Specific trauma feels so far away

Posted: November 11, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: mental health, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

For as long as I’ve had this blog (9 years!), I’ve written annually around this time of year, about a hospitalization I went through at age 17. I was there for 19 days; it was voluntary but quickly became involuntary once it was clear I wasn’t actually based in reality.

This year, I wasn’t sure if was going to write anything. I’ve been thinking it over for the past few days. What else is there to say? I mean, there’s a lot, but is it worthwhile? Do I want to get back into the headspace? I’m not even sure if that’s possible anymore (which is mostly a positive thing.)

I started by opening a tab for each post I’ve made about it, so far. Rereading it all. I’m not sure why, but I think I want to try to plot out a timeline, even if it’s hazy and incomplete.

November 12 – December 1, 1999 – hospital
Spring of 2001 – wrote down everything I could remember, for a college course
Next 10+ years – continued to get blindsided by the emotional intensity of this trauma, all the time, but especially mid-November
Spring of 2012 – talked a lot about it, tentatively, in therapy, which really started to help
2013 – got a copy of the medical records. Was disappointed at how boring and repetitive they were. There were some nuggets though, for sure. First wrote about it on my blog.
2014 – brought the records to therapy. Watched my therapist zero in on the paperwork as if she were working out a puzzle. She kinda tore it apart, actually! This was both alarming and calming. Something was definitely lifting.
2015 – I got the records back from my therapist (she had been hanging on to them for me). I had been hospitalized earlier in the year, for the 2nd time for the same reasons, and it started to sink in that I might actually have bipolar disorder, type 1, might have had it this whole time.
2016 – didn’t dwell on it. Lots of other things were going on.
2017 – I was hospitalized for a third time, and the traumatic event was starting to be re-contextualized as just, one of the times I was hospitalized.
2018 – This is where I really started to rework things. I’m not sure how to distill that down into a sentence; it’s just pretty amazing to be able to look back on this journey.
2019 – This was the 20th anniversary of my first hospitalization. I wrote that I thought all this writing might serve a future purpose; I just wasn’t sure what yet. I included a photograph of a re-working of different photos I did for a college project, in the spring of 2002.
2020 – I wrote about starting work on a memoir, and the raw material from that college course in 2001 factors into it, but I couldn’t get myself to revise that stuff; make it more cohesive. I was working hard on everything else surrounding it.
2021 – I had gotten past that block and had reworked the writing quite a bit.
Earlier in 2022 – I was clearing out a lot of old stuff from a storage area in my parents’ house, this spring. I save everything. In sorting through all that stuff and reorganizing it to bring to my house, I found a hand-written letter my mom had given to me while in the hospital. I had been looking for this ever since then! I even asked her about it; I was at a loss for where it might have gone. It was in response to a letter I wrote her – that piece is still a mystery, but it was so healing to finally find this thing.

Present day (my 10th time posting about this) – I’m stuck. My memoir is off track and I’m sad about it. I started to revise it drastically in a whole different direction for a long time, but it doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore and so I stopped. I haven’t touched it for over 6 months. Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of journal writing, emailing my therapist, the usual. Recently, I started on ideas for a 2nd memoir. I’m starting to feel a little more serious about writing overall; I think I have three different stories to tell. Working on this other memoir has felt rewarding, but it’s not the story. I want to get back to this traumatic event and the events surrounding it. I feel like I might be on the cusp of getting back to it…

In those early posts about the hospitalization, I kept ascertaining that I didn’t need to be there, that it was extreme, and I didn’t actually lose a grip on reality until I got there. I see it much differently now. I definitely was going to need to be there – it was more a matter of when? If I hadn’t gotten my mom to get me there, I would have eventually had to go some other way. I know that now. And I could have ended up doing a lot more long-term damage. It’s kinda incredible that at 17, I had enough insight to know I needed to get there. Somehow, I saved myself. (In looking back over all these posts, I realized I wrote something very similar in 2018. For me, writing and recording and reviewing and revisiting all overlap and blend into each other. I’m starting to feel like maybe I am a memoirist? And trying to understand this one experience could be the impetus that has been pushing me there?)

The Out Alliance Saved My Life

Posted: June 13, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: coming out, mental health | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Around this time, 20 years ago, I was experiencing suicidal ideation and debilitating depression, after being hospitalized for mania and psychosis.  The #1 stressor in my life was my sexual orientation (I hadn’t yet gotten to the gender identity part).  Two things saved me:  therapy, and regularly attending the youth group at the Out Alliance (called the GAGV – Gay Alliance of Genesee Valley, at the time).

Learning, yesterday, that the Out Alliance was folding and laying off all its employees hit me hard, both in a community-forward kind of way, and on a personal level.  We need the Out Alliance and the services it provides.  The board stated,  “We hope that this cessation in our services will be temporary and that, after reassessing and restructuring the organization, we will resume our vital mission, stronger than ever.”  Let’s hope this happens sooner than later.

I went to the youth group for the first time on March 15, 2000.  I was a painfully shy, sheltered, awkward, naive 18 year-old.  I wrote about it immediately afterward, in my diary:

“I was really nervous about going, but felt like it was something I had to do.  I got mom to drive me.  While I was there, I badly wanted to leave, but in retrospect, it doesn’t seem so bad.  We talked about dangers on the internet and stalkers.  I had nothing to contribute.  Dr. [Therapist] says that’s OK.  It was my first time.  Next Sunday might be better anyway.  There’s going to be pizza and a guest speaker on relationships.  Also, I noticed many bookshelves filled with books.  Maybe next time all the kids are outside smoking, I’ll go check them out.”

And it did get better.  I remained painfully shy and awkward.  I never did connect with the other kids or make any friends, but I went every single week from then until I left for college at the end of August.  At the time, the age limit was 19, but I asked if it could be extended to 22 because I still wanted to keep going.  The age got changed in the “rules of the group,” and I was so thrilled I had been heard.  I went sporadically when I could throughout my college years.

Gay Pride Parade, 2003

To back up, I started writing in a diary a year before attending the group, and my first entry starts out with a fantasy scenario in which I come out to a support group, 12-step style.

” ‘Hello.  My name is Katie.  And… I am a lesbian.’  ‘Hi Katie.’*  I’ve gone through this scenario hundreds of times.  I wish it were that easy.  I’d just walk into a gay / lesbian support group and come out.  I just can’t do it though; I haven’t told anyone.”

So actually attending and being around other LGBTQ+ people was HUGE for me, even if it was hard.  Probably largely because it was so hard.  Schools did not yet have Gay Straight Alliances.  The internet was, well, you know, it was the internet of 2000.  Which is to say I didn’t / couldn’t use it to find like-minded friends or look up information about sensitive subjects.  I was too ashamed to take out any books about LGBTQ+ topics from the library for fear of the library clerk looking at them and deducing that I was gay.  The information I would have found in those outdated books might have been more detrimental to my sense of self anyway.  I was most certainly internally homophobic.

To know that there was an organization that was out and loud and proud was a revelation.  I attended the Gay Pride Picnic that July, and was blown away by the number of people.  Who knew?!

It took a while, but the sense of belonging and the normalization of the gay experience grew on me.  I learned so much about safe sex and sex-positivity, LGBTQ+ portrayals in media, history, just a ton of feel-good stuff.  We watched movies, we went on outings as a group, and yes we even got to eat pizza.

Marching with youth group, 2003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Huge shout-out to the facilitator at that time, Patty Hayes.  She changed my life.  I was so psyched to find that this 44 minute interview with her is out there on the internet!  (Interview conducted for the documentary, Shoulders to Stand On.  She has about 3 minutes of screen-time in the final product; here is the full interview):

Interview with Patty Hayes, former Youth Program Coordinator

The Out Alliance was there when I needed it, and I can honestly say it saved me from my own self-hatred, homophobia, and loneliness.  Now that there are so many more options and ways to learn and connect, so what?  It’s still very much needed.  Every city needs something like this.  It was a place to connect face-to-face and find role models and local resources.  A place of hope for kids in surrounding rural areas who could drive in and find out they’re not alone.  City and suburban kids too, of course.  Older people just coming out.  People who have been out for forever.  SOFFAs and allies.  It does, however, need to change with the times.  There were times where I railed against it, for being too normative, too playing-it-safe, not diverse enough.  

Hopefully their return will be swift, and well-thought out.  The former staff have laid out some demands:

  • Diversification of the board’s executive committee. They point out that the board is diverse but the executive committee members are all white and cisgender.
  • Selecting a person of color to serve as the next executive director, “to reflect the necessary changes the agency still needs to take.”
  • Making all board meetings open to the public and the minutes from those meetings accessible to the public.
  • Including dollar figures, not just percentages, in all future annual reports. The annual report for 2018 showed a dollar figure for contributions, but nothing else.
  • Changing agency bylaws to give the board greater oversight over the executive director and “veto power” over major spending and investment decisions.
  • Creating a mechanism for agency members and community members to weigh in on who sits on the board.

Sources:  CITY News article by Jeremy Moule
               Shoulders to Stand On, documentary film

*At the time, I thought my name was Katie and that I was a lesbian.  Now I know it’s actually Kameron, and that I’m a queer person.

20th anniversary of a specific trauma

Posted: November 11, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: mental health, Uncategorized, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

For 20 years, I’ve been churning and mulling over, obsessing and ruminating about, writing and re-writing the events surrounding my first hospitalization which happened around this time of year in 1999, when I was 17.  Up until the age of 30, it had a hold on me in that way that trauma can stay with a person:  it was my biggest source of shame and fear, I felt like it defined my past and if only I had avoided it, maybe my mental health wouldn’t have gotten so derailed for so long.  It was a super sore spot that for some reason I just kept picking at, revisiting, but wasn’t getting anywhere with.

I’m 37 now, and I’ve been seeing it much differently, with the help of my therapist.  It was extreme and drastic, for sure, but it led to me getting real help that I desperately needed – without that help, my mental state could have festered and bubbled badly for much longer, in a much darker place; who knows what might have happened.  Not that I didn’t suffer for way too long regardless.  I did!  But some systems were in place that helped me feel not so alone, even through those times where I despised those systems.

I’m writing kinda vaguely here…    I voluntarily admitted myself to a psychiatric unit because I thought I was bipolar and I stopped being able to sleep, and things were getting wonky.  I was indeed diagnosed with bipolar disorder, as well as having gone through a psychotic break.  I was there for 3 weeks, even though I kept thinking I could leave at any minute, if I could just figure my way out.  I was put on medications, and later on, different ones and different ones and different ones.  So many different ones.  I got disillusioned with drugs and eventually weened myself off of everything because they ultimately didn’t make any sense.  They did do me some good at some points in time, but not much.

The thing that helped more than anything else, ever in my life, was getting assigned a therapist.  I was required to attend 20 sessions after my hospitalization; I ended up going so many more times than that; if not specifically with her because she moved away, then to the therapist she referred me to.  In fact, I’m still seeing this therapist (with a break of a bunch of years in between, during that time where I wrote off meds and all other psychological interventions).

I was talking recently with a friend about therapy, (It seems like all of my friends are currently in therapy…) and I referred to the fact that my parents facilitated me being in therapy from such a young age (and by young, I mean 18) as “early intervention.”  I know that term usually refers to 3-5 year-old’s who might be on the spectrum or might have a learning disability or a speech delay.  But, sadly, when it comes to emotions and figuring out how to communicate them, age 18 is still pretty much “early intervention,” in my opinion.  Things are definitely getting better, but not fast enough!  And when I said that out loud to my friend, it hit me how lucky I was.  I always went to therapy willingly – at some times, it felt like the only thing I had to look forward to.  Usually it felt like the progress was not quantifiable.  Was it doing anything?  What good was it?  Was it worth it?  I still pretty much always loved going, even if logically I wasn’t so sure.

My therapist has told me that among her clients who have gone through psychosis, I’m the only one who has ever wanted to revisit it (for me, there are 3 instances).  Everyone else just wants to put it behind them.  I don’t understand that; and I’ve ended up doing a lot more than just revisiting it.  I think there’s a lot of worth there.  It feels like a gold mine in an alternate universe.  The more I write, the more I can mine it later, for future purposes.  I’m not sure what those purposes are, exactly, yet, but I want the raw material to be intact as much as possible.

In the spirit of that, here’s one short snippet, that I first wrote in 2001:

“I’m going to be leaving tomorrow,” I announced at our afternoon community meeting.  I figured that since I wanted to come here, I was allowed to tell them when I wanted to leave.  I was getting sick of this charade.  The day before, I had told the nurse that I wanted to go home, expecting to find my parents there when I woke up.  When nothing came of that, I panicked, but then I realized the key was for me to get myself out.  I was going to have to stand up to everyone and announce my intentions.  I had to take control.  Everyone, including the staff workers, stared at me without saying a word.  That made me uneasy, especially when my statement went untouched, and the meeting continued with staff member Bob saying, “If no one has anything else to say, it’s time to go to the gym.”  It’s alright, it’s alright.  They’re just testing me.”

There’s a lot more where that came from.  Maybe one day I’ll share it with a wider audience.

Two year anniversary of my most recent hospitalization

Posted: May 15, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: mental health | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been hospitalized a total of 3 times for mania and psychosis; for some reason, the anniversary of this one, this time around, is hitting me pretty hard.  Every year in November, I make a post to remember and acknowledge my first hospitalization, because it was so traumatic, and it’s stayed with me even now, 20 years after the fact.  These two other, more recent ones were much easier to get past / work through.  In fact, I’d even say that this most recent one was even cathartic, in a positive sense (not so much for my loved ones, I know!)  But personally, it helped me heal from the other two times.  And the fact that I didn’t boomerang into a deep, dark depression afterward… that I was able to take as much time off as I needed and kind of come back around gradually, organically, meant the world to me.

It’s been a very rainy May so far.  It reminds me of looking out the windows of the hospital; it was rainy a lot of the time then too.  It was my brother’s birthday, and then Mother’s Day, and right after that, I was admitted to the hospital.  The Lilac Festival was going on; there are lilacs in bloom right now.  We have a lilac bush; I can see the flowers from our dining room window.

Last year during this week, I was preoccupied with a trip to Massachusetts to visit our friends.  I didn’t think about the fact that we’d be away during this week.  It occurred to me while we were on the trip, I think.  I remember being hyper-aware of everything blooming at that time, exactly.  We smelled lots of flowers while we walked around different parts of Boston and Salem.  Things weren’t in bloom when we left, but suddenly, bam!, they were, when we got back.

_________________________________________________________

I’ve been super stable, mental health-wise, for a long time now.  I’d say I re-stabilized by September of 2017, and I’ve been good since then.  Great, even.  Super productive with creative projects.  Anxiety has been at an all time low.  I have energy.  My mood is very very very even-keeled.  Iike, maybe a little too much.  Meaning, there’s so little variety in how I feel, from day to day.  But… I’ll take it.  I haven’t felt any compulsions.  I haven’t been having obsessive thoughts.  The only down-side to my mental landscape, in an ongoing way, is that I sleep a LOT.  And I have trouble waking up in the mornings.  I usually sleep 10-11 hours a day, on average.  Which is most likely a side effect of the medication I’m on.  (Seroquel.)  But, also, as the years have gone on, I’m also realizing it just might be how much sleep is actually optimal for me.  I generally slept that much, if I was able to, long before starting this medication.  And I used to beat myself up about it, like I was being lazy and unproductive.  And whenever I’ve had to get on an earlier schedule, such as during summers, for work, my mood, energy levels, and motivation have always suffered.  Probably because I wasn’t sleeping as much as I seem to need to.

So I’ve decided to give myself a break.  It works out much better if I let myself sleep as much as I tend to need to (as opposed to how much I think I should want to, I guess?), life goes much more smoothly.

Huh, I went on an unexpected tangent about sleep!  I meant to write about my most recent hospitalization.  Actually, I’ve already written, in a word document, as much as I could remember from my week-long stay.  It was jam packed with activities; it was action packed.  So maybe I’ll just cut and paste a slice of life from that time.  …I just pulled it up to find an excerpt I could put here, but it’s total nonsense!  No one paragraph makes any sense within itself.  Also I burst out laughing a bunch of times.  I think it’s not quite ready for consumption yet.  But it might be, one day, as part of a larger project…

Finances and the LGBTQ community

Posted: February 9, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: mental health, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

It’s been long-known and proven over and over that, in general, people who identify as LGBTQ are worse off, financially.  Discrimination at work and within housing, along with being kicked out, disowned, or cut off from family ties, are big factors as to why this might be.  Mental health also plays a huge role.  There have been times when I was so deep into depression that I was not able to function at my job (or, in the past, at school).  Fortunately for me, I was able to take multiple medical leaves, when I needed them, with full pay and full job security.  That’s not always the story, though…

I was contacted a couple of months ago by Linda Manatt, who works for OverdraftApps.com, a company “created to increase awareness of the annual $35 billion overdraft problem in the U.S., which primarily affects the most vulnerable populations of our society. By creating content and developing tools to inform the public, [they] hope to make a positive change and shape tomorrow’s consumer finance policies for the better.”

In July of 2018, they commissioned a research organization to conduct a survey about financial attitudes and realities.  1,009 people from 46 states, aged 18- 71 participated, and 11% of them identified as LGBTQ.  A couple of other factors were isolated, including renters vs. owners and income levels, but not age, race, education level, or any other demographic.

Some of the big take-aways, as it applies to the LGBTQ community were:

  1. While only 14% of people surveyed make less than $25,000 per year, 25% of LGBTQ people fall in this bracket.
  2. 51% of the general respondents reported feeling “that the system is trying to take advantage of them when it comes to financial products.”  When isolating for LGBTQ people, that percentage jumped to 61%.
  3. LGBTQ people are 50% more likely to overdraft between three and nine times in the past year compared to the general population (18% compared to 12% of the general population.)

It is surprising how many people overall have over-drafted at least once within the past year (46%), how few people were even aware that they can opt out of over-drafting all together (39%), and how frequently over-drafting happens without their knowledge (42%).  No wonder people feel taken advantage of, purposefully!  As I was reading through the data, the overarching human emotion running throughout is the avoidance of embarrassment.  And sure enough, there’s a quote within the article to suggest this:

Paul Golden, from Nefe [National Endowment for Financial Education], provides an … interpretation on the reasons people don’t opt out more often of overdraft protection. In his opinion, “bankers [don’t] say that overdraft protection is mandatory” but they do sell it as an insurance to one’s reputation.  In his experience, this is how they are sold to consumers: “You go out to dinner with your friends or work colleagues and the bill comes up. You don’t have enough to cover it – can you imagine the embarrassment you would suffer if your card was declined?” People react: “Oh yeah, I should have overdraft protection.”

It’s like, pay $35 later for the convenience now of not having to put groceries back, in front of other people, when there is not enough in the checking account.  I’d even take this a step further and go so far as to say that people who are more likely to be singled out, to be devalued, humiliated, harassed, abused, and assaulted, are exponentially more compelled to do certain things to get out of embarrassing situations, including (but not limited to, by a long shot!) financial embarrassment.

I’d be curious what types of trends would emerge if the data had been isolated even further, to account for transgender and gender-nonconforming identities, within the LGBTQ community.  I can tell you right now that the picture would become much more bleak, very quickly.  I’d love to hear your own stories if you’d like to share, in the comments section!

If you’d like to see the full study, it is here:
Overdrafting in the United States:  Distrust and Confusion in the American Financial System

And thanks to Linda Manatt for prompting me to get out of my comfort zone and attempt to cover such a big issue, in my own, semi-personalized, way…

Thinking about trauma

Posted: November 11, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: mental health | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Every year around mid-November, I tend to think back and reflect on a defining period of time in my adolescence.  And for as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve written something about it, annually.  When I was 17, I voluntarily admitted myself to a psychiatric unit.  I envisioned I’d be there for a day or two; in the end I was there for 3 weeks, with everything quickly no longer becoming my choice.  It was both good and bad that I went voluntarily – On one hand, I didn’t resent anyone else for making that decision, and I may have made some things easier for calling that shot so early-on in my downward spiral.  Specifically, I could have been walking around in a mild/moderate psychosis for a long time without giving off any glaring red flags, which could have been much more damaging in the long run, led to me slipping back into that state easier and more frequently as the years went by.  On the other hand, I couldn’t forgive myself for the longest time, and I blamed that traumatic experience on being just the start of all problems and struggles that came after it.  If I hadn’t gone to the hospital, everything would have been different, I thought.  If I hadn’t gone to the hospital, I wouldn’t have lost my mind, I thought.  Now though, 19 years later, I don’t think those things anymore.  Instead, I think that I was an incredibly self-aware teenager, and I acted out of self-preservation.

When i was in the hospital, it was expected that I keep up with my schoolwork, or at the very least, try.  In Humanities class, we were just starting to read The Handmaid’s Tale.  Instead of my school-issued book arriving for me to read, a copy was sent from the Central Public Library, which made me immediately suspicious.  I was paranoid that we were being force-fed, brainwashed, and doped, and every little detail just added fire to that flame-in-my-brain.  I started reading it anyway, but I didn’t get far.  On pages 3 and 4, phrases such as,

“A window, two white curtains.  …When the windown is partly open – it only opens partly…”  “I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window only opens partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof.”

really freaked me out!!  All I could think about were the parallels.  The decor in my own hospital room, the panic and the dystopian surrealism of it all.  This part especially has always stayed with me:

“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of.  We wouldn’t get far.  It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

I’m pretty sure I did eventually finish the book.  But I dropped the class.  I dropped a bunch of classes when I got back to school, out of necessity.  In order to graduate and have as little stress as possible while doing so.  In order to try to put some of my mental health issues behind me and to look forward to college…

My spouse and I just finished watching The Handmaid’s Tale, up through season 2.  So depressing and distressing.  Just a really jarring portrait of where we could end up, some of it hitting way too close to home – not so much on a personal level, but in a collective consciousness kind of way.  Hauntingly horrifying.

I got the book out of the library again – my local branch this time, not the Central Public Library…  Gonna attempt to re-read it.

Here’s what I wrote in the past, on the topic of being hospitalized:
2013:  Continuing to work through a specific trauma
2014:  That specific trauma is still there
2015:  That specific trauma is no longer a big deal
2016:  Anniversaries, traumas, deaths, and name-change
2017:  As that specific trauma dissipates further…

Janitors in pop culture #4

Posted: April 23, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Janitorial work | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

I haven’t written one of these since 2014!  That’s way too long!  My spouse and I just watched Another Earth for the second time, and I had forgotten that the protagonist, Rhoda, is a high school janitor.  Heads up – this post might contain spoilers!  And also, although I’m being critical and having fun with it (the portrayal of a janitor), I actually really do love this movie (hence, the wanting to watch it for a 2nd time!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She doesn’t start out as a janitor.  She’s a promising student that just got accepted to MIT, but her path takes a sharp turn when she kills a wife and child in a drunk driving accident.  She spends the next four years in prison, instead of college, and when she gets out, she struggles with even wanting to be alive.  When talking to a social worker about a job placement, she says,

“I don’t wanna really be around too many people or do too much talking.”

And that is, in a nut-shell, what being a janitor is all about!  She gets placed at West Haven High School.  We see her in a bunch of scenes at work.  I’ll try to break it down a bit:

Uniform:  She’s wearing workboots in the style of Timberlands.  She has a hoodie and a full-body jumpsuit on over that.  Plus a beanie.  It is winter, but this is what she’s wearing while working in the building, and she is WAY overdressed!  I’d be sweating bullets in this get-up, plus the footwear is too heavy-duty.  Even running sneakers would be better – you do a ton of walking as a janitor.  I wear a t-shirt, pants, and sneakers, and I still get hot – school buildings are usually kept super warm.

The Work:  We see her pushing her cart through the building, mopping halls, and scrubbing at bathroom grafitti.  This is fairly realistic, although where I work, we have an auto-scrubber for halls, and I’d never use that much elbow-grease on anything the way she’s going at that grafitti – I’d blow out my ligaments!  I already struggle with “tennis elbow” from regular repetitive motions.  Not worth it!

Storyline:  There’s a sub-plot where her co-worker, Purdeep, is noticeably blind, and you’re left wondering how he gets his job done without seeing.  Then, one day, Purdeep isn’t there, and Rhoda asks about him.  The reply?  He’s not coming back because he poured bleach in his own ears.  This was the 2nd incident – he had previously blinded his own self by pouring bleach in his eyes.

“He said he was tired of seeing himself everywhere.”

Later on, there’s a scene where Rhoda visits him in the hospital, and she writes letters on the palm of his hand in order to communicate with him.  It’s a tender connection, but other than that, I’m not sure what’s being coveyed through this other than here was a janitor who incrimentally lost his mind and self-destructed.  ???

There’s one other scene, early on, that I think is really relevant.  She runs into an old classmate at a corner store, and from his demeanor, it’s apparent he’s super surprised to see her, and he knows all about what happened to her, going to prison and everything.  Their dialogue reads, starting with him asking,

“So, are you working?”
“West Haven High.”
“Yeah? What do you teach?”
“I clean.”
“What?”
“I clean the school.”
“Oh, that’s cool.  …That’s probably very … therapeutic.”

It might not be apparent from the words, but his tone is sooo condescending, his classism is really shining through.  I often tell people that I’m a janitor, and I feel fortunate I don’t come up against this kind of bias, generally.  But there was a long period of time where I did feel shame about my job, especially because I work for the same school district I went to school at, and I too was a “promising” student, and I actually did go to college (and not prison), and I would brace myself for those moments where I might run into someone I knew from school.

Recent books I’ve read with mental health content

Posted: January 29, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: mental health, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Back in November, I lamented about not being able to find much writing out there that really portrays what can go on in someone’s head while they are in the middle of a psychotic episode.  In the past few weeks, two such books sorta fell into my lap, so I want to mention them!

My spouse picked up a book called Mental:  Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind from the library last weekend.  They pointed it out to me, like, eh?  You’ll want to read this!  This weekend, I was super sick, and I binge read it in 2 days, while trying to stay warm on the couch.  It was compelling for so many different reasons, one major one being that I could relate to so much of it.  The author, Jaime Lowe, was also hospitalized for a good chunk of her senior year of high school, and she also just took the pills without much reflection for years and years.  Like, it’s something that is a thing now.  (Although, for me, it was Depakote, and not Lithium.)  She had another manic / psychotic episode when she tried to get off Lithium at age 25.  I successfully(?) did get off all my pills in my early 20s, and that was my new normal for a long time, until I had 2 subsequent manic / psychotic episodes in my 30s.  She had to switch off of Lithium because it was killing her kidneys, and she had a really hard time stomaching Depakoke, but she finally did get through it.

Having to switch sent her on a spiritual journey to learn about Lithium as not just a psychotropic drug but as an element, super common in nature.  Which made the book encompass much more than just her mental health trajectory.  The best thing about it though, was how thoroughly and deeply she gets back into that headspace of being so completely out of her mind.  The slightest suggestion toward a minuscule thing could send her on an all-day (or longer) journey to do and/or be that thing.  She devastated every aspect of her life that second time around.  I was surprised by the fact that everyone around her wanted to keep her out of the hospital for a second time because she was no longer an adolescent and the adult ward was apparently to be avoided at all costs.  As a result, she was in that state much longer – days, weeks…  I was brought to the hospital like, BAM!  So fast my head didn’t get a chance to spin out too far too fast with too many repercussions.

The second book I’m reading with a portrayal of a breakdown is called The Petting Zoo, by Jim Carroll (of The Basketball Diaries fame).  He wrote this book in 2010, and according to the forward by Patti Smith, he died at his desk while writing.  He had finished it at the time of his death, but it was still in the editing process.  A few people had their hands in trying to edit as close to Jim’s style as possible.  It’s fiction.  It’s hard for me to get through (probably largely because it’s fiction – I almost always gravitate toward non-fiction and memoir).  The book opens with the main character, Billy, in the midst of a manic frenzy.  I didn’t know the book would be about that at all – nothing about that on the back cover summary – I bought it on a whim from a record store that was going out of business.  So it was interesting to get thrown into that unexpectedly, but I gotta say it felt lacking in… something.

Billy has some kind of crisis over an art opening at the MET and how what he saw of this one artist affects how he’s approaching his art for his own upcoming show.  He careens off down the steps, on his own, into the Central Park Zoo, more specifically a side spectacle, an outdated petting zoo.  From there, he flees down the street, in his tuxedo and fancy shoes, to a building that reminds him of an Aztec temple.  He then hits his head and his eye on branches or something and starts shouting something about a knife.  He has a momentary black-out and the cops pick him up.  At which point he comes back to reality, and that’s it.  Although the aftermath ends up taking longer, red tape and everything.  He has to stay overnight in a mental ward, which is just kind of looked at as a novelty, a curiosity, a stop-over.

In conclusion, real life is zanier (or at least more compelling to me) than fiction.

As that specific trauma dissipates further…

Posted: November 11, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: mental health, Writing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Every year around this time, I revisit the first time I was hospitalized, which was Veteran’s Day weekend in 1999.  It used to feel like the worst thing that ever happened to me.  And, in terms of fallout, I still think that it was – it just no longer feels that way.

Two years after this hospitalization, I wrote an essay for a class, including every little thing I could remember about the experience.  A few months ago, I gave that document to my therapist to read over.  I didn’t necessarily want to delve into it or have her probe me about it.  I just wanted for her to have read it.  And she really only said one thing:  “There were always questions about whether you had been in a psychotic state or not.  This definitely shows that you were.”  And, strangely, I was satisfied with that.  As if I could lay to rest whether I needed to be there or not.  For the most part…

I’m currently giving my most recent hospitalization (from 6 months ago) the same treatment, as best as I can remember.  I’m up to 2,500 words so far, and only about 15% done.  I don’t have any plans for it other than just something that I want to do for myself.  We’ll see.  I feel like there’s not much writing out there that really portrays what can go on in someone’s head while they are in the middle of psychosis.  (If anyone has any recommendations, let me know!)  That does not mean I have lofty goals for where I could take this writing; it’s just a motivating factor, something that pushes me to try to capture it as best as I can.

I just did a cursory search, and a couple of books that stand out as worth checking out are:
Stress Fracture: A Memoir of Psychosis and Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Here are the other posts I have made, yearly:

Continuing to work through a specific trauma – Four years ago, I wrote about how I finally gained access to the medical records from my hospital stay, and how I started to process things differently with the help of my therapist.

That specific trauma is still there – Three years ago, I wrote about finally bringing that record into therapy and how it felt to have her go through it.  I was starting to realize that maybe I didn’t need to pick it all apart; maybe my perspective was shifting naturally, over time.

That specific trauma is no longer a big deal – Two years ago, I wrote about how much time has changed things, and it no longer felt like a big deal.  The fact that I had been hospitalized again, that year, surprisingly helped me find ways to heal, rather than adding more baggage onto the feeling of it.

Anniversaries, traumas, deaths, and name change – Then last year, I wrote about how other things were going on, and I really didn’t have the space or time to reflect.  Which was perfectly fine.  Between the election results, working on getting my name legally changed, and other emotional markers, it just didn’t come up.

This year, I am thinking about it, but it is more in terms of “one of the times I was hospitalized,” rather than, “a traumatic event – the worst thing that ever happened to me,” etc.

 

I’ve been thinking of all the little occurrences that go into the bigger story.  Like, for example, in that state, my mind was so malleable and adaptable that it seemed like, theoretically, anything could be true and just as easily, not true all at once.  Which is one of the reasons I avoided watching any TV.  (There were two TVs on the unit – one played music and had legalese constantly scrolling, in both Spanish and English – like a “know your rights” kind of thing.  The other TV had a remote and listing of channels, and we could watch whatever we wanted, 24/7.)  At one point I did sit down, and there was a documentary on about pineapples.  (Er, rather I’m sure the documentary was on something more broad, but I saw the pineapple part.  I started yelling about the unlikelihood about these pineapples growing.  Don’t pineapples grow on trees like sensible fruits?  What were these miniature pineapples growing up from fronds in the dirt?!  A patient who knew-all immediately matched the intensity I was spewing, and argued for the realness of these pineapples.

A few months later, my spouse’s aunt was visiting from Hawaii, and sure enough, she grows pineapples on her property and sure enough, she had pics to prove it.  I can now accept it fully.

World mental health day / Nat’l coming out day 2017

Posted: October 12, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: coming out, mental health, name change | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

These days occur consecutively every year – October 10th and 11th.  It’s a good chance to kind of look back and take stock.  And to see where I was at; here’s what I wrote last year:
World mental health day / Nat’l coming out day 2016

Before talking about this year, I just want to note that last year I said,  “I’d say within the next 6 months I’ll be out at work and everywhere else.  I look forward to the day that my driver’s license, signature, little plastic rectangle on the custodial office, Facebook page, the words out of teachers’ and co-workers’ mouths, and everything else, all say the same thing!”  I’ve reached that point!!!  Well, everything except that little plastic rectangle, but that is in-process (see below)!

This past year in my mental health landscape:  I thought I was stable in a way that couldn’t be rocked, but actually I ended up back in the hospital again with another manic / psychotic episode.  I know my loved ones went through a lot of stress and strife, but, in comparison to past episodes, this felt like a breeze, and it even felt healing in many ways.  I do want to try to write about this, but I’m not quite there yet.  Hopefully soon.  I spent two months out of work, I got raised to triple my prior dose of Seroquel (a drug I continue to like a lot – a first for me), and now I’m down to double my prior dose.  I’m off of any antidepressants right now.  I’m worried I will lapse into another depression, but so far, so good.  I’m starting to finally address the issues I’m having with oversleeping.  But, to be honest, if oversleeping is the worst thing to come out of being in a really good place mentally otherwise, then so be it, I guess…  For now at least.

In terms of National Coming Out Day, coming out is happening all the time, and I’m glad to be in a place where I’m neither invisible nor fearful of having to come out again and again and again.  I love every opportunity.  Take yesterday for example:  I didn’t realize it was National Coming Out Day until that night when I went on facebook after work.  And during that day, I had two instances of coming out.  While I was working in the cafeteria during lunch, a kid asked me, “Are you a boy?”  I replied, “I’m neither.  I’m a little bit of both.”  He replied, “Really?!”  And I said, “Yeah!”  I had a big smile on my face.  Then later in the afternoon, I realized that my new boss(?) got his plastic rectangle with his name “engraved” and it was now on the custodial door, and I’ve been waiting for mine since January, when I changed my name.  So instead of getting worked up about that, I just wrote down on a piece of paper what I wanted (so there’d be no confusion) and explained to the administrative assistant that Mr. [last name] has his on the door and I’ve been waiting for mine.  She apologized for forgetting to include mine in the order, and said she would go ahead and order mine.  I gave her the paper:  It said, “Mx. [last name].”  She verbalized that back to me to make sure it was right, and I said, “Yep.”  I should have that up hopefully within a couple of weeks, finally.  This feels like such a victory!

There’s one other thing I want to mention regarding mental health:  I started listening exclusively to a new-to-me podcast.  By this, I mean, I listen to podcasts every day while at work.  And previously, that would be somewhere between 5-8 different ones at any given time.  Right now, for whatever reason, I’m just listening to one, all day every day.  I’m sure I’ll get tired of it and get back to some of my other ones, but for now, it’s pretty mesmerizing.  If you’re interested in checking it out, it’s called the Mental Illness Happy Hour.  It is definitely not for the faint of heart.  The host jokes that he does not give advanced notice for triggers because he would have to stop every couple of minutes to announce another Trigger Warning.  And it is absolutely true.  There is a lot of stuff about abuse of all kinds, dark secrets and shame, both sexual in nature and just like, the kinds of stuff that randomly pops in your head and you hate yourself for thinking it.  The host lightens things up by being in turns uplifting and darkly humorous.  Each show is somewhere between 2-3 hours (!?!), and he’d read people’s surveys they’ve sent in anonymously, and he will also interview one person per show.  He’s doing all this seemingly on his own, and he’s making a living off of it.  I’m kinda obsessed right now.

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