narrative

Remodel

~ storm257 ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been seeing my new therapist for several weeks and today faced uncomfortable truths, which I find difficult to write about articulately.

A student of mine wrote an essay this last week in which she narrated her personal experience with bullying and the trauma caused by these abuses. I too was victim to bullies as a child – both the physical “school yard” variety and the menace that is middle school cliques, whose psychological torment seems to be almost exclusively the tool of girls in early adolescence. While cyber-bullying has created a new sphere of isolation for victims and a grander stage for hateful, damaging abuse, the impact for the victims is much the same. Those who survive relentless teasing, rumors, threats, or actual physical attacks, are left with years, if not a lifetime of insecurities and a severely limited capacity for trust.

I am thankful in many ways to have grown up before social media existed. I cannot image the difficulties young people now face when negotiating this, seemingly unavoidable, omnipresence in their lives. My bullies were necessarily limited by the confines of school buildings and adjacent playgrounds.

However, something in the voice of my student – the urgency leading her to share her story – spoke to a part of me I have long sought to, perhaps not forget, but certainly silence.

The truth is the girl who survived daily abuse at the hands of other young girls, from third grade through middle school, has lived within me, jealously guarding my fragile self-identity, while I have grown and strengthened my resolve to never need the approval, or trust the apparent approval of others. I have built my life carefully, nurtured trust slowly with a few, long-term friends, whom I love with an unquestionable ferocity. I give to these few all that I can and there is nothing dishonest in these relationships.

When it comes to matters of my own needs and, more to the point, my own ideas of what I deserve – my own value – I am not so resolved.

We all have places where our edges are sharp and ragged. Within each of us there are wells of shadow, places we know exist. Sometimes we move toward the vastness to lean in, but more often we stay away. One of my wells holds my younger self: who feigned illness to avoid attending school; who got in fights with other outsiders to try and disassociate with otherness; who wanted so desperately to be left alone to continue to be strange, thoughtful and anonymous. The well she inhabits has also filled with abilities I know I should have: vulnerability and self-love, the resolve to trust that those who love me truly see me and the person that they see, can be allowed to be vulnerable and understand that she is worthy of this love.

You see, it is one thing to know that you can love another. It is entirely more complex to understand, with all the splintering and holes, the shadows and protections, the walling off and silencing of experience, that the person I AM – all of it – is worthy of being loved.

How do we become this complex? Years of constructing – careful design in some ways – self-preservation resulting in varied forms of harm and misdirection. But, ultimately we are the architect and can discover where we need remodeling – an opening of space – windows – a library – to fill in a well.

This path will lead me somewhere. This is me today:

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Stretch

~ storm257 ~ 1 Comment

One of the hardest obstacles for me to overcome when depressed is two-fold. I like solitude and quiet and therefore I choose to spend a lot of time alone. This is true for me all of the time, but it becomes tricky when I am not well.

Depression plays games with self-esteem and self-regard. It wants you to stay “safe” inside your own thoughts. Within this place is is easier to convince you that not only do you lack interest in doing anything, but really in actual fact – you are not capable.

The rational part of you calls bullshit. However, if, like me, you slip into the place where isolation feels less overwhelming and you spend increasingly more time listening to depression – these ideas can take hold.

This is the two-fold problem. Depression not only robs you of your desire to engage, to do what you know is healthier for you, it also can be very convincing about your lack of ability to do things you know you can accomplish. It is not just that you lack motivation, but more disturbingly, that you are beginning to believe you also lack capability.

Fear can take over and fear is really powerful.

It has been nearly four weeks since I was involuntarily hospitalized for depression. Today I received a “check-in” phone call from the hospital making sure I have followed up with the crisis diversion program.

I was pissed initially to be receiving a follow-up phone call so long after that horrible experience, but a few hours later, I find I feel grateful. In under four weeks I have found comfort in the weekly meetings I have with a social worker; they are engaged in helping me to take steps I could not handle on my own. I will meet a therapist later this week who will hopefully work with me toward deeper, meaningful coping and uncovering truths I have not examined fully.

I attended a book club on Sunday where I only knew one person. This is way outside of my comfort zone, for those of you who couldn’t guess, and it was nice to be with kind strangers. This is the first time in many years I have chosen to try something that makes me uncomfortable. Admitting this is also kind of a big deal.

I have also been approached to teach some Freshman level English courses at a nearby community college this Fall. Last Fall, before I started to collapse, I applied for lots of different work. Thankfully, some of that energy has panned out.

I am grateful for the follow-up call because it led to this reflection. I can see quite clearly that the work I am now engaging is beginning to fight against the powerful forces which have kept me afraid, second-guessing my abilities and doubting that I can rise above to once again find meaning in my life. There are days I still let doubts in, but I am growing stronger, taking the small steps toward wellness.

This is me today:

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Stepping Back

~ storm257 ~ 2 Comments

I spent the last week with my family in a Girl Scout camp in central Maine. There was rain and mosquitoes, laughter and tears, warmth and comforts only found with the people one can count on not to judge too harshly, because they know, my silence and my inability to explain well the deep and constant weight of emptiness depression creates.

I found myself alone in a canoe Friday morning with my little dog, tears streaming down my face because the grey stillness of early morning Maine perfections – the calm water, the unbearable green treeline, the unearthly, pure air breathed into my lungs – did not bring me joy. Or more to the point, joy was there, but I could not experience the emotion which I have had in abundance so many time before because I am still here behind this wall. I see, I smell, I taste the same things I have hundreds of times, but just now, they are out of reach.

It isn’t easy to articulate this gulf. It isn’t pleasant to stand at this place and to know there are things to feel just beyond my grasp. However, the knowledge that I can remember feeling joy and awe, while causing discomfort, also moves me to want the path back to be again within reach.

I held my infant nephew many times this past week and was comforted by his simple love. His responses to smiling faces, to sweet voices, gentle touch, inspire me to take the small steps back to finding a place where simplicity can begin to bridge the void.

This is me on Friday:

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Fight or Flight

~ storm257 ~ Leave a comment

Living with depression is not like living. Moving through the day, finding reason to continue the actions that one intellectually understands are necessary to sustain life, becomes a chore. Being around people who require interaction, trying to make one’s self understood, or likable, or even human-seeming is exhausting. And if, like me, one is already given to isolating and solitary activities, it does not feel bad to retreat even further into those safe places. Except that being alone feels bad. Meaninglessness seems reasonable. Your own inability to function in the world like other people do does not seem a product of shitty brain chemistry, but a fact that becomes easier to accept as the grasp of depression pulls you in.

If you like me are fortunate to have people in your life who want to try and keep you out of the hole that depression makes so comforting you may also understand how frustrating it is to know you are irrational, but feel powerless to do anything about your own behaviour. Feeling that you no longer understand how you got all these loving people in your life in the first place is one of the scary realities of being depressed. For me, in the past few months, it has also been a major factor in my seeking mental health expertise.

I titled this post “Fight or Flight” because on Thursday, July 9th at 3:48pm I was admitted to a hospital, against my will, because the help I sought for depression took an unexpected turn. That’s mild, really. I spoke with a crisis worker who was both young and perhaps inexperienced and felt that my symptoms required “more intensive therapy than [our] program can offer.” Which meant being admitted to a psych ward for evaluation by a psychiatrist. This was not explicitly stated until I was already being transported to a hospital, where I had already stated I did NOT want to go. All of my possessions were taken from me. I was held for four hours before any sort of medical professional spoke with me. Long story short (and I intend to discuss details later, but not in this post), I was held for twelve hours, given ultimatums concerning treatment in an in-patient hospital, finally allowed to speak to an actual psychiatrist, and finally released (had to take a cab back to my car, which came out of my pocket) with a promise that I would seek intensive out-patient assistance.

I have never been more afraid than I was in that miserable, locked ward. I have never been angrier than I was to find that my attempts to take care of my mental health, which is not good, led me to a place where I felt not only worse, but punished for seeking assistance. I have never been more humbled than by the realization that this experience happens to people everyday who have limited access to mental health treatment. I am fortunate to not have had this be my first experience with the mental health infrastructure. Nor will it be my last.

I am on a path to fight. Feeling afraid, punished, and feeling my rights to have a voice in my treatment and therapy being infringed upon, pushed me into a place where I felt my only option is to fight. I want to be well. I have no illusions about the unlikelihood that I will ever be “cured”; there is a great deal of who I am depression has shaped and because of that I do not expected to live without depression. I do, however, want to get to a place where I can stay ahead of depression. I want to be able to care for myself again.

During the next two months I will be part of an out-patient program that will hopefully help me gain tools to better navigate the mental health system. On my own, I will be reading and reflecting on a bunch of writings about depression, my own experiences, and the recent trauma caused by the experience I just described. I want to put into the world what this felt like to me. Perhaps someone reading this will relate, or have insight.

This is me today:

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I am trying to find my way back to wanting to engage in my life. Many of you may be able to relate to that. Many may not. Either way, it is important that we talk about this experience. It is important for me. Thanks.