Healing

To heal the wound I walk among the pines
Sometimes the wheat field
Each softly whispers.
When Winter comes
She weeps snow upon my cheeks,
Cold and fresh
Reminding me I am changed.

Drugs

I feel the need to trace my drug history. 

To make things clear, severe depression and dissociation, perhaps even ptsd, have existed since early childhood.

I started drinking and using marijuana around '83 in an effort to self-medicate. 

Between '85 and '92 I tried all sorts of drugs, including meth (a lot) and acid (a few times).

Around '92 I moved into a more manageable alcoholism, with the addition of an SSRI.

With increased alcohol consumption, I really broke psychologically and was, I think, periodically psychotic to the point of stopping the alcohol use in 2001. Then came an increased dose of SSRI and off and on Risperdahl.

From about 2006, maybe, I experienced possible syptoms of narcolepsy. Extreme sleepiness.....as well as trying a drug typically used for bi polar and epilepsy....depakote. I also started another anti-psychotic whose name escapes me. I took them for 6 months and then stopped as I felt psychologically and physically TERRIBLE.

From 2007 or so until 2010 or so, I was off and on with seroquel, abilify, ambien and an SSRI. I started Nuvigil for the sleepiness. In 2012 or so I started Xyrem. Since 2012 I consistently take seroquel, ambien, Nuvigil, abilify, and Xyrem. 

The psychological problems are definitely persistent from childhood and are not caused by drug use. I have developed a host of coping skills for these problems. I question how much my use of street drugs and prescribed medication interfere presently with my ability to cope with my psychological problems. In essence, do the the drugs I take now keep me sick or help me cope? Have I permanently damaged my neurological functioning with street drugs and prescribed medication? Does it matter at my age? 

Life, Death, and In-between

I am grieving the loss of my nephew - a sudden, death of a young man. I am coming out of the deep darkness of a months long depression, a time when my own hold on life was precarious, and I pause to ponder the tragedy and gift that is humanity. He and I went a few times to some NA meetings, and had meaningful conversations before and after. I don't know yet if his death is related to chemicals, but I know we shared something in our personalities that revolves around using. He is gone, and I am here, and I don't know why some people 'make it' and others simply don't. Death has nothing to do with who deserves it, as I can point to many who deserve death and live long lives.

During my own depression I spent much time debating with myself whether or not death was a viable option. Logically it seemed like a reasonable choice. One of my doctors once said to me "sometimes medicine is a good choice, especially if it lessens the chance of suicide. Suicide certainly isn't of use." I looked her straight in the eye and said "suicide is an effective means to end the suffering." And I can't argue with that even when I feel good. But death affects the living. Death rips a hole in the fabric of a family. Death leaves a circle of friends incomplete. Death is the loss of a meaningful life, no matter whose life, no matter how the meaning is formed. So I grieve my nephew and watch his mother and father weep, his siblings weep, and feel an emptiness where his presence was in our lives.

I know the meaning of my own life in some contexts - mostly in relation to others. I do not understand the meaning of my life in relation to me. I know I used every coping skill I have developed over the past 30 years of therapy and perhaps I kept myself alive, with the help of all the supports in my life, but suffered nonetheless. And suffered deeply. So deeply I stand in amazement at me - and a little sadness - because I have worked so hard to create a meaningful life and the price I pay for being who I am is almost insane. My nephew suffered, I know from our talks, and his approach was to be simple and carefree. He lived a life of unrealistic hope and optimism, never working terribly hard to overcome his 'situation' and instead just played a lot of Xbox and drank. I think in a way I envy him that, as I contrast his coping with my own - unrealistic hopelessness that propels me into constant personal growth and change. He was loved deeply by all the same people that love me deeply. I wonder if he understood the meaning of his own life, or simply accepted, or lived in denial. I knew him well, but there are some aspects of our lives that others are never privy to.

No one will ever 'get' the suffering I experience, or the relief I feel when 'it' is over and I can laugh and think and live without impediment. No one will ever understand how deeply satisfying and pleasurable it is to walk in the woods those first weeks out of the shadow of depression. Our lives are so very personal, and the meaning we construct and the way we build that meaning and the very paths we walk so unique and individual.....yet there is something we share. I know we share it when we laugh together, or exchange an eye-to-eye look, or when there is death. Sometimes what we share is most poignant in it's absence.

Good-bye, nephew. I will plant flowers around the hole you left in the fabric of my life and every now and then when I hear an AC/DC song or run into a foolishly optimistic soul, I'll visit the hole and wonder about you.

Raw

It seems to me no place is psychologically or physically safe. Anyone, anytime can say mean words that are razor blades to my heart, or leave me to cry so hard I lose touch with reality and only know being alone in terror. Anyone, anytime can rape me or kill me or cut me or touch my hand. Safety is a farce. I don't understand how people can live in this world, know this, and just set it aside while they love and play and work and create. I don't know how I have done it in the past. I don't know how I do it now - how I create a story with my words while I breathe in and out knowing I am not safe either inside or outside my flesh. I guess most people can set it aside, this terrible knowledge, because they either don't realize how much rape or complete abandonment hurts or if they do they have learned how to cope and know they will cope again. I lost myself in the aloneness of terror last night and it broke something in my soul. I'm left today with poignant memories of L.A. (myself) screaming in the darkness, knowing no one would come to help, and having no place to go and no skills to self soothe. I broke. I'm left with echoes of a conversation Prowler (myself) had with Rae (myself) and Sarah (myself) about survival. We were raging, about to be incredibly mean with our words, and Sarah begged Prowler to stop. Prowler asked if anyone knew how to survive without rage. Panicked, we tried to think of something. We reasoned  that if we weren't in physical danger, we would indeed survive without rage. But Prowler was wise and pointed out that suicide was a real possibility. So we reasoned that if we stopped the rage and went back to the aloneness and terror, eventually the body would tire and we would survive. Prowler was wise and said that any more terror and we would fragment even more. More fragmentation might be permanent or bring suicide. So we reasoned out that we could take 3 sleep aids, they were prescribed to be taken that way and although the med hangover would be difficult and uncomfortable the body would likely sleep. Prowler agreed. It worked and today I am afraid I truly already fragmented in a most horrible way - fragmentation with awareness. A number of times I have told my therapist, myself, my husband that I can NEVER go back to that alone terror place. It is psychologically dangerous. It is physically dangerous. My room is supposed to be a safe place where I can perhaps self soothe to avoid the alone terror. But no longer. It doesn't matter what the rules of the room are, rules are broken and forgotten and vague and up for interpretation and at best a false safety that can be breached by mean words and aloneness. Safety is a farce. My soul has been broken. My system, a facade of personal safety itself, has broken down so that I can see L.A. and Prowler and Sarah and Rae and ...... and I know who they are and I know what they feel and the "I" is ego - self- fragments of chemical and electrical brain function communicating across neural pathways to my destruction or salvation or simple survival. "Self" a facade, screaming in the darkness, alone and terrified, the only reality. Tell me, what is safe?

Detached (?) Observation

I don't know how to explain "crazy." I imagine it's a very individual experience, personal. I can tell you sort of what it's like. It's like every television in the world turned up to maximum volume inside your head, all with different shows and most of them horror shows. It's knowing you are in grave danger, but not knowing where the danger will come from or what kind of danger it will be - but you know in your heart there is danger and it's terrible and it's imminent. You know because you've been there before, the memory of it is just behind a cloud, and it felt exactly like now. It's a thunderstorm in your head - with lightening bolts crashing through your brain and you think you will certainly die this time but you don't, you hear the thunder and seconds later the lightening flashes again burning grey matter and it's a miracle you don't die from it, because it seems so unbearable. Crazy is emotional torture. It's grief/terror that tells your brain you will never recuperate and your soul believes it. I've heard that people can pass out from extreme physical pain. Crazy is so emotionally painful I pass out from it - dissociation. I had 3 good days recently - I only felt depressed some of the time and the rest of the day was relative contentment with maybe 2 pockets of happiness. On the evening of the third night I felt a migraine coming on - intense pressure screaming at the insides of my eyes and waves of nausea. I remember thinking that I would take a migraine any day rather than the same amount of time spent in crazy. Any time. In fact, being physically sick or hurt is laughable compared to crazy. I have felt some pain - a broken arm, surgery, migraines, child birth... the child birth was pretty painful and minimally comparable to crazy. Imagine painful child birth for months. That's what crazy feels like emotionally. I seriously don't know how I can take it, except that I know I actually can't hence the dissociation. What really fucks with me is that sometimes I'm in crazy and I KNOW the feelings are not based in reality. Sometimes I can literally scream at myself above the noise and my soul hears me and simultaneously I know I am in danger and I know I am safe. No amount of screaming at myself when I'm in crazy can turn down the television noise, end the thunderstorm, or birth the child. I am terrified of my own crazy, and I have explained it here in sensory terms. Crazy is partially sensory, but it is more how you would FEEL if these things were actually happening to you and you knew it. It doesn't physically feel like millions of televisions screaming in your head, crazy emotionally feels how you might feel if you had millions of televisions screaming in your head. Wouldn't you be scared? Confused? Disoriented? Imagine how you would emotionally feel if suddenly there was a thunderstorm in your brain, and you could hear and see the lightening blast your grey matter. How would you feel? Terrified? That's how crazy feels - like the most horrible, terrifying event you can imagine is actually happening, but you know it isn't, but your soul believes it is and your body and brain respond electrically and chemically to that knowledge and you FEEL like you would if it WAS happening because you BELIEVE it is, while KNOWING it isn't. And there's no way to stop it. And it lasts for months so that you forget you were ever happy. You forget how good spaghetti is. You forget how to sing along to the radio. You get so lost in crazy, you tell yourself to feel the warmth of the sun on your face because you know you love the feel of the sun on your face but you can't enjoy anything because the terror/grief is so awesome it eclipses every bit of possibility of actually feeling the sun on your face let alone enjoying it. I challenge you to try to enjoy the sun on your face the next time you have a million screaming horror shows playing in your mind at top volume and lightening scorching your brain.

Eating My Way to the Bottom

Imagine a huge ice cream sundae. Perhaps, if you know the ice cream parlor Bridgeman's, you know of the Lalapalooza Sundae. It's huge and I ate one once. I forget how many scoops of ice cream, but it doesn't even matter because once you are full and driven to continue eating you just simply eat. When I was eating my way to the bottom of that sundae, I lost my sense of taste. I lost my sense of fullness. I just ate because I wanted to be done. It's such a stupid thing to do, yet there are food challenges all over the nation and television shows and obesity. Just because something is stupid and meaningless doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Depression has no bottom. Just as I think I see the bottom, assume there are only a few painful bites left, the depression expands as if it is eating me and my life and not the other way around. A profound experience unfolds as depression eats my soul; I find my soul is infinite. I'm not about to launch into a philosophical/spiritual discussion of the eternity of the soul. Fuck that. Whether or not I turn to dust, get reincarnated, or enter the pearly gates I find that while alive, life is eternal. As such, depression knows no bounds and the eternity of being eaten alive by this deadly psychological phenomenon is profound. I can only take so much and not take my own life.

But I don't. Instead, I stand on the edge of the bottom looking down farther while I fall until with breathtaking precision my body shuts out the pain and the drive to survive makes me take a few more bites. Empty, stupid, meaningless eating of life in a banquet that has no end. I long, desperately, for an end. I need an end.

Just one more thought. Insanity is sometimes defined as "doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results." I feel like each breath I take is just that - an exercise in insanity. Perhaps all of humanity is insane as we inhale, over and over, with the fullness of expectation only to exhale and there is emptiness. I don't know if this thought is dark or if it is beautiful.

Middle of the day, exhaustion sweeps over me, nap time. Close my eyes, think and feel at the same time, tears. I realized I am in the midst of a great depression, trying to wait it out like a swimmer in a riptide might tread water as they get sucked out to sea. I quit swimming for shore. I'd like to quit treading water but I can float in a salt free lake for as of yet undetermined amount of time so even if I quit randomly moving my legs and arms I'd still be breathing. The ocean is buoyant.

Perhaps I'll realize someday I'm sinking, just like today I realized I'm depressed. Perhaps someday I'll suck in some air and find my lungs filled with stinging sea water. I know what will happen, people don't just drown. They fight. They kick and they flail and they get themselves to the surface with every last ounce of energy they can possibly summon. I am a natural swimmer, and I can seriously float. Once, in South Carolina, I went out to the hotel pool and floated. Wendy came out to have a smoke and thought I had drowned, until she saw me breathing. She watched until she got bored, and I floated until I got bored. I think I fell asleep. Sinking isn't an option.

The thought is depressing.

I suppose this is why I drank. I still don't understand why I'm not drinking now. Alcohol is a nice lead weight tied to my soul and it would pull me down, down, down and I have no desire to use it. Buoyancy. Big, pint size screwdrivers, half vodka and half orange juice used to go down so easy. Right now, the thought of one is appealing but I lack the energy and the motivation to go get the damn vodka. It all sounds rather acidic, as well, and I think I would substitute 7-up for the orange juice. *body involuntarily remembers puking vodka screwdrivers*

I have a house full of pills, a garage full of guns, all locked up. Buoyancy.
I have friends and family to call, to hold me, to tell me they love me. Buoyancy.
I have doctors - a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a pulmonologist, a gp, a cardiologist - all of whom will do their utmost to better my health. Buoyancy.
I have a job I love to go back to, if only to burn out on and leave, but there it sits and waits. Buoyancy.
I have chihuahuas. Buoyancy.
I have a retirement plan, insurance, a savings, an IRA, a stellar credit score. Buoyancy.

I can't sink and all I want to do is sink because I am so tired of treading water. But even when I stop treading I float. It literally hurts my heart to breathe .... physically because my heart hurts and emotionally because my heart hurts. Yet breathe I do, and another, and another. Buoyancy. This is, no doubt and all irony, Hell.