Category Archives: bipolar
In Which I Reflect On What I’ve Done
Today was a very mixed day.
I accomplished a ton of stuff around the house (you guys, I even ironed things!) and then completely lost the plot.
My frustration tolerance has been through the floor the past couple of days (Hormones! Declining sunlight! Sleep deprivation! Yay!), and I hope today was its nadir, because I’d be totally good with being over this.
To be entirely fair to myself, I did succeed in holding it together for longer than I might have: it took the combination of a huge spill (spills are a meltdown trigger I’m having trouble shifting), a loudly-ringing phone, and a cascade of other Things Going Wrong All At Once to finally drive me over the edge into a fridge kicking, door-slamming meltdown.
To be entirely honest with myself, though, I might have headed that whole episode off at the pass if I had listened to the signals in my head that were saying, “Hey, maybe it’s time to sit down and chillax before you lose it,” instead of being all like “NO I JUST NEED TO FINISH THIS ONE THING … AND THIS ONE … and this one …”
It probably also would’ve helped if I’d realized I was in Low Blood Sugar Land. Oy vey.
Denis happened to be just getting up from a nap at the same time that I hit Hormonal-Bipolar-Aspie-ADHD Defcon 5. After, when I was busy being all mad at myself because in those moments I feel like All The Work I Have Done Is For Naught, he came into the room, asked me what was up (I had the presence of mind to not be like, “NothingEverythingIsFine”), hugged me and said he gets it; that it’s okay to be screaming mad at the world sometimes — and that it might be a better strategy to actually scream at the world, even.
And I was all like, “Um. Oh.”
Because, to be honest, that never occurred to me. I mean, that actually, like, Using My Words (Loudly) might be a possible response to frustration of that calibre (which is, for me at least, a very physical, visceral experience).
In short: I recognize that other people use their words when frustrating crap happens; I also can do this up to a point — it just never occurred to me that maybe other people do experience explosive frustration* like I do, but have maybe actually figured out how to respond to it verbally, or at least vocally.
Which is interesting.
I had a long talk with El Roberto about this a while ago. We are both very high-functioning in many ways (and not so much in other ways) but I go thermonuclear way more easily than he does. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was a thing that ever happens to him until back in May — and I’ve known him for ages.
This may be because of the whole hyperactivity component, which he doesn’t have, and which means I’m just generally a lot more keyed-up than he is. It may also be a function of the fact that he grew up in a house in which verbal expression of emotions was valued, whereas I didn’t. Like, he is more able to talk about feelings and yell when he’s frustrated than I am.
Regardless, I have historically coped with most “loud” emotions fairly non-verbally — in part because of my upbringing (which brooked no yelling, least of all incoherent yelling), and in part because strong emotions make it much harder for me to access my language circuits, so to speak — it’s like they shunt system resources away from my language co-processor.
It never occurred to me, though, that these could be active parts of my embarrassing tendency to be a grown-ass person who occasionally gets in fights with the fridge without actually being drunk.
Yelling incoherently isn’t currently in my behavioral repertoire at all (not even when startled or frightened) — but it seems like a step up from kicking the fridge, to be honest (also less likely to injure my feet — foot injuries are like the Ballet Bogeyman).
It’s also a behavior that’s less likely to be perceived by normal people (not people like me, for whom yelling and sudden loud noises are really pretty terrifying) as scary and anti-social. Though my fridge-kicking frenzies are in reality more akin to a freaked-out horse kicking whatever’s in front of (or behind) it, I am definitely aware that they can seem a lot like the threatening behaviors of jerks.
The difference lies in intent — controlling jerks intend for their physical explosions to imply threat. In my case, there is no threat intended. There’s really nothing intended, at those points; I’m largely beyond higher-order stuff like that in those moments — but it’s not hard to see how a threat could be perceived.
Anyway, most people apparently find someone yelling, “AAAAGH! I’M SO FRUSTRATED! BLARGH! GARGLESNARP!” or whatever much less frightening than someone slamming a door or kicking the fridge or throwing all the hangers on the floor (which did not happen today, but almost did, which probably should have been the clue that the laundry could wait). I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to adjust my behavior.
I am wondering if I could learn to yell when I’m melting down instead of slamming doors, etc.
It could be difficult for a couple of reasons — one, I have done a ton of work on this and meltdowns of this calibre aren’t that common anymore for me (Yay!), which will make it harder to do the actual behavioral work in question; two, it never occurred to me that this was even possible because (believe it or not) language is hard for me. But I might be able to start by just learning to make vocal sounds, even if they’re non-verbal and incoherent.
It would be nice not to worry about causing Denis (or anyone else, I hope) to feel unsafe.
Anyway, it’s something I’ll be trying to figure out.
For now, though, I’m going to try to figure out how to get to sleep. Advanced Class tomorrow, then opera.
À bientôt!
Notes
*Seriously, this reaction is fight-or-flight, survival-mode stuff. Ugh.
Come to think of it, maybe I could also try the “flight” option? (Another thing my upbringing didn’t really allow for.)
Like, instead of kicking the fridge and slamming the door, maybe I could just run down the stairs and then run around in the basement until my limbic system stops blaring its klaxons? Hm. Not that I have too much volitional thought happening in those moments, but maybe I could somehow rewire myself so flight, rather than fight, is the default response.
Good Therapy, Bad Therapy (Maybe Part I)
I’ve had a bunch of both, and therefore I feel fairly qualified to say a few things about them, though I’m not going to try to claim that my experiences will resemble anyone else’s or that the lessons I’ve gleaned from them are universal.
But, you know. Just because my experiences are guaranteed not to be universal doesn’t mean that they might not be helpful to someone else.
So here goes:
- There’s therapy that’s actually going to fix things on a long-term basis, and then there’s therapy that’s basically Field Medicine — trying to keep you in one piece so it’s possible to get back out there and fight another day. Or another hour, or week, or whatever.
They’re very different things: which is to say that they might look exactly alike, and involve the same methods and techniques, but in the long run, they play roles as disparate as military field medicine and civilian obstetrics.
My first therapist, who was very gifted and who I adored, was stuck in the unenviable position of practicing Field Medicine Therapy. Maybe she couldn’t get me off the battlefield, so to speak, but she kept me patched up well enough to keep me going during that time. That was important work, back then.
When you’re stuck in a high-stress situation but are lucky enough to have good therapy, it often functions as Field Medicine Therapy. That means you might still need therapy (maybe totally different therapy) afterwards, and that’s okay.
Then again, you might not, and that’s okay, too.
- Some of the worst therapy I’ve had has been provided by PhDs (which doesn’t mean all PhDs are bad therapists; read on). Also some of the best.
Some of the best therapy I’ve had has been provided by people with Master’s degrees — and, in particular, by my current therapist, a great lady with a Master’s in Education (which is actually a reasonably common therapy credential in Kentucky due to our state licensure system).
It’s worth remembering that a PhD, at least in the United States, is a research-based, academically-oriented degree, and few US PhD programs in Psychology are actually aimed at producing therapists. Many are aimed at producing clinicians who are also academics, but not necessarily clinicians who practice psychotherapy.
PsyD programs, meanwhile, tend to be more practice oriented, but they also aren’t necessarily geared towards producing better therapists. Unfortunately, I don’t know a heck of a lot else about them, except the fact that they’re generally less oriented towards an academic career track and more towards a practice-oriented, clinical one.
So a PhD-level therapist isn’t necessarily going to be a better therapist than a Master’s-level therapist — which isn’t to say that PhD- or PsyD-credentialed practitioners can’t be awesome.
Just that you’re not getting short-changed if your therapist doesn’t hold a doctorate of some kind.
- Some of the worst therapy I’ve had has been provided by very good people with the very best of intentions.
I was really pretty angry for a long time at some of the practitioners who were responsible for my care when I was in high school.
It’s been long enough now that I’m comfortable stepping back and recognizing that, while at least one of them was a complete dick (who was asked to resign from her position after an episode of particular dickishness), most were good people doing the best they could with what they had. They were also unwittingly practicing field medicine; sending me back every time I walked out the door into a situation that, at the time, was pretty harmful (though the worst part was behind me by then and, ironically, took place in a gap between therapists).
That didn’t make it easier to cope with at the time, but it does make it easier to forgive them now.
As does, I suppose, knowing that whatever damage might have been done by therapeutic decisions that led to unforeseen consequences (hellooooo, meds), I do to a great extent owe my life to the people who did their best to take care of me when I was in high school.
But it was still terrible therapy … and they were still good people.
- The best therapist for you might not be the best therapist for someone else.
The best therapy for you might not be the best therapy for someone else.
Heck, sometimes, it may not even be possible to delineate what’s therapeutic about the best therapy: while my current, brilliant therapist is influenced by the classical talk-therapy school, including the practical (but not the weird theoretical) ideas of Freud, I’d describe her style as eclectic.
Often, we just Talk About Stuff — but somehow the Stuff we talk about is real stuff even when I manage to walk into a session manic as a crack-addled ferret and convinced that Everything Is Just Fine.
And, while I couldn’t outline exactly how she’s done it, D. has operated as a mirror of fresh insight in a way that has been transformative for me in a way that no other therapist has (in part because even my best prior therapist, who I adored, was practicing field medicine).
And this is a lady with a Master’s in Education, so once again, if you’re worried about credentials … sometimes the best credential is a jillion years of experience and a recommendation from someone you, the patient, trust.
- Like school, therapy is something you pay for.
That means that if your therapy isn’t working for you, you’re totally allowed to speak up about it.
And if your therapist is a jerk, you’re allowed to fire him (or her; jerky therapists come in all sexes, sizes, etc). You’re even allowed to fire your therapist (and, one hopes, find a new one) if your therapist just isn’t a good fit for you. Sometimes that happens.
True, as with school, therapy is something that isn’t going to work as well if you don’t do your end of things.
That said, as with school, if you’re not doing your end of things, you might be over-faced — and it’s okay to say, “I’m not ready for this level yet; I need to step back to therapy without fractions and work on the basics some more.” I have totally done that, and my therapist totally did not kill me.
Also as with school, you’re not doing your end of things just because, you’re screwing yourself outta money! Why you wanna do that?!
But if you’re doing what you can and it’s not working, it’s okay to speak up.
- Therapy doesn’t have to be forever, but it doesn’t have to not be, either.
It’s okay to stop, then start up again, or cut back, then step it up again. It’s a service.
If it helps, you can compare it to physical therapy: you might start physical therapy to address some kind of longstanding muscle imbalance, get that sorted over the course of therapy, be fine for a while, then end up with an injury (maybe even one that causes the old problem to re-surface) and need another course of therapy.
That doesn’t mean that the original course of therapy didn’t work, or that you don’t deserve the new course of therapy.
Likewise, sometimes you might get assigned a course of physical therapy and not actually do the exercises for whatever reason (which as TOTALLY NEVER HAPPENED TO ME, okay? I am the BEST PHYSICAL THERAPY PATIENT. …Um, is my husband looking?). So that therapy might not work as well as it could have, and you might need to try again later. Your physical therapist might be all, “Did you do your exercises?” … but she’s not actually going to kill you, and if she’s really good at her job, she probably won’t guilt-trip you, either.
Good psychotherapists kind of work the same way. They don’t guilt trip you about not doing those million leg lifts, or whatever their psychotherapeutic equivalent is, between back when you finished your last course of therapy and now. They just help you get down to work.
- Lastly, good therapy is not always easy to find.
People can be really judgmental if you’re not in therapy and maybe you should be.
Those people are jerks, and you can tell them I said so.
Even though I just said bad therapy was nonetheless partly responsible for saving my life, bad therapy can also be worse than no therapy (you could make a physical therapy analogy here, too: a bad physical therapist, especially one who’s heavily invested in some trendy new modality, can seriously hurt you and leave you needing way more physical therapy than you did when you started).
Sometimes you just kind of have to do what you can and forego therapy until you find a good therapist.
And that’s okay, too.
You gotta do what you gotta do.
So that’s all for now.
Again, your mileage may vary (and, in fact, it may vary enormously, which is also totally okay) … but I hope some of it might be useful to somebody, somewhere.
Touching Back on a Point About Bipolar
Recently, another blogger linked to my post, “Bipolar As Unexpected Gift?”
I haven’t read the linked post yet; I’m not in a great place for dealing with controversy (of which there may not be any).
That said, there are a couple of points that I think are really missed in my post — for a couple of reasons.
First, I didn’t invest a great deal of clarity in them, because the post in question was never meant to be anything but a reflection on a very surprising experience of mine (that of finding that there were good outcomes in my life — especially my marriage — that stem from the effects of Bipolar disorder on my decisions and experiences).
Second, the title is unfortunately close to the kind of thing that apparently gets out there a lot — happy-clappy New Age bull about accepting and making the most of mental illness or whatever cross one bears in life; seeing it as a gift and not as a tragedy.
I wasn’t aware of those articles when I wrote my post.
Anyway, the points in question are these:
First, when I used the word “as” in the title, I didn’t mean “as only” — quite the opposite. I had been struggling with a lot of bitterness; a lot of pain about the things Bipolar had taken from me. I can’t remember now what led me to realize that there were also things it had given to me. So the word “as” in the title doesn’t mean “as this and nothing else.” Not at all. It means “as this, surprisingly enough, along with all the other stuff it is.”
Western culture likes things to be black and white, either or: thus, if any one of us points out a way in which Bipolar has been beneficial, there are many outside the Bipolar community who will choose to see only that. “If it can ever be good, it can’t be bad, right?”
But that’s not how life works. Sometimes an ocean of bad manages to bring along with it a teaspoon of good. No, the good doesn’t invalidate the bad — not by any means. But neither does the bad invalidate the good — and hanging on to the good is one of my survival strategies.
Which brings me to the second point I rather failed to address back then: in this battle, there’s no One True Way. My experience with Bipolar Disorder is, by necessity, different from yours, and yours from mine. What works for me might not work for you.
So when I comment on the surprising experience of finding that there are good things in my life that wouldn’t have been without Bipolar Disorder, know that I don’t expect you to feel the same, or judge you in any way for however you do feel (okay, full honesty: if you regard your Bipolar Disorder as an unequivocal good and insist that others should do the same, I’m going to at very least shoot you a long, stern, professorial look with bristly eyebrows — feel how you feel, but don’t tell other people how they should feel; that is so not cool).
So there you have it.
I don’t see Bipolar as only or even as mostly a gift, and however you see your Bipolar, I honor that, too.
Getting By: Food
Occasional forays into the world of fast food notwithstanding, most of the time, I eat pretty well — blah blah, varied diet, lots of fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, cook from scratch, etc. I can’t really gloat about that, by the way; it just happens that if you made a Venn diagram in which one circle represented “foods I really like” and the other “foods I find easy to prepare” basically includes all that stuff. I am lazy; I like leaves, therefore, salad.
I don’t bother my pretty head about the hot micro- or macronutrient of the moment, I don’t place anything off limits (except walnuts and their relatives, because I’m deathly allergic); there are just some things I eat less often and/or in smaller portions. If I want to eat steak, I eat steak; if I want to eat cake, I eat cake (isn’t that a Cat Stevens song?). Consistently excellent basic health indices — blood pressure, pulse, cholesterol, triglycerides, etc — confirm that this strategy works just fine for me.
When I’m struggling with Bipolar crap, though, sometimes that goes out the window. Depressions represent the tanking of, among other things, dopamine levels and the attendant ability to perceive pleasure. Manias represent … jeez, who even knows, let’s call it wild over-activation of so many systems … but they obliterate the small capacity for planning and patience required by my normal diet.
What this boils down to is that, sometimes, I more or less live on bread and butter for days. Denis is my saving grace; usually, I have to feed him at least once a day, so I generally manage to feed myself as well … though sometimes what I feed us is macaroni and cheese from a box, because that only requires one pan and, like, twelve minutes.
Meanwhile, I find baking bread pretty therapeutic. It’s one of the few things I can reliably do during depressions and manic episodes — there’s a lot more stomping and cursing involved during mixed manias, but even then it still gets done almost every day. I’ve baked enough bread now that it’s essentially an automatic process (though when I tried to bake bread while still fighting off the dregs of my most recent illness, I was sufficiently out of it that I forgot to add yeast).
A few minutes ago I was “woefully wonder(ing) why, my dear” (because depression) I have abandoned actually eating real food in favor of sort of grazing on bread… and then I realized, “Oh, right. Depression.”
And then it occurred to me that, while it’s not an ideal solution, it’s one that gets me by, and I guess that’s okay.
Depression can be reductive like that.
Personally, I don’t believe that worrying about what you “should” or “shouldn’t” eat is a very effective strategy in the first place — it’s much better to work your way in, cultivate a taste for a group of more health-sustaining foods, and allow yourself room for foods that other people might call “bad,” but less often and perhaps in smaller portions, if you find they’re affecting your health. Arbitrarily declaring foods to be “bad” and “off-limits” is far too often a recipe for cravings and disaster.
The acute phase of any depression, meanwhile, renders the whole point moot. If you’re someone who just plain can’t eat anything except bread (or chocolate, or boxed mac-and-cheese, or things prepared by other people, or curry takeaways) during the worst parts of your depressions, there’s a good deal of sense in doing so.
Better to eat a ridiculous, unbalanced diet for a few weeks (or even for years) than to starve to death — especially if something within that ridiculous, unbalanced diet grants you even a little pleasure.
Every drop of pleasure counts when you’re fighting a tidal wave of depressive anhedonia (in short, because neuroscience). That argument breaks down a bit when you’re talking about things that can swiftly create much worse problems — acquiring an addiction to a substance that can wreck your health overnight probably isn’t really going to help, for example, so it might not hurt to try to avoid doing that, if possible … though it’s not always possible; it’s not always as simple as “just saying no” when you’re trying to reach the other end of the tunnel alive.
Which, I guess, is kind of what I’m saying. Like physical illness, acute episodes of mental illness take the niceties of life off the table. The idea is to survive; you can sort the collateral damage later on.
So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat some bread and creep one day closer to the light at the end of my tunnel,which I hope won’t turn out to be an oncoming train.
Some Days, Bipolar Wins*
Monday was kind of, in many ways, one of those days for me. Yesterday was also kind of one of those days, though it was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t sleep on Monday night, took a sleeping pill at 3 AM, and woke up … um, kinda late.
Today started out feeling like a Bipolar Wins kind of day: I woke up at 8 AM, said, “F*** a bunch of life right now,” and went back to sleep, which is uncharacteristic.
Later (at 9:30, when it was too late to leave on time), I woke up again and berated myself about how I could have and should have gone to Wednesday class, and how I am never going to accomplish anything I am trying to accomplish because I’m apparently constitutionally incapable of being consistent, &c.
And then I read for a while (because that’s one of the things I can do even when I’m depressed) and then I got out of bed and took a bath and read in the bath for a while (because that’s another thing I can do even when I’m depressed) and then I decided to shove myself out the door and finish up the yard work that we started working on this weekend.
That felt like a small victory. When you’re really, really depressed, you can’t even shove yourself out the door. Sometimes, you can’t even shove yourself out of bed.
Anyway, while I was out there in the yard, chopping and bundling bits of the trees that Denis cut down because they were growing too close to the house and feeling sorry for or maybe about myself, something occurred to me:
Some days, Bipolar Wins, and that just kind of how it is, and that’s okay.
Right now, my goals feel a billion miles away. I’m not making it to ballet class on the schedule I “should” be. I’m only writing intermittently (but, on the other hand, wow, have I made some progress in the past month). I’m only sort of on top of the housework, which I guess is progress, actually?
A lot of the time, I wake up and think, “What’s the point?”
A lot of the time, I don’t want to go out into the world because my social persona is so, so very far from who I am right now.
A lot of the time, I’m frustrated by my own lack of forward momentum — or, well, of continuous forward momentum. Like, when I have moment, OMG, do I have momentum … but then when it goes away, it’s gone. For a while.
And then I have these moments of clarity and insight, these moments in which I understand that this is who I am, when I remember that trying to fight my own nature isn’t going to really solve the problem.
I can beat myself about the head with a stick all I want, but it isn’t really going to accomplish anything.
So often, resources written by people without Bipolar treat these moments of clarity as if they should, like, magically solve the problem — and I think that’s because, for a lot of non-Bipolar folks, they do.
Like, often, if you can identify and begin to understand a problem you’re experiencing, you can begin to solve it — but Bipolar Affective Disorder kind of doesn’t work that way.
This is where all that psychobabble about acceptance comes in handy (if not easily, because our minds like to resist things like that, and I think BPD affects cognition in ways that only increase that resistance).
I think that, in the past, I’ve seen acceptance as a synonym for “giving in” — that I’ve seen it as the equivalent of telling someone who’s just had an amputation at the knee, “You can forget about running marathons.”
Yeah, well — it turns out that amputees can run marathons if they darned well please, thank you very much.
I am trying to learn to accept that BPD makes me inconsistent; makes me constitutionally unable to really be consistent in the way that I might have been if I didn’t have BPD, or maybe if medication was a more workable option for me — while also remembering that the inconsistency inherent in my existence doesn’t mean I’ll never do the things I’ve set out to do.
What it does mean is that I’m good at getting back up when I fall down (you guys, I have had a ton of practice at getting back up when I fall down).
What it does mean is that it takes me longer to reach my goals, maybe, than it would take someone else. My Original Life Plan was School => High School => College/University => Write some books and who knows what else?**
It didn’t actually work out quite that way. It was more like:
School => Mental Breakdown => Psychiatric Hospital => Psychiatric Hospital High School => Non-Residential Psychiatric Hospital High School => Arts Magnet High School => Win A Bunch of Scholarships and Walk Away Anyway Because I Just Couldn’t Even => Wander Around In A Haze For A While => Pick Up A Few Community College Credits => Moar Wandering => Computer Networking Certification => Work At One Job I Loved (Playing With Horses And Getting Paid For It!) => Move Another 79 Times => Work At a Few Jobs I Mostly Either Didn’t Like or Hated => University => Well, Here I am.
I’m actually kind of in a better spot than I’ve ever been, in one regard: I have something more closely resembling a long-term vision of What I Want To Do When (If Ever) I Grow Up. Dance-Movement Therapy! Writing! Baking Bread! Ballet! Choreography! Art! Maybe a PhD in Neuroscience! Definitely Travel!
The thing is, it’s probably going to take me longer to get there (wherever There is) than I want it to … and the road might look a lot different than I think it’s going to look.
The hard thing is knowing that, in the darker places, I won’t remember this.
Maybe I should make it into a poster and stick it on the wall, like one of those affirmation things.
Come to think of it, maybe I should make a bunch of those, because (even though I know they work for a lot of people, and I am total not judging) they make me feel really silly, which makes me laugh, and anything that does that is worth keeping in your anti-depression arsenal.
The long and short of that is that accepting the limitations that come with Bipolar disorder means, for me, being willing to countenance the fact that I’m going to have to take different routes than I thought I would; that I’m probably going to have to arrange my work and creative life differently than I expected to (not, to be fair, like I ever had much of a set of expectations about having a traditional work life; that hasn’t really been one of my major goals, to be honest).
The overall output of my creative spark might be smaller in volume than it otherwise would have been. That doesn’t mean it will be less significant (though it feels weird to think of myself as someone whose creative work will harbor any significance at all in the world — but that’s a topic for another time, as I always seem to be saying).
Meanwhile, I need to stop panicking when I fail to make it to class for a week or two. That is the nature of the beast, and it doesn’t mean I’m not eventually going to absorb all the stuff I need to learn. Over the course of ten years, it doesn’t even mean it’s going to take all that much longer (if anything, sometimes I come back from one of these unexpected Mental Health Breaks and discover that something I was struggling with has magically sorted itself in the gap).
I’m not sure how to wind this all up. To some degree, it’s just a reminder to myself; just me thinking out loud, as it were, in this 21st-century-specific way we have of thinking out loud now.
To some degree, there’s something that feels New and Important about these thoughts — not in the sense that they’re New and Important in a universal way, because, like, All of Buddhism has had this down for centuries. It’s just that I feel like I understand this stuff in a way I haven’t really understood it before, which I guess is what Life and Adulting and stuff are all about.
It’s all leaves of the lotus or layers of the onion, depending on whether you prefer boating or cooking, I guess.
So there you have it. Ten years from now, as long as I keep dancing, I will be ten years better at dancing than I am now; ten years from now, as long as I keep existing, I will have ten years’ more experience and wisdom under my belt — and that will be the case even though I am going to take breaks, and fall on my butt, and generally be a screw-up sometimes because that’s how I am; that’s how my Bipolar is.
So there you go.
Some days, bipolar wins — but usually, in short, it’s not the end of the world.
Pas de Don’t
Please forgive the Giant Stupid Whiny Rant to follow.
Yesterday, I had an absolutely lovely conversation with my therapist about trying to learn to sort of honor what I am, including the delicate-respiratory-system part.
Today, I’m just frustrated.
I feel like I make so much progress, then get sick and lose so much ground, and like this is an ongoing thing for me, and like the smart thing, the good-zen thing, the Good Mental Health thing to do would be to learn to accept and embrace that.
And then another part of me is all, “Ain’t got time for all that, I’m a dancer. Dancers gotta dance.”
(The painful corollary: if I’m not dancing right now, do I cease to exist as a dancer? What a freaking terrifying question.)
I have written, occasionally, about Making Dance Accessible.
I am forced, now, to admit that my own internal prejudices, or whatever, have left a potentially huge group of people out of that thought process — that is, people like me, who are talented and have been given bodies that look and in most ways act like classical dancers’ bodies but who are afflicted with chronic illnesses that make sustained training problematic.
Truth is, I don’t see a workaround for someone like me. Or, well, yes — here’s something. Short-term projects; an approach to training that recognizes that even the longest spell of good health will eventually be interrupted by illness. A willingness to be flexible about classes; to step it down a level when the body demands it.
I admit it: I don’t feel ready for the physical demands of Brienne’s class yet — and a part of me is angry about that; just furious that my body has failed me.
Another part understands that it doesn’t help to think of it that way; that this is just another wave in the ever-changing ocean. After the ecstacy, as it were, the laundry: after a stunningly-long period of quite good health, the pneumonia, the period of recovery.
And still it is painful, yet again, to run up against the limits of my being; to be reminded that I am working with mortal clay and all its host of flaws (though, on the flip-side, I remain grateful for the great gifts I have been given, and I recognize that if this is the price, or only part of the price, I have so been given an amazing bargain, here).
I also recognize that the day I accept these limitations will be the day they stop hurting me so often: I’m like a stubborn horse that doesn’t want to stay in its field, startled every time I run headlong into my fence*. The fence is always there; if I just accept that, I won’t crack my legs against it anymore.
For what it’s worth, I was thinking about backing out of the audition (haven’t felt up to extended rehearsals with Denis), but instead I think I’m just going to change horses midstream, maybe: channel all this into a dance, albeit indirectly.
It may not be a dance about all this; I have something else in mind, though something equally topical in its own way — it relates to my other ongoing struggle: how do I learn to live as the androgynous person that I am when, in a very real sense, I’m afraid to do that for reasons even I don’t understand?
That, or else something about living with bipolar (perhaps unsurprisingly, that was my first idea anyway).
Either way? Cue Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.“
Notes
*This is actually a terrible analogy. With few exceptions, horses don’t do this kind of crap unless there’s a good reason to get out of the field in question. Will they bolt through an open gate just for a lark? Sure. When they bash themselves repeatedly against a fence for absolutely no reason, though? Better check your pasture for locoweed (or scary plastic shopping bags — horses be cray).
A Little Lift
As you may have already determined* based on the sheer number of posts I’ve made in the past few days, my mood appears to be creeping up a bit at last. As usual, I’m trying to approach this uptick with caution, so as not to, like, scare it away (or burn out my synapses, or exhaust myself, or overcook my brain, or whichever analogy you like).
The timing is interesting. The whole intersex thing, in my case, means my hormones do interesting (and sometimes horrible) things on what has evolved into a fairly predictable cycle. I would, in fact, rather expect this to be the part of said cycle that makes me (and everyone in a 20-meter radius) miserable. That said, I am not complaining. Complaining about catching this lift is like complaining about catching a taxi in Times Square at 2 AM (I think? Oddly, though I have spent a fair bit of time in the Big Apple, I have never been to Times Square, let alone at 2 AM).
Of course, it’s possible (to belabor my metaphor) that this lift which appears to be driven by a sedate little old lady driver is in fact under the command of the Little Old Lady From Pasadena (Go, Granny; Go, Granny; Go, Granny; Go!). As those of us whose carpool parents were huge Beach Boys fans may recall, “…she drives real fast and she drives real hard.”
So while I am not complaining right now, I reserve the right to complain at a later date.
Speaking of dates!
I love dates. The fruit, I mean. A while ago I bought a 2-pound tub of deglet noor dates at ValuMarket (which, though it sounds like a Quick-E-Mart kind of operation, is in fact an awesome little local grocery chain; the one in my neighborhood is decidedly international in flavor).
At the time (this was several months ago; the dates in question suggest that I use them by 30 June, 2016, so we’re good), I was in the midst of an upswing and not shopping all that carefully and failed to notice that the dates in question are processed with glucose. So now I have all these sugar-coated dates lying around, waiting for a purpose in life … or, well, un-life, I suppose, since the purpose of the sugar is to preserve the dates, which are not living, and perhaps could be considered undead**?
Since I am not really into consuming oceans of refined sugar (regarding which: dates are pretty sugary to begin with, but you eat them whole, fiber and all; it’s the added sugar that’s kind of not my thing), I have been working my way through the dates a little at a time. Last week, I added some to my batch-o-muffins. This morning, I said “screw it” and ate four of them (a portion is about eight) with breakfast.
So, to make a short story unnecessarily long, I’m thinking that the next time I have people over, I am going to make an enormous, enormous date-oriented cake or something in an effort to reduce my household Zombie Date population. I am also thinking I could probably soften them in water (which might also coax some of the added sugar off the dates), chop them up, and make them into bike/ballet fuel of some kind (and then freeze the extras).
If any of you have any recipe suggestions, let me know.
In the future, of course, I shall purchase my dates more carefully.
I make no promises about the duration of this uptick, but I plan to relax and enjoy it while I can.
In other news, our finances are more or less sorted at this point, and I was able to purchase a RAM upgrade for my laptop. Said RAM arrived last night; I dropped it in (which was an incredibly frustrating process; getting the RAM seated correctly in this machine is a huge PITA) and my lappy, unsurprisingly, is like a whole new machine.
I really should’ve done this ages ago.
Homemaking: Kacy Is Your Friend
…And she’s awesome.
Five years ago, author and blogger Kacy Faulconer wrote a great post called “Obvious Tips For Not-Very-Good Homemakers.”
Tonight, I read it … and then its sequel … and then the sequel to its sequel.
The tips themselves are great (if, yes, sometimes pretty obvious: but, honestly, even if they’re things you already know, it’s pretty validating to know you’re not the only adult who occasionally calls upon the power of Pigs in Blankets) in a way that will make perfect sense to anyone who thinks a cookbook called Cooking with ADHD is a good idea — but it’s Kacy’s tone of acceptance and cameraderie that really makes it work.
It’s like a friend or a sister or a cousin saying, “Okay, guys and gals, we’re in this together. We kind of suck at this, but we’re doing it anyway, and it’s okay.”
…And also:
He didn’t become Gandalf the Citrus Moderne Dot, did he?
— Kacy Faulconer
Because, seriously, he didn’t. Because he knew he was going to have to get orc blood off dat shizzle, and you can, as Faulconer points out, bleach white.
My own education as a half-baked homemaker has been very much about giving up on visions of making my own laundry detergent and growing my own vegetables, then embracing my limitations (and strengths) and learning to work with them.
I may not grow my own vegetables, but I turn vegetables that we buy into a mean set of no-sugar-added breakfast muffins every single week, because I not only know how to do that, but like doing it (because I do it well, so it makes me feel good, so I do it more, which makes me even better at it, etc.).
I may not make complex gourmet meals every single day, but just about every evening I do cook a meal that my husband enjoys (fortunately, he is a man of simple tastes, and doesn’t object to a regular rotation of variations on Freezer-Marinated Chicken with occasional forays into Things Made From Ground Beef).
I may use a lot of workarounds, but little by little I’m learning to get stuff done.
That’s the spirit that Faulconer’s blog embraces, and I feel like it’s a spirit whose time has come. So go read her!
Oh, yeah — in other news: did Essentials yesterday morning; was able to crack out the flying chassees and a couple of sautes without my toe falling off or swelling up like a ball of bagel dough. This definitely feels like progress. It also didn’t give me any real trouble today, just the generic “Hey, I’m still healing a little” soreness that has become its temporary new normal (for a while, it was fiercely sore the day after class even if I didn’t do releve work or jumps).
We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
My mood is hanging in there, somewhere in the neighborhood of the Upper Doldrums. It’s not approaching “good” yet, but it’s at least more tolerable. I am more able to ignore Bad Thoughts (admittedly, by playing Bubble Wars or baking, but still…) when they arrive (but they’re still arriving).
The upside of my current mood? Holy cow, I have never been this productive in the kitchen. I mean, I have reached a point in life at which my kitchen is basically under control (I’ve even started weeding out unnecessary kitchen things and relocating or offloading them). I like being there, I like working there, and our dishwasher died, so now I just wash the dishes by hand and everything stays sorted.
The downside?
I don’t know. Is it bad to have 24 carrot-pineapple-coconut-raisin muffins hanging around?
Quickie: Plans
On Wednesday, B. and I were chatting during the quick break between barre about how we’d both lost so much ground to injury this year (she with a stress-fractured foot; I with my calf and then my toe). I was like, “Can you believe we were doing brisees last year?”
Anyway, that’s kind of a theme for me, right now. In some ways — mood-wise, ballet-wise — I’m sitting at the bottom of a long climb back to where I want to be.
Fortunately, as a cyclist, the ability and willingness to climb ridiculous hills was and remains one of my strengths, and I feel like maybe I can translate that over to the rest of my life.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to climb this particular set of hills quickly. Just that I know myself well enough to recognize that I’m probably going to make it (even though I’m in that weird place, right now, where you’re rational enough to know that the voice in your head that constantly yammers on like, “You’ve squandered your potential and will never amount to anything now!” is a crazy voice, but not yet in a place where you can make it STFU).
Anyway. So I’m gaining ground more slowly than I would like, but I’m gaining ground.
I guess I can pop in another bike-racing analogy, here: one time, Timothy and I raced Death March while both of us were recovering from various winter illnesses, including some kind of gut thing that was going around. In short, neither of us had been able to eat like a normal person for several days, and we were what a long-ago Arnold Schwartzenegger might have termed “weak little girly-men,” and we did nothing fast, least of all climbing … but climb we did, and (as evidenced by the fact that I am sitting here in my living room, writing this post), we lived to ride another day (in fact, the next year we came back and roundly spanked half the field, although we were in turn roundly spanked by the other half).
Sometimes it sucked, and sometimes we walked our bikes, but at the end of the day, we kept going and eventually made it back to the ranch without having to ride in the Broom Wagon.
So, anyway. I’m not all there yet, but I’m not ready to wait for the broom wagon, either.
As such, here are some plans for upcoming posts, with no particular timeline in mind (though next week would be nice):
- Two Cooking With ADHD posts:
- What To Do With 10 Pounds of Chicken Leg Quarters (Because They’re On Sale)
- How To Make Bread And
InfluenceImpress People
- One hopes, a string of Ballet Class Notes, as my foot can definitely handle at least 3 classes per week at this point if I don’t jump too much.
- Maybe a post about writing? I am doing that still.
In other news, I am rocking along in Homemaker Mode and actually rather better at it than I used to be.
This is comforting.
Some of it, of course, is the Miracle of Modern Medicine (go, Adderall!), but some of it is simply a function of the fact that, amazingly, I do appear to be able to learn.
I’m hoping my friend Robert (Hi, Robert!) will be able to come visit before we head out to the desert; maybe when he does I’ll ask him to collaborate on a Cooking With ADHD Video Post, since we have two different flavors of ADHD and we might find different things helpful.
Oh, and I just read Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, and I highly recommend it (if Regency-era romping bisexual sword-wieldy people sound like your cup of tea).
That’s it for now.
Maybe if I ever manage to get Cooking with ADHD rolling, I’ll expand it into a guide for the ADDle-pated Homemaker. Goodness knows I could use one!
Onward and Upward, By Fits, Starts, and Degrees
Sometimes, recovering from a bad episode of this depressive bipolar crap seems a bit like doing the hokey-pokey.
You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in, and then you go back to bed because frankly you’ve had enough for today and you’d really rather try again tomorrow, thank you very much.
I tend to make optimistic prognostications about my ability in moments that I’m feeling a bit more “up” than I have been (read: moments when I’ve taken my meds and downed something with a bit of caffeine in it, of late).
Later, when things shift back towards really deep end of the spectrum, I tend to sit there kicking myself about making said optimistic prognostications (which I tend to do publicly, because, in short, I never freaking learn, I guess?).
Right now, I’m somewhere between those two states: not at that point where I’m like, “I am going to do All This Stuff soon,” but not at that point where I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a waste of oxygen and I should really stop thinking I’m ever going to do anything.”
Instead, I’m in this spot where I’m able to see that the optimistic part of me that makes bold plans is okay, and the horribly depressed part of me that gets really angry when I fail to complete those plans is also okay, and that can be what they are, and it is, in its own way, okay.
Not always happy, not always fun, not always even remotely anything like pleasant: but valid, allowed. The human experience is rich with contradictions; with complications.
Today I did not even remotely attempt to get out of bed early enough to get to morning class. A part of me is really pissed about that — the same part that’s forever saying things like This is why you never amount to anything; you’re better than that; this is what makes the difference between people who succeed in ballet and people like you.
Another part of me recognizes that you have to work with what you’ve got. What I’ve got right now is hard to work with (though, on the other hand, I’m writing a fair bit, so there’s that).
I did begin my Great Office Rehab Project — or at least some of it (some of it will have to wait ’til I can buy some paint and some fabric). Denis brought in the replacement desk, so I set it up, installed the office air conditioner, and then became insanely, furiously frustrated because there are still Too Many Things In This Room.
The difficulty is that some of the things need to stay, but they need to live in or on other things that aren’t in here yet, and I don’t want to bring those other things in until the things on or in which the first set of things resides are out of the way, but I can’t get them out of the way without bringing in the things to put the things in…
Yeah.
My brain makes everything a thousand times harder than it has to be when I’m depressed (not like ADHD helps any of this, but depression makes it worse; when I’m manic, OTOH, I can organize anything to within an inch of its life, as long as something else doesn’t distr— SQUIRREL!).
So today I went to see my therapist (and rode my bike a lot, because I figured actually getting some exercise would solve one of the problems contributing to the severity of this depression — lack of exercise).
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll bring in the things into which I need to transfer the other things, so the things in which the things now reside can go wherever it is they’re going.
Maybe I won’t.
I’m not making any bold statements right now. We’ll see.
Perhaps that should be my motto for the time being: “We’ll see.”
Ultimately, it’s not like we can ever say for certainty what we’ll be doing at any given moment, anyway. Control is an illusion, and it seems especially illusory when you live with a mental illness that really rather prevents you being able to make long-term forecasts about your emotional weather.
If I have my head together well enough, my foot should hold up to at very least Essentials on Friday. I might give Intermediate class a try.
I do feel like I need to get back on top of ballet. I have missed so much. I don’t suppose I can do anything about that (water under the bridge, etc.), but I can work on putting the pieces in place to prevent it from becoming an established pattern.
Just going to class is one of those pieces — ballet is such an effective preventative and remedy; it seems to take the teeth out of my depressions when I can keep dancing.
This particular depression, though, has been a perfect storm of ballet-interrupting foot injury, stress, hormonal disruptions (blargh), lack of externally-imposed structure in my life, general lack of exercise, and the destabilizing effect of summer itself.
Anyway, that’s it for now.
More soon, maybe?
We’ll see.
danseur ignoble 