I found the solution

It’s April. I started dieting December of 2010. I have lost about 33 pounds. If I lose four more I will qualify for Lifetime Membership, which means I met a goal weight and don’t have to pay $40 a month anymore. I’ve talked about this before, but I have quite a new new readers, so I’ll tell it again.

At 207 pounds I thought I was probably about fifteen/twenty pounds over weight. I took funny pictures of myself looking sad eyed at the camera. I was pretty fat, but not all that fat, I thought.

I lost fifteen pounds and I was excited! That calls for New Pictures! Imagine, to my astonishment, I was not only still fat, I was still very fat. The weight began to creep off and I did (most) everything right. I tracked my meals on eTools program, exercised some, and showed up to meetings. (As of press I have missed two meetings in almost 2 1/2 years.) I got down to 173. And it stayed there. Every week I was either up a pound, stayed the same, or down .2. This has gone on for months now and I’m tired of it. I know how I lose weight: Follow the Weight Watcher’s Program. I will do that, guzzle water, counting points of everything I eat and exercise.

But wait, there is more. It’s warm out and I really wanted a cold drink, like a freddo from Pete’s. I decided to save a dollar and go to McDonalds. Shamrock Shakes are here for just a little while, and I have good memories of a friend who has fallen by the wayside, and Shamrock Shakes. While I was there, I’d get a “Mini Meal” A hamburger, french friends and Diet Coke. (For the record, Diet Coke and mood disorders usually don’t mix. I popped an Ativan just to get through it.) They did not have Shamrock Shakes.

Bait your breath no longer: I managed to find another milk shake. It was good – I sucked it down. It had 2/3 of my Weight Watcher Points Plus for that day and I am pretty sure the hamburger and french fries knocked the rest of them out of the park.

Why would I do such a thing? I am so close to my goal and, when I am asked if I’d like fries with that, my answer is, low and breathy, “yes, oh yes.”

Here some of the reasons I might do such a thing:

I prefer being fat – As T so elegantly put it I want to hide under a huge mound of fat.

I don’t want to reach my goal. I’d rather have the life of gobbling whatever it is that I want, anywhere or time than I want than that of health and wellness.

I hate myself and am going to let my body know it through a steady diet of junk.

I’m afraid of being thin or attractive.

I don’t want to succeed at this or anything else. Keep me plain, chubby, unaccomplished. It’s easier this way. Except for it’s not easier. I could have popped in to Trader Joe’s and got any of their deli lunches. It would have taken about the same time as it did for me to go through two drive-thru menus. Being destructive is a chore with physics on its side. Being constructive needs creativity and planning. I am creative. Sometimes it is difficult to put this creativity in motion. It’s like words that catch my ear and sound beautiful. It’s like a just right jar of red paint – on clearance. Maybe if I saw my body as an act of art I would take better care of it.

I want a tattoo that says, “TOSKA” except for in Cyrillic. I won’t get one. He says they are too expensive and that it would be even more expensive when I decided I didn’t want it anymore. He won’t get one either.

“Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

the day I deserve

I am off kilter. Last night my husband and I watched Sherlock over the internet. If you have any sense you will find it and watch it yourself. I thought about it all last night and woke up this morning with him in my brain. I feel frightened. I’m attributing it to the scary British tv show, not to anything real…

But I’m anxious, no matter what caused it, I still am anxious and I need to do whatever it takes to get out of it so it doesn’t become depression, and depression doesn’t lead to death. The last time I was depressed my seven year old asked me, “Do you feel like you don’t deserve anything?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Yes, yes I do.” That really is a part of all the moods I travel through. You can call it self-pity. I don’t care what you call it, actually. For me, those feelings come and bad things happen. No chemically balanced person can say that.

“You deserve ME!” She told me with out stretched arms. A perfectly acceptable time for a hug. I deserve her.

I asked her if she ever felt that way. Her answer was a simple “no”. This child has so much self esteem it is, as her North Dakotan aunt would say, “disgusting.” She is confident. She is happy about 80% of the time. She will pretend to be sad, some of the time, but I have never seen her pretend to be happy. Maybe it comes naturally to her and maybe we’ve built it in to her. Either way, the feeling I don’t deserve anything is mostly gone for me today. It’s just the fear without discernible cause that is getting to me today.

Bells Might Ring

A lot of my friends are getting divorced, or want a divorce. It seems kinda funny to me, but I’ve heard this story before. Most of us marry in our twenties. A lot of us divorce in our thirties/early forties. Some of us want to remarry, and divorce with the hope they will find someone better, others swear they will never marry again.

My therapist is about six feet tall and has a Ph.D. She has been married five times and told me that her husband of many years is almost perfect. She says that moving out to California was a challenge before because of her liabilities, namely the height and education. I don’t know if Californians are less intimidating here in California or what, but she met her husband that day she moved here. Good for her. She is a smart cookie and I like her much more than I thought I would.

She rarely works with bipolar patients, but that is okay. She said that I do quite well. Many of her patients lie on the couch and watch t.v. all the day. I do creative, productive things and have relationships. I liked that she said that. I wonder if it is a disguise or what. My illness doesn’t spread over everything I do. There are days I am totally in control, and there are others where I run up a $350 bill on art supplies. Last week I had really bad cycling. I had minutes where I said, “What is bipolar, anyway? I don’t have it, I feel great.” By the time I parked my car I was ready to die. That went on about three days. It was thrilling and disappointing. I wasn’t sure if it what would happen. There was no living in the present. I like that idea, living in the present can be wonderful so some people, but when one is suicidal, there is nothing to comfort yourself in that moment. To live with a mood disorder means living in the next moment, and knowing that the moment will change.

More about that later.

Still Reeling

If you don’t know me, I’m boring you, but if you don’t know me, I don’t think you’re reading this blog.  

I went to the psychiatrist today.  (A psychiatrist is a MD who prescribes medication.)  She was shocked and horrified by my Inderal overdose.  ”We would both be in trouble,” she said, and spent the rest of our appointment reeling.  This was serious stuff.  ”It just wasn’t your time,” she said.  I had done a very dangerous thing.  I have mostly stayed cool about this stuff, but, to be honest, hearing from the doctor herself that it might have been the real end is oddly thrilling.  It’s like setting things up for a suicide attempt, some thing I’ve only almost one once.  It’s titillating.  There is so much grief and pain that comes before an attempt.  I didn’t have those feelings about taking all those pills.  It’s only now, in retrospect, almost a week later, that I’m really allowing myself to have any feelings about it.  I regret to say it’s kind of exciting.  I wish it was just that I felt relieved.  I don’t, not yet.  Maybe when I get my mind wrapped around it I’ll have another experience.

My husband says that I didn’t die, or get very sick, so there is nothing to say or do about it.  I could make myself think about this, or even believe it, but I don’t have that kind of maturity.  Not yet.  

You were lucky, says the pharmacist to me.

Pills are always a bone of contention for the taker and just about everyone else. My brilliant book will be called, “Sorting My Pills”, which is about the wrestlings of a mentally ill person and her treatments, family and everyone else in the world. I like to tease my dad about the number of pills I take and prescriptions that are a part of my life. He is uncomfortable with the joke, so I tell it to him every chance I get.

Inderal is a heart/cholesterol medicine. As you can guess, it lowers the heart rate. It also has the side effect of causing the shaking, caused by Lithium, to go away. It has anti-anxiety properties. I thought I was supposed to take the little blue tablets three times a day. I frequently forgot the midday dose, but ultimately got that taken care of by taking it at 11, when Small eats lunch. I went off it when I developed Serotonin syndrome about a year ago. As of December 16 – fourteen days ago – it was re-prescribed.

Yesterday evening I checked the pills I was about to take. I do a cursory pill counting glance every night, but for some reason zeroed in on the yellow tabled I had been gulping on morning and evenings for the last two weeks. I just followed the instructions without considering what they were. (This is not like me – usually I do a lot of research and have much discussion with my doctors before I add a drug to my regime.) I find a cool website that identifies pills and find out I was taking two sixty mgs of Propranolol. I didn’t know what it was so I go on the chat with a Walgreens Pharmacist. It turned out it was the trade name for Enderal. I was already taking Enderal. In fact, I was taking it almost three times a day, at 20 mgs a slug. Somehow the prescriptions overlapped. Let’s do some math here. 60 x 2 = 120. 20 x 3 = 60. I was taking 180 mgs, an abundance, of a drug that slowed heartbeat. I typed to the pharmacist such, “I am lucky.” She answered to me, the medical facade dropped, “You are lucky.”

I haven’t really cried yet. I have worked on processing this – I could have killed myself without the intention. It hasn’t scared me, yet. I looked at my child and my spouse with more shock than sadness. When I am seriously depressed I look at them and feel so sad and sorry they will have to go on without me. This sort of death is more of a spectacle. It honestly never occurred to me I could accidentally hurt myself. These drugs are safe, right? So long as a I follow their instructions, everything will be fine, right?

Not so much. I’m not sure how to prevent this from happening again. I have so many daily prescriptions, so many different prescriptions it’s hard to keep up with it all. This is true for the mental patient I am and for anyone who is emotionally connected to their illness. I don’t know if people who take statins have the kind of relationship with medicine that I do, maybe they do. If they don’t they can detachedly open a bottle and swallow a pill or two. They don’t need to think or resent their pills. They keep them alive longer than they would, and that’s that. I would do better if I was more detached. I don’t hate taking pills – I know they extend my life and my health, but there is still something emotional going on here. If i wasn’t would I be in the situation I was last night?

How Far Do you Go?

I deal with a lot of health care practitioners – I have a serious, incurable mental illness. (Bipolar, along with OCD and ADD). Before my diagnosis I played around with different things to help my depression – Rescue Remedy, that I became psychologically addicted to, St John’s Wort, which I never remembered to take, and therapists.

Once I was diagnosed with depression I was adamant that I would never need drugs for my illness, and if I’d just cowboy up it would go away. We were talking about a “major depressive disorder.” Years later when I received a more accurate diagnosis they admitted me to the hospital and started putting me on medications. [spoiler] Five years later I take at least eleven pills a day. [/spoiler] I see a therapist every couple of weeks and when I need it I go to group therapies. One of the groups I was a part of was called Dialectial Behavior Therapy (DBT) It is based on Buddhist teachings, although I believe it never fell in to heresy.

I think the “heresy” is where my long ole post fits in. In the groups, we studied mindfulness, learned to avoid black and white thinking and radical acceptance. These are a part of Zen Buddhism. While nothing in the class offended me, I did read a book by one of the speakers that I thought was repugnant. He repeatedly and purposefully used the Bible out of context to prove that all religious teachings espoused the same thing. It was frustrating and I am at the point I cannot take any of his teachings graciously because he so offended my faith. Now, if his messages totally turned my life around, I may not be so quick to kick him to the curb, but ultimately I believe that someone so spiritually lost is not someone I want to take spiritual advice from, even if the temptation was great. If he were a psychiatrist, though, that would be different. My psychiatrist is from the Middle East and shared with me that she meditated, but we didn’t discuss it further. It’s not appropriate, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she is an excellent doctor. If she was handing out crystals and fliers inviting me to worship them with her, that would be different, but she’s not.

All of this medicine that I am about to take is taken by someone who eschewed aspirin. Sometimes, when I get tired of it, I think, why do I do this? And the answer is, because you are going to die if you don’t.

I do want to be healed, most of the time. Bipolar can cave in on you if you’re not very careful. I am not willing to deny Jesus to do it, though. I think there are all kinds of practitioners that can do great work but I would not be willing to set aside my beliefs or relationship with God to have it done. I’m not passive, I just don’t want to be a part of it. I want my end of the equation to ultimately glorify God. For some reason I am thinking of that old “psychic surgery” scene in the end of the Man on the Moon movie. He has incurable, un-treatable cancer and he flies around the world for a “miracle.” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xy53Un2AXpU (work safe) He sees that there is no miracle to be found.

I’m looking for a point to everything I just wrote. I suppose it’s this. I went far looking for help for myself. The best way for me to help myself was with medication and therapy – both decidedly “Western” although the medication more than the therapy. I also needed the body of Christ is work towards being well – that’s a Universal idea, right? I’m not ever going to be 100% well on this side of paradise, but I know that Western medication is going to push me along that path. Medication can be miraculous too, right?

Shoes, yes shoes

I like clothes. I look for beautiful colors and soft fabrics. Once I went in to a vintage store right after I got paid and bought, at a very good price, every single cashmere sweater in the place. I just bought two pair of shoes, frantically purchased at Famous Footwear because the outfit I was going to wear wasn’t going to work out and the solid grey I put together desperately needed silver shoes. I found them, and a pair of gray boots, too. But one, get one half price.

It’s not just that I love clothes. I love my daughter, my husband and having good hair. I love Jesus and the Holy Spirit and God. Chocolate and Italian sodas make higher on my list than clothes. I easily love them more that shoes, however: Shoes do something to me. I rarely need a pair of shoes, such as running shoes, go in to a store and buy them on sale. That is what people do that do not have psychiatric issues. I buy shoes when I need them powerfully. It happens during a severely depressive day or bad week. I think like this, “I can kill myself, or I can buy some new shoes.” So far, I have always chosen the shoes. I’ve come home with eight pair. I took them home and tried them all on and took some (not all) back. I reasoned that I should try them on in a place I felt comfortable. I will not be taking my boots and flats back. They are cute and I like them. They are also silver. I will give my husband the birthday and Christmas money I get and that will make us “even”.

Ah, glorious shoes. I will go upstairs, now, and clean out my closet.

Time cards are for geniuses

For this otherwise glorious job, I have to fill out timecards once every two weeks. I’ve never managed to get it right. I write down the wrote date, forget to give myself credit for hours I’ve worked and once had to pay for days I actually worked because I screwed up so badly. It sucks and I hate it. I wish I had a job with a personal secretary, a competent, good one, because I need it. I need a housekeeper, too. Those are two tasks beyond my level of skills. I think I always thought I’d have those things, so I didn’t focus on two very important tasks. My house remains a mess, and often visits the world of shambles. I am not sure how to handle this well. There is this book my mom got me, “Sidetracked Home Executive” and it is effective. But I have to remember to use it, and not just skip things in to the back of my 3×5 cards labeled with important chores and activities. Some of the things are like: Tidy kitchen. That usually means putting my husband’s eggs away. Other things like: Put on makeup, frequently get ignored. I think I’m prettier at 35 than i was at 25, but I’m really not the one to judge.

I had another bad morning. Yesterday was terrible. I just feel, I don’t know, unusual. It’s like I skipped an important medication, or got treated differently than I am used to be treated. It throws me. It looks like the Malakoa who thought she could do anything was wrong.

I read the other day how bipolar people believe they can do things they cannot do. This is true, and I wished I had known it before. It’s not the same as having dreams, dreams are important. There are some folks with bipolar who think they can fly, or know how to solve California’s budget problems. I believed I could roller skate and invited friends out skating. (I do not roller skate.) The confidence is compelling, so sometimes we get jobs based on claims we make in job interviews. Yes, in college I read 100 pages an hour. Now, I sometimes take 1/2 hour to read three.

I can think of two great big examples of how I screwed my college education up. One was my major. I studied Comparative Literature and thought I could go to graduate school. I spoke pretty competent Spanish but could not read and write it well. I took the Spanish 25 class, which it like English 1A. You are expected to know Spanish, but not be familiar with the skills necessary to write essays or interpret readings. I got a “C”. I didn’t take this as a sign that I should change my major, which required upper division work in Spanish. I just plugged along, got a tutor and kept getting those “C”s. I do not know what I was thinking.

Another thing I did was decided I wanted to take a graduate level class in Anglo-Saxon literature. I was not earning good grades and I was not regularly attending class. However, my enthusiastic demeanor earned me a space in the small, exclusive seven person group, filled with the finest English graduate students in the United States, and me. I did horribly in the class. I was asked to drop it, but instead hung around and didn’t quite get why I wasn’t doing well. I never dropped the class, and what’s more I arrive an hour late to the final because I wrote the time down right but read it long. I didn’t take the final at all. The teacher felt “betrayed” and refused to even give me a grade in the class.

It really screwed up my GPA, which wasn’t so great in the first place.

I didn’t know then, but my behavior was classic bipolar nonsense. I can’t go back to school and fix things. I earned my Bachelor’s degree with out commendation and had similar troubles in graduate school. I dream of going back to school and earning a psychology degree so I can work with other mentally ill folks, but the truth is I don’t have the chops. My memory is not good and there are probably not a lot of schools that would take me. National University, maybe? I’m not too proud. But we’re wise enough right now not to go into debit so I can get a degree for a job I may or may not get. I can’t work too much, it’s do much responsibility. I don’t want to be in charge of anyone either. I like my Genesis job. I do not like payroll, but you can’t like everything. If you do, it seems to me, you are not paying attention. It’s silly. Do not always be silly, all your credibility will be gone and no one likes that.

Kittens seem to play into it a lot (PG)

My friend “youknowwhoiam” once described her head as being full of kittens. I didn’t know she was bipolar before that, but I recognized it right away. A quick chat confirmed it and I found comfort in my brethren. 4% of adults have bipolar, I wonder how many of them can be open about it. I can’t, yet. But if I spot one, I will reveal myself.

Now I feel like a kitten myself. I’ve got my mama kitty picking me up from the scruff of my neck with her teeth and noodling me. Problem is, while the kitten is being nestled in to mommy’s lair and given a sweet nipple, I’m just tossed aside. My expectations are useless. I’m just cold. I want to find a place of comfort, There aren’t any here. I took an ativan. I often drink some caffeine, too. The Ativan or Xanax relax me and the caffeine peps me up, in a good way. There is no caffeine here. I texted a friend asking what she was doing today, but she hasn’t gotten back to me, and I know she’s busy. The greenegem.wordpress.com has been helpful and I am happy to have her. I just need to get out. I might feel better if I eat something, but I am not about to cook. I might feel better if I did yoga, but it’s best on an empty stomach. I might feel better if I made myself get up and do something, but all of those things make me feel so overwhelmed. Remember, overwhelmed is a kind of fear. What am I afraid of? What do I have to lose by confronting bipolar? I know It’s best for now to write, to try to sing. To dream a little. These episodes are a part of my life and always will be. It’s that where the overwhelmed comes from? It is me? Or is it the illness? Or I am the illness? Is it like pusy pimple? They aren’t me, but they sure look like it. I’m all broken out now, too. They sure look like my neck is covered in them. (Thanks, Vyvanse).

I forgot to get Small from school yesterday. It was minimum day and I forgot. This is the third time I have forgotten. She called me and I was across town. I called Li and she rushed out to get her like she was her own. This woman has a newborn baby and a six (almost seven) year old. Also – a seventeen year old. All that, but she still cares for my baby.

Meeting Myself

“if you met yourself tomorrow would you be someone you like… trust… want to be friends with… admire? That’s where it begins.”
— Marcel Nunis’ Dad.

If I had the pleasure of making my own acquaintance, I would like myself right away. I have red hair, after all! And some freckles. And pimples. In a lot of ways I look like a forty-year-old-eighth-grade-early-bloomer. I kinda like that look on a woman. I think I’m interesting. I have a small family but I talk about my child (mostly) only when asked, or when the story is really funny. I have an interesting job, read interesting things, and have traveled all over the interesting world. I’m also will spend three hours on the veranda talking about nothing with a friend. I love that in a person. I do not understand why it is so rare. People have time to spend hours on the internet, watching television or getting high. They are not always more important than spending precious hours with a friend. (I obviously use the internet, I watch some tv and I can’t drink anymore for a thousand different reasons – I’m not better than you, because I spent two hours drinking coffee at the house across the street. If I thought I was better than you, it would be because of different reasons.)

I am not sure I could trust myself. I am loyal to a fault, but sometimes it’s difficult for me to understand things. I look at my calendar every single day. Some days I read, “Psychiatrist – 1:00″. Unfortunately I read, “Psychiatrist – 3″ and there at 2:45, announcing to the receptionist that I know I’m a little early. My daughter’s play rehearsal starts at 5:15. I should remember this. Two out of four meetings we have been fifteen minutes late because I am sure the rehearsals start at 5:30. I’m trying to get this straightened out. I ask B to read the days appointments back at me, and I carefully read the numbers on the page. I still make about two calendar mistakes a week. I do not purposely hurt people anymore. I don’t get mind-cloggingly drunk, anymore either and that makes me much more reliable – but please – that is not saying a lot. I am pretty good at gently confronting people if I have issues with them. Except when I’m not.

I do admire the person I hope that I am. (Let’s slip this into the third person so I don’t get embarrassed.) Malakoa manages bipolar disorder. She has a regime and she mostly sticks to it. For example, she would rather sleep late as much as she could and stay up as late as much as she wants. Instead, she keeps to a pretty consistent sleep schedule. She sorts out twelve pills a day in to a big ole pill box and takes those damn pills twice a day, even if they make her choke or don’t seem like they are doing anyone any good. She has lost most of the weight she gained on those damn pills, and that is not a common thing for mentally ill folks to do. You are more likely to see a patient walking around with a dazed look on their face and a milkshake in one hand. I know because I’ve done that before, too. It’s easy to give up on ever being well – so many folks with mental illness get fatter and fatter and feel so sorry for themselves, thus making no effort to pull themselves together. It’s a hard thing to do, and sometimes it’s nearly impossible to do, but she does it a lot of the time. She has held mostly difficult jobs – right now she works with a little autistic guy – it’s something that, even if she’s not great at it, is one most people would not want to attempt. She quit drinking on her own. No meetings, no backslides, nothing. She’s been sober for six years, and as much as she wants to drink again, she won’t. I believe her.

So, meeting myself would give me a true, albeit untrustworthy friend. What can I do to be a better friend? Anyone?