I am depressed and exhausted and I can’t get warm and I lost my favorite hat yesterday and the dog ate my whole bag of trail mix and my weight’s not down enough and I’m hormonal and my mother might have cancer again and I’m still waiting for a spot at Sheppard Pratt and I don’t like my therapist and my hair looks like a rat’s nest and there’s no sunshine and I want to kill myself.
Can I just go back to bed and skip today? And maybe all the days?
Tonight I’m so angry I can’t think straight. I’m angry I can’t get the help I need.
I want to lash out and hurt the people trying to help me. I hate that urge, so instead I want to hurt myself.
I know I need too much. Or I feel that way. I’ve tried so hard to convince myself that I’m not too much, but now pretty much the whole universe tells me I’m too much.
My family. They’re finally cutting me off at the end of the year. My grandfather has paid a ton of money for my treatment, and he wants to retire. I get that. But what do I do about the fact that I’m still in need of treatment?
I’m trying to get treatment on my own. Right now I need residential care for the depression and the trauma issues. And theoretically the eating disorder.
But then there’s Medicare, telling me I need too much. Medicare will cover psychiatric hospitalization, but their definition of “hospital” is so narrow it covers only locked units. It probably sounds silly and overblown to everyone when I insist that I cannot go to a locked unit. Oh, there goes Sara with her manipulative melodrama again; god, we’re all so sick of hearing it.
But I was beaten to a pulp in a psychiatric hospital and then told by the staff to forget about it. Then I was sexually assaulted every night for months. EVERY NIGHT, you bureaucratic bastards. You wouldn’t be able to go to another locked unit if that had happened to you.
But it doesn’t matter what happened to me. I’m crazy. I have no value to anyone. So it doesn’t matter what happened to me.
It doesn’t matter that the help I need is out there because I can’t afford it. It doesn’t matter how badly I need it it doesn’t matter that I’m teetering on the cliff about to fall off. It doesn’t matter if I die because I’m not worth anything anyway.
I went to a really lovely party this afternoon. It was organized by one of the core team members from the campaign, and most of the people there were also from the campaign.
So we talked a lot about politics. Also knitting, writing, and having to get drunk to tolerate family gatherings.
These are my people, they really are. We all have slightly different topics of interest/knowledge as far as politics are concerned, but we’re all dedicated liberals.
It’s so nice to be around people who I don’t need to censor myself for, who actually like my strong opinions on pretty much everything. I didn’t feel like I was annoying people or putting my foot in my mouth. It was great.
And as soon as I got home, the emptiness flooded me again. Why can’t the good feelings last?
I’ve been thinking about telling my family about my political involvement–or, rather, not hiding it anymore.
I’m tired of hiding myself and my beliefs. I’m tired of fragmenting myself, being this person to my family and that person to others. I want to be me, without apologies or revisions.
It’s just such an effort, all the hiding. Making sure you don’t let it slip. Making sure no one else lets it slip. I don’t want my grandfather taking up that much space in my head.
Plus, I have the deadline for when my treatment is over, so that threat doesn’t frighten me anymore.
The only thing stopping me is that there are still parts of me that want his approval and his love. It frustrates me that I still want that. I want to be able to not give a damn if people approve of me, and with most people I don’t. But I think we all have those child parts who crave the approval of the people who raised us.
But now there’s a chance I could get a job with a company that does canvasses for various left-wing groups. If I get the job, I don’t want to hide it from my family. In my fantasy, they’d be thrilled for me. In reality, I know that won’t be their reaction. Still, I want to stop hiding such a large part of my life. It feels too much like lying. I want to be all of me.
My family really doesn’t get me.
I know that’s not exactly news, but it’s really been striking lately.
My grandparents have my phone number now. I’m not thrilled about that, but I had to call my grandmother when her sister died, and I didn’t want to tell her no when she asked for my number. I think she really does love me, in her own way.
When she called me on Thanksgiving, she gave the phone to my grandfather. He proceeded to talk for 15 minutes about Alabama football, how they just needed to beat Auburn (which they would definitely do) and Notre Dame (which they could probably do) to win the national championship. My grandmother left me a voicemail over the weekend to say that Alabama beat Auburn 49-0.
I couldn’t care less about football.
Yeah, I went to Bama, but I didn’t really want to. I was a National Merit scholar who could’ve gone to any college I wanted. I wanted to go to one of the good creative writing schools: Hollis, Randolph Macon, Sewanee, Smith. But my family wanted me to go to Alabama, so I went.
I never graduated, and when I was there, I actively avoided the football culture. In fact, when the Iron Bowl was a home game, my friend Eugene and I bought a bunch of junk food, rented all the Star Trek movies, and didn’t leave the dorm for three days.
I even got in a pissing match with the president of the University over football, at least in part. I wrote an editorial for the school paper criticizing his financial decisions, namely that there weren’t enough professors, academic buildings were literally crumbling, and there was such a shortage of on-campus housing that many students (myself included) were living in broom closets with roommates–all while the new football coach was making $8 million a year. The president responded to this by calling me at 8:00 AM the morning my piece ran, accusing me of lying, and threatening to take my scholarship away. When I realized the administration valued football more than its students, it made me hate football even more.
So why are my grandparents so interested in telling me about football? Part of me wants to believe it’s an attempt to reconnect and find common ground, however misguided. A more cynical part of me thinks this is an attempt to make me conform, to say they don’t care what I care about, these are the family values and I must fall in line. I’m not sure which one is closer to the truth.
I can tell you one thing for sure, though: I’m never going to worship at the altar to Bear Bryant.
So I have a deadline for ending treatment: December 31, 2013. Team Leader and Fake Therapist talked to my family this morning, and that was the major thing.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. There’s a big sense of relief in that I do know, finally, and my grandfather isn’t going to yank the rug out from under me the way he did at Riggs. (He called me the day after my birthday to say he was pulling the plug in 6 weeks, which was not long enough to wrap up the work and make a good discharge plan.)
But there’s also a sense of dread, mostly about housing. I don’t think I’ll be ready or able to work full-time a year from now, and my big worry is housing. I’ve tried to get on the list for government housing or housing vouchers, but the lists are closed in Massachusetts. Even if you’re already on the list, it’s a 3 to 5 year wait, and I’m going to be homeless in a year. But I’m trying not to panic. My team will help me figure something out. I hope.
It’s just so hard not to panic. I’ve been homeless before, when my family got sick of dealing with me. At least then I had a car to live in, and Alabama isn’t nearly as cold as Massachusetts. And then I got arrested for vagrancy, and they wouldn’t ROR me without an address. The whole situation was incredibly fucked up, and I’m terrified it’ll happen again. I’m trying desperately to distract myself so I don’t panic or shut down.
I’ve also started looking for yet another new therapist. Team Leader got a list from somewhere. I eliminated the men and the ones who I found online who don’t take my insurance. I should start calling the rest of the list, but I haven’t. A combination of phone phobia and general therapist anxiety is making it feel impossible. I might ask Team Leader and/or Fake Therapist if they can make the calls for me.
I’m gonna have to do more of an interview this time than I did with either if the last two therapists. I’m not good at that either, but I’ll have to get good at it. I don’t want a repeat of what happened with either of the last two.
Ugh. I’m sitting here desperately trying to believe I’ll be okay. Right now I’m not convinced. Everything just seems so dangerous.
I ran across a blog post tonight in which the writer says you sometimes have to point out people’s flaws to them to empower them to change. I had a strong, visceral reaction to that.
My experience has been that people can’t change until they’re ready. Apply enough pressure and they’ll try to change, sure. They may even really good at faking it by changing the external behavior. But the internal change can’t happen until you’re ready.
And you wind up feeling guilty because you know you’re faking it for someone else’s approval. You live in fear that they’ll discover you’re faking it and then reject you. You always feel not good enough, and the pointing out of your weaknesses to “empower” you feels a lot like being bullied “for your own good.”
It’s hard not to try to fix people. It’s a natural impulse for humans, I think. But consider that what you see as a flaw, the other person might see as something valuable, useful, or necessary. To try to fix people who haven’t asked you to assumes they’re broken and forces them not only to believe that they’re broken but also to thank you for “empowering” them by telling them how broken they are. It is, in my book, presumptuous and often very offensive. In the words of C.S. Lewis:
To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
He says it much better than I could.
I’m sure my strong reaction is the legacy of a lifetime of harsh criticism “for my own good.” As a child, I was never good enough; my family thought I’d never make anything of my intelligence and talents if I wasn’t pushed mercilessly. Instead of making me feel secure in my assets, I turned into a perfectionist who wouldn’t try new things for fear of failure and who would hardly breathe without permission and approval. I started punishing myself for all my “failures”–first with harsh and unrelenting self-criticism and later with self-harm, starvation, and even suicide attempts.
That led me into psychiatric treatment, much of which reinforced the messages I was getting from home: you aren’t good enough, you are a huge bundle of flaws with no redeeming virtues, you are broken, blind obedience is the only way for you to get fixed, we’re doing this for your own good. I naively thought mainstream psychiatric treatment would fix all my terrible flaws and finally make me an acceptable person, so I blindly obeyed. I wholeheartedly engaged in their Maoist self-criticism sessions. I didn’t understand why I was feeling worse instead of better.
Now I understand: it was the same dysfunctional power structure I was used to at home, where I was harshly criticized but had to thank them for doing it for my own good.
What I needed was compassion, not criticism–even if it was called “empowerment.” I was lucky. I went to Riggs and had an amazingly compassionate therapist there. I kept waiting for her criticism to come, waiting for her impatience with my stuckness. It never came. Without ever having to say it, she showed me it was okay to be where I was for as long as I needed to be there. Even though it looked to most people like I was stuck and going nowhere, I needed that time and space to make the changes that would let me unstick myself. And with her compassion and patience, I finally was able to make the changes that everyone else had forced me to make too quickly. That was when the changes stuck because they were real that time, motivated not by the wishes or demands of external people but by a deep internal desire for something better.
Today was bad.
I’d mostly gotten over the intense suicidality, but I was still having a really hard time.
I had an appointment with NT this afternoon (usually it’s on Monday, but I’d had to reschedule because of the hurricane) and told her how awful I was feeling. The last thing I remember was telling her my family hates me and wishes it was me who had died.
The next thing I know, I’m in the hospital ER and it’s 4 hours later. From what I could piece together, I dissociated and NT called an ambulance. But judging from the time I was admitted to the ER, NT didn’t even spend the rest of the session trying to ground me before calling the ambulance. For that matter, I don’t even know if she tried to ground me at all! Even my Windhorse fake therapist manages to get me grounded when I dissociate, so if NT did try, she must not have tried very hard.
When I finally “woke up” at the hospital, I was alone in a hallway. I kept trying to call my Windhorse team, but the calls wouldn’t go through because I had no cell signal. Finally I texted my nurse, who talked to the ER people and got Fake Therapist to come get me and bring me home.
I’m really, REALLY upset with NT. She knows I’ve been traumatized in hospitals, and I remember specifically telling her today that I didn’t need to be inpatient. She knew I have a whole team at Windhorse, but she apparently didn’t call any of them. Just called the ambulance. I cannot BELIEVE this.
Oh, and for added fun, the ER called my grandparents because they were listed as emergency contacts. They bothered my grandmother the day after she lost her sister, and now my grandfather is going to throw a tantrum about me. He might cut off my treatment because he’ll say this incident proves I’m not making any progress.
And now I’ve got to start all over again looking for a new therapist. Took me months just to find this one.
Sandy didn’t do much here in Western Mass. Some rain, some wind, but not enough to do any damage.
But my head is a storm over my great aunt. So many voices, so much noise. Need quiet but can’t get it.
I’m the bad daughter. I should be there. Somebody needs to take care of my grandmother. It should be me–I’m the oldest grandchild. But of course I’m doing nothing because I’m an asshole. What kind of granddaughter doesn’t even call? What kind of granddaughter gets mad because nobody asked how she was doing in the storm? My great aunt is DYING, for god’s sake. They’re not supposed to be worrying about me. I should be on a plane back home right now, but I’m not. I’m too selfish. I’m the bad daughter. Bad bad bad.
(Note: this rant is not directed toward anyone here.)
I am so tired of this pervasive myth that everyone’s depression is biochemical. I’m tired of people who barely know my name(s) telling me I should talk to my psychiatrist and try more meds.
I have already tried all the meds, and no, that is not hyperbole. My depression is not an imbalance of neurotransmitters, and more drugs are not going to fix it.
To insist that my depression is biochemical is to deny the very real and valid reasons I’m depressed. I’m depressed because my father raped me for 16 years, took explicit pictures of me, loaned me to other men, forced me to participate in my sister’s abuse, and frequently threatened and even attempted to kill me. I’m depressed because my mother is a narcissist who taught me I was a worthless waste of oxygen, verbally and emotionally abused me, abandoned me to take care of my sisters at a young age, and dumped me when I stopped participating in her mind games. I’m depressed because my grandparents only value me for my external achievements, and they threaten to withdraw financial support at a whim, leaving me homeless. I’m depressed because the damage from ECT leaves me with huge functional deficits. I’m depressed because I’m in constant physical pain.
These are valid reasons to feel depressed. It’s not because some little receptor in my brain isn’t getting enough dopamine or serotonin.
My unwillingness to stay on the psych med merry-go-round does not mean I’m not trying to get better. It means I’m making an informed choice: since I’ve been on tons of meds with no benefit, it’s unlikely that new drugs or cocktails will benefit me.
On the flip side of the coin, don’t tell me that the meds I’m on are causing my problems. See above elaboration on all my valid, non-chemical reasons for being depressed. In terms of implication, “all your problems are caused by your meds” is the same as “all your problems can be solved by meds.” They both invalidate the experiences that really cause the depression.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own 