This Noise Inside My Head

With the end to the hectic rush of the holidays, it’s on to the final leg of a year that was astounding in all of the changes that occurred. I’ve reflected on this a number of times and I don’t feel that I necessarily have to do another one this time around but when I look forward, I do feel cautiously optimistic about the future that I’m looking at going forward. The job is in place now. I’ve carefully and with the greatest indelicacy pruned my friendships to reflect the person I am now. I am doing my best to care for myself by making better choices. As I jokingly note in some of my comm logs, “good life choices for the win!”

I still find myself grappling with one final adversary that I don’t think will ever leave and that is my mental…whatever-it-is. I don’t deign to call this an illness because I don’t believe myself to be “ill” in the conventional sense of the word. I am, however, different. I endure the mercurial moods of the bipolar with my downs that will turn into the rages that people see on Facebook when I become offended by the wrong color background on a feminist meme when the Sun in trine with Jupiter and Neptune when I couldn’t find my Sephora eyeliner pencil and had to settle for the Kat Von D pencil that day. Thirty minutes later I’m laughing at videos of cats talking to their owners and reposting songs by Julien K and sharing passive aggressive notes and then manically showing everyone around me videos of screaming goats and getting lost in the YouTube worm hole of Jenna Marbles videos. All that is perfectly fine… Really. I’ve lived with this for years. It’s mostly bothersome to people who don’t understand me, those that do just live with it and chalk it up to being part of knowing Dae. It’s a bipolar thing, you wouldn’t understand… The meds don’t help. Don’t even think about telling me to up the dose.

What I’ve never really been able to work around is the paranoia and the fear which are two different things when looked at individually. Paranoia is being afraid that something is going to happen when there’s no logical basis for that belief. It’s probably not going to happen. Fear is being afraid of something that will happen because there is a logical basis for that belief. It really could happen or it IS happening. Paranoia: I’m going to be abducted by aliens. Paranoia: She’s not talking to me so she must hate me. Fear: I’ve have a past history of multiple neck tumors and now I’ve felt another lump. Fear: I’m hearing voices and there’s no one in the room. One just yelled at me.

I’ve been able to put on a brave face with much of the paranoia. Some of it I’ve been able to conquer for the most part. Are aliens really, I mean REALLY, coming to get me? Not likely but if they did. Not much I could do about it. If some girl doesn’t want to talk to me anymore for some half-assed reason then that’s not my problem, that’s hers. I think I’m alright… a little weird… but not bad. The fear is another thing entirely. Having faced a lot of health shit… it sucks. When my head feels like it’s about to cave in it’s really difficult to talk myself out of the, “I’m dying, I’m having a stroke” panic that occurs but I find ways. Usually it’s reminding myself that there’s time and if it really were a hemorrhagic stroke I’d be dead too quickly to know what hit me. If it’s a stroke caused by a clot, I’ve seen enough of those to know that I could survive it. I’m clear for brain tumors according to the CT scan I had a few months ago. So… yeah. That’s how that goes. The voices though… this has been a tough one and working where I do… it makes things very interesting. I feel like a bit of a fraud a lot of the time being this person playing the role of the girl who has it all together when there are some days when I’m possibly in the same boat as some of them. Is writing this probably a bad idea? Maybe but it’s important to me to finally be honest with myself as well as those closest to me. The truth is that it’s hard sometimes to sit there with someone who thinks I’m totally “normal” and have them talk at me, expecting me to pay complete attention when I’m really trying to focus on getting music that playing in my head to be quiet.  Sometimes there will be a crowd talking all at once and the real person cuts through and I shift my focus to listen to them and it’s like changing channels. Crowd, person, person, crowd. Sometimes it’s just the one or two. The child or the man. Does this freak you out? Do you wonder what they say? They say… things. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s… not. Sometimes it just makes me sad. They remind me that I’m not like others.

This is why when I see memes that share stupid things like, “I’m not alone, the voices in my head keep my company” I become offended. Or when I see people make flippant comments about meds and crazy pills and things like that. If anyone really understood what it was really like to live in that world, would it really be something to joke about? I’ve tried to convey that at length but it’s hard for people to understand without being explicit. I suppose a similar thing would be if one were to make fun of trans or gay people. Or to make flippant remarks about race. It’s never okay to do that so why is it okay to make remarks about individuals that have to live with a thought disorder? It doesn’t ever get easier, one just adapts and learns how to hide so that the rest of the world doesn’t keep pointing us out.

One day a client said to me, “You couldn’t handle it if you were like me.” They have absolutely no idea what I live with day to day because I would never self-disclose the way I just have. It’s absolutely unethical in my opinion and serves no purpose to try and one-up the individuals I try to help. Just knowing that I can empathize in my own way is enough for me. But when they said that to me, my first thought was, “I am like you and for a long time I couldn’t. But it’s made me stronger than most people I know.” I used to just tell myself that to get through the day but now I really believe it. Yes, it’s difficult and, yes, if I could make a lot of it stop I would. Who wouldn’t? But if I could reply to that individual honestly… I would tell them that I can handle it, I do handle it, and because of that I’m here to help… and because of what I’ve learned from you… you’ve helped me too.

This little light of mine…

These are strange days inside my head. Strange days indeed. A year ago I was another person entirely. Injured. Scared. Unsure of where my place was in the world. Very alone even thought I married my best friend only a few months prior.

Now I find that my mind has been replaced with someone else’s. She’s nothing like the girl that lived inside my head before. This new girl is caring, sensitive, emotional, goal oriented, and she is genuinely happy. I love this girl. I love me. I did a lot of soul searching, trying to understand how this came to be and I think it’s ultimately the result of working for what I wanted and not accepting anything less. I wanted to be respected by those in my life whether it be my co-workers, my family, or my friends. Anything less than that resulted in me discarding, walking away, or outright demanding that I have what I wanted. At times I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have been overbearing to the point of being a bully but, for me, I feel that the ends justified the means. In order to have peace sometimes there has to be a war… sometimes that war is violent. Sometimes it’s devastating beyond any realm of comprehension. Sometimes there’s nothing left and all that can be done is to rebuild on the ashes and the wasteland that is left over. I think, for me, that’s what happened.

I literally carpet bombed my life into a decimation that was beyond all hope but then I began to build. I had done this before but I put it together with chewing gum, popsicle sticks, and hay and it all came apart again. This time I used the strongest materials I could get and I made sure it would stick. My supports, friends, were only the best that I could find and if they weren’t positive or good people that would be there when I needed them and would allow me to do the same in return… they were placed outside the wall. My job, career, took time to locate but when I found it, I made sure it was the right place for me and now I have gone from a temp staff member to a full time member of the team in as little as a few months. I wake up each work day excited for any challenge and opportunity that I’ll experience. My family has been repaired once my expectations were set that I would not be treated poorly any longer and those wishes were respected. 

The results of all of this are nothing short of remarkable from the perspective of my own eyes looking back on a life that is so marred by anger and depression. Sure, I have moments where I get annoyed and I lash out but to see a happy video or a post about something that genuinely affects me to the core and to be able to exhibit an emotion such as joy or sorrow is something so foreign to me that I embrace it. To be able to see an individual I’ve been working with begin a path to recovery after a struggle for many months and feel so overwhelmed with happiness at their progress that I burst into tears on the way back from the visit shows that what I do means something to me. My life simply isn’t a day to day existence any longer. It truly is a life being lived and it’s all lived away from the reach of technology.

This is where my segue occurs… I watched a video today of a gentleman who, for lack of a better way of putting it, pulled a stunt in a Hannaford grocery store. He was singing “This Little Light of Mine” loudly and after a time people joined in and soon the whole store was in on it. For a moment the whole group was connected in this rare display of human interaction that so rarely occurs these days. Watching it had me feeling truly overcome with emotion because I felt a) happy that these people were having fun but b) sad in some ways because our society has lost a bit of itself because we no longer connect on even the simplest levels. Friends don’t call one another to chat. They text. Even when hanging out at dinners or at each other’s houses it’s never a surprise to see people pulling their phones out to check for messages, Facebook, texting someone else, or just looking around online. They’re not engaged with the individual they’re supposed to be with in the room. In society, people don’t talk at bus stops or in subways, they play Candy Crush or whatever game is popular or they pretend in order to avoid the “risk” of having to talk to each other. They listen to music. They insulate themselves from the world and hide.

Is this really living if we only take part in a small piece of life? If we’re chained to a piece of technology and we don’t allow ourselves to reach out and connect with one another without the use of a text-based system? If we don’t use our voices to pick up on the subtle nuances of the conversation? If we can’t grant each other the eye contact that is so important to show we are interested in what our companion is saying? Are we afraid to do so now? Have we lost that ability because we are so insular now that technology has bred two generations of socially phobic technophiles that depend on their phones and computers and tablets just to communicate, who become verbally constipated when asked to use their words? I think we have.

This is where I drew the line for myself. This is where I said no more and I've been learning to end my dependence on such things. Friends are encouraged to talk with me in person when they're close enough. If they aren’t, we talk on the phone. When working with participants I insist they put their phones down and look at me while we speak. Or I ask that they turn away from the computer and face me out of respect for our conversation. In our home, my husband and myself don’t have our phones out during serious discussions out of respect for one another and when I’m with family for gatherings, I make sure the phone is on silent and it’s away. It's taken some time to break the habit of checking over and over but in time, the addiction and the insecurity has started to go away and I'm finding my voice. The excuse of, “I’m too socially phobic,” is becoming lost and the truth of “I’m too busy” is really true or if I don’t want to get together, it's a legitimate, “I really don’t want to hang out with you,” because those people are outside of the wall and earning their way back in.

The reliance on technology concerns me and I think part of it has to do with the fact that technology contributed a great deal to my damage as a person. Growing up I was a gregarious child in spite of the fact that I had a lot of shitty experiences. Even still, I didn’t let that stop me from trying to make friends and being a good one in turn. It wasn’t until I got online that I became an angry, shitty person who bordered on narcissistic and didn’t care what others felt and allowed my emotions to rule over me. On the internet, you’re the most important thing in the world and when you’re not looking at the person you’re talking to, it’s easy to disregard their feelings. Text messages can work this way too. It was easy to hide away and become mired in this so-called “social anxiety” that I supposedly had. If there’s one thing I learned in my current line of work, the best way to combat anxiety is to expose yourself to the thing you’re scared of… so if you’re scared of being around people, the last thing you need is to be online or hiding behind a text message. We all could do with a lot less of that shit in our lives. Sometimes just saying hi to a stranger or seeing an old friend changes the course of your life in ways you wouldn’t expect. Sometimes you make new friends in the process. But how are you going to know if you’re stuck behind a computer or staring at a phone?

It’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is that you won’t.