Bucket List

The writing group I belong to was given a free-write prompt to write our own bucket list. I've never been one for those.  Seems to me your dreams and wants should just spill out and around as time goes by, but this was my attempt at one. 

I've never been good at following directions:

"I want to see a sunrise in each and every country, against every backdrop. I want to hear the sound of all the oceans, one by one. The Aegean will be peaceful, the Mediterranean will have a lilt to it. The Pacific will sound like an opera, the Atlantic like a rock concert. Each new body of water will sing to me. I want to see my husband's face light up at my arrival to a room. I want to be a writer, and a teacher, and a singer, and a reiki master, and a sketch artist, and an actor, and an absolute failure at something so that I can say 'But look at all the other things I do.'

And what of the bucket itself? What will I carry all these shiny list-items in? C'mon Laura, everyone knows that the bucket list is a list of all the things you want to do before you kick the bucket. Well I'm taking it a step further. I'm carrying around all the items IN a bucket. My bucket list will be carried, goddammit! It will be purple glass, the shade of purple that makes you smile startledly when the light hits it. And it's glass. Oh yes, it is glass; fragile and precious and to be handled delicately. Even though the shade of purple is practically brute in force, it is still a piece of glass. It is still so easily breakable that a gentle breeze could knock it to one side and destroy it. 

Please be careful with my bucket and its list. For it resides inside me, just under my left rib."

What's Next?

Anyone who watches "West Wing" knows that one.... what's the next thing to be tackled?  Who needs to be taken on?  How do we claim triumph over the next set of obstacles?

These are the questions I ask myself in a hospital room in Concord, MA.  By now, I figure I've lost at least half my reading audience.  I figure this mostly because I write about THE SAME SHIT OVER AND OVER AGAIN.  But I can't help it.  This is the stuff of life that eludes me, and I will continue to write about it until it makes sense. I swear, I'm not trying to bore anyone.  But this is the course of my life.  If you're bored with the monotony of hospitalization after hospitalization, can you imagine how I feel?????

I ask "What's next?" because I (and a team of highly-trained specialists) have come to a conclusion: Laura is very good at being bipolar.  Laura is also very good at singing & acting in high-pressure, high-level musical productions.  What Laura is NOT very good at is doing both at the same time.  Since kicking bipolar disorder to the curb doesn't seem to be in the cards right now, I am taking a hiatus from performance.

The thought of this makes me nauseous. This is not "ok, go do this difficult thing without a net".  This is "you've been doing this difficult thing without a net since you were three years old, now just fucking stop". The idea of it brings on waves of depression, devastation, confusion.  I feel like someone just pulled a rug out from under me and told me there was a floor to walk on, so just go do it.  But the floor is covered in tacks & nails.  How the FUCK am I supposed to walk across this new floor?  I don't need a net, I don't need a map; I need feet of steel.

I know that there's nothing telling me not to sing EVER.  I'm allowed.  My throat works.  I remember the notes and words and rhythms.  I just can't do it in front of anybody for the foreseeable future.

AND I AM PISSED.

I have some thoughts.  I won't stay away from music.  I'll continue to take voice lessons.  I'll continue to work on my piano playing (when the titanium screws in my right hand don't give me too much trouble), and I am hell-bent on learning to play the guitar.

But this feeling of not singing feels like someone is trying to pull my heart out of my chest... through my right eye socket.  It's a ripping and tearing that I can't even get my brain to comprehend.  I need some steel plates in my head and heart to go with those feet.  I need to walk across that floor.  How the hell am I going to get across that floor?

What's next?

A Reflection

But that's what these all are, aren't they? Reflections of a mind that is usually aware of itself, and sometimes on another planet.  Today, I'm somewhere between the two... and here's why....

Today is my 35th birthday. A birthday is always a time of reflection.  What has happened in the last year?  What has happened since I got to this planet?  Am I leaving it in a better place than when I showed up?

I'm not sure.

Everyone who reads this knows the struggles and battles I fight.  I am a woman with Bipolar Disorder.  I am a talented singer, writer, and hopefully a loving person of my friends, family, and fellow man.  But I am also a person who sometimes finds it easier to cut her own flesh than make it through the next five minutes.  

It's been 10 days since that happened. 

I'm proud of myself for that. I also dread the next time. Because I'm not foolish enough to think that it'll never happen again. I can only pray that I'll stave off the feelings for a long while. That I'll keep doing my nails and wearing bracelets and dreaming of the "scar tattoos" that I will never get. 

I am starting another round of partial hospitalization. I am hopeful, as always, that I'll fill my arsenal with more tools and weapons against the worst parts of the disease. 

I am starting to lose hope that the naturopathic care I'm receiving will do anything good for me. I ended up in the ER last week with a whopping part of gastritis. After they gave me morphine and at least 4 different stomach medications, they told me I might have the beginnings of an ulcer. I was instructed to discontinue my supplements by my naturopath. Now I feel better. Many thousands of dollars and supplements and ten months later, I find it hard not to throw inanimate objects randomly. I'm so angry. I feel a fool once again. Just like after the failed TMS and the failed ECT and the myriad of failed medications. 

I saw a new medication doctor last week. He was brutally honest, and I could have kissed him for it. He said "Laura, after reading your chart, I thought a mess would walk into my office. You're not a mess. You're a high-functioning person with a chronic illness, doing the best she can. I don't have a magic pill, or even a lot of ideas for you yet, but if you continue to be open-minded and use your tools, including the hospital, you will live well with this disease." 

It's all I can ask for. It's all any of us can ask for. To go forward and live to the best of our ability, whatever that is. 

So am I leaving this world better off than when I was brought into it? Am I doing my best? I hope so. I hope for better futures. I hope for things like peace and harmony in the world. I hope that the Red Sox will stop sucking. I hope that we will find a way to stop hurting each other and ourselves. 

I hope. 

Vignettes Part II

Another excerpt from from hospital travels. Names and such have been changed. 

Gerald

Gerald laughed again, his perfect brown skin sliding easily over chiseled cheekbones. His laugh and winning Hollywood smile were infectious, and all packaged in a dapper frame. His entire demeanor spoke of a cool fall day in 1952, a radio softly playing jazz with a fedora lying on a nearby chair. 

Gerald's personality literally filled a room. The room just happened to be in my mind. 

I found myself seeking Gerald out. Maybe his mania was exciting, a perfect dance partner to my sluggish depression. The fluidity of speech that only made sense to him was like a Miles Davis riff. I wanted to lean back against my chair and let it wash back and forth, a breeze blowing through the window on that afternoon in '52.

I think Gerald is good for me. I think Gerald is my escape. 

The Snake

When I was 4 years old, I went to pre-school at the YMCA in town. I wore paisley dresses and cried when Momma and Dad came to take me home. I wanted to stay there with the books and toys and children all day. 

I don't remember a whole lot about pre-school. I remember that we went for walks sometimes. We'd get in a big line and a jump rope would be strung among us with rings attached. Each one of us would grab a ring and hold on. Off we'd go, parading down the street attached to a plastic ring that was attached to a jump rope, connecting the lot of us like a short, stout, brightly-colored snake. 

We were a snake of criers and complainers and stumblers and runners and a few laughing teachers. We were a snake of lives just beginning. We were a snake who will forever shed its skin, with new teachers laughing, and new children holding on. 

I eventually let go, and some new pre-schooler took my place, and on, and on...

I am attached to a new jump rope now. The plastic ring I hold onto is the promise of help from a hospital. My fellow walkers stumble and cry and laugh and complain. We pray that the walk ends successfully, and that we can pass the rings of a jump rope onto a new class of those who seek help. 

We are a snake that is just as stout and short and brightly-colored. We have the potential of a group of pre-schoolers, off to make our lives anew. 

Silent Screams

I've been thinking a lot about the recent shootings in our country. When things like this happen, the conversation almost always stumbles right into the gun control issue. Who should have them? Who shouldn't? Should we ban them? Should there be stricter laws? Should the second amendment be obliterated?

I find myself shaking my head and pointing, usually while silently screaming,  to the mental health issue in our country. People with mental illness are all silently, or not-so-silently, screaming for help. For understanding. For acknowledgement and treatment. 

If you walk into an ER with your leg hanging off, they put it back on. If you are diagnosed with a horrific growth somewhere in your body, you get chemo and radiation and other treatments to try and shrink or eliminate it. If you walk into an ER saying you are depressed, anxious, or suicidal, you wait. 

You wait hours to see a nurse. You wait a few more to see a medical doctor who listens to your heart and lungs, then walks away without a word. Then you wait a few more hours for a social worker to give you the third degree about "just how bad things are". You wait another few hours for them to call around and find a mental hospital that has space for you. Oh, and if you're not "bad enough", they send you home again. 

Now if you don't think you need hospital care, there are outpatient options. You can go to a day program where 3 social workers are trying to teach workshops and care for 30 patients, all while fighting with insurance companies for more time, fielding med questions they can't answer because the one prescriber that treats the entire program's worth of patients is at another facility 2 days a week; that facility doesn't have anyone, and it's the best we can do. 

You can go to a therapist, and you can go to a prescriber. Just remember that if a crisis arises or another clinician is sick, you'll get cancelled on or ignored if "you're not feeling too horrible" that day. 

I decided to really take the bull by the horns. My body doesn't respond at all to medication; they call it "paradoxical" or "treatment-resistant" mental illness. So off I trotted to a naturopathic nurse practioner. Don't worry, she's just as confounded as everyone else. This is my supplement regiment from 2 months ago:

This is last month's:

This is what I need to try this month:

And I'm lucky. I have Medicare because I'm on Disability, and they don't cover naturopathic care. So I have to self-pay. I'm lucky because I have a husband who says "Damn the cost; we have to get you better." I stopped counting the expense at $5000 out of pocket in the last 6 months. 

This is what my arm looks like today: 

I am one of "the lucky ones". I have people to help me, people who love me, and I have never been homicidal. 

If I am one of the lucky ones in the psych system, how dare we be surprised at what happens when people aren't getting   treatment?

Best Days

On my best days, I walk to work.  

My walking commute to the Parker Memorial Library is ridiculously short; driving, it's obscenely brief. I usually drive because I go to Dunkin Donuts first.  Anything worth doing well is worth doing with an iced coffee in one hand.  I take the mile and a half ride down to my favorite drive-thru, order a large iced black with extra sugar, and easily fly back down the street to the library. As I drive back, I feel a momentary sense of pride in ordering a coffee with no dairy, and then an equally-timed sense of guilt for ordering it with extra sugar.  I always forget my Stevia at home. 

Anyway, there are days when I walk to work.  In those brief minutes, I breathe in the air as deeply as I can.  I notice things like the brands of cigarette butts I pass in my travels, or the way a soda can has been maimed and tossed to the side of the road. I hear the cars passing by on Route 38; motorcycles make the most interesting and annoying sounds.  Sometimes I imagine a helmeted head turns and watches me ambling past the hair salon and dance studio with a TARDIS messenger bag slung over my shoulder and a travel mug of iced coffee in each hand. (The days when I walk are the days when I made my caffeine fix at the house...and those mugs are small, so stop judging the number!)

The other day I was walking to work, making my usual observations. I suddenly realized that I was ignoring the bigger problem.  It's a problem that follows me around, just like my friend Bipolar.  It's like Bipolar has this annoying kid brother who always tags along, and his name is Self-Harm.

Self-harm is exactly what it says on the tin: hurting oneself.  It comes in forms as diverse as the people who engage in it.  Some people burn themselves, some people cut themselves, some people hit themselves with objects, some people scratch themselves to the point where the skin begins to redden and even open. Some people pull out their hair, some people bite or pick at their finger and toenails until there's nothing left but the bleeding.  People generally engage in this behavior because they are so upset, frustrated, depressed, or anxious, they cannot think of another way to fight the growing explosion inside.  There are all kinds of different names for people's various preferences.  I'm a cutter.  Cutting my skin (usually on my arms) is horrible and wonderful.  I do not know how to describe the feelings that come before, during, and after this action is taken. 

Walking to work the other day is what made me realize that I can't describe the feelings, and that I'm focusing on anything BUT those feelings because they scare me.  

That's it.

That's the punchline.

My own feelings around self-harm are so conflicting and confusing that I don't know what to do about them.  I just keep going to my therapist and talking about it.  That's all I can do.  That's all ANYONE can do.

On my best days, I walk to work. Perhaps enough trips past the hair salon and dance studio with a TARDIS messenger bag slung over my shoulder will begin to provide answers.  Maybe I'll stop ignoring the feelings and explore them instead.  

Perhaps all of my days ahead are my best days.

On my best days, I walk to work.