the modernity ward

Don't Eat Those, They're Maggots

Well fuck me running, I was SURE I'd saved the last thing I was working on. That'll teach me to look up from the internet at my actual human friend who has entered my house demanding Fresca. 

(You guys are welcome to do that, by the way. I like it.)

So this friend, Angel (and you better believe that name is fitting), asked me, well, what do you think it should feel like, the practice of making things? Not the actual finished product but the process? Do you expect it to feel good? Because it doesn't. It feels horrible. That's how it feels.

Angel makes the most wonderful things, some of which I'm lucky enough to have in my house. It came as a shock to me, that the process of creating is, for her, riddled with worry and the discomfort of working a bit of yourself into the wool with a felting needle. 

Which, I mean, damn. I was hoping I was special! Uniquely tortured! Doomed to serve as a living coffin for my Substantial Gifts that would, I don't know, upon my death spill from my corpse like candy from a pinata? 

No, don't eat those, they're maggots. My metaphor is crawling with larvae. Because it's been dead for a while. 

But you know what I mean? Maybe I got some issues or whatever, but maybe I can choose not to be self-indulgent about them. Maybe I can do shit even if it really really hurts.

I was running this morning. I had 30 minutes, figured I could do 3 miles, right? 10-minute miles? I ran ten of those in a row back in November! 

But I barely made it. 32 minutes and just under 3 miles. And every fucking step of it sucked. No Fun Run, this: my legs burned, my cardiovascular system protested. Ever since I started meds, I can't run as fast or as easily; my muscles tend to cramp and stay sore for more than a couple of days after even small workouts. I fight the ugly voices in my head; I make my body go when it wants to stop. I sweat and chafe and ache and want to barf, sometimes. But I run anyway. Even though it sucks. Because I trust that having run will be worth it.

Oh and this one time I had a couple babies, not at the same time or anything, but I did the whole damn thing twice over, and you know how much of it was fun, each time? The first contraction. That was it. That's the last clank of the roller coaster as it reaches the pinnacle of that first hill; after that, it's all momentum and shit is about to get CRAYCRAY. 

Childbirth was not a spiritual, ecstatic experience for me. I was pretty darn well prepped, and it was still crushingly painful at times, terrifying, exhausting -- but yeah, worth it. Not because of the baby. Hell, you can get a baby anywhere. Just for the experience itself. I get to keep coming back to that one, what I figured out about myself and where I fit into the world, what I don't get to choose, what I do. Having done it was worth it.

Birth isn't that for everyone, and you sure don't have to birth a baby to have an experience like that. Besides, the creating-as-giving-birth metaphor is so awful and hackneyed that I'm going to stop right there. For me, though, running and birth are two times that mind and body are engaged equally -- or rather, there's no division between the two.

Whatever well of instinct drives those two improbable activities is the same thing that makes me need to talk to other people, with words and things. That creative urge is as overwhelming and earthy and yucky as the urge to take a giant shit.

None of those things feel good. They aren't nice. They're pretty nasty, actually, with sweat and blood and oh god did I poop? Please tell me I didn't poop! and terror and drudgery and WORK. 

But hey! There is always triumph at the end. It might not look how you expect, or how you want it to. It might not be recognizable. Sometimes my only triumph after a terrible run is that two days later, I run again.

So, hell. The obstacle is the path.

That's Zen for "Quit being such a fucking baby and get going, asshole." But don't mistake the bluntness for cruelty. 

Now I'm glad I lost the first thing. I like this one better. Triumph, right? 

Partly Cloudy

I was reading salon.com this morning, which is a shameful habit I've had since 1996 and I had to do it in a university computer lab on a monitor the size of a milk crate, and I found this piece, about a writer whose experience with Klonopin completely dulled her creative impulse, both desire and ability to express herself.

It sounded pretty nice.

"Well-known benzo side effects include 'emotional clouding' and 'loss of creativity,' which can be distressing whether someone wants to make art or not."

Well, but what about the someone who wants to not want to?

I don't know why, exactly, I want so badly for that urge to go away, that bone-deep need to make stuff or say stuff. Blogging should help, right? It should dispel the charge. But it doesn't and I don't know what to do. 

Lots of you have asked, well, what is it you expect from the things that you make? Can you let go of the idea of these things existing for other people, can you break from the fear of having those things judged, will that free you up to make them without the crushing hate. 

And I say, I don't expect anything from them. I don't expect them to be Great-capital-G, or famous, or significant, or important. I really don't. The thought of others judging me does not trouble me in the least.

That is not the root of that twanging nerve.

But there is no freedom in making things for my eyes only. I don't like to do it. I don't enjoy it, I don't see any point -- and the things I make for myself alone never, ever bring me joy. I am happy to sit and think my thoughts in silence for days on end, laugh at interior jokes, move myself to tears or joy or fury. I make sense of the world internally. I never could keep a diary going, but look at this shit here! (gestures around blog)

What I want from anything I do is a point of connection. A little ET-fingers-ouch something. I am so self-contained that sometimes it's lonesome in here. Are you lonesome in there, sometimes?

All I want is to feel like someone else understands the world the same way as I do, just for the briefest instant: 140 characters or a Facebook post or if a blog post catches you the right way or a poem that punches you in the gut or a joke that takes you by surprise and makes you laugh, or I can make you the best goddamn lemon meringue pie you ever had and you love it and for a second we both know what that tastes like, the union of sugar fluff and tang and sweet and richness and salty flaky crust that fills the whole universe.

We have the same thing for a second, and we are both not alone right then. 

So what, then? Why is the blog both so comfortable and so not enough? Is it that I wish to communicate in other dimensions as well, that I need a challenge? But then why is that so threatening? Why do I instantly congeal into self-loathing the second I even begin to consider other forms of expression? (It's pretty funny to see. If anybody asks me, in person, about those other forms, I go from normalcy into a weird stammering repetitive trance about how no I don't do that, no it's better if I don't, no no that's not me I don't do that any more I never did that it would be a mistake. And I stop making eye contact and start shaking my head.)

Y'all are welcome to offer your thoughts. I can't figure the fucking thing out. 

**Edited to add: But I don't think that's the same as caring what other people think, exactly. Since I operate from the standpoint of assuming everyone barely tolerates me at best, I take perverse delight in NOT giving a crap what other people think. The judgment of others never troubled me in the least -- since I know in my bones that whatever I do, some aspect of my being will be found wanting by somebody, if not everybody. I say all manner of gross, silly, dumb, naked, unpopular things here, without a care -- because I know that they are genuine.

The Used-Up Tits Are A Metaphor

I don't want to give the impression that I am always down. Because sometimes I feel pretty great!

I mean I'm like totally bipolar or whatever! HA HA HA

(Okay but you have to admit it's kind of funny.)
(Or you could just sit there with your arms crossed staring at me like the audience at open mic.)

I'm not flying too close to the sun, I don't think. I just had a nice day. A nice day after a pretty good week (that had a few dips and freakouts but righted itself, eventually), and the house looks better and I did all the grocery shopping and we have a washing machine that works and the air conditioner done got fixed and tomorrow, tomorrow, my task for the day is to purge the children's dresser of the faded, stained, too-small, and holey, and replace that stuff with the giant tub of hand-me-downs we just got. And wash and hang up all the school uniforms, because Sophia, child who began as a most determined little sea monkey no matter how uncertain her mother was, is about to begin second grade.

Second grade! Could you just die? 

And Daphne, no less a blessing for how much we didn't have to sweat for her, will start full-time day care. On MONDAY, people. Which means the days of dressing her in a shredded pajama top and a skirt and no underpants and sending her out into the world with the Kool-Aid Mustache of the Subsequent Child (and we don't even HAVE Kool-Aid, I don't know where it comes from) are coming to a screeching halt. 

Let us not mention the fact of my own classes, beginning in oh about two weeks.

Or of the things that must take place before that happens: The purchase of the remaining books, of the smartphone, the receiving of the holy Hep B shot #2, the flu shot, oh can we get a Trileptal level and a sodium level while we're at it, and oh yes the CPR course.

I am determined to do one more open mic before school starts. Mostly because after one of those the terror I have of the social upheaval of beginning school will seem as deflated as my used-up tits. 

The used-up tits are a metaphor, of course. They represent the depletion of that certain little-baby mothering energy I had. That part is gone away and not coming back, and I will admit defiantly that I am looking forward to the paradigm shift. I want to be a school-and-daycare mom. I want to spend large chunks of the day in the company of adults, using big words!

It was awful nice while it lasted. But to everything there is a season blah blah blah. 

I'm not sure where the tits metaphor goes after this. 

 

Chicken Poop for the Soul

It is de rigeur, I believe, when one is afflicted, to declare the illness a "blessing in disguise." To offer up a little chicken soup for the soul.* To draw the public eye to the less frightening bright side of the situation, and in so doing, one's own eye as well. 

Well.

I won't bother with the "in disguise" part. Because you know what, shit happens. Shit happens to everybody. Somebody is always sick or hurt or sad or low, someone can't afford some important thing they need to live, someone is in jail or bailing someone out of jail or sitting in the fucking courtroom again waiting to forgive a son for stealing her savings. The bad stuff is guaran-damn-teed.

So there's no disguise to it. There's just life, happening the way it does. 

Blessings sure do abound, though. In my eyes a blessing is anything that emerges above the roiling sea of inevitable crap: sometimes a life preserver, sometimes a floating pile of debris to hang on to. Sometimes a boat full of people, arms reaching in to haul you out. Whole islands upthrust from the sea floor. It never comes in the form you expect, and you won't see it coming. 

Grace means a mercy unearned, but really that's any goodness at all. Because you don't earn the things that happen to you, bad or good. There's no great tally somewhere in the sky and if you think that's what karma means, then you better RTFM**. Blessings, grace, it's all religious-sounding language but them's just the tools I have in my hands, you know? I think you know what I mean. 

Whatever it is, it shows up in sharpest relief when the sea is darkest.

So yes, maybe it's a little gray around here, of late. Not unrelentingly. But I have seen so many of your hands extended to me. So many, I don't know, styrofoam coolers tossed my way. (Those float, right?). Sandbars under the waves, places I can stand with my head above water even when I'm not all the way out and sometimes I find myself, unexpectedly, walking on land. And this grace, it has appeared from unforeseen corners. People near and distant share things, my God, I had no idea -- good things, bad things, ways we are alike I never would have guessed. People have been kind, forgiving, gracious. I have done the same, offered up little shoulder-squeezes that felt so inadequate, but I get it now, how even the simplest stumbliest help is such a comfort. Just to have the roughness acknowledged. And then, you know, a story shared, a resource pointed out, banana bread, let me watch your kids for an hour. 

This is how we don't drown.

Forgive me, now, for switching metaphors in midstream: You know what it is? When the bad things happen and the good things happen too? It's chicken manure. (Hey, man, it's one thing in which my life is ever rich.) It's the shit that happens, it's piles of crap that build up in astonishing quantities. It needs shoveling out or the fumes will sear your chickens' lungs. You can't put it directly on your garden; it's too hot with nitrogen, it'll burn your plants. 

So you throw it in the compost pile with all the odds and ends from the kitchen and yard, zucchini ends and coffee grounds and onion skins, dead leaves, the plants that died. You let it sit, grow horrible with larva (which the chickens eat, which make the eggs so rich; that's a metaphor for another day), but when the season turns you return to it, and it's something almost magical: rich, black, fresh-smelling, the best thing to feed your garden, wholesome and useful.

If you're lucky. If there is grace. If the bad things don't kill you, as does happen. You wait a few turns of the season. And while you are looking away, shoveling shit in other places, something rich and useful becomes yours: different, for sure, from what it was before, but maybe better. 

You all, you all are helping, whether you mean to, whether you know it or not. Everyone. A cashier who smiles, someone liking a stupid Facebook status, a story shared in private, a little forgiveness for some social misstep. Every kindness, every interaction. Every connection. 

I have faith this time will feed some tree I haven't even thought to plant yet. I trust I will not drown.

 

 

*Barf.

**Look it up.

A Most Unamusing Post about Disordered Eating, I Think

There's nothing lighthearted or redeeming in this one. Sorry. It may be of interest if you deal with similar.

I think I have a food problem. I mean, all right, I obviously have a lot of problems with food, from periods of extremely restrictive eating to binge eating to even when I'm eating normally just having an an unhealthy, warring relationship with food. (Can you blame me?)

In order to maintain a borderline healthy weight (and I don't mean by any external measure like BMI or clothing size but a weight at which I feel healthy and can move my body comfortably, and maintain my PCOS symptoms at a steady level) I have to choose very carefully what I eat, and how much of it. And all my supposed successes with intuitive eating have occurred during early hypomanic phases, when I had very little appetite, but hadn't yet made it to the near crash point when I start eating entire packages of Oreos publicly. As much fun as that is for all of us.

I guess it's not fair to say intuitive eating hasn't benefited me -- I am very aware of how different foods affect me, and (usually) motivated to avoid the ones that aren't helpful. That list is getting pretty big, though. I tend to binge when I have a bite of any of the foods below, and by binge I don't mean two helpings, I mean eat until it's gone and then eat whatever's on your plate and then scour the pantry for the next closest thing and then eat that until it's gone and I am in pain and STILL ready to eat more if it were set before me. And then spend the next three days feeling bloated and gross, BUT obsessing, still, over that same food -- imagining it, wanting it, waging an internal battle to keep myself from going out and buying it. 

It's shocking to me, and more than a little disturbing, how big that list is, and how it's grown to encompass not the standard American crap food that was designed in a lab to make us binge, but healthy foods, foods in their natural state, foods that my dietary gurus would label as acceptable, "safe," unlikely to cause a binge.

Binge triggers that I have discovered the hard way:

• Cookies of all kinds. Thin Mints, Oreos, homemade chocolate chip, sugar free peanut butter, no-sugar-added banana and oats. ALL cookies.
• Cake. Ditto. 
• Pretty much anything made with flour. Donuts, homemade challah, whatever. Baked goods.
• Candy bars. Little, big, whatever. Halloween is deadly.
• Pizza.
• Ice cream, regular, sugarless, all-banana, whatever.
• Mashed potatoes.
• Cereal. Any kind. Even Uncle Sam or Grape-Nuts.

Those seem fairly standard, no? It gets better.

• Meat loaf. Sigh. With or without carbs added.
• Pot roast.
• Cream cheese, added to anything.
• Plain Greek yogurt, non-, low-, or full-fat. Unsweetened, always.

Bummer, especially since those are Primal or Atkins-friendly foods that I "should" be able to handle. But wait! There's more!

• Dried fruit of any kind. Raisins, prunes, figs, apricots, cranberries...well maybe not goji berries
• Cooked fruit, even without sweetener: so apples, peaches, anything you'd put in a cobbler or pie, EVEN if you made it without sugar and used a butter-almond flour-cinnamon crumble topping with no sugar.
• Some fresh fruit: figs, stone fruits, berries.
• Sweet potatoes. Fried, baked, mashed, no sweetener ever.

I have been known to overdo it on roasted vegetables with a little bit of natural sweetness -- brussels sprouts! Cauliflower! Carrots and parsnips! 

I don't really know what to do about it. It's not that I'm weak or lack discipline -- I can keep cereal and cookies and granola bars and berries around, for the other people in the household, since those are so firmly OFF LIMITS in my mind, I don't even consider them food to me. I make mashed potatoes and even homemade baked fries for the rest of the household, and don't touch them. I even bake with the kids, brownies, muffins, and I don't eat a single one! I do have incredible willpower, despite what it looks like!

But anything I think of as "mine" (sugar free, flour free cookies, apples baked with cinnamon, heck, meat loaf) is in danger.

It's awfully hard to be the primary shopper/cook/lunch packer/kitchen manager when you are constantly dancing around your own triggers. If I go too long without eating, like more than 5 or 6 hours, I no longer get shaky or hypoglycemic -- the physical issues are well under control -- but I get my weird disordered eating issues triggered and start thinking, good, that's good, you didn't eat, now you just have to go the rest of the day without eating! Don't eat. You're good if you don't. You're bad if you do. 

Now, on meds, I can step back and know that's not right, can ignore the shrieking in my head and make myself eat something good, an egg or whatever. And then the voices turn off.

Jesus. I don't even know where to start with this shit. I wish I didn't love food, or cooking, or any of it. Wellbutrin is what they prescribe to people with binge eating disorder, but it hasn't done a thing for me in that regard. 

 

 

 

Steady Now

Oh man, I don't even know. I'm tired and I have a headache and really I think I'm okay. But it is exhausting, you know? Never to have a feeling that isn't suspect, somehow. Never to get to drop the filter of overthinking well am I happy because I'm switching hypomanic, am I irritable because the meds are wrong? Which one? Up or down? I'm a little bit bummed, is that a problem? 

Never to see the edge of something without assuming the precipice beyond.

I am okay, yes. Really. I had my initial visit with a therapist today, who at least laughed at my jokes so that is promising, right? But just to start talking and realize how much longer I could keep talking was a little jarring. There is a lot to do.

I think I will focus on making art pieces, in the meantime, that are meant to be completed and then smashed up with a hammer or burned or something. And no one ever sees them. If that's the goal, it's no defeat when it happens, I am thinking.

 

 

Unprepared

You know how I know it's time to increase my Wellbutrin dosage? When I decide Oh hey maybe I'll try drawing again! and I sit and sketch and I can't let my six-year-old give me a compliment and then I throw everything away after tearing it up. Maybe I should just drop my Wellbutrin dose so I'm just depressed enough not to even pick up a pencil. Functional, yes, in the kitchen and the house, but lacking that extra little push to think I ought to try.

I was not ready to start making things again. I don't know what'll fix that. The only thing I can think of is not to try to make things ever again. And frankly it seems so -- I don't know, presumptuous? Prideful? Shameless? -- that I should even worry about that, you know? What I make doesn't matter, so what does it matter if I make it? It doesn't, really.

But then why bother making things in the first place?

It's easier to sit quietly and listen. Not to take the risk of talking. Busy my hands in the kitchen, chopping, washing up. I don't like to cook for other people, any more. Outside of my household I mean.

Nothing comes out the way I mean it to.

* * *

That depression screening  question: Do you no longer enjoy the things that used to give you pleasure? There's a lot it doesn't ask. What it means, I guess, is do you feel empty inside. Numb to the joy of a thing you once loved. And that is not the case for me at all. I am moved, intensely so, by art, by music, hell, by stand-up comedy. By hearing Sean play the piano or make a comic or seeing Sophia draw something she is so proud of or know she is really nailing it when she plays Oh Susannah on the fiddle; watching Daphne figure out something new, draw a picture of a mouse, sing a song, surprise us with some costume. 

Those things bring me joy. I love watching other people make things, seeing their etsy shops, their stories, their poems.

To attempt these things myself would crush me, I think. I try, and sometimes the results make it out into the world, and the repercussions are devastating. Internally I mean. 

In a fit of who knows what I pass things off to other people. Sean keeps my old art from 15 years ago. Someone might get a poem once in a while. Those are the things that survive, but you have to hide them from me because as soon as the wave passes I will destroy whatever I can find. I am so intensely embarrassed by these things, and worse yet, once in a while admitting that I was satisfied with something I made.

* * *

I hate that I write. It's the last thing to go. It is one thing I halfway trust I can do and when I say I can't stop maybe I mean that some deep part of me senses it is important to hang on to something. Or maybe it's just an old habit, inflicting my leaden self on the world this way. I wish I could stop. No, that's not quite it: I wish I would.

Friday Scatter

It's been fun to watch my creativity come roaring back, and by "creativity" I mean "willingness to broadcast my thoughts to Facebook in realtime" (thank you Bridget). It's a sort of low-cost social engagement, a way to get laughs without having to look out at a roomful of people with their arms folded. I mean I imagine most of you guys sitting like that, maybe texting, looking at your watches, but it doesn't make me want to crumble into dust the way it did, oh, two weeks ago.

Oh HEY CRAP I haven't taken my pills yet this morning. Excuse me.

Well hang on I just need to check Facebook for a second.

Yeah so anyway, the faucet is back on and I don't know what to do about it. Part of me worries that any improvement over the sort of basalt-bedrock zombie depression is merely a return to the supersaturated color and pretty lights of hypomania, which while amusing and productive also completely disables my self-criticism function (again FUN for me, less so for innocent passers-by) and I am unable to determine what percentage of the crap I generate is, well, crap. 

Speaking of crap OH MY PILLS HANG ON

Okay. Now just don't let me forget to retrieve the cup of tea I have now microwaved and allowed to cool three times. 

I don't think my thinking is as disordered as it seems. I'm just watching Wow Wow Wubbzy with the girls which is basically the same thing as having a seizure at a skating rink, and the kids are throwing plastic Spidermans at each other with their feet.

On August 1 both my kids are in full-time something or other. I can hardly believe it. The downside is that then I have to go to school for like two and a half years, but now I'm pretty sure I can handle it. 

I don't imagine I'll have a ton of free time for creative pursuits but I'm hoping the momentum of nearly a decade of blogging will carry me. I guess you make a habit of it, the way you make coffee in the morning. 

Have a good weekend, guys.

 

 

 

 

Going Sane

The tide goes out.

The offshore hurricane churns away, slowly, peters out without warm ocean and wind currents to feed it. The roiling surf eases up, slips back away from the sand. You can see what it carved out, this latest storm: a new shape to the shoreline. Shells from farther south, seaweed heaped in miniature mountain ranges, and then -- some new thing jutting up from the sand, a shard of a boat, weathered but preserved and now, finally, visible.

A manic state for me is an excess of energy. Sometimes that feels indescribably wonderful and sometimes, when my energy is high but my mood is black, it feels like an outsize chainsaw I can't quite manage and can't turn off. Oxcarbazepine brought the fury down. I stopped wanting to -- seriously planning to -- smash my fingers with a hammer, slam my head in a door. Okay.

Then the bottom dropped out from beneath the place I thought low enough already. I don't know that I've ever experienced such pure depression -- mine have always been energized rather than lethargic -- and I trudged instead of walked. Spoke slowly. Could barely raise my eyes. I wasn't sad, for the most part; I was empty. Void. The constant music playing in my head went quiet. (I mean that literally -- I always have some song going on in the background in there.)

I fed everyone something every day: something out of a jar, something out of the freezer, something crunchy out of a bag. My basic caretaking abilities, like brain stem functions of breathing and beating heart, are the last to go. Crud accumulated on the floor. Sean kept up with the kids and the laundry. The garden died.

Buproprion turned the sound back on, the color back on. And my mood lifted, my energy returned, with shocking rapidity. I've been taking it a week and I have had a handful of days where I felt normal. Took an exam, ran two errands with the kids, made lunch for them, read for a while, worked out, cleaned the house, fixed dinner, practiced fiddle with Sophia (an excellent measure of both mood and energy level for me). This all happened without me screaming or breaking anything or even wanting to.

It felt revelatory. No way to take the full measure of what is missing until you find it back, again.

Now I have to quiz myself: am I too happy? Too bursting with ideas? Am I accepting of myself or crazy overconfident? Okay for now. But I get to ask myself those questions every day. Several times a day. From now on. 

About the rowboat, now.

The froth of a mixed state settles, in the clarity of adjusted brain chemistry, and what you get isn't some Perfectly Fine version of yourself, but a chance to see the junk and driftwood that was waiting under. It gives shape to the illness; the illness moves it around; but they are separable, and require different kinds of cleanup. No pill will unmake me a person with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility to the people I care about (to the point of self-obliteration), will unknot my assumption -- my acceptance and understanding -- that no one wants me around. 

No, that's my wreckage to tidy up. Without the manic depression, though (and I am going to call it that because it's a better way to describe what I have rather than try to sort out discrete states), I can see that it is just wreckage -- a rowbat that maybe served me once, when it was the only way to stay above water, but isn't fit to use today. That boat needs to be hauled up out of the sand and burned before some kid running on the beach stubs a toe on it.

But I can haul it up, now.