Finding My Disorder

For me, my illness was an old friend. It was something I knew was there, but that I could handle. Sure, my life would be better without it, and it made maintaining relationships hard, but it wasn't that threatening. I was used to it. And I didn't think anyone would take it seriously. I didn't take it that seriously.

Sometimes I thought it made me sort of endearingly crazy. Something that's sort of romanticized, I guess. A girl that seems well enough but ends up being absolute batshit. Her neon hair flying around her bright eyes and pale tear-streaked face agonized in some sort of internal struggle that's come out to play because she's lost control of herself.

But I still managed to just sorta roll with the punches. Bad day? Okay, we can do it. Really bad day? Ouch. But then, it just suddenly went, “Oh, fuck.” And when the phrase sort of stuck things started getting dicey.

I'd been getting worse. I knew that. I'd thrown a really long, good (to my standards) relationship out to the dogs and was wallowing in self-loathing. Part of my typical cycle (the poor guy). I would wallow and cry and sit in the dark and sleep and do nothing except get up, go to work with a fake smile for my employees, and come back home. And then sometimes I would feel motivated and crazed and go out dancing at goth bars and relish in turning men down constantly as I danced.

Sound familiar to anyone? I didn't recognize the pattern at the time.

Eventually, I settled down and rekindled with my longtime paramour. Except that he was still on cocaine. And weed. And Xanax laced weed. And cocaine laced weed. He swore he quit cocaine, but I swear I tasted it on his lips after he said that. And his lips were the only reason I knew what it tasted like in the first place.

His insecurities and drug issues drove me crazy and just as things were getting worse again I felt another depressive low coming on. At that time a friend of mine showed up around town again. He was astounded by what I was dealing with. Somehow I'd never realized how bad things had become with my boyfriend. I went on a trip to San Francisco and when I came back, I broke it off for good. I was happier. But I was also sadder, dangerously so.

My returned friend became my solace, and eventually my new paramour. But still I struggled. I went to work and I came home, unless he made me go out. I was spiraling down a rabbit hole of depression and self-loathing. And I was hesitant to put everything into him. I was afraid he would change his mind and leave. I was afraid he didn't want me, afraid that it was all some big joke. He started taking me places.

Places I had never been. He started teaching me how to drive (no one had ever taught me), and made me go out when I wanted to go home all the time. He was trying to give me the push I so obviously needed. But I was drifting.

When I was alone at night I was frantic. I'd pace and scratch my legs. I'd hold my head and pull my hair and cry and cuss and dodge around my poor startled cat who just wanted to make me feel better. I couldn't eat, I couldn't read, write, draw, paint... I couldn't do anything but try to keep from crawling out of my skin. Eventually, it got so bad that I started cutting myself.

I used a box cutter from work while I sat at my kitchen table with my legs propped up on another chair. I still have scars on my left thigh. My boyfriend noticed the cuts almost immediately of course. We were laying in bed and my leg, which was usually smooth and pale, now had a small collection of little hot red cuts. He ran his fingertips over them and looked at me in the way he does when he's trying to cover up his alarm.

“Did you do this recently?”

Of course, I did. They hadn't been there the last time he'd spent the night. He covered up his concern and told me to call him next time. I knew I wouldn't, but there were a few nights when I stopped texting him because I was so frantic and he would call me and ask what I was doing, and ask me to tell him about my day. That helped some, and I'm sure he knew what he was doing.

But I kept getting worse. Every once in a while I would slip up and cut again. Just a couple more red lines onto the unoffending thigh. He would notice them, and ask why. And I'd just say I didn't know.

Nights alone were starting to frighten me. There were a couple times when the urge to hurt myself would come out of nowhere and I wouldn't be prepared to fight it. I started having suicidal thoughts. I wrote about it, and I remember being afraid of no one finding me and my cat eating me.

Not that I'd blame him, but the idea still gave me the jeebies because I didn't think anyone would find me. The idea started forming more completely, and I kept drifting more and more absently through my days.

I worked as a manager in a very busy building of a very busy company. I started losing track of my work. A superior could ask what I did today and I wouldn't know. Only that I had done so much- but couldn't put it into words. I walked in one day, and I felt like I had never been there before. I knew every scuff on every piece of tile on the way to the office intimately, yet I felt out of place, disconnected, like I was floating in a fog. I shut myself in an empty office and forced myself to make a phone call while I felt like my head was floating away.

I called the mental health phone number on my insurance card. They'd made me an appointment for three weeks away. I didn't make me feel much better but at least I'd done something- and at least I had a goal to look towards when things were spiraling down.

I started doing research. I'd pulled a muscle in my back and been given a muscle relaxer. I'd only taken it three times, but that was about when things started going so downhill. Maybe that had something to do with things suddenly getting so bad? Well, guess what? Muscle relaxers are related to tricyclic antidepressants. And guess what people with Bipolar Disorder aren't supposed to take? Tricyclic antidepressants.

I started to think I was bipolar. I knew that I'd had a really bad mania episode the year before. It'd been so bad that my boyfriend at the time had wanted to take me to the hospital, or my mother, and hadn't wanted me to go to work the next morning. He'd thought someone had drugged me. It had been the first time I'd experienced anything on that level, and it stuck with me.

I still remember it- in little flashes. I know that I said that elephants should rule the world and told him things I'd never been willing to before. I remember brilliant little ideas forming and flitting away again before I could grasp them. And I remember him trying to catch me when I suddenly sat down on a curb in the parking lot because he thought I was falling. And I couldn't stop talking.

Mania is weird.

But I kept doing research. I researched dissociation and mania and depression and memory and things started to add up. But three weeks was a long time to wait, and I lost it a couple more times. But finally, the day of the appointment came.

I was so nervous. I sat shaking in my seat and scribbling in my journal. Literally scribbling. I wondered if the receptionist thought I was batshit crazy. But hell, it was a mental health office, what did it matter?

And then there was suddenly a little shout and a toddler with dark hair, big brown eyes, and pigtails dashed across the room and tried to climb up on the bench next to me. Her parents grabbed her and pulled her back, and she tried a few more times. I didn't really mind but I had bright blue hair and circles under my eyes and shaking hands.

So I don't blame them. My name was finally called and I met with a young woman for my intake appointment. She asked me an array of questions. She asked about sadness, guilt, shame, self-harm, suicide, all of it. I read to her out of my journal to answer her questions with my voice shaking the whole time, because I knew I would just start crying if I wasn't reading.

She made an appointment with a psychiatrist for me, and started talking about evening workshops—but cut herself off. She said there was a program where I would attend for several hours a week for four weeks, and they would take me out of work to complete it. The idea of interrupting work terrified me. It was the only thing I could still do regularly.

But then, I wasn't even doing so well there. So I agreed. I had an appointment for “intensive screening” at 7 AM the next morning in the same building.

And intense it was. Hell. There were three of us and a therapist. And all three of us were crying before my turn was over—and I went first. He asked any question you could think of in just the right way that it felt like he was tearing you open and rifling through the debris.

But he looked at me and said: “This will be the best choice you've ever made in your life.” And he sent me off so I could go have a meeting to pull myself out of work. And I did.

Everyone at work surprised me. I thought they would all express the inconvenience and frustration with me for leaving them without someone in such an important role without notice.

But they just said, “Take care of yourself, we'll figure it out.” I went out for lunch with my boyfriend after the meeting, feeling drained and a little hysterical after crying so much in one morning, and I got a phone call from the general manager who was away on a retreat, and she just said the same thing, “Take care of yourself.”

I went back to my boyfriend and asked if it was that obvious I needed help. He looked at me quizzically and said “No. But they probably hear it and go, 'Oh... That makes sense.'”

My boyfriend never really let my being sick affect the way he treated me. Which I've always appreciated. He doesn't dance around my soft spots like I'm some delicate little flower. He treats me like he always has, no matter what might or might not be wrong with me. And that makes life a little bit easier, knowing at least one person looks at me the same way- knowing that he doesn't see me as the embodiment of my illness.

I had almost three weeks until I started my treatment. I had an appointment with a psychiatrist to wait for in a couple of days, but after that? We grabbed my cat and we went on a trip. He'd recently bought a big old blue van we named Frankie with the intention of leaving and traveling the country in it. So we went up north.

We went past San Francisco and up into the redwoods. We walked around the campus where he went to college, and I remembered wishing that I'd applied there, and wondered how different my life might have been if I had. We went through the town he'd been in the past four years and fixed the rear view mirror in the van when it fell off and he made a copy of the keys to the van for me.

We ate at his favorite cafe and snuck into the philosophy building one morning to brush our teeth after we'd slept in the parking lot. We drank beer and I started a blog while we sat in his favorite coffee shop, talking to locals and typing away.

Then we went to Lake Tahoe and spent a week with his dad's side of the family. His aunts told me how crazy his grandma was, and his uncles laughed and smiled at the idea of us going off to travel the world in a junky old van. We got his grandpa drunk, and he told old war stories. The boys dove under the dock and convinced me to cook the crawfish they caught. One eventful evening his grandmother even called me 'disgusting blue-haired girl with the nasty cat'. She was a little crazy (but I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess).

But it was over soon. It was time to go back home, and time for me to start the real work. But I already felt so much better. I felt guilt, for not being at work when I was supposed to have already been in therapy, but the therapists told us that feeling better was why we were out of work, and if it made us happy, they didn't care. So I felt less bad. I'd gotten a diagnosis and medication from the psychiatrist I'd seen before I left.

He'd diagnosed me as Bipolar II with traits of Borderline Personality Disorder. But he didn't write down the BPD, he said there was too much stigma about treating it for him to want to put it in my file so soon, and the medications for it were virtually the same as the medications for Bipolar Disorder.

So I took an anti-psychotic and a mood stabilizer every night at ten o'clock. I could feel the difference after about a week. The anti-psychotic was supposed to work fast- they were worried about me living alone and being so volatile. It felt sort of like a buffer. I would feel myself getting worked up, but it would be like falling into a bunch of feather pillows instead of pavement. There was still an impact, but it wasn't devastating. My nights were still agitated, but I wasn't frantic.

Therapy itself was interesting. We met every other day, except weekends, and always had a goal to meet between sessions. We were supposed to walk outside, and try to eat and shower, and sometimes we were supposed to do things for ourselves that we felt guilty about. Like buying the dress we really wanted or going out for breakfast.

During the sessions, we learned how to breathe when we were upset, talked about our issues, and went over metal fallacies and how to combat them. But every day was an emotional roller coaster. It was exhausting. You were faced with your own issues, and everyone else's. As someone with an inordinate amount of empathy, it was sometimes hard to handle. Because I was broken, but so were all of them. We regularly helped each other and triggered each other. It was a back and forth. Her story would make her cry, his story would make her try to comfort him, and on and on we went. And the therapists guided us through the process of learning how to talk about it all, and how to react to our emotions, and why we were reacting that way.

Everyone felt differently about their medication. But everyone seemed to hate Prozac. Everyone. And since it's what the psychiatrists started with for anti-depressants, almost everyone who was supposed to be taking it, wasn't taking their medication. I felt lucky to be someone that didn't have to deal with antidepressants. But then the reality sunk in that I have to take medication for the rest of my life in order to keep myself from completely flying off the handle.

Some people don't seem to understand that medication can be such a pivotal thing.

Everyone has their right to deny medication. But no one has any right to tell you that you don't need yours. Granted, medication isn't a cure, but it helps. Even with medication I still struggle. But I don't scream every two seconds when I'm in a car, see dark shadows following me, cut myself, talk about elephants ruling the world, or question if what I'm seeing is real every five minutes like I do without them.Those things? They make medication necessary for me to live a normal life.

As the month went by, I decided that I wasn't going to go back to work. I was going to quit work and travel the country with my boyfriend. The decision terrified me, but I knew I couldn't just stay behind and go back to work and be happy. And my therapists said okay. They didn't tell me I was crazy for making the decision like I thought they would. I thought they would blame my mania and tell me it was a terrible idea and up my medications. But all they did was smile and give me tools to make it easier.

So by the end of it all, I was ready to leave. I was more stable but I felt so raw, like I had an open wound that had been numbed but my body was still in shock. I was sensitive to everything, and I shook all the time, but I was better.

They had taught us not to expect the world from ourselves all the time, and that it was okay to be sick. They told us that baby steps are still steps forward, and to be proud of. You don't need everyone to understand your illness -and a lot of people won't- but that doesn't mean it isn't real. It's not your fault if someone else doesn't understand. It doesn't make you wrong or your struggles invalid. It just means that they don't understand.

Today I still have problems. Sometimes I still want to scream when I'm in the car. Sometimes I'm positive my boyfriend doesn't want me and is going to leave, so that even when he pulls me close to go to sleep, tears roll down my cheeks. I panic now when I never used to.

Sometimes I shake constantly for no reason, and I have really bad anxiety and racing thoughts that send me towards the rabbit hole. But It's still better than it used to be. And I'm still happier than I used to be. I have to remember to take my medicine, and I have to remember to breathe. But I'm alive.