anger – Life and Lims

Partnering with and struggling against at the same time

The Gilbert Arizona Temple, photo courtesy of lds.org

I just came across this brief article about a Jewish rabbi visiting a newly built temple of my faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “What I learned from visiting the new Mormon temple.” I am always interested to hear what others think about visiting our sacred sites, and I enjoy discussion and interaction with other people of faith, regardless of their doctrines or denominations. I heartily agree that we can all learn from each other, which is hardly a revelation, but a simple but important reminder. What struck me tonight was this sentence from his article: “My Jewish beliefs are strongly built on the Jewish idea of covenant (humans as partners with God) and Israel (humans wrestling with God).”

This really encapsulates what I’ve been experiencing myself, today alone, and the past weeks. I’ve been going back and forth, sometimes within minutes or hours, between the partnering with God and the wrestling with God. I have moments of clarity, of Spirit, of confidence that I can keep moving forward, of just-enough-hope, and then moments of frustration, anger, sadness, fear, and not-enough-hope. I’m seesawing.

I am all too aware of my firm belief that we lived as spirit beings with God before coming to this life. We knew we were coming here, and it was part of a plan for us to grow from spiritual toddlers to at least spiritual adolescents (that last bit is my little twist). I believe that I accepted and understood, at least in some measure, that life would be challenging, most of the time. But for some reason, right now, with whatever mixture of things that are working on me (a series of particularly challenging events, my particular chemical balances or imbalances, my background, my expectations, my hopes for my own future and those of my children …), I’m finding it difficult to feel consistently optimistic about my ability to just keep up, to keep pushing forward, “enduring to the end,” as scripture puts it. I’m wondering just how much faith I had in myself back in that time I can’t remember right now, when I was eager to come to this life, even knowing some degree of how difficult it would be. The question always is: how much did I really know then? How could I really know without having experienced it yet?

I’m really digging down deep to try to change some ingrained mental habits, and they’re fighting back hard. I know that my faith is both getting me through/should be getting me through. I’m trying to figure out how to truly rely on God at a level I most surely have not yet attained. I am all too aware that I’m trying to do too much on my own without being yoked with the Savior. But getting from point A, where I am, to point B, where I know I could/should be, is a bit of a mystery to me at this very moment.

My spirit soars when I experience those moments of covenant, of successfully partnering with God to do something good, to serve and uplift someone else, to create, to make something or someone better. But I’m still struggling mightily. I’m coming to appreciate more fully the concept of wrestling.

So this evening, I thank this good rabbi for his simple words. He probably had no idea what sharing a brief blurb about his beliefs would do for my thinking. I’m still going to be wrestling for a while, but it’s a mitzvah to have new insights.

The light feeling of forgiving

Several experiences and conversations lately have reminded me of just how much good forgiving others can do for our own hearts, and, conversely, how much holding on to anger, hurt, and blame can just drag us down, mire us in bad feelings, and darken our hearts and minds. It harms relationships and our own worldviews.

I won’t elaborate on the situations, but there have been a few instances in my life that have led to some serious anger and heartache on my part. The ways I was treated certainly “justified” my feelings, and they were natural reactions to the things that were said and done to me. And honestly, I didn’t want to forgive and let those hurt feelings go. It’s just so much easier (and oh-so-satisfying) to point a finger at someone else and say (either to someone else or just internally), “Look what that horrid person did!”

But there did come a point I realized I didn’t want to carry around that baggage anymore. It just wasn’t doing me any good, and I didn’t like the visceral reaction I had inside every time I just heard the perpetrator’s name or some other reminder brought them to mind. Not only that, I consider myself a follower of Christ, and holding on to truly ugly feelings against someone else (no matter their crimes against me) certainly didn’t make me Christ-like.

I did find, though, that the lightening of that burden of hurt and anger didn’t just happen overnight. In one case, it’s taken me several years to find that I must have, somehow, really forgiven someone. But that realization did strike me fairly recently, and I was amazed to have confirmed to me that it really had happened. I remember reading this beautiful description of that dissipation in Khaled Hosseini’s fine book The Kite Runner, and I was so happy to find that it had come to my life:

Because I never noticed the night it slipped away, I didn’t realize it had happened. But it had. And that right there is a miracle, no question.

Don’t use my mental illness as an excuse to write off everything I say or do

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long, long, LONG while, and I’ve put it in words now after reading some others’ blogs. Here it is: My mental illness is NOT an excuse for people with whom I interact to just write off anything I say or do that they disagree with. And yes, this extends to opinions that I have that are carefully considered, based on life experiences and, yes, even my interactions with YOU, who are so eager to chalk up my opinions to craziness.

I’m not going to say that in my darkest moments (and the times I feel most ashamed of myself and my behavior) I never say something I regret or that I don’t even completely, 100%, mean. I do. But, honestly, DON’T WE ALL? We all get tired, angry, frustrated, annoyed, irritated, strung out and worn out, and say and do things we don’t mean or that we just regret. So in this way, I’m really no different than any “normal” person, if you’d like to use that easy but non-precise terminology.

Here’s what really, really, REALLY bugs me: when I choose to discuss an issue with someone who is treating me poorly, in an effort to improve the relationship or our necessary interactions, and then that person essentially throws up a wall and refuses to talk because they don’t like what I have to say. People do that a lot anyway, sure. But I am convinced that some people through the course of my life have been all too quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to anything I say. If it’s something they don’t want to hear, they say, “You’re overwrought. You don’t know what you’re saying.” and then either studiously ignore me or what I tried to discuss, or they react with righteous indignation, even putting a burden of guilt and shame on me for daring to be open. They might even point the finger at me outright and denounce me to others. Not cool, people, not cool.

Because I’m that type of person. I don’t like having any kind of relationship with someone, whether it’s family, friends or acquaintances, or even work associates, that essentially forces me to bury any hurts or problems. I like to TRY, at least, to resolve the issue, to bring it to light and talk about it and free all from the burden of darkness. I think it’s much kinder to everyone. It does generally involve the peeling back of a scab, but then that sore is much more likely to heal over and not scar or get infected. It’s worth the initial discomfort.

But it angers me when my efforts are met with derision, nastiness, and blame. I have also tried to be somewhat open about the mental illness with which I struggle on occasion. And that, unfortunately, is seen by some people as a free pass, as a way to characterize my opinions as simply the effects of a frenzied mind. And they’re not. I might end up being not as soft and kind as I generally am (I think I’m pretty good at phrasing things well most of the time), and I do regret that. But that doesn’t mean that what I have to say is wholly without merit. If there’s a problem festering in our relationship, it’s NOT ALL ON ME. Face it: it might be you. Or at least partly you.

Let’s not be too quick to peel blame off ourselves and throw it back on another person, especially someone who is an easy target like one afflicted with mental illness. Let’s stand courageous and brave and compassionate and stop deflecting. Please just don’t write me off. My thoughts, opinions, and concerns have value. Please treat them accordingly.

When I’m boiling over, just grab some oven mitts

I’ve just had another week (couple of weeks? month?) that ended horribly for me mentally. I ended up nearly incapacitated with hurt, anger, and hopelessness, curled up on my bed in a puddle of tears and surrounded by tissues that I’d flung wherever. And something that has struck me (yet again) is how difficult it is to explain this outcome and all the little triggers, inner and outer, that lead to it. I still am convinced that most people do not have the least idea how to deal with someone in this situation, or clearly on their way to it. This even (maybe especially?) includes family members, who have known me for years and have varying levels of knowledge about the struggles I face periodically, but who still just don’t KNOW what it’s like to be me at those moments or how to be WITH me.

I can’t blame them, most of the time, honestly. In their place, I might be unsure what to do or say (and how to handle any lightning bolts that come zinging my way out of the storm) and possibly just find it easier (safer?) to wait until that storm was over, the clouds all blown away, until I came near again. But when it comes down to it, in my own place, I can’t help at those times but feel angry and resentful that few people do know how to approach, how to offer support. And if family members, who are supposed to love me and be there for me, just as I’ve always tried to do the same for them, cannot be there for me, what does that say about them, or even about me? Those moments leave me mostly alone, feeling abandoned. I mentioned on Facebook, to friends, that that medium is a dicey place for trying to reach out for true support. How in the world do we use the one medium that keeps us in touch most readily to really connect, to really help each other, when it generally is limited to use as a place for sharing mundane details of day-to-day life, news of our kids’ accomplishments, and photos that show us in vacation spots or in our best moments? I do appreciate that when I put out that little message, some friends offered their support and care, just saying they were thinking about me. That did mean something. A lot, really.

But in real life, how in the world do I get support from those whom I need when I’m giving off a really bad, hopeless, negative, angry, and, yeah, even “crazy,” vibe? Most normal people would run away, far and fast. This is been one of my biggest concerns over the years as I’ve struggled with this beast of mental illness. I’m a pretty “normal” person most of the time, and people say they find me to be upbeat, happy, blessed with a great smile. I care and really put myself out there to help others. I do spend a lot of my time and energies trying to help those around me. But sometimes life just gets to me or I end up spending too much of my energies on others and then run dry in my own well.

It’s kind of like I’m boiling water on the stove, and as long as there’s still water in the pot, even if it’s only a half-inch of water, everything’s fine. But the second that water boils off, the pan is in big trouble. And despite my best efforts to balance my life (ha!) over the years, it’s still a really tricky act to pull off successfully, and I burn out sometimes. The pan bursts into flames as soon as it gets dry, and I need to be removed from the burner, cooled down, and filled back up again with water. Those are the times I need loving friends and family who, armed with oven mitts, are willing to help me cool off and refill my reserves. I sit on the stove sometimes and whistle like crazy, wondering where my mitted friends are, because it’ll take a lot longer to get myself filled up on my own merits. If left for too long, I stay hot and just get angry.

I know it’s hard to come near me at those times. I realize that. But I know I’m worth the effort. I know that I am a good, genuinely caring person who uses my talents and resources to be helpful to others. I’m fun, I’m generally kind, I’m pretty handy to have around in a lot of ways. So I give. Even just in a balance-sheet kind of way, I’m worth the investment. But during all those good moments, I still fear that those I care about aren’t taking the time to find out more about the few really bad, challenging moments that are my reality just as much as they are the good ones. I want my friends and family to want to really get to know me, to understand me a little better, so when the storms come, they’re ready for a little lightning. Because when the sun comes back out again, it will warm them even more radiantly.

All in all, this is probably true for every single one of us, whether we have mental illness or not. We need people in our lives who really get to know the whole us so they’re ready for the times we’re not our best selves. But it’s just magnified a lot more with mental illness, and society still places a stigma on it, where many people misunderstand and avoid in their ignorance. I wish we could all do better to stop this from happening. I would be happy to keep all this to myself. I’m not proud of who I am in my dark times. But that’s my reality, one I’m trying to mitigate and improve, bit by bit. So in the interest of increasing awareness and helping others, just by being open and sharing information, here I am, baring my soul. And thanks, from the bottom of my hot saucepan, to those dear friends who have braved the storms and held me until they’ve cleared. The world is brighter in so many ways because of you. Thank you, my dear ones.

Too depressed to think of a name for this post

Sometimes the depression end of the mental illness that I get to enjoy hits me like a nice thick fog with claws. I can hear it coming but still can’t quite escape its nasty grip. It grabs on and envelops me, surrounding me in a dark cloud no matter which way I try to turn. But pretty soon I don’t try to turn any way anymore.

Cathy alone — This ugly depression erases companionship out of my life and surrounds me with a dark cloud, and, to add insult to injury, it zaps me of the motivation to make a nicer-looking illustration with Photoshop.

It’s sadness and frustration and hopelessness all rolled into one entity. It’s wishing all that feels wrong could just wink out of existence, that somehow I could wave a magic wand and have everything better. On extreme times, it’s wishing I could wink out of existence. The cloud allows me to see out, and I know others can see in just fine, but they can’t tell that anything’s happening. It somehow eerily makes others blind to my inward suffering. I end up feeling alone, isolated, and misunderstood.

I want to scream and cry sometimes. I want to talk it out. But talking doesn’t help because there are no solutions, and the people around me have nothing to say that can change the stark reality of the dreary fog. I want someone to have answers. I so desperately want that. I want someone to fix it. When I’m pushed into the depression it’s usually because circumstances in my life have become a bit too much for me to be able to handle anymore. This time around, it’s all the things I wrote about earlier in the week. It’s not having any time to myself to think or write or just care for my inner self for the whole summer. It’s having huge expenses and a bunch of seemingly nonstop little ones drain my bank account this year and make me nervous about spending any little sum, so I don’t even want to take all of my kids to see a full-price movie for a nice change of pace (even at matinee prices, it would cost almost 40 bucks for the five of us to see “Brave.” I mean, come ON!). It’s this darn broken foot. It’s the frustration of having no control over almost anything in my life lately. So many things have conspired to drain me of my resolve and my strength, and now I am down to the level of near-hopelessness.

Oh, I wish a miracle would happen. I wish my blog and website could be wildly successful. I wish I could get some time and inspiration to write the book I’ve been planning and researching for months now: and to feel that it’s even possible to get it published if I do manage to get that mythical time and inspiration together. I wish that I could find the motivation in myself to lose some weight. But with a broken foot, the exercise part of the equation is more than challenging: the recumbent bike sessions I’ve been doing this week aren’t going to cut it.

I wish that I could feel comfortable enough with more people to really say how I feel, but I don’t trust many people to do so. I’m pretty much afraid of how people will respond. My husband at least has learned over the years to stop saying anything that I could remotely construe as platitudes (because those make me go from 0 to 60 in angry miles almost instantaneously), but now he just says nothing. That’s only a slight improvement on the cliches and pep talks; I just wish he could say something that would really comfort me or encourage me. I wish I could find it in me not to feel at all resentful that he can’t do this for me, because it’s really not his fault. Very few people are very good at dealing with someone who’s laboring under the fog of depression and that utter hopelessness. That’s what’s so frustrating: it isolates so quickly and easily. No one knows how to respond. I know. I get that. But it still makes me feel alone, and angry, and doubly sad. I am deathly afraid of people’s judgment, of their fear, of the possibility that they’ll think I’m weak or that I am just a complainer. (I usually feel fairly strong. That’s the problem: I’m too strong. So even when I feel weak and hopeless, everyone else still thinks I’m fine and just leaves me alone.)

I’m afraid. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I’m actually just overflowing with “sick-and-tired”-ness. I’m at wit’s end. I’m utterly sick, sick, sick of feeling like this on a somewhat regular basis, of feeling that life has me cornered, that I have no control over my own destiny, that I’m Sisyphus pushing, pushing, pushing on that rock. I’m SICK of looking at that rock.

That’s the thing: I’m not the type of person who expects to have anything handed to me on a silver platter. I don’t think the world owes me a living. It’s the opposite, really. I work hard all the time to take care of myself and my kids and my husband. I work hard in volunteer roles to help other people. My heart goes out to everyone else I hear about who’s in need in any way and I wish I could help. I am always doing something that’s practical in some way. But when I get into this down mode, I wish that all of my efforts would finally bear fruit, that the rock on the hill I constantly am climbing would just sprout some legs already and MOVE, dammit. My arms are tired.

Again, I guess that’s why I’m writing this blog. I want to put into words what I experience, in the small hope that what I say can be of help to someone else out there climbing their own hill, pushing on their own insurmountable, immovable rock. Man, I wish I could just pick up your rock for you and toss it away, let it crumble into a million pieces as it rolls down and hits the valley floor. I wish you could do the same for my rock. And I wish that I could help everyone out there feel more comfortable talking to someone in my position right now, make you feel able to say something encouraging, able to sit it out and not run away cringing. I want to feel less alone. I want others like me to feel less alone.

It might be another thing that’s impossible, but like all the other goals in my life that seem impossible right now, I just have the tiniest hope that they might, might, MIGHT be possible, in some other universe in which I am happy and capable again.

Medications and me

Having a mental-health concern (that seems most likely now to be a bipolar disorder) for the past 25 years or so has naturally led to my being on various medications to try to improve my quality of life. I’ve already discussed a bit how it’s been a challenge to figure out exactly what I’ve been up against over the years (just some depression? anxiety? postpartum depression or PMS? bipolar disorder? nothing at all?), so I’ll try to go back and address what kinds of medications my doctors and I have tried to use to help me feel a bit more “normal,” or, more accurately, just better able to cope with the usual stresses and strains of life.

The first I ever took some kind of an antidepressant was toward the end of my LDS mission when I was feeling serious stress. The resident older missionary/retired doctor prescribed me a medication that would supposedly help with that. At this point, I honestly don’t remember what it was he gave me. What I do remember is that I was in pretty bad emotional shape and just going about my regular busy schedule just with a new medication didn’t help me feel any better. Besides, it usually takes a few weeks for those kinds of medications to even start making a difference, and in the meantime, I just kept feeling stressed — and guilty or bad about being stressed while I was supposed to be happy and spiritual and serving God and my fellow beings. It just wasn’t a good recipe for success as a missionary or a happy human being. So I ended up having to leave the mission behind and go home to seek help in a different environment (already talked about how that went).

I was next put on lithium when hospital doctors decided I was bipolar. I took that for a bit less than a year, I think. I felt better as time went on, mostly, but I also went back to college, where I felt more at ease and myself and had my friends around me. I am sure that the medicine must have helped though, looking back, because otherwise I probably still would have been seriously depressed/angry/stressed. But the change of environment did contribute, and after a time, I just felt that 1) the diagnosis of bipolar disorder couldn’t really fit me because I didn’t fit the “classic” signs of the “full-fledged” disorder and 2) lithium is a serious drug to be on: it can potentially damage the liver. I was having my blood tested every few months to make sure my liver was fine, but it was still a real concern. So I went off the lithium. During all this I was seeing a counselor at school, so I didn’t do all this just on my own without any professional support, but I don’t know if I had a psychiatrist on my “team” at that time.

After I married and moved to California with my husband, I know I ended up seeing a psychiatrist regularly, but I cannot remember if she had me on any medication. I know I didn’t go back on lithium. She might have put me on some kind of antidepressant, if anything, but I don’t remember for sure, and I have no idea what it was if I did take something. I do know that the first year of my marriage was very rough for me emotionally, and I prefer not to think about the way I acted. It’s too embarrassing. Luckily, my husband stuck it out with me. I also know that I was on hormonal birth control pills for the first two years of our marriage, and I am convinced that fiddling with the sensitive balance of my hormones was not a good thing for me emotionally.

I know that there were months and years I didn’t take any kind of psychiatric medicine, and there were other months and years that I did. It was always some kind of antidepressant. I took Zoloft and Wellbutrin at a few different times off and on after and between pregnancies. I took them together for a year or so, mainly because Zoloft did take away my sexual response. That’s something that’s a warning when you take that and various other medications, such as Prozac, and it’s definitely true for me. It can seem like a small price to pay, but it’s actually a pretty big sacrifice when it comes to a full intimate life with your spouse, so it bothered me greatly. Taking the Wellbutrin with the Zoloft took that side effect away.

After probably my third pregnancy, my gynecologist prescribed me a new medication, Lexapro. He said it worked well and had no significant (definitely not sexual) known side effects. I was eager to sign up. The morning after I first started taking it, I got out of bed in the morning to use the bathroom and then ended up passing out on my way back to bed. I was so scared about the weird feeling I had during that few moments that I told my husband to call 911. The paramedics came out and pronounced me fine. They said I’d most likely rubbed the back of my neck or something and had some kind of vagal episode. OK. Fine. Unfortunately, over the next 5 or 6 days that I took the Lexapro, I still felt weirdly faint and out-of-body-ish, and I figured the only thing that had changed in my life was that new medication. I visited with my general doctor, who told me that was ridiculous. But I decided it was the cause, and I stopped that Lexapro. I instantly felt better, well, fainting-wise. (The lesson here: even if your doctor says you’re being ridiculous, you still should trust your instincts.) So I went back to Zoloft or something similar, I think.

I started going to a psychiatrist again, which I hadn’t done for quite some time, just getting antidepressants from my gynecologists or general physicians, although I had still gone to see counselors for talk therapy more regularly. The psychiatrist I saw at that point, probably in 2007 or so, put me on Effexor eventually, which worked well for me for a while. He did suggest I might be experiencing bipolar disorder and might benefit not from lithium, but Lamictal (lamotrigine). He even gave me a sample pack. Even though I did consider that option, I told him that since I was feeling pretty good taking the Effexor, it seemed silly to stop taking something that was working just to try something else. He thought that was reasonable and kept me on the Effexor.

Then in 2008, my family and I moved to California from a long stint in Alabama, and life became unbelievably stressful. I’d also been taking the Effexor for probably a year or maybe a little less. At any rate, I’d probably only done well on an antidepressant for a year or so at any time I’d taken one, either because after a while, my life had settled down and I’d gone off a medication and been fine, or the medication had seemed to stop working. In this case, I just kept taking the Effexor, but my new general physician upped my dose. Shortly before another momentous, life-changing event for me, the death of my beloved dad, I started trolling the Internet and found the site I’ve mentioned already by Dr. Jim Phelps, which made me start to seriously consider the possibility that I really did have a bipolar disorder. But this psychiatrist was making the point that there was a wide spectrum of bipolar disorders, not just the “biggie” in which people stay up without sleep for a few days at a time, go on wild shopping sprees and spend tons of money, and do otherwise really foolish things they wouldn’t otherwise do. So I found a psychiatrist in my new town who was on my insurance list and made an appointment. He put me on Lamictal, which my previous physician had suggested a couple of years before. It did seem to slowly make a difference, and I was happy to be off the Effexor, although it did take a solid two or more months to very slowly wean off of that very addictive medication. (If I didn’t get a dose, I’d start feeling kind of headachy and light-headed, in a distinctively Effexor-less way.)

So I think the Lamictal gave me some relief and some hope that I was on the right track, but a couple of months into that, my dad died and sent me spinning. My psychiatrist asked me at the first appointment after Dad’s death (merely two or three weeks afterward, mind you), “So, how are you feeling?” Uh. BAD. My dad died. I’m miserable. Hard to say how the medication is working. I’d feel rotten no matter what. And that’s how it went.

A few months after that, I mentioned to some people in my church congregation that I was struggling with mental illness, and a few recommended I try a different option, a natural formulation called EMPower that was sold by a company called Truehope. The company says that the formulation contains micronutrients that are found to correct the imbalances found in those with bipolar disorder and other mental issues. I have always felt that ideally, it would be nicest to treat the actual cause of a problem rather than just the symptoms, if at all possible. This sounded like a very reasonable option, and Truehope has actually been doing scientific studies showing the benefits of EMPower.

I felt that I needed to at least give this option a shot. If I didn’t, I would never know if it could have helped me or not. So I went in to my psychiatrist, who naturally told me he didn’t agree with my decision and that he couldn’t continue to see me if I went off my prescription and took EMPower instead. I knew he’d say that, and I was ready to say, “OK. I won’t be back.” He said he knew I’d be back in a few months in even worse condition.

I tried the supplement, which is actually pretty expensive (probably about $100 a month, and not covered by insurance, of course), for about six months. I felt at first it really did help, but after a few months, I was just not feeling good enough. I tried a few adjustments and options after some phone calls with the company’s support techs, but I finally had to make the decision to end my own personal “drug trial.” I am sure that the supplement truly does help lots of people, but as with anything, nothing helps everyone. I did struggle, however, with what to do next. I firmly did not want to go back to my previous psychiatrist. He was too abrasive, and I felt I couldn’t work comfortably with him to find the best options to treat me. I finally decided to go see a nurse practitioner working in psychiatry 45 minutes away from my town because my therapist had heard good things about her from several other clients. I felt that it was going to be best for my mental health process to work with a psychiatrist who I felt comfortable with, that we were really a team, that she would be supportive. So I made the appointment. This new person, who I still see almost 2 years later, turned out to be a really good fit personality-wise, which I think makes a big difference in getting the best care possible. The only drawback is that my insurance doesn’t cover her, so I have had to pay entirely out of pocket. Luckily, I have had the spare funds to be able to pay for the visits, and it has been a good choice for me.

I’ll just call my nurse practitioner by her first name for ease of writing. Susan really went into a lot of detail with me, talking to me about the options and what she thought might work to help me, even explaining why she felt that way. I personally have really liked her approach. I like to feel that we’re on the same page, and knowing her reasoning helps me to feel more confident that is happening. We tried probably four or five different medications over the course of probably four to six months, during which time I’d go back every month to see her and check in. We tried Abilify, Prozac, and maybe Celexa. I can’t remember exactly. I did notice Prozac didn’t make me feel any better, and it just made me feel completely dead sexually, which was super-frustrating for me. So that was a no-go. I also know the Abilify didn’t do it on its own, and it actually made me feel, rather than “more normal” or “more like myself,” just kind of numb emotionally. I wasn’t stressed, kind of, but I was just dead. I didn’t feel anything. I felt like a zombie. I absolutely did not like that. She ended up adding in Cymbalta, which felt pretty helpful. Eventually, we took out the Abilify to see if that would help me feel less numb. And it did work. The Cymbalta, at the time, on its own, was a good fit for me. I’ve now been on that for perhaps 18 months.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that now we’re getting to a point we need to tweak again. I’ve been on just antidepressants before, and I’ve either just gone off them or they’ve stopped working, and I fear this is happening now. I’m just feeling unhinged. The stresses and huge demands on my time are taking a huge toll on me, and I’m not proving up to the challenge of dealing with them in an appropriate manner. I’m coming up in a few weeks on another check-in with Susan, and I think this time we’ll have to address now how to change my dose or try something else. It’s been nice, though, for the past year, feeling pretty good and “myself.” Descending back into my “crash” mode is a scary and upsetting thing, for me and my family, and it’s nerve-wracking for me to ponder how much trial-and-error it’s going to take to get me back to happy. Will it take a couple different medications again and weird feelings of numbness or just not-effectiveness (so I’ll just feel unable to cope for a few more months? Yikes!)? My main fear is looking ahead at a few months of not being myself, far from it, especially with summer months coming on and my kids being out of school and all the stresses that places on me every summer. It scares me.

So that’s where I am, medication-wise. I’ve been a bit of a guinea pig for the past 20 years. It’s difficult because treating any kind of illness can be tricky and require some finesse. The basic stuff is kind of straightforward (infection? take an antibiotic; cold? take some antihistamines and Sudafed and wait it out), but other health issues take some trial and error. Then when it’s mental health, which is still a kind of slippery creature in the early 21st century, and every person’s needs and body chemistry is unique, it’s a science that’s more art than anything else. Being the doctor is probably a challenge, but being the patient is truly difficult. Being that guinea pig, the one on different kinds of medicines, is tricky and frustrating as all get-out. I’ve said for ages I wish there were a control group for me. But there isn’t. Good science requires a control group and an experimental group, and in this case, giving just me a medication and seeing what happens isn’t truly good science. And the onus is still on me as the patient to make the judgment calls, to figure out what’s changed, what to tell my health-care provider, about what might be significant. Do I feel better taking Lamictal even though my dad just died? Can I possibly separate out the effects of that from my normal stress reactions? Can I say I feel better on something even though a bunch of stuff has been happening in my life? If I could put myself in a quiet room without any interference from outside sources, I could judge better. But that’s never possible. (And if I could be by myself in a quiet place — resort, maybe? that would be amazing — I may very well be able to get to feeling better without the medication. Maybe. At least I wouldn’t be bothering anyone else.)

This post is incredibly long; perhaps I should have separated it into a few parts. But it’s the best answer to those who would like to know what my experience is with medications. I hope it might be of some use to those of you who struggle with similar problems and need to figure out how to look at your own situations with more clarity. Perhaps it will just make some of you more sympathetic with those in your lives who have challenges similar to mine. Or maybe those who know me but don’t know all these details about me will feel more empathetic with me. Either way, I hope this is of use to someone out there. This is an ongoing story, so I will need to update as the next few months come along and I visit my nurse again.

Let’s start at the very beginning

I’m going to crack open my heart, peel back the layers surrounding me, and essentially strip down to my bare inner self here. It’s a little unnerving, but I am telling myself this is for the greater good: I hope that things I write will be of benefit to you who are reading this. So here goes.

I have always been a perfectionist. I have also always been a pretty optimistic, cheery, energetic person. I was brought up in a religious home and have always been faithful inside and out, if that makes sense. I have never had alcohol or cigarettes; I even avoid caffeine. I was taught to not take the Lord’s name in vain, and it still bothers me to hear people use God’s name as an expletive. I didn’t use bad language. I earned top grades since my early days and graduated as valedictorian of my high school. Generally, I was considered a “goody-goody.” No problem. I didn’t mind at all.

The summer I was 17 I had the amazing opportunity of spending five weeks at a state program for gifted students. The program itself was great and offered all kinds of interesting activities, but even better was spending that kind of time with students like myself. I felt like I belonged. I also fell in love. Ah, First Love. I had a whirlwind two-week romance with a boy who was smart and cute and who liked me, nerd that I was. I began to see myself as pretty and attractive to guys, an utterly new idea. It changed me.

It also devastated me to have to go home. The Boy lived a five-hour drive away. The romance was over. I saw him one more time, briefly, and we agonized over the distance between us. But that was it. He didn’t even try to keep up a long-distance relationship of any kind. I pined for him and went on with life, starting my senior year.

Several months later, I traveled to a state academic function, and it happened: I was in a crowded room, and all of a sudden space just opened up, and the Boy was standing a few feet away. A choir might as well have been singing and a heavenly light spotlighted down on him. I went to him, trembling. He responded distantly, and that was pretty much it. No happy reunion, no resuming of our summer romance. I was absolutely crushed.

Where is all this going? To what I now realize was my first “breakdown.” I crashed. I cried and cried and acted completely not myself. I don’t remember the details, since it happened 25 years ago and it’s too embarrassing for my mind to keep in my memory bank. I do remember, however, a teacher being called in and me acting out somehow that night in our hotel room, and then yelling and using my first bad language the next day when it came time to board the buses to go back home. Even thinking about the brief flashes of memory that are still there makes me cringe with embarrassment and shame. But in putting together pieces that resemble this outburst, I now know that this was the beginning of moments of not-normal behavior. I felt out of control and completely not myself, as if I’d been taken over by an alien being.

Even so, it was years until I even thought of this event as anything relevant to later incidents. I went off to college and went to see a counselor there, not because I felt compelled to do so by personal demons, but because my younger sister was facing her own demons at a drug rehab facility, and my mother told me that it would be good for the whole family to be involved somehow. I was 2500 miles away, so going to a therapist at college was the best I could do to be involved, I guess. I still felt a bit detached from the counseling, as if it wasn’t for ME, but for a family thing. I didn’t personally need the counseling, but I was contributing to the good of the family in a way. I did recognize that my family was dysfunctional (my parents had had issues over the years and divorced right at that time as well), and it was nice to have someone to talk to about those things. But otherwise, I was going about my own business, living the life I had been so eager to get to for years: being on my own at my dream school.

Oddly enough, I had another incident during that first year of school and I don’t think it still really struck me that anything was seriously wrong. I had boy issues throughout the year, but none really sent me into a tailspin. One evening, however, I was waiting for a date to take me to a very nice event at a theater on-campus. He was perpetually late and I’d warned him to be on time. Even so, he was hideously late and I “lost it” again. I yelled at him and generally overreacted. Again, my mind doesn’t care to let me remember details, but I remember the feeling of the out-of-control anger (rage? fury?) that was disproportionate to the offense, and the shame I felt at how I behaved. The guy was pretty easygoing, so, oddly, it didn’t seem to really damage the relationship. We broke up later, but it was just because it was time for it to be over, and I had realized I was crazy about a guy I was best friends with (who figured in to some later outbursts, a number of them).

I think I really just tried to ignore these events, or I considered them to be weird blips in an otherwise happy life in which I was still the happy, optimistic achiever who admittedly was a perfectionist and consequently a bit anxious, but everyone still saw me as a happy, energetic, bubbly person, so I could kind of skim over these incidents. In hindsight, they’re just signposts that I didn’t recognize for years for what they were.

Three years later, I was in a distance relationship of sorts with the aforementioned best friend. We supported each other through some challenging times in our respective church missionary assignments and felt we would be together at the end of them.

I will probably have to write later about more specifics of what I experienced during my mission time, but I can say briefly right now that it was generally great except for some big but brief blips at the very beginning and the very end. I came home feeling in need of support and shoring up, and I knew it was time to figure out what was wrong. At age 22, I finally realized I was depressed or … something. I came home from my mission to focus on getting myself well. Unfortunately, I expected love and support from the Male Best Friend, who had by that time been a part of my life for about 3 1/2 to 4 years. But I went to visit him, vulnerable and looking for support, and he decided practically within hours of my arrival that our relationship was not going to work out. It doubly devastated me, and when I went home two weeks later, I was in even worse condition than I had been when I’d come home from the mission service and, rather than feeling I had support to help me as I figured out what was wrong with me emotionally, I was even more crippled.

My father had had some of his own breakdowns and had once or twice decided to put himself in a hospital to get care. So I decided that was probably the best course for me. Again, I don’t care to remember the harrowing details, but I’m pretty sure from the snippets I’ll let myself remember I was at that point suicidal. So hospital it was. I went into our small-town hospital’s psychiatric unit voluntarily for what was almost a week, I think. It was odd and a little embarrassing to be inside a locked unit, and I had some fellow patients there who had some real issues that made mine seem small. But over the course of that week, the doctor there decided I was bipolar and began treating me with lithium.

I resumed my life, feeling better able to cope and probably doing better after being on the lithium, so I was able to go about life. I stayed in my small hometown for a month or two but then decided to go back to college early, a couple of months before the new semester would start and I would be enrolled. I just needed to get back with friends and in a place I enjoyed and felt comfortable. I still was absolutely heartbroken over my failed relationship, and that pained me for a long, long time, but I managed.

I checked in with counselors at college again, and I had regular blood tests to make sure the lithium wasn’t damaging my liver. But over time, I came to believe that wasn’t the best treatment, or rather, that it was unnecessary. I knew what the “typical” textbook symptoms were of bipolar disorder, and I just felt that I didn’t fit the profile (I didn’t stay up for days on end or get “manic” in the way that seems to be the “typical” way we hear about with certain cases). Lithium was a serious drug to be on, and I didn’t want to be taking it if it wasn’t completely necessary. So I went off it and seemed to do fine.

In more posts, I’ll share more about what I’ve experienced over the years. For now, this does cover the beginning. Now, I reflect on all that and wonder if I should have stayed on the lithium, and made things a lot simpler for myself, but who knows? Perhaps it was for the best I struggled and learned. I was able to have three pregnancies and give birth to three daughters, which I couldn’t have done if I’d been on lithium. In a way, hindsight doesn’t much matter now. I can’t say I have “clear”, for-sure answers now, but I do have years of experience and I know for certain that my brain chemistry does require me to be on medication of some kind. Again, I’ll share all those things in further posts. But it’s been a long haul these past 25 years, and I hope that in sharing these details of my life, I can help enlighten someone else and make things clearer in this world of mental health that can be oh-so-NOT clear.