Follow me home
For now, for starters, this page will include entries from various web sites and blogs I've had in the past. Eventually I hope to add in other writings as well, keeping it all in chronological order as much as possible. That's the long-winded way of saying that any new stuff may not necessarily be at the top each time.
This set of entries ends on May 26, 2003. The last entry before that was January 16, 2003. Those five months were lost to me, lost under the cloud, lost to depression.
My hope is that this website might be able to help two groups of people. First, I hope it can help others who suffer from mental illness to share in the ups and downs, successes and, yes, failures of everyday dealing with this sucky hand of cards we've been dealt. Secondly, maybe it can help families and friends of other manic depressives to understand them a little better.
We're not making this stuff up, folks. Trust me. Most of us are pretty damn smart. If we were making it up, we'd do a better job of it.
Hang tough.
J
26 May 2003
I wanted to write something. Anything, really. But I've got a monster block hanging over my head after a nearly five-month drag through some miserable deep depression, and nothing's happening. Maybe it's just fear. I don't know.
Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 72 if he hadn't died of cancer three years ago. He was blind in one eye because he lost that eye to a work-related accident when I was just a baby. That eye was almost always at a slightly wrong angle, and for some reason I found that most endearing. I still remember the day when my childhood shattered most thoroughly. It was the day my dad cried. Really sobbed. Sat on the floral sofa in the living room and wept. My world was never the same after that day. I miss him. Yesterday was my first time back to the psych nurse since October, and I was a nervous wreck. She's put me on another mood stabilizer, Topamax, along with lithium. I don't know how I feel about it. Tired, mostly. I'm back able to come to work and muddle through, so I reckon it's all good again. Why, then, do I still feel like crying?
13 January 2003:
I'm back at work. I've been here about three hours. I've felt sick at my stomach the whole time, but by god I'm here. I've finished one story and one ad, and I was just working on another ad when the freakin' Photoshop app crashed mid-job. Now I'm sitting here taking deep breaths and reminding myself that this is okay. I hate being like this. I feel brittle. To paraphrase Bilbo, a bit like butter spread over too much bread.
6 January 2003:
Life stretches ahead A meaningless blur of days But still I move on -J I made it through two-thirds of a day at work today. I'm tired of drowning in ennui, but if I start to try to think too hard, I get tangled in bad thoughts. So I sleep, and wish for something both unchallenging and involving to read. Everything I'm trying to read now is too hard to focus on. Television wins the default, so I live in the world of Animal Planet, COPS, Trauma: Life in the ER and the ilk. Or I sleep. If I sleep, I think, maybe I'll get through it more quickly, or more painlessly, or both. I don't like me here. I'll be glad when it goes away.
5 January 2003
In my mind I know "Clay" Silent clay awaits
Sunlight slices around a hundred years of door
3 January 2003:
A sick hollowness Life boils around Have I died?Where has this nauseating emptiness come from?
2 January 2003:
Today the sky weeps
Wish I were home.
1 January 2003:
The new year dawns in chilly calm 8:35 a.m.
12 December 2002:
Huddle When I reach outward
10 October 2002: Waking Up is Hard to Do
Finally I'm more or less sane again. One of the biggest ways I can tell is when I start looking back at recent weeks (or sometimes months) and thinking "Good god. What was that?" I find I can get done in a couple of hours at work things that took me a couple of days before. I wonder how the dishes got done for the past (x) weeks ... how the clothes got washed ... how I got to work ... how I got *anything* done ... I'm not sure I have words to describe how scary that feeling is. It's a good feeling, yes, because now I can see clearly. But it's a bad feeling because I don't know how much I lost ... and I can never know when it might come back. I actually had a few thoughts about the future yesterday. I thought about getting back into clay. I even tested the waters a little bit with thinking about writing. Not such big things, obviously, but huge for me. I've seen no point in considering any possible future for quite a while. 11:35 a.m. Trying to chase down a camera for a noon appointment. Somebody else took it, saying they'd be right back, but that someone hasn't come back yet. The joys of only having one good camera. Guess I should go. It's time to head out to the high school for a story about a computer class. Yep. Computer classes can still be news around here, depending on what they're doing.
3 October 2002: Who Am I Anyway?
What I do is not who I am. 11:37 a.m. My job is not me. For a lot of years – nearly a decade – that wasn't true. I was a teacher. That's what I did *and* what I was. It's very difficult to separate work as a teacher from the rest of your life. You're a teacher all the time, regardless. I liked that, really. I enjoyed being a teacher, even if there was really no time off. I liked being able to introduce myself as, "Hi, I'm a teacher," and feel that that was enough. Being a teacher is not job, it's a life. But now I'm not teaching, so I'm not a teacher. Now I have a job, and one I don't particularly like all the time. For months now, I've wrestled with getting back accustomed to a job that isn't me. I'm not my job. I was letting myself be my job, but I've got to break free of that. 11:55 a.m. I've had so many problems the last year to year and a half that I'm sick of me. Between changes in the bipolar crap, a new thyroid problem, too freakin' much weight gain, two or three "unspecified infections" that cause fever, aches, pain and exhaustion, and what I'm beginning to suspect is either early onset menopause or PMS or both, I've got more on my plate that I can handle. I split my time between loathing myself, feeling bad for myself, trying to force myself to keep going, wanting to just lie down somewhere and die quietly, refusing to give up for the sake of my husband and child, feeling like hell – oh, and about two or three days a month of feeling like a legitimate human being. And trying to rush, in those few days, to make up for all the other crap. I know my husband's sick of it, too. I've tried to suggest that he get in touch with some kind of support group for friends and families of bipolar people, but he's a guy. He doesn't think it'd be any use, and besides, he can take it. But what if he can't? What if he gives up some day, and leaves me? Then what will I do? I don't want to die when I want to die. When I think I want to die, I don't. Because of him, and my daughter. I could never, ever in a million years give up while they're still here with me. Believing in me. God, I hate who I've become. Who am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? I'm so lost. So adrift. I hang on to my daughter's dreams of the future, and my husbands dreams of the future, and pretend they're mine as well. Blech. I'm whining again. Gotta go do something else.
20 September 2002: Losing Time
I just lost a day and a half, and it scares the devil out of me. I don't mean I lost it as in a total blank. No psychotic fugues or anything like that. But I lost it into fuzziness. I can barely remember it. I'd been feeling sort of vaguely down, but nothing worth mentioning, over the weekend. Monday was about normal, I suppose. Tuesday I just was feeling worse, but ignoring it and going on. Wednesday I was feeling worse and worse physically – a sort of sick-stomach feeling. When I went home for lunch I thought I'd just lie down and rest for a bit. I woke up five hours later. And that's how the next day or so went. Waking up long enough to plod around a little feeling sick and then going back to sleep. Who knew a person could sleep so much? So here I am, not feeling great still. And I'm wondering if I've just been physically sick, or if it's a mild physical illness compounded by an abrupt depression, or if it's something else entirely. It worries me. I admit it. And I hate losing time to the cloud.
18 September 2002: Living Bare
The noise is unbelieveable right now. Between a press running full force, the phone ringing incessantly and three separate conversations being held by six loud-talking people without 15 feet of where I'm sitting, I can barely manage to hang on to the simplest thoughts. A year or two ago I read a book about "The Highly Sensitive Person" and almost wept to find someone recognizing and describing things I've experienced all my life. Sensory overload ... oh, yeah. I know all about that. I know why I always struggled to succeed in the newsroom amid all the unending bustle, but I flourished in jobs which allowed me a private, quiet place to withdraw and do my work sometimes. The best thing about a classroom, from this standpoint, is that you can leave it and go back to your office. The only way I can function well in an overly sensory setting is to find something that holds my attention so tightly that I can tune the rest out. But that's hard to find here, in this particular job. So some days I feel like I'm sitting here in bare skin, with nails scraping and pins poking and pans being banged next to my eardrums. And it's thoroughly unpleasant. But there's nothing to be done about it, so I hang in there.
16 September 2002: The More Things Don't Change
Some things just don’t change nearly as much as you’d think. I picked my daughter up from school after the day of her first pep rally. “Let me guess,” I said, and gave her a wink. “Oookay,” she responded, one eyebrow lifting. “So... first there was the band playing something really loud that you couldn’t make out the tune of because it echoes so bad in the gym.” I ticked one off on my fingers. “Then the cheerleaders did something involving lots of jumping and yelling, and probably an introduction of the senior cheerleaders.” Two. “Then the principal spoke, but you couldn’t hear what he said because the sound system was cutting up.” Three. “Then the football coach spoke, but you couldn’t hear what he said because nobody can understand football coaches.” Four. “Then the cheerleaders jumped and yelled some more, and maybe some of the players walked out on the gym floor,” I continued, ticking off five. “And then the band played echoing noise again and everybody left the gym.” I ticked off six and gave her a quizzical look. “So how’d I do?” She laughed. “You’re either psychic or a good guesser. That’s exactly what happened.” Much as I’d like to claim to be psychic (“Believe Jay the Amazing. For only $19.95 a minute, I will tell you the most astonishing things about your future, and I’ll do it in a charming Southern drawl. Call me now!) I’m not. Psychic, that is. What I am is a good rememberer, and a gambler that some things just don’t change over time. That’s exactly, event for event, the way every pep rally went the whole time I was at good old AHS. Can it really be 30 years ago? I’d dare to guess that not once in the past 40 years or so of pep rallies in that gym has the public address system worked without squealing. Cheerleaders still have ponytails, I’d bet, and football players still try to look tough and talk in muttering monosyllables. On game day, I bet the school is still covered up in black and gold. Although I noticed there didn’t seem to be any ribbons of the kind we had back when –- with shiny gold football stickers and black or gold ribbons hanging from them. Maybe nobody makes those any more. I think I’ve still got one somewhere, tucked in a scrapbook. The year I started high school, in the same building as my daughter, we were two years past the Summer of Love, which meant the whole hippie movement was only just arriving here. We freshmen crowded into that long, intimidating hallway with the girls in prim dresses and some of the guys still wearing ties. We left four years later in a flood of bellbottom jeans, peasant shirts, long hair, peace symbols, denim, flowers and Peter Max art. I had to chuckle when I picked the kiddo up after the first day of school and watched the girls drift outside in their bellbottom jeans, peasant shirts, long hair and denim. I guess in some ways, not so much has changed since I was a scared freshman. One thing I had hoped would change still hasn’t. There’s still an inequity between athletics and academics. I’m beginning to fear it may be impossible to overcome. I grit my teeth over reports from students, friends and teachers of classes which don’t have enough books so nobody gets to take a textbook home to study. I listen to tales of broken lab equipment that has to be used anyway. I’ve heard teachers talk about the struggle to keep classrooms operational, sometimes buying materials out of their own pockets. In the meantime, every day I pick the kiddo up, I drive past a brand-new sports fieldhouse complex that I hear rumored is well-stocked with top-notch equipment. I also hear that a few years ago, the textbook situation was still in the same tight spot it is now, but somehow the football team could all afford new helmets because the old color wasn’t working for them any more. Some things do change over time. Some things shift but remain much the same, and it’s a good thing. But some things remain the same and it’s not a good thing at all. This part of the country needs to get over its macho hangup and face the fact that athletics may make a half-dozen people very rich in other cities but it’s high academics that will raise this whole area out of a low-wage manufacturing backwater and into an information age powerhouse. Pep rallies and ball games are terrific stuff, but it’s time to get the educational horse before the athletic cart, and try to give our children – all of them – a real future.
15 September 2002: Grizabetta the Glamour Rose
Outside my window, three bedraggled roses are swaying like Balinese dancers in the breeze. Two are near death, gone mostly brown and starting to crisp. Soon those brown wisps will drift away, leaving nothing but a scrawny rosehip and those oddly starlike pieces. Sepals? I can't remember. The third one, though, is farther from death. It's Grizabella the Glamour Rose, obviously once a beauty, but now with a haggard brown look. I wonder if it wishes it had been ripped apart by a storm weeks ago and died fast while it was still young and beautiful? When I was a teen, it was all the rage to distrust everyone over 30. Somehow, in our minds, at that magic age people became old. They lost their fire and beauty and became part of the system. We were sincere but sweet gods we were so wrong. The fire and the magic have nothing to do with age and everything to do with a person's essential self. Some people are old and might as well be dead at 25. Some people are vibrant and young in spirit at 85, and live richer, more fulfilling lives than a lot of know-it-all teens. The rose outside ... It's battered and bedraggled, but it's still a rose. It's still pink. It still smells good. And the ones of its sisters who went out in that storm two weeks ago are just gone. No longer a part of the world. Maybe that third rose isn't thinking melancholy thoughts at all. Maybe she's glad to have another day, to lift the petals she still has and let them soak up the sun and the breeze. Maybe she knows that it isn't important to be anything in particular. It's just important to be, fully. 6:03 p.m. I wish somebody would make a cologne that smells like a mixture of potting soil and lawn clippings. Hey! I'd wear it.
My head is killing me. I'm dealing with stories about neighborhood watch, preserving virginity, child ID, a toddler hit by a gas truck, a couple named Foster Parents of the Year, a two-car crash with a nursing student hanging on to the bare edge of life... and I can't believe it's not even 2 p.m. yet. I feel like I've been here for 200 hours today already. And somehow, between now and 5 p.m., if I'm lucky, I'm supposed to write a column. I have no idea what to write about. Nothing seems any more important than anything else.
This despair is not the truth
But my heart still bleeds.
But my hands have been struck dumb
Why even bother?
Cold boils through the wound to pool in corners and caress feet with icicle fingers
Sunlight stabs like a knife, leaving no place to hide
Hauling out entrails of hope and potential
Steaming wads on the glistening floor
It doesn't matter. It only hurts.
marks the place
where my self lives
but doesn't touch me,
Can't melt the fear ice
I fear.
I fear therefore I am.
Sick and lost
in my life.
But now the tears are cleansing
I am still awake.
beneath gray satin skies,
While birds fight territory wars
in which nobody dies.
A gray van prowls the empty streets
closed off from nature's cries,
And all around the people sleep,
embracing pleasant lies.
I become marginalized.
Better to stay closed.