If you haven’t seen this article, I recommend you do so.
What Do We Actually Know About the Relationship Between Mental Illness and Mass Shootings?
There’s a lot more to be said on the subject, but this is a good jumping-off point.
This week has been pretty bad. I tried to poke my nose out from under the rock where I’ve been hiding from the world.
Bad idea. I was instantly overwhelmed by the crazy-stupid-crazy of various sorts that has been sucking up all the oxygen lately. Read James Thurber’s story “The Box.” I was safe in the box and then I tried to come out.
Mistake. The sheer volume of malignant idiocy in the world seemed to have increased exponentially in the intervening week. I tried to stay away from it, refused to dip my smallest nerveless toe into Facebook threads on topics I have strong opinions about. A friend called to see whether I was okay, and I had a mini-meltdown.
I really thought my brain was going to break again.
It wasn’t just the relentless assault from the outside, though that was more than plenty.
I also had internal stress. My work. My difficulty forcing myself to do it. My exhaustion once I had done it. My total lack of spoons, even plastic ones.
The friend who called suggested a day off, comfort food, a book, cats. All good suggestions, and I tried them all.
The problem was, when I shut off all that other noise, memories began haunting me. Ones from years ago that I’ve never been able to suppress completely. From a time in my life when my psychiatric problems were undiagnosed and untreated, my body began to be plagued with conditions I still live with, my self-esteem was nonexistent, and my soul was being sucked dry by a person who might have helped, but made all of those things worse.
Today is still rough, but I had one good memory return. My husband bought a watermelon and I sprinkled a piece with salt.
This was a thing that my family used to do in the summertime – sit at the backyard picnic table and eat watermelon lightly sprinkled with salt. (And of course compete to spit seeds the farthest.)
The combination of salt and sweet is a trend among foodies these days, with the new sensation, salted caramel. Believe me, we were not foodies. Served with the watermelon were home-made popsicles made from Kool-Aid in Tupperware molds.
But for me, watermelon with just a touch of salt was one of the hallmarks of summer that I have not experienced in years. It was right up there with going barefoot and climbing trees.
My husband tried the melon with salt, but it didn’t do the same for him. It’s not one of his childhood pleasures, and he hates to add salt to anything, even popcorn. But at least he tried it, and listened to my story.
Mostly when a memory leaps suddenly into my mind, it’s the haunting kind. But every once in a while, I get salted watermelon. And I am grateful.
I recently was involved in an online discussion. I probably should have been doing something else at the time, but it caught my interest and I jumped in.
It was (or at least became, in part) about getting up, getting dressed, and doing the work (or art or whatever). One person stated that she worked at home, but she needed to get out of her pajamas and get into regular clothes as a signal and reminder to herself that it was time to work.
I work at home too, and when I can make myself do the work, I do it in my pajamas. I reserve getting dressed for when I have to go outside the house – maybe three or four times a month. Pulling myself together that way takes much effort, many spoons, that I need to invest in doing the work.
So am I high-functioning or low-functioning? Yes.
We also discussed Dale Carnegie’s admonition, “ACT enthusiastic and you’ll BE enthusiastic.” This advice comes in various forms: Fake it till you make it. You get good at what you practice.
It doesn’t work that way for me. I can pull myself together for a limited time and on the phone, talking to a client, for example. I can fake it for that long. In my pajamas. A few months ago I had to drive to a face-to-face, multi-person business meeting – all together, about a half a day. By the time I got home, I was not just fried, but extra-crispy. Even the next day, I was too exhausted to do much more than get out of bed. It did not result in my being any more pulled-together thereafter.
So I was high-functioning for half a day and low- to non-functioning for a day and a half.
I suspect that most of us go bouncing back and forth between high- and low-functioning, with an occasional pause in the middle. It probably goes with the mood swings.
There are high-functioning activities I can (sometimes) do: earn money and blog, for example. There are also ones that I used to be able to do, but now can’t: cope with taxes, travel abroad or on business, tolerate crowds. And there are things I can do for a limited time or with help: grocery shop, cook a little. Also things I can do, but not as well as I did before my brain broke: solve puzzles, analyze, concentrate.
I suppose you could count napping as something I can do better now. I am a truly high-functioning napper. Not much of an accomplishment, maybe, but it beats the hell out of insomnia!
I have been avoiding the Internet for days (and TV news and commentary as well) because I just can’t handle it right now. Actions, reactions, reactions to the reactions, et endless cetera. I’m depressed enough without all that.
There are plenty of thoughts I have on the Isla Vista shootings, and the media coverage of it, and mental health, and gun regulations. I’m sure most of them have already been said, and probably better than I could, and everything about the subject makes me angry, confused, outraged, despairing, hopeless, helpless, and majorly depressed.
Then there’s everything I’ve read lately about bodily autonomy and male privilege and the “war on women” (why does everything have to be a war?) and politics and climate change and all of those make me angry, confused, outraged, despairing, hopeless, helpless, and majorly depressed too.
But it is TBT, so here is a picture of Maggie, a cat who saw the glowing design on Dan’s forehead that reads “Sucker.” He instantly scooped her up and brought her home. She was thereafter totally devoted to him. He could arouse her to a fever pitch of writhing and seduction with only the use of his voice. I mean, if they had been the same species, I wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Maybe next week I’ll have pulled myself together a bit and can write about something. For now, I’ll just say the best things that have happened to me today are a head-bonk, a nose-touch, and two nose-licks from Dushenka (Little Soul) with the Crazy Eyes.
Yours truly,
A Truly Crazy Crazy Cat Lady
It used to be that I could never be found without a book within arm’s reach. I had a purse book, a nightstand book, a bathroom book, and a car book at the very least. (I kept them straight by having a different genre in each location.)
Now that I have a Nook e-reader, I have hundreds of books with me everywhere I go. But I’m doing a lot less reading.
I think it’s a function of my lack of concentration, but whether that’s the disorder or the meds, I couldn’t say.
I do know that when I was in the depths of my most recent breakdown, I barely read at all. I watched moronic reality shows like Trading Spouses, on the theory that these people’s lives were bigger train-wrecks than mine. And I watched cooking shows, because they were calming. (This was before cooking game shows really got going.)
During an earlier meltdown, I tried to watch sitcoms, but the relentlessly upbeat theme songs made me weep.
Now I have to hoard my concentration like I hoard my spoons. I am fortunate enough to be able to work freelance from home. But it’s the kind of work that sometimes has deadlines. On days when I can force myself to work, I can concentrate for about 2-1/2 to three hours at a spell. Some days I have to do two sessions like that with a nap in between, if a deadline is approaching too rapidly.
But when it comes to non-work activities, I can usually only concentrate for an hour at the most. Sometimes I try really hard so that I can watch a movie, but mostly I stick to half-hour or hour-long shows.
But reading takes concentration too, especially if the book has a plot (which I recommend) or is information-rich nonfiction. I do a lot of my reading in bed at night. (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that because it keeps you from falling asleep. But it’s a life-long habit.)
My mind flitters, the hamsters and sometimes the badgers stir, and I find myself several pages along with no idea what happened. At that point my need for distraction and my attention span collide and I have to find something moderately absorbing but short-term to do. It’s a good thing I have some games on my reader so I can play a hand of rummy or work a sudoku puzzle.
Reading has been one of the great joys of my life, since I was four, and it bothers me that I no longer have the ability to immerse myself in it the way I used to.
But, like so many other things, it’s something I’m having to learn to live with.
Ah, the shrieks of laughter and squeals of delight from playful children! They cut through me like a light saber through Jell-O. I’m hyper-sensitive to loud or high-pitched noises.
A while back, one of my blogging buddies was speculating on whether she wanted to or ought to have a child, despite her disorder. I have no answer or even advice for her, but but here is what I think about motherhood and Bipolar Me.
When we got married, my husband really wanted to be a father some day. To tell the truth, I never gave it much thought really, since I had never expected to be married.
At that time in my life I was barely medicated and had a lot of meltdowns and breakdowns and up-and-down cycles (mostly down) ahead of me.
Looking back, I am glad that I never became a mother. The thought alone overwhelms me.
First of all, I would have been a really bad mother. It would have been unfair to a child to have a mother who would disappear into her room for days at a time, not communicate for weeks at a time, be depressed for months – or years – at a time. Not to mention not being able to enjoy anything. Put that person in charge of a live human child for 18+ years?
I know there must be people who do it, but I don’t even really understand how non-biploar people manage it.
Second – and this is the part that is going to sound selfish to those people she feel that childless-by-choice women are all selfish – but I needed all the resources I had to construct and reconstruct myself. As Gloria Steinem reportedly said, I didn’t give birth to a child because I was giving birth to myself. I still am, after my most recent and most monumental breakdown, still trying to salvage what I can of my psyche, seeing what pieces still fit, and learning to live with the things that are no longer present – or maybe never were.
And I had all kinds of irrational thoughts on the subject of motherhood. The one time I thought about motherhood, it was because my father was dying, and I wanted him to see his grandchild if there was going to be one.
Also, I was terrified of losing myself. My husband had some issues of his own and was, let’s say, way too close to his inner child. I thought he and a child would outnumber me and I would be the mean one, the killjoy, the Other.
As time went on, I grew less and less inclined to even be around babies or small children. And my husband would go into a funk if one of our friends had a baby. Eventually, he decided that if he wasn’t going to be a father, he could be a mentor, a helper, a healer, to other children and former children. Maybe even his inner child.
Now having a child is no longer even a possibility. And I’m good with that.
Many of you are probably already familiar with Spoon Theory (and if you’re not, go here and read it: http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/wpress/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/).
In my previous post, I explained my Theory of Misery and Math. This week, inspired by something a friend posted, I will expound on Cookie Theory. Here’s the post:
As I commented then, even an RSVP is optional. This is especially good advice if your FB friends post on controversial topics, as a number of mine do.
On to Cookie Theory. Just as I didn’t invent Spoon Theory, I can’t claim Cookie Theory as my own. My husband shared it with me, on the weekend over 30 years ago when we met.
I was having a difficult time (to say the least) with my boyfriend at the time, whom we’ll call Rex. Among the difficulties was that I was stranded, several hundred miles from home, with no money. I had to borrow money from every single person I knew there, including some, like my future husband, that I had just met, in order to get bus fare. And find someone who would take me to the bus station.
Dan, the aforementioned future husband, was the one who gave me a ride, and as I was waiting for the bus, he shared with me these words of wisdom:
Just because someone hands you shit cookies doesn’t mean you have to eat them.
The more I pondered this metaphor, the more I realized how insightful it was. Rex had generously supplied me with shit cookies over the year and a half I knew him. And I ate them. I was also supposed to pretend they were chocolate chip. And say yum, yum.
And I did.
The bus wasn’t the only thing that stopped for me that day. So did my willingness to eat the cookies.
The first step is training yourself to recognize the difference between shit cookies and chocolate chip. The second is saying no. (Like refusing an invitation to an argument. Just say no and walk away. Or catch a bus.)
I’m not claiming it’s easy. But when someone hands you a put-down, a micro-aggression, a lie, ask yourself, “Is this a chocolate chip cookie?” If not, don’t take it. Don’t eat it.
Then stay on that diet. It’s amazing how much weight it will take off you.
Janet Coburn
Bipolar Me 
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