To Stick

So I’m sitting here on my day off, watching “Eat, Pray, Love” and thinking about marriage. At its core, the movie is reprehensible. It’s about a scared woman who marries someone she shouldn’t (who I’m sure is lovely on some level but is predictably portrayed as a buffoon) and so abandons him to travel around the world with what seems to be an inexplicably large amount of money. And of course, it’s making me think about the fact that I am up to my eyeballs in a 15-year relationship (and almost 10-year marriage) and that IT is the adventure of my lifetime. I don’t need to travel around the world to find meaning in a plate of pasta or on a beach. I find meaning in the life I’m building day by day with my husband.

And dear god, is it SOME life. It is unbelievable what we have been through in these first ten years of our marriage:

• The world fell apart on 9/11
• I walked away a career I’d been building for 20 years
• I went completely crazy and had to be hospitalized for over 2 straight years
• I was arrested
• We were POOR
• We moved every 2 years on average - once, across a continent, leaving everyone we knew
• We learned we could not make babies and fell apart for a while
• We bought a house
• We built 2 careers with some success
• We decided that our families are unsalvageable and destructive forces in our lives
• We discovered that one of us has an orphan disease
• We spent SO MUCH money on therapy…

Lying in bed last night, we both discussed what to make of all this. A curse? A self-fulfilling prophesy? Behavioral patterns passed down by previous, suck-y generations? That one sounded the most likely. And how to proceed? Bury-head-in-sand sounded good as did pull-covers-over-head. But the amazing thing is that we both came to the same answer on our own.

We get up each day and continue to try to make a life.

Nothing else makes any sense. All other options are worse. I’ve tried them - I know. How amazing to roll over in bed and discover that the person lying right there next to you thinks the exact same thing as you do. And, on top of everything, loves you right back. THAT is an adventure.

(And funny enough, that’s what Julia Roberts discovers by the end of the film too…)

The Collector

I have a new diagnosis (or two)! More to add to my collection! So far I’ve been told I have:

- Major depression

- “Double” depression (major + dysthymia)

- Alcoholism

- Borderline personality disorder

And now, drum roll please:

- Generalized anxiety disorder

- Obsessive compulsive disorder

Frankly, I think all these diagnoses are sort of all bullshit at this point. I know I’ve met the diagnostic criteria for all of them at one point or another and I currently meet the criteria for GAD and OCD, hence the new “diagnosis.” But honestly, these don’t mean anything to me anymore. Nor does the DSM mean much to me these days. I know what I have and I know how to fix it (brains + cash + support + time).

Yet when my doc sprung this on me yesterday, it was still a disappointment. Half: “well, of course” and half “oh no, not again.” He wanted to leap right into a discussion of treatment options and therapeutic interventions and I was like…. Stop. Let’s just process the fact that you’re saying this to me. Let’s just process what this MEANS and feels like. Let’s start with identifying what was the chicken here and what was the egg.

I dunno, somehow, it’s really important for me to understand what came first. If you had cancer, you’d want to know that it was the chemo that was causing your nausea, not the cancer or some other, horrible, underlying illness. And I kind of think that this might be what’s happening here: getting better is causing some things to get worse. It’s like trading one, horrible debilitating illness for four, smaller slightly less annoying ones. Watch:

Age 0-7:

I know I started with a genetic susceptibility towards emotional sensitivity. I own that. I’m sensitive in all the good and bad ways that word connotes. I’m also creative and intelligent – another asset/liability depending on what day it is. Growing up, my home environment preys on this. My parents’ inability to regulate their emotions spilled over and made me even more hyper-vigilant. Their invalidation & narcissism alters my perceptions of the world and necessitates coping mechanisms like dissociation and near-psychotic (albeit creative) interpretations of reality. (I cannot control trees, no matter how much I believe I can. (I think.))

- Diagnosis at 7: gifted

- Treatment: play Battleship with the school shrink

Age 8-14:

Now, add to this mix an actual, tangible reality that I had to LIVE in every day with things like school and peer pressure and adolescence and loss… and I get pretty worn out. It’s hard to be the crazy one. It gets old. I want to escape. I think about death. A lot. Remember, the rules don’t apply to meeeee!

- Diagnosis at 14: major depression

- Treatment: go directly to hospital. Do not pass go. But maybe stop in at your local liquor store.

Age 15-27:

Wow. That whole crazy/hospital thing really got everyone’s attention. Maybe a bit too much… but, WOW. I’m gonna tell everyone I meet about THAT. Maybe even make it my new “thing.” Oh, and alcohol works great!

- Diagnosis at 27: double depression & alcoholism & borderline

- Treatment: how much money have you got? Double it and mail directly to the nearest mental health provider. Also: cutting releases endorphins! Do that.

Age 28-36:

So. Maybe I went a bit overboard… That whole crazy thing tends to make nice things like husbands and jobs and car keys disappear. Maybe I should try getting - and then keeping - my shit together. But to do that, I’ll have to hold on tight. Really dig my nails in deep and keep everything under perfect lock and key. Measure it out to the nearest microgram. And worry. Don’t forget a heaping spoonful of worry. That’ll help the medicine go down.

- Diagnosis at 36: GAD & OCD

- Treatment: to be determined.

Groups

I’ve done a LOT of group therapy in my life. Of course there were the endless hours of groups that came with every inpatient and partial hospitalization. There were various outpatient DBT groups, various AA meetings and even one outpatient CBT group. But nothing – nothing held a candle to the group my friends and I created on our own.

We all met in a PHP program run by a local hospital. It was a pretty good program, as these things go. There was the usual drama. A girl that no one liked killed herself. The damned “movement therapy” people forced us into sing-a-longs (with tambourines) in the middle of a day that bruised our self-esteem. There were insurance battles. The DBT therapist had a newborn and was so sleep-deprived that she couldn’t run a group to save her life. One of the social workers looked like a hobbit. We tried not to look enviously at the other outpatient programs for medical issues that looked better funded and frankly, cleaner.

Eventually though, the program ran out for all of us (did I mention the insurance battles) and we tentatively agreed to try and keep meeting. Maybe every couple of weeks, we said? A potluck at one woman’s house? We did it and it went WELL. Then one night, at the last minute, we couldn’t get in touch with our host. She was busy trying to kill herself we later learned. When she got out of the coma we started meeting again but now on a weekly basis.

Every Friday in Alameda we sat for hours and hours and listened patiently to each other. There were 8 of us. I was actually the youngest at 31. Everyone else was somewhere between 40-60. But it didn’t matter. We all had some variety of depression. Others had some axis II stuff going on and maybe some substance abuse thrown in for fun. But we all had something in common: at one point, all of us had wanted to kill ourselves and we just wanted to keep each other ALIVE. It became a support group for people addicted to the idea that suicide was an answer.

I’m going to stage a reunion in May when we go back for a visit. It’ll have been almost 4 years since we were all together. I’ve missed them all so much.

All of them.

All of us are still alive.

All of us.

Worst day

I’ve had a lot of “worst days” in my life. Some of them were clearly terrible horrible days:

- The birthday my dad strangled me

- The day I tried to go to high school but was hospitalized instead

- The day they locked me in isolation

- The day I tried to die but was arrested instead

- The day I help my first set of commitment papers

- The day I tried to go back to the hospital voluntarily but was arrested instead

- A couple days later when the PHP I’d been attending for 1.5 years kicked me out over the phone for the above incident

On all these days, the defining characteristic was the sense that reality had completely broken down. Suddenly, all light and air was bent, as if through a lens. Anything off to the side was clouded in a blur but those things immediately in front of me seemed crystal clear. This Terrible Thing was happening and I could perceive every last detail of it in painful detail. I remember the way those rooms looked. The cracks on the ceiling of the first hospital’s admitting room. The size of the piece of birthday cake in front of me. The feel of the black, metal pay phone in the hallway of the hospital. The way sound reverberated off the Plexiglas window of the Side Room.

Sometimes this fracture of the fabric of space was helpful – a reminder that this shit wasn’t going to work anymore. There was something I was doing that I needed to Knock OFF. Get away from my parents. Get away from these hospitals, these policemen. These were not moments where I should linger.

Other times, it just felt as if I were living through a traumatic brain injury – a concussive blast in slow motion that was gradually creating tiny shears throughout my grey matter that would never heal. Afterwards, nothing would ever quite be the same - like an indelible mental limp.

I had one of those days a couple weeks ago. Nothing dramatic like a hospitalization or an arrest, just a horrible, horrible day where literally every possible thing that could go wrong did. All throughout, I tried to remember non-dramatic terrible days like this that I'd survived to tell about before:

- The day snow chains ripped out the ABS on my sports car just before my skis were stolen

- The handful of horrible, terrible, cry-all-night fights we’ve ever had as a couple

- They day we were thrown out of a B&B and went wandering across the muddy Scottish countryside, looking for a place that didn’t exist

- The day I met a professor who was having the kind of architecture career I wanted and realized I wasn’t nearly strong enough to do that

On all those days I still felt the same brain-splitting panic, the same cognitive overload during each of them. The feeling that

This. Is. A. Crisis.

And You. You are not capable of handling such things.

What happened a couple of weeks ago? It’s barely worth mentioning. I got up early to drive my husband to the airport through a snowstorm so I started the day exhausted. I drove to work a couple hours later through a subsequent ice storm to arrive at work a scared, angry mess. I returned home at 9:30 to discover that we had what I thought was a propane leak (terrifying) but turned out to be an empty tank (infuriating). For three hours I ran around the yard in the dark and freezing rain, calling anyone I could think of who could help, digging feet of ice and snow off of every surface, worrying that I was about to blow all of our worldly possessions and myself and the cat, sky high. I felt alone and terrified and confused.

- How could all this be happening and why had the fates conspired against little old me?

- How did I wind up so alone?

- Why did time and space seem so flexible and tangible all of a sudden?

- Why did everything seem so muffled and how long had I been shoveling?

And by the end when the heat was back on and my head was throbbing and sleep and food seemed like irrelevant novelties, I sat with that familiar old feeling: I don’t know how many more days like this can I face.

hidden in plain sight

It has been an extremely long time since I last posted. I didn’t exactly abandon this blog so much as I forgot I HAD a blog.

Why…? Well, I’ve been in hiding. Not any kind of witness-protection, government-sponsored kind of “official” hiding. More like hiding from the world and everything in it. If you recall (why would you – it’s been 3 years) we received some bad news in early 2008 that we could never have children of our own. It was devastating in a fuck-this-shit-I’m-giving-up kind of way. And giving up looked different for each of us. For me it looked like: bury self in job and wifely tasks. I figured if I could just dig myself a predictable little groove then nothing (good or bad) could ever find me and I’d be safe from future disappointments. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I stopped answering the phone or taking vacations. It was more of a mental program to keep me busy so that I didn’t have to think or feel:

8-9am: get up, make coffee, feed cat, kiss husband good-bye as he leaves for work

9am-12pm: work on computer

12-2pm: shower, eat leftovers for lunch, drive to work

2-7pm: work at work

7-9pm: drive to gym, workout while reading iphone, drive home, shower

9-11pm: eat dinner while watching DVR’d shows, work on computer more

11pm-8am: read in bed, sleep

Repeat as needed. On weekends I just replaced work at work with housework and voila! A pattern that allowed me to fill all mental space with work and the other minutia of life. Have I been productive at work – absolutely. They’re delighted with the robot they hired. My boss said yesterday that he wishes modern science had progressed to the point where they could clone me. Have I kept a well run home – yes. Our house and personal finances are tidier than 99% of Americans. (that remaining 1% are people that live in those little mobile 200 square foot homes and own two changes of clothes – oh how I envy them…) But have I really been living the last couple of years? No. I’ve been hiding, afraid to even turn on a radio station for fear of what havoc that unoccupied mental space will wreak.

So what is it that I’m so afraid to think about? How about the final, unassailable realization that despite all our efforts, we have become the local weird-o’s; different enough from the rest of society to no longer take pleasure in any of the things that mankind has created to entertain/distract ourselves from the fact that life is nasty, brutish and short. About the only things that seem to make us crack a smile are old Simpsons reruns, the odd Robot Chicken Sketch, theoatmeal and some old George Carlin videos. The only things that hold our interest are long, complicated movies, work, books and the Internet. We have jobs that are purely academic – we trade purely in ideas – which is pretty different from most of 2011 America.

We don’t have kids so that immediately alienates us from our now child-obsessed culture – oh, and not to mention all our friends who are knee-deep in exactly what they should be at this point in their lives: child rearing. Add all this to the years of trauma we’re both recovering from and well, we don’t feel like we fit in ANYWHERE.

I have a desire to return to the world of the living. I do. But this desire is consistently derailed by the reality that life just keeps getting harder and harder and harder. The easiest way to deal with the mounting difficulty is to lose myself in the program. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse, repeat. Put on movie, zone out, go to bed. Turn on computer, surf around, go to bed. Take on more work, look up, years have passed.