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.
No comments:
Post a Comment