjoyed every minute of it.
At this moment, God is not mad at me.
My sister is mad at me, but I'm lucky to have a cool sister who won't be mad at me for long.
I made some mean vegan pumpkin waffles for my dad for dinner, and he liked them.
My puppy tried to eat the house while I was doing this, but I arrested her in the act.
Puppy is now asleep next to me, and I have a very nice, warm bed to sleep in myself.

Note to self: review above evidence as needed, if your blood does indeed prove to be low on Lithium.  Things may soon appear to suck, but it's just your neurons making an unseemly racket and does not reflect reality.  

 

Going on two months since my last post - sorry. I hear from other lithium-heads that the drug tends to kill motivation, and my experience is supporting the trend. It's been difficult to do the things I must, without fail, accomplish, without adding anything optional to the list. Furthermore, writing isn't easy, so I apologize for the quality of all posts from here on out.

As I posted in a comment not long ago, though, I'm a big fan of the lithium. First, it kills the constant barrage of chatter in my head (I don't really hear voices per se - I'm not schizophrenic - but I sometimes wonder just how similar that experience might be: many researchers put bipolar disorder on the same continuum as schizophrenia). Second, even if it doesn't drive off the depression entirely, it really eases certain symptoms. I always want to describe my depression as a feeling of being on fire. I mean that pretty literally. It's kind of like the first surge of adrenaline when you've just had a near-miss with a car. "You mean like anxiety?" a friend asked, but no - not like anxiety, because that involves intellect. The depression I feel is significantly physical and not thought-related at all. The lithium, however, eases this. And I even had two full weeks where I was downright happy, without being manic.

Yes, I still get depressed. Today I was ready to turn in my icons and my baptismal cross and call it quits. This is not because I don't believe in God, but because when I get badly depressed I no longer have the energy to contend with my own doubts and fears. My worst doubts and fears center on God, so the first thing I want to quit is my spiritual life. Not possible, I know, and decidedly unadvisable. When I can't even say an "Our Father" without bursting into tears, though, it's awfully attractive. "I have enough problems contending with my earthly father, thank you," I want to say. "I can't contend with his human-sized patriarchal problems. What would I want with God-sized ones? Oh, that's right. And because God is God, God's problems aren't God's problems, they're MY problems. Well it's hard enough when I can attribute fault where fault is due, without having to lay all the difficulty back on my own shoulders. Yes - thanks, but no thanks."

And then it occurs to me that it really is just my own doubts and fears I'm dealing with, not God's "faults" and not even my true feelings about Him. So I hang the icons back up and straighen my baptismal cross and pray to know the difference between the straw god I'm so afraid of and the real God who I can't afford not to call my Father. And I thank Him for the drugs.

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.