Feeling Funky
Day 13.
No Seroquel. No Abilify.
The crackheadedness is slowly fading. My “happy feet” are less and less as the days go by, but my feet and ankles are so horribly sprained and sore from the constant twisting, tapping, and grinding my feet into the ground. They just ache. My bones hurt. I feel like someone’s hit me with a bat every morning, and my hands are so stiff when I wake up I can’t make a fist. The teeth-grinding has died down and the twisting in my neck and back are reserved for later in the day when my exhaustion takes the wheel. Sea-sickness when I stop moving has pretty much gone away and I’ve gotten a little of my appetite back since I stopped dryheaving every 20 minutes. Still not sleeping. I get an hour or two in most nights, wake up all night sweating and freezing, needing to get up and walk around. The itching is still incredible. Especially my torso, legs and feet. I feel like I have poison ivy beneath my skin, like I need to scratch until I bleed. It’s not helping me to sleep either. Nothing helps with it. I am guessing it’ll fade eventually but in the meantime, sweet Lord it’s lame.
I knew this would be the case, but I have to say I wasn’t emotionally prepared for it. In fact, despite my long drawn out taper, and the deliberate choice that was quitting these medications, I didn’t really brace myself. It kind of snuck up on me. It was like one day I’d gotten down to my last pill, put it in my mouth, and thought “oh good, I’m done.” I had been going through all kinds of aches, pains, and bouts of anxiety already. The taper was eternal, exhausting, and not without its own torment. I felt like I’d had the flu for months, aches & pains, insomnia, sweats and chills, and just general misery. I really had it in my head that once I was free from the drugs, I was free. Now here I am at my desk, having heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, and shooting pain in the right side of my head and I’m wondering, how much longer? How much longer do I have to feel this way? WHY do I have to feel this way? You’d think the choice to quit alone, knowing that in a few months, once my brain is unsaturated, completely chemically imbalanced, and I am physically exhausted from all of this, that I am going to be walking on the edge of a true breakdown, would be scary in itself. Knowing how unstable I will likely be when this all comes crashing down on me, how it will affect my friends and family, how it will affect my marriage, it’s pretty devastating. That alone is plenty of reason not to do this, but to be in physical pain, feeling like a freak, on TOP of the psychological aspects of this decision, is just making it feel more and more like punishment. I can’t breathe, my body hurts, and I’m scared. I know it’ll get better. I know time will take this off of me and I have to be brave, but I’m totally afraid of how long this is going to last. I don’t want to freak out. I’m trying to be the strong one, who did this, and who wasn’t afraid to take her health and her ability to enjoy life back. I’m trying not to act like I feel. I’m trying not to let everyone around me see what an exhausted wreck I’ve become. It’s just getting harder and harder not to throw my hands in the air and shut down entirely. I would rather be locked in my house, in my pajamas, completely shut off from the world. I’d rather turn my phone off and hide. I just want to be somewhere cold and dark and quiet. Where no one can see me. Instead, I’ll get up every morning, get my kids to school, go to work and come home, cook and clean, take care of my family, and go on about my business as though it were any other day. What choice do I have? What choice does ANYONE have? I can’t feel sorry for myself at all, but I am a little pissed off. Pissed off and ready for this to end. I guess we’ll see.
Is it asking too much?
I just want to be myself when I wake up.
I want to look in the mirror and not wonder if I am pretty enough.
I want to put on my clothes and not feel like I’m fat.
I want to get up every morning and put on my “Amber” hat.
I haven’t been myself in so many years
I’ve already forgotten the hopes and the fears
The birthdays the thursdays, they all brought me here.
A girl with amnesia, who can’t tell you here name.
I have forgotten the books, the music, the beer.
No idea what kind of clothes I would wear.
I can’t pick them out, I can’ t tell you the words,
I forgot what my face was without you to judge.
I can’t fucking wait to be me again, whoever the hell that is.
It’s not a dirty word.
Yesterday went swimmingly. Having survived it, I’m a proud little chicken. I had therapy yesterday morning before lunch. My weekly dose. It’s getting easier to be candid and think of things to say. I have been so guarded and basically shut down before every session. I have to force myself to really let go, not out of distrust but more so out of habit. I say a lot on this blog that I otherwise would not. Mostly because, like I said before, I feel like somewhere my honesty is appreciated for what it is. That despite how uneventful, my life exposed may help someone to deal with things, if for no other reason than knowing that mental illness is not a dirty word. On the contrary, I think it’s beautiful. The more I make peace with what I am, the more fascinated I become with learning about it. We discussed the usual things, mostly my over-anxious state over my visit to see the psychiatrist later that day. We laughed a little at my hallucinations, mostly because they really are quite funny. I felt pretty sound in my sales pitch by the time I left. Mostly because my anxiety was eased by making fun of myself for an hour. So healthy. I drove to Houston with zero panic, made a stop to grab a drink and some gum and walked through a store like a normal person. I didn’t feel stressed out at any point during the trip. Had a quick session with the Dr. It went extremely well. She heard me out. I was surprised but at the same time just really relieved that I wasn’t being chastised. On the contrary she praised me for being so intelligent and approaching my medication for what it is. For being aware of my triggers and the situation that landed me on medication in the first place. My sleeping habits reformed, I am better armed against the madness. Psychosis I can live with. I lived with it for a long time before I ever took medication and the “relief” of it brought with it the complete derailment of any natural emotions that I may have felt. It makes sense that me being physically healthier, rested, and aware of my psychosis would make me better fit to go back to my normal state. We both agreed that there is potential for failure or some sort of spontaneous combustion but she seemed very proud that I had made the choice to go off of my medication in a healthy way and was honest with her. She said that she felt I would be able to recognize if things were getting bad again and would be responsible enough to resume medication if that situation arose. I agree. I would. But the question is, what am I willing to live with? What am I willing to ignore? Here’s where I say ‘when it’s real bad.” Now having been at a point where all day every day was a walking episode and reality was so skewed that I found myself having to tell myself repeatedly “now that wasn’t real, just keep moving” in order to function, undetected in the world, I can say that I am well aware that we do not want to approach that state again. However that state was inspired. It was inflicted. It was at the peak of my overwhelmedness. That said it’s also safe to assume that while I can see them coming back, I feel differently about them than I did before. Not at their mercy. Perhaps not entirely in control but having SOME kind of grip on my reaction to them, which is important. Rather than being startled, distracted, emotionally fatigued by them, I feel enabled and unaffected by them. They are still there, they will always be there, but it is the way that I allow them to affect my life that is the important thing. Bottom line, I am what I am. Fighting it is just silly. Embracing it, although ideal, is not so easy but it must be done. I can’t get caught up in all of the bullshit my head throws at me. What I can do is feel empowered and not ashamed of the way that my mind works. It is the way it is because of genetics and conditioning. Period. It’s mine. It’s beautiful. You’d all be so lucky to get to listen to invisible wind chimes all day long.
Going to see the principle soon.
Thanksgiving this year was a good one. I didn’t get to spend it with my daughters, but I did spend it with the in-laws and it was interesting and just all around a good break for me. I did a little of the cooking but not the brunt of it, which was nice, and there weren’t any quarrels to speak of. We ate and laughed and spent time together and by the end of the long weekend I was more than ready for my girls to come home so I could love on them. Next year we’ll be having Thanksgiving Dinner at my house, with all my kids home, and it’ll be wonderful.
Not to downplay the greatness of Thanksgiving, but on to other things. I have to face my Psychiatrist this week with my having decided to stop taking medication. She’ll be disappointed in me, I’m sure. I feel like a child who didn’t do their homework and it’s Sunday night and tomorrow there’ll be hell to pay for it. It’s not until Thursday but I’m sick over it. Not because I am not feeling secure in my choice, just that I’m not feeling man enough to defend it just yet. I have done relatively well so far. Been very stable and honestly not a lot to report. I haven’t been overwhelmed with paranoia or felt any depression or mania setting in. Even for the Holidays, which usually send me reeling into insanity, I am just as composed and normal as anyone could be. I know I know, it’s only a matter of time. Well maybe it is, but so far, so good. I’ve been sleeping well, getting real rest when I do sleep, and focusing on the family and just life in general. Not really stopping to get too emotional over anything and haven’t really been given any real reason to. My usual triggers aren’t having much effect on me. I have been doing the grocery shopping with little anxiety and only once over the break while test driving the Suburban did I really feel overwhelmed. Shaking and the whole nine, but for me, that’s really a brief encounter with the anxiety that used to plague me. Had a few “attacks” or “bombardances” if you will as far as hearing things, just a few. Blaring-ringing-bells that would hit from one side or the other but when I’d say my prayers and simply ask them to leave me be, they would abruptly stop or fade away. I have a sense of control I’ve never really had over it and it brings me peace. No voices. I don’t want to say “not yet” because that’s just me dooming my own fate. But not yet. As far as seeing anything, I’ve seen a few of them. One in particular yesterday at the park. It was a child. I don’t know if a boy or a girl, but a child. Beneath the slide and kind of going back and forth under the play-center. It didn’t really DO anything and I saw no need to react to it. It was minding it’s own. Clear, like water. But it was there. Eddie didn’t see it. He walked over to where I said that it was and waved his hand through. It went away. I saw it again after he walked back over to me and then it went away again. To wherever they go. I don’t know. Regardless it was harmless. I didn’t feel disrupted at all by seeing it and it certainly didn’t scare me. There was a hospital adjacent to the park, probably where it was from. Who knows the answers. All I know is that I feel the need to completely deny seeing or hearing ANYTHING whenever I go and see the Dr. I have therapy that morning so I’ll be primed and ready for whatever comes, I’m sure, but I can just hear her chastizing me for going off of our plan. Me, with little explaination as to why I would do something so self destructive sitting there nodding at her helplessly. No defense outside of, it’s what my heart wanted me to do. How silly does that sound? What kind of excuse is that? Going off of serious medications because you felt compelled to do so by, your heart? But God, I feel so much more alive. So vivid. So untangled from the web. I feel like myself again. Except without the anxiety. I hope so much that I can keep it this way. If I just pray enough and focus on the good things and breathe maybe I can learn to live like this without being doped up and dead inside… but then, that just wouldn’t be my style, now would it?
My Cemetery
Sometimes I think my mind is a cemetery, full of plots, each one filled with something that I’ve improperly compartmentalized at some point or another. To me cemeteries are beautiful places. My mother used to take me to the graveyard in Brazoria a few times a year to clean her parents’ and sister’s headstones. Anniversaries, Holidays, and such were the occasion. She’d have me carry her scrub brushes and cleaning supplies and she’d dutifully detail each headstone with her gnarled hands and her feet. I had a favorite headstone that I cleaned each time. It wasn’t anyone I knew. I was just in love with the baby angel that it represented. A little boy who’d died on the day he was born, with a small white marble headstone, a lamb on top of it who’s head had been knocked off at some point. It was just lovely to me. I would always take the old flowers we were discarding from our family’s graves and place the prettiest most intact ones on the little boys resting place. I would imagine the heartache his mother must have felt and how precious he must have been. I would leave him with a bit of loss in my heart each time as though he were my friend that I was leaving in such a lonely place to rest. My mother is now buried in that same cemetery, although separated from the family we once visited so long ago, she is placed catty-corner with my grandfather who I love dearly and so I make my visits to both of them in the same fashion as often as I can. Taking their old flowers across to her parents’ and sisters graves and always keeping a few for the little headless lamb. I visit him just as I always did, only now with a mothers love in my heart and it truly breaks for a mother who is surely long gone, buried somewhere in the same cemetery, long reunited with her baby boy. It makes me appreciate, as I feel that I always have, even before they were ever born, my children. Paige was a healthy baby, who gave me no worry. She sprung into this life with fire in her eyes and has be so ever since. My twins were not so eager to stick around at first. I had to love them a little differently and convince them that it was a far better place here than with the angels. I pulled one over on both of them as they did, in fact, survive those early months spent in NICU in Houston. It was terrible and heart-wrenching and they both faded in and out of life for the first three months of it and I can not tell you how many times I envisioned myself standing over my own two little white lambs. It was nothing I could wish on any heart, regardless of the bond it forged and the strength it instilled in me. I surely compartmentalized that trauma along with all of the others because I feel like I may have never cried about it. Honestly. Even now when I look at them I feel all of this unfinished crying to be done, thankful tears. And so it goes for so many things, buried in my cemetery, stowed away for some psychotic break, it seems. Some day when I find myself scrubbing away at the headstones in my mind, digging in the dust, ready to cry. That day has yet to come and in the meantime what a pretty place I see it as. Magnolia trees shedding leaves as fall fades into winter and I breathe deep, so happy to be alive.
Don’t say “crazy”, it’s ugly.
Ok so I am a month off of Lithium and my f-ing hair is STILL falling out. I feel like I am out of some bipolar club now for stopping the medication. It’s really strange. I’ve already had some serious bouts of mania in the past month, in fact I’ve been pretty consistently manic in general. If it weren’t for Lunesta (which helps me sleep off an on through the night, I wake up about every hour and a half now but I sleep hard in between so I get a little rest) I would be awake 24-7. I have so many projects brewing and am literally DYING to figure something out in terms of a show. My studio is cluttered with work. The emotional attachment just needed to fade a little and the desperate need for more room to put new stuff has gotten intense enough that I think I am really ready to sell something. Before it was the scariest question in the world. “How much would you sell that for?” Now? Now I think that I might be ready. I want to make a trip to Houston and just eyeball some galleries. Just to see. To see if I “have it” or not. IDK what that means. I just know that if I keep on letting my husbands fear of me speaking to other people or “meeting” people (I say it like that because he constantly implies debauchery when he mentions the prospect of me meeting another human being in person) continue to dictate my life I’ll never be what I want to be when I grow up. Not that we see that happening 
ever. Speaking of which, I’m overdue for a therapy session so I can hear about how I am trapped at a nine-year olds emotional growth and how I need to gain control of my fear of my father being in or out of my life so that I can move on and be a little more healthy in my own relationships. HA! Sorry. Anyway, next Friday brings on another appt. with the psychiatrist. I’ll tell her I’m still not really sleeping and how I”m sleep-eating again and have been quite the maniac the past month. I haven’t gotten angry since I broke my finger pretending to be the hulk and thrashing around throwing my husbands underwear from room to room trying to get attention. You might have won the battle, door frame, but I”ll win the war. There will come a day when I can exercise self-control and not throw tantrums the size of Texas spawned from wells of anger saved up and sat upon like the Oola-Alla Aquifer. Look it up, it doesn’t exist. SO, here goes nuthin’. I’ve been snooping around blogs and really am enjoying all of the venting and the not-so-gentle information I’m getting about something that IS a thing and isn’t “Amber” or “Amber’s Fault” after all. Besides getting a laugh at other people’s plight, which I do, I”m also learning to accept this with a little more grace. Be it from the sheer LACK of grace I have seen flailing about the bloggish-type-places or just the bipolar and borderline anecdotes I’ve been privileged enough to come across, I couldn’t tell you. What I CAN tell you is that I am seriously hoping that there is some Schizo out there like me who has their wits about them enough to confess even a little bit of their story so that I can feel like I’m not alone. Just for a minute. Someone please tell me that they see the things that I see so we can make fun of ourselves together. Seriously. Make my day. I’m not so delusional that I honestly believe that there isn’t another “me” in this Universe. I AM, however, in favor of challenging fate a little and telling the Universe to go fuck itself. Just once I’d like to hear someone say, I am batchit crazy, I am doing the best I can, and I am smart enough to utilize the fingertips that God gave me and rant a little into the echoing forever that is cyberspace so that someone might hear me, get it, and feel validated. I am not crazy, I am just insane. I am not the only one who is walking around with a smile painted on my eggshell and voices in my head. I am your bank teller, your grocery checker, your waiter, your lawyer….. just like Fight Club only the bruises are on my soul.
Daddy Issues
Don’t tell me that we don’t all have them. Whether we were raised by superdad, had no dad, or had the grand champion of jackasses to look up to, every girl comes by her Daddy issues very honestly. Straight or Lesbian, it is undeniable that our perspective of men is shaped early and without fail by the blank that is filled by our Fathers. In my case it’s not so simple. I grew up with “dad” and “my real dad” as the flagships for the would-be men in my life. I know very little about my Father, it’s all summed up in a wine box at home, pages and pages of dilapidated letters written while he served in the Navy. Mostly to my mother but some to both of us. He called me Amy, which I resented for a long time as his not knowing my real name for some reason. As a child you find things to support what you’ve been told to feel. In my case I had a step father who made sure that I resented the very existence of my real father. I was adopted when I was five years old by my step dad, supposedly with ease since my father “didn’t want me” and signed me right over. The truth was he had a drug problem and felt that I would have a better chance at life with a “good dad” instead of himself. The “good dad” would abuse me and destroy every fiber of any chance at a healthy relationship in my future. My real father would put a gun in his mouth when I was seven and be buried on Christmas Eve. I have never seen his grave.
I”m supposedly just like him. Joe was his name. I get my personality, my flaws, my sense of humor and my appearance from a man that I would only know for a moment in my life. I remember him. I remember his laugh and his faces. I remember he loved me. That I remember. The rest is just what I’ve found through quiet digging and sorting what I get from my mother from what I do not. They were both artists but I can say I lean towards my fathers style, while I clearly get my maternal instincts from my mother. They both did drugs, she stopped and he did not. I am not an addict, but I have done drugs in my life. I have not since I had children so I would say I do not get addiction from him. My mental illness, which I love to say out loud, would have to come from them both although he is the one who gave up, so I’d say he is the one who let it win. I do not get that from him. I will never let anything destroy me. My goals are simple. Live, laugh, love. I can’t achieve that with a 9mm aimed at my uvula. So while they say a risk of suicide is heightened by a family member’s choosing to commit it, I say they are full of shit. It would, however, leave me to doubt that men are more capable of handling internal conflict than women, as is the example set by my father.
My step-dad I’ll not name. Just because. I called him Daddy. I still do in my dreams. Dreams that haunt and terrorize the little sleep that I do get. Dreams of him capturing me, holding me hostage, taking me from my husband and children. Hopeless helpless dreams full of desperation and fear. Why? I can’t say. I haven’t spoken to my Dad since his January confessions of all the completely reasonable factors that contributed to his abuse. How he drank and did drugs and how he loved me so much he could not stop himself. How I was so irresistible and how no woman can compare to me and his love for me is so pure and different from any other love that he’s felt it since he first laid eyes on me. My step father is a sick man. I have to come to terms with this. He was ridiculous as a parent. My mothers death left him practically drowning. Flailing, if you will. Drunk most of the time, although drunk was good, and wasted was bad. I would take him drunk. He was overly affectionate and downright manic when he was intoxicated. He “tickled” me too much and was very clingy and emotional, but he didn’t hit me. So that was better than wasted. Wasted was another story. Wasted would have him throwing me against walls, hitting me with household items, extension chords, water hoses, whatever he could reach. Wasted would have him calling me a whore, beating me, and swearing that I’d be nothing in life other than something for someone to fuck someday. Wasted was my worst nightmare. Drunk I would take. Dad had a tendency to sneak into my room at night to crawl into my bed and cuddle. When he realized that I never slept, that I waited in fear of him catching me off guard he immediately began to “punish me” by forcing me to sleep in his bed while he spooned me and held me as tightly as he could to keep me from “laying awake and thinking of lies.” I was, according to him, a pathological liar. Everything I ever said was a lie. I was notorious for not telling the truth if you asked him. This was all, of course, to dissuade any hopes of my every telling on HIM. And so it went for years. It’s hard to sleep when Daddy can’t keep his hands to himself. It’s hard to trust anyone when the only person you have to believe in abuses you to sooth his own loneliness. His own sickness. I would have sworn he had demons in him. Until I was seventeen and even after, as he spent nearly two years stalking and tormenting me after I moved out of the house, he would do his best to make certain that I knew that I was only a girl and that I would be judged accordingly. If I did not cook, clean, and satisfy I was worthless.
Now we are here, today, with a past full of shit, and we are expected to now have healthy relationships. Whatever your experience, you can not deny the completely real fear of finding a man who is just like your father. In my case, I couldn’t find a man who would give me enough negative attention to make me feel wanted. I broke a few down and drug a few through the mud and all in all, even in my first marriage, my number one issue was attention. Why? Even though it was bad attention, obsession even, my Daddy paid a lot of it to me. I grew up thinking that being scrutinized and tormented WAS attention. So when I went out into the world and discovered that sex was good, after all, and men were not all out to hurt me, it became quite the MO to find someone to keep me company. What I found was weakness. Or so I saw it. If a boy treated me decently I immediately took it as not caring enough about me to see my flaws. It was a challenge to stay in a relationship, the healthier it was the more like torture it seemed to be. I was unsatisfiable, and incredibly lonely. My first marriage ended because my husband wasn’t faithful to me. Our entire relationship I felt I wasn’t enough for him and he proved me right eventually. Of course only in the darkest moment of our time together, when I felt most rejected and abused, did my heart suddenly love the man. We are cordial now, we have three children together, and I will always have a soft spot for him as their father. When I was with him, I felt invisible. It wasn’t until I found someone who would be completely controlling and jealous over me that I would feel safe and secure. Someone who would point out my flaws, put me in my place, and insist that I take the domestic role in the relationship. The man who rejected me the most in the beginning. That is where I found my happiness. That’s the man I would chase to the ends of the earth. That’s the man that I married. So now here I am in my second marriage, to someone who showed his affection by acting out of jealousy and paying attention to me through criticism and this is what I fell in love with. As the world does work in mysterious ways he is, strangely, becoming less and less this way as time passes. Our friendship grows into something safe and the insecurity is beginning to subside. There is the natural ebb and flow, it comes and goes, but mostly goes and for me the thing that lured me in is not so prominent or necessary anymore. It took me finding someone who would bear enough resemblance to my crooked past to make me feel at home, but who would grow out of it just as I am, so that we would survive it after all. It sounds insane, but isn’t that where I fit anyway?
Nuggets of… Butterbeans?
*gasp!* Two in one day?!?!
Holy Crimanitley!
Blithering Butterbeans!
Ok, I’m done. I just felt like it was time to take a moment and update the un-updateable. Where are we in our plight of dealing with, simmering down, and downright disguising our Full Blown Schizophrenia and Bipolar innards? Why thank you for asking. It’s been awhile since I’ve straight up blogged about mental illness? Why? It feels contrived and somewhat self-righteous. I don’t know what I am talking about when it comes to the professional dealings of this nature. What I do know is how it FEELS to be insane. My meds just changed and I think it’s a good idea to kind of jot that down, if for nothing other than my own organization.
My spice rack consisted of the following :
- 900 mg of Lithium (which I was taking 300 mg at a time three times a day)
- 45 mg of Adderall (15 mg 3 times a day)
- 15 mg of Abilify (was 30 but we knocked it down a notch b/c insurance wouldn’t pay for it)
- Benzotrophine (for the Tourret Syndrome that the Abilify causes)
- Propanolol (for the “tremor” that the Lithium causes)
- Ropinorole (Restless Leg Syndrome – I wish I were joking)
- Ambien (Sleep – duh)
- Trazodone (Antidepressant/Sleep Aid)
And I’m sure I’m forgetting something…. I can’t remember the doses of the last ones but they are low, except the Trazodone. Now this cocktail in play I can’t really tell you “how” I feel. Is that the effect we are going for? My Doctor reassures me that what is normal to most will feel alien to me and that I will get used to it. Get used to what? Just WHAT am I getting used to? NOT feeling? My main issue here, aside from the obvious Schizo auditory and visual psychosis… which in my case come in tow with feeling like I was getting touched and being grabbed by invisible things that “aren’t there.” I say that with utmost respect for my Dr. but come on…. they are totally there, is mania. See how I totally got off subject and then BAM! finished that thought? We can thank meds for that. Hmmm what else can we thank meds for? Silence. Sweet silence. Something like oiling up the gears in my head and lulling the roar of voices down to a muffled trumpets course… just one song at a time, ever so organized. I don’t see ALL of the things that I used to see and I surely don’t hear ALL of the things that I used to hear. I did sleep for quite some time and then the Ambien stopped working. My complaints? A few. First I just feel grungy. Like the inside of my mouth is dry all of the time and I just feel yucky. The puking and the stomach aches? Not a full blown fan, although they are winning me over slowly with their convincing “we can get you out of work” schpeel. I just feel grungy, I wish I could describe it. Like I have too much in my system that just doesn’t belong. Mood swings? Yeah we still live in a ruckus of up-down-up-down-up-down(this is not in a week this is in an hour)-up-down-up-down… and so on. The difference is they aren’t so extreme. I don’t find myself crying joyful tears at stop lights because Bon Jovi came on the radio and made me happy to be alive by excavating some lost childhood memory of my parent’s not fighting. I also don’t find myself feeling so broken all the time, my thoughts still race, especially at night, but they aren’t like they were before. There is a strange order within me that I can not say I’ve ever experienced, I want to say (and I’m no doctor) that the Schizophrenia being under control gives me a false sense of control over the Bipolar types of things. I had a meltdown on Thursday, I broke some things, including my finger, and I screamed and I threw furniture around the dining room. All over nothing. Just me snapping. Then Friday I went to face my psychiatrist, hubby at my side for the first time ever, and was asked how I’m doing with my meds. My opinion was this, Lithium sucks. It makes me feel like shit. I started taking it before bed and dropped my dose to 600 mg and I still have a tremor unless I take propanolol (I know I’m not spelling it right) and I feel grimey and pee too much. Period. I’ve also gained 18 lbs, suffer from bouts of black-out rage, and on the up side am not experiencing the anxieties that once had a grip on me. So we changed our meds again. This time dropping the Lithium (taper off to none) and up we go with the Abilify, back to 30 mg. Am I concerned? Not really. We are also switching from Ambien to Lunesta which I must wait for the authorization on Thursday so in the meantime no sleep for Amber. Trazodone, does nothing but make me nauseated and while it makes me sleep-y it doesn’t make me sleep. I just can’t sleep. I lay awake all night, half the time crying, because I just can’t make my brain stop. I literally listen to my own heartbeat at night and go crazy thinking about all of the things I have to accomplish. Silence is so loud to me. It’s like a bandsaw inside my head. I can’t explain it.
What I do know, which isn’t much, is that this little switch in meds may be a relief, getting off of Lithium has GOT to be a good idea. Now it’s just a matter of what works? What DOES work? I’m a Paranoid Schizophrenic with Mixed Bipolar Disorder, OCD, and PTSD. What works? I read all of your blogs, I gotta tell ya, you are all popping the same pills that I am. Somebody surprise me.
Stopping to sniff things
You know, I was looking at my tags. My GAWD my tags are downers. I mean really. Do I not ever complain about fuzzy goodness? Is it all about insanity? I got a new laundry cart this weekend. Caught a really big fish. Had fun with my kids and cleaned my house. The swimming nearly killed me, I had an anxiety attack when I decided I could drown if the stars aligned and I failed at treading water for a few seconds. So that was one of your good old-fashioned classic case scenarios for panic disorder. I think I did good for someone who’s not been in water since 2005 and has a major issue with water in the face. I didn’t die. I even swam. It was a good day. I know it sounds downright dumb, but to me it was a huge victory. Things are going to get better, I can tell. They lowered my dose of Lithium by 1/3, I”m not taking it during the day anymore, so the shakes are down and that edgy feeling has gone away. I feel like I am figuring things out. Enough, at least, to be able to smell a few roses. So here I am, it’s raining it’s ass off, I am tired from a long weekend and chugging an energy drink praying it will somehow infuse me with not only energy but some shred of a personality today. Please, NOS, with your calories and your sugar poisoning my system and adding to my already disproportionate ass, please use your magical evil powers to make me funny and good-looking. Amen.
When you can live with dog piss in your carpet….
…. you are not ok.
Yes, I am talking to you. The one who sits on the faded hand-me-down futon watching reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and laughing out loud with a mouthful of Top Raman. You. Stand still so that I can point. You love your life, right? Being illusive, not paying your phone bill, dancing in front of the same mirror you sit and cry into, hoping someone can hear you through the thin walls of your apartment and pray for your satisfaction with life. You get up and go to work every day, play the vixen, play the outgoing “I’ll sell you a popsicle” fireball and make them all laugh. 
You sneak off to smoke pot on your lunch breaks, but don’t eat food. Every dime in your pocket is owed, and yet you go out drinking every weekend. Target is your internal conflict. You have agorophobia with comorbid shopping problem. Broke and suicidal, you paint. Tell yourself your little sister and your dog need you alive while you disregard the fact that both of them shit where they sleep. It’s only a matter of time, don’t you think? Just a few more self-destructive seconds before someone tells you the truth? When the fans fall back and the crows start to circle, are you planning on listening? Your confessions fall on deaf ears, your only refuge is dark solitude. This is your specialty. Friends come knocking, you hear them, you are just on the other side of the door holding your breath. They love you. Despite who you are. Your secrets eat through your sheets and you lay awake every night stoned wondering where you will find something to eat tomorrow and if there will be enough to share with the dog. Not total poverty, just plight. It’s not anorexia, it’s the deterioration of normalcy in general. Weeks locked away, you write in your book and you do it as though there were some chance it would “explain you.” What better place to lie than on paper? Oh the life, years like this, where will you find yourself. Who will save you if not yourself? No one cares, no one misses you, they just say that they do. All the soul-mates you seem to have found and yet you lock your doors and you tear at your face and you paint and you dream that someday someone will cut the stitches and out will come normal. I feel sorry for your friends, for the ones that waste love on you. I feel sorry for the canvasses you defile and the legacy you will never have. Not until you love yourself, not think about yourself, not dismantle yourself with charcoal and tears, not open your window. Love yourself. Someday it will happen for you, and you’ll write about it, and it will make you feel better to know that you admitted to having been a caterpillar.
Trazadone and Ambien DO make you cough…. how weird is that?
I slept last night, not drunken sleep, not doped up pilled out sleep, just sleep. Took an Ambien and 50 mg of Trazadone with my other meds, I am not on the same pile of pills I was. Seroquel is dead to me. I bid it farewell. I feel skinnier already, ha ha. Midnight sleep-walk-sandwich-making a thing of my past? Who knows. What I do know is I feel fantastic today. The Trazadone was an “and/or” combination for the Ambien. I found neither will make me sleep alone, that 100 mg of Trazadone is too much, and that one of each seems to pair perfectly with the exception of a first thing in the morning cough that if I can avoid succumbing to I am in good shape the rest of the day. So I am taking 30 mg of Abilify, my insurance finally gave in and decided to give me a break. I am taking multivitamins like a good girl with my other meds at night. That’s probably making a difference in the way I am feeling too, and I am taking Benzatrophine twice a day for the turret’s symptoms I experience as a result of the Abilify. So the blinking and the muscle spasms are under control for the most part as well. I feel good. I know I know. One would want to feel good WITHOUT all this jazzy get-up in their system but I’ll tell you what, to not be psychotic, to not live a life of constant anxiety, all of my OCD symptoms are kind of checked in, they are “checking in” the more calm and anxiety free I become, and wow what a difference. My face has healed. I don’t have to wear make-up or be a shut in and cut myself off from the rest of the world while I heal from my midnight bouts of mutilation. I feel good today, it’s all I can really say. I feel like myself again. Just today, so far, but let’s be optimistic and say this might NOT be all in my head for a change. Still can’t believe I slept without getting out of my mind on Seroquel. MAN, what a relief! I might be salvageable after all. 🙂 Go team!
Making peace with crazy.
So I’m sitting on the floor in my kitchen trying to explain, during a hot flash, that it turns out I am bananas and I’m all pilled out so don’t mind me or be offended by my waywardness of late because I didn’t mean to ignore her or act like a little bat and only come out at night at which point I still was blind to all interaction, our neighbors and ourselves are very close. We eat at each other’s houses a lot and our children are dear friends. It’s all been so hard to explain. I felt relieved when she nodded knowingly and said she understood what it was like to go through withdrawals. I explained that I was in a position now that I had to choose my path wisely. I have to medicate. At least until my kids are out of school. I have to do it for them. I can not function with all of the distraction and after a week off of meds I came to realize that it is, indeed, dangerously distracting to see dead people and shadow monkeys and hear voices all day every day. I was so used to it, at nearing thirty, that I had no idea what broken silence could lend me in terms of “life.” I mean I was getting shorted. I was so distracted by everything and just total awareness that was given to me surely for some reason, but at the same time, I am not using it now, and am certainly not serving through it, so I am sure the Lord can understand where I need a break. Schizophrenia, as I love the word itself so much I can’t tell you, is extremely exhausting. Period. Let alone everything else. My list goes on and on. The least I can do is take my meds until I can honestly say “this isn’t me” and at this point I have NO idea who I am at all so how can I say that THIS isn’t me? Or THIS! OR….. that? Who in the hell even knows? Jesus knows. He knew me before I was a twinkle, this I know, for the Bible tells me so….. I mean it does. So Jesus knows what I am going through and honestly, that is such a relief to know I am perfect just the way I am, as soon as I figure out what way that is… I’ll probably selfishly blog about it. Lol.
Agorophobia….. I hadn’t gotten to this part yet but someone tagged my blog and so I spose I’ll cut away to another fun topic.
Agorophobia: Not the Incubus Song.
So…. I’ve made little jokes about my grocery cart antics, but I guess “fessing up” to being totally aware of yet another completely dumb (and I say that about anything that I am aware of but do anyway, because it makes me feel like an idiot) facet to my beau coup dien ca dao existence here on planet Texas. Yes, at this point I have formally decided that Texas is not only it’s own country, but it’s own planet…. leaning towards the high likelihood that it is an actual Universe. Here is where the complete craziness comes to light. The grocery store. Namely, Walmart, and here’s why. I don’t NEED ANYTHING, but surely at Walmart at least with all the categories at my fingertips… SURELY I will think of some reason to be there. It is usually “a container” as my husband likes to call it. He says I am addicted to containers of girl stuff. He’s right. I will see it on TV and be absolutely positive that I NEED it. Not want it. Not would like it. NEED IT. I will then commence obsessing over it until I go to the store and buy it. Now “it” is never over $7. I also have a severe guilt complex over spending more than $7 on myself. I can’t do it. If I do I have to formulate an elaborate justification about why I need whatever the thing is that is over $7. This applies even to copays for my Psychiatrist/Psychologist visits. Which are $15. GASP! I always find a way to punish or deny myself as punishment for spending $15 on ONE thing for MYSELF….. now…. I will buy $100 worth of crap I don’t need at any time, but each thing individually will be between 1 & 7 bones. For my kids? I’ll spend zillions, lol. My husband? Zamillions. Me? $7.
NOW, the reason I would say that I probably have this odd number to stay beneath is that I literally go to the store every single day. WHY? As terrified as I am of people, public, face to face unexpected conversation…. I am ten times as terrified of myself. I won’t be home alone with me. I don’t trust me. If I am home alone I am on the phone constantly, pacing all over the house, never sit on the phone. I can’t do it. I literally can NOT sit and talk on the phone. I will go to the store and I will keep the phone plastered to my face, If I can’t find anyone to talk to I won’t go. I can not be in the store and just in the store. I can not walk to go and get one thing, I have to take a cart which I will then pretend to be distracted by the quirkiness of said cart/arm basket/whatever it is I am buying itself, so as not to give the impression to anyone around me that I am in a state of mind or have time to be spoken to. On the off chance someone speaks to me anyway? Nervous-fockin-wreck. I’ll shake all over and laugh nervously and talk as loud and fast as you’ve ever seen in your life. I’ll be nearly sick until I am home. Please don’t talk to me in public. I don’t belong there anyway but I am afraid to be alone so I go and I wander around, mortified, in public, where I also am afraid. It makes no sense. An earthquake, a bomb, downright Armageddon? I’m your girl. I’m quick, I’m focused, I’m ready to act, I am fearless and without emotion. Blood? Guts? Teeth and bones? I got it. I will sew your shit up, hold your guts in, and carry you to the hospital over my boney shoulder without so much as a falter in my step. I will put teeth back in someone’s head and wrap them in gauze and take them to the ER… but whatever you do, don’t talk to me in the band aid isle. I’ll freak out. The meds I am taking have lightened the grip of this by… oh…. I’d say a smidge. Barely. I notice because it is such a terribly part of my life that even the very slightest of “less anxious” I feel is such a victory I want to shout it from the rooftops, but then someone would look at me. I cover my mouth with my hand while I am chewing food if someone is in the room. I constantly look up my nose in the rearview mirror when I am in the car because the other cars might be able to see up my nose. I am an all around total psycho in public. If I am alone. If I have my kids with me I am twice as psychotic because now I am also obsessing with the way they are acting and/or the possibility that they may be kidnapped at any moment. Realistic? Nope. Do I know this? Yep. Does it matter? NO. I can’t focus on what I came or if there is an actual mission because I have ADHD so bad that even ON Adderall I can barely complete a task. I feel like a leper in public. I feel like a total psycho when I am alone. It’s a lose lose.
Charming Aberration 