Category Archives: Healing

The Antidote

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just perfect

original art (which you will recognize from Canvas) by The Artist formerly known as Babygirl 


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Because I Can

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I’m finally letting myself show anger, even rage, call people on the bullshit they hand me, their lies, singular or repeated, all of it.

Because I can.

I purged an old, dead email account of its contents the other day.  What (at the time) I felt was a stupid move was reading a bunch of those emails first.

I was aghast.  I saw myself being emotionally and psychologically abused to a horrifying degree.  Had there been a physical analogue, I would have been the woman in the ED who “fell down the stairs”, “walked into a door”, or was “just the clumsiest woman ever, you won’t believe what I did to myself. . .”  And I would have ended up there daily, until eventually I landed in the ICU, on life support.

Reading those emails was something that needed to happen, though, because it wasn’t just one relationship, and it hadn’t been just with guys I was “involved” with.  I took a long, hard, painful look at the woman I have become, and I’m angry.

I’m angry at myself, but I’m also angry at all of the people who had a big hand in turning me into this woman.  Because I never used to be this way.  You swung at me, I ducked and hit back twice as hard.  You lied to me, I called you on it straight out and gave you the option of being honest henceforth or getting the fuck out of my life.  You treated me badly, or took advantage in any way, I walked and never looked back.

I entered treatment for my bipolar, and slowly, but slowly, I began to wear down, and people took advantage of that.  Even though I knew I was doing everything possible to be well, and that I had never taken my illness out on others — except for a few, a very few, bursts of shouting and tears — I felt like I was a burden just being in people’s lives, and I had to do everything I could to compensate and please others.  This belief was reinforced when friends I’d known for years started backing away; the mother of one of the children I nannied for started distancing herself and telling me how disappointed her child was when I didn’t show up for something because I was curled up in my bed, sobbing, unable to even move (yet I always at least gave her notice that I wouldn’t be there); and finally, my sister, with whom I had always been very close, and my best friend of 20 years both decided to cut off all contact with me, basically telling me that they couldn’t handle “my drama”, and other behavior that was completely beyond my control — even though I was still working my soul to the core trying to prevent them or anyone else from being negatively affected.

Clearly, there was something wrong with me beyond my illness, as a person, and I was lucky to have anyone still in my life at all, so I had to (and did) do anything and everything to keep them.

FUCK THAT.

A sister who walks out on you when you are at your lowest is not a sister.  For a long time I have been compassionate, because she genuinely didn’t get it.  She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting well.  But you know what, it doesn’t matter if you understand or not; you love someone, you support them.  You do not call them “a black hole”.

A friend who uses her children to hold you hostage — consciously or not — because you know they are little and they love and need you, and that if you call Mommy on her lies and bullshit and manipulation she will cut off the contact you have with them, I don’t even have a word for that.

Friends who back away because you are as contagious as a leper, and even if they know that statement is true, who don’t want to deal with the fact that you have to fight constantly to keep your head above the swells while they can get up and live their lives every day are not friends at all.

And new people in your life whom you will put up with, excuse even, all manner of garbage from, all while hiding or making light of how bad things have really gotten, because you’re desperate for someone, anyone, to “support” you and show you kindness. . .  Well, that one is on me, but I never would have gotten there without the concerted efforts of the people above.  Yes, they had every right to make a choice to remove themselves from my life, but they were cruel and weak and cowardly to have blamed me, instead of having the guts to admit that they couldn’t deal with being spectators to the struggle I was living and the constant pain I was in.  Because, had they done so, they would have had to admit to themselves that what I lived every day was an enormous struggle, and so unspeakably painful, and they were cutting and running, abandoning me when I needed them more than I ever had.

For years I have searched for the reason I let my former psychiatrist lie and manipulate and force me into electroconvulsive therapy — I can finally use the word FORCE, for the very first time, and you don’t know what a triumph that is — and at last, I have found it.  It was the result of a long line of abandonments and betrayals and manipulations and lies by those I loved and trusted most.  I had been made to feel like less than nothing for so long that I had come to believe it as gospel truth, and who cared that the old me, the real me, had been firmly and unwaveringly against ECT with all of her being for three-and-a-half years?  She wasn’t standing guard any more, and my opinion didn’t count.  How could it, when I didn’t count as a person myself?

That’s something I get to carry with me always.  The permanent brain damage, and the post-traumatic stress I have from being anesthetized, having electrodes hooked up to my head, having a current, a shock pass through my brain to induce a seizure in me — sixteen times over.  I blamed myself for that, too.  Up until about an hour ago.

And still, I put up with bullshit and manipulation and being treated as less than a person by people I love, because it is all I know anymore.  Almost three years to the day of my first shock and seizure.

Now, three years and fifteen days after that first blast of electricity, arguably the lowest point of my life, it ends.  I’m done.  I’m worth more than that, a hell of a lot more.  I am often a hard person to have in your life, and that has always been so, it has very little to do with mental illness.  But I am the best friend you will ever have, if you are willing to accept me, all of me, and give back.

I am smart.

I am compassionate.

I am intelligent.

I am strong.

I am creative.

I am resilient.

I am supportive.

I am loving.

I am beautiful.

I am selfless.

I have a strong moral compass.

I am patient.

I am understanding.

I am honest.

I am accepting.

I am forgiving.

I am idealistic.

I am open-hearted.

I live my beliefs.

And I once again believe that I am worth it, that I am worth more, much more than I have been given in the past six years of my life.  From friends, from lovers, from family.

So I will live my life accordingly from this day on.

Because I can.

“I ain’t a soldier, but I’m here to take a stand. . .”

~ Jon Bon Jovi/Richie Sambora/Billy Falcon


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Midnight Ravings Of A Madwoman

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I’ve had some shit going on in me lately, I haven’t been quite myself.  Or rather I have been, I’ve just been a self I don’t particularly care for, and usually have properly under wraps.

Paranoia.  It’s an ugly word, a much uglier feeling.  What am I so afraid of?  Better to ask what I’m not.  I’m afraid of leaving my room.  I’m afraid of speaking to anyone.  Two years ago it was so bad that I had a little device rigged up to cover the lens for the camera in my laptop.  Never mind if it was turned on or not.  And there has been more.  A lot more.

You can’t explain paranoia, nor can you really do much to treat it.  I carry diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder (PD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Of all of these, I say paranoia is the worst.

In any case, GAD, PD, OCD, PTSD, these are all things that came along for the ride when my bipolar got bad — latent traits, recessive genes activated by my wildly dominant bipolar.  Or, in the case of PTSD, a trauma that was a result of a “treatment” for my bipolar depression (electroconvulsive therapy), and a trust violated.

Paranoia has been with me, in milder but truer form, since birth (to keep things straight, I do not believe that bipolar has, but that I have yet to discuss).  I have what a lifelong friend calls “a paranoid personality” (minus the disorder part, it makes an enormous difference).  And it’s true.  I read the big books young, cutting my teeth on gems like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and (of course) George Orwell’s 1984.  I even understood the evils of totalitarian societies when I read Richard Adams’ Watership Down for the first time when I was ten.  Oh yes, a book about bunnies and evil.

These books didn’t make me paranoid. I was drawn to them because they spoke to something I knew, something which was already a part of me.

Lately there have been so many people and things that have me scared. I’ll stick to the latter.  This thing, this internet, this “information superhighway” — it scares the fuck out of me.  Do you know how your information is being collated and collected and used and stored?  I think most of you know the bare bones of facebook.  But do you know that The Library of Congress is saving all of your tweets?  Do you know how tailored Google’s algorithms and tracking of pretty much everything you do online is? Do you know that the privacy laws (in the United States, at least) protecting information like your private, personal email correspondence are so incredibly loose as to be a joke?

(Do you know I am terrified to have ventured down to The Dungeon right now to post this? My wi-fi is out, so I have to connect to the modem in the basement directly and I feel utterly exposed.)

Do I know I sound like I’m raving like a madwoman right now?  Yep.  That’s what paranoia does.  I’m terrified to watch and read and learn more, but I’m much more frightened to look away, because someone has to be paying attention, goddamnit.

I don’t know.  I don’t know what I’m meant to do with this, what I mean with this post.  I have this magic brain — and not in the crazy, “magical thinking way”, in the unusual, really fucking amazing way.  It got me through years of horror and saw me out the other side.  It’s like there are two of me, living simultaneously.  And one of them would be hallucinating, and the other one would be telling that one, ‘This is a hallucination.  Those noises, that smell, those things you see and feel on your skin, they aren’t real.  It’s okay, don’t worry, all you have to do is to just wait it out.’

And I did.  That part of me saved me, it talked me through highs and lows and fears and crazies and got me to where I could be the happy, healthy, more-or-less sane woman I am now (maybe not right now).  Most people don’t have that, believe me, I’ve done my research here.  But my point is, that part of me is now wondering how to talk the other part down.  Or at least keep a lid on things until this episode passes.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

It May Not Always Be An Easy Life, But It’s My Life

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And I just want to live while I’m alive.

I think it’s time to update everyone.  I’ve had a very eventful couple of weeks.  To the point where I haven’t told anyone not directly involved in said events anything about them, not really.  It’s taken some processing time.  Also, it’s painful for me to be still long enough to write anything.

So, the new year started off with a bang.  I went to see my infectious disease specialist on the second.  There was good news: I am no longer in the acute stage of mono, I am now in the convalescent stage.  Except that really is only good news on paper, because the convalescent stage can last up to six months.  And having had mono before, I know that it’s pretty much guaranteed to with me.

I felt so miserable (physically) that very day that I went to the urgent care directly as I had finished my appointment, and they pumped me full of two liters of fluid.  I didn’t have to pee once.  I tell you this, because as anyone in the medical field might recognize, it was indicative of my severe dehydration.

The next day I took my two younger sprites down to see the lights at the Denver City and County Building, as I was meant to do the day before, but couldn’t, being hooked up to an IV and all.  This may have been a mistake, as I was in no shape for it (there was much to see, so we got out and they ran around while I trailed behind and hollered for them not to get too far away), but we had a really nice time and I managed to save my meltdown(s) until I came home.

I haven’t melted down like that in a long time.  That night I was like Vesuvius.  Explosions and tears and anger and yelling and frustration. . .  Well it got very ugly.  I was emotionally and physically drained, and had made the mistake of actually looking long-term and realizing that July was when I was probably going to be back to about 85%.

See, that was (and still is) kind of a huge thing for me to deal with, because I pretty much spent three years in bed due to mental illness.  Except for appointments and very rare visits with friends, I lived my life curled up in my sheets.  I couldn’t wrap my head around being forced back into a state like that, even temporarily, and even when I was doing pretty damned good psychologically.

Well, I had a lovely friend, whom I actually reached out to — which is huge in itself — help me through that night.  And for that (among other things) I’ll always be grateful to her.

So I’m dealing with the mono recovery road, but I’m also dealing with sciatica.  I developed mild sciatica about a decade ago, in my left hip and leg, when The Artist formerly known as Babygirl (I can’t call her Babygirl anymore, I’m afraid, she’s 13 and way too grown up) had been riding on my hip for a couple of years.  It went away — I would get a tinge every now and again, but no big deal.

Well, starting last Fall, it came back, and it came hard.  A couple of the times I went to the urgent care for Dilaudid injections, the sciatica was my primary pain.

(Side note:  My primary care doctor and I — the one I was certain there was no hope of salvaging a relationship with — somehow hit the reset button during one of my urgent care visits.  A doctor at another location in the same network that my doctor works in essentially treated me as a crazy drug-seeker, which pissed my doctor off righteously, and I’m wondering if it maybe made him see the way I felt he was treating me [minus the drug-seeker part, he's never treated me badly from that standpoint].  Whatever it was, he and I are now on the best terms once again.  Just goes to show you, there is always hope when a person is a good person.)

It continued to build, and it continued to build, and after seven urgent care trips in two-and-a-half months, and a conversation on the phone with my doctor this past Thursday, I ended up spending Thursday night in the emergency room.  My doctor wanted me somewhere they could do a more thorough workup, instead of just treating the pain, and I was happy to defer to him.

It took two shots of Dilaudid (I don’t think the first one was more than one milligram, I think the second was about twice that), but finally, finally, and for the first time in months, I think, I was out of pain.  I knew that day that I was in a great deal of pain, and waiting in the ER to even get through triage was pretty ugly, but I don’t think I knew how bad the pain really was until I got out of it.

So I saw my primary in the urgent care on Friday, because his office said they couldn’t get me in until the beginning of February (he said other things when I saw him).  I have an MRI set for Monday morning to check for a slipped disk or spinal compression, I’ll be set up for physical therapy contingent on the results of that, I’m taking an oral steroid — if that helps there will be steroid injections to follow — muscle relaxers, and I’ve got my good friends ibuprofen and oxycodone keeping my pain minimal for now.

It took me some time to process all of this, and I’m probably not done — right now I’m just kind of high.  I keep hearing things from people like, “Wow, you just have one thing after another,” or, “It never stops for you, does it?”  And there is truth in those statements.

But, with the exception of The Night Of Vesuvius, I’m alright. Better than alright.  Even that night was just some dealing and processing I had to do to get to here.  My mental health is well intact, praise God, and everything else will fall into place as long as I have that.  After being without it for so many years, I feel like as long as I’ve got it — and all of the support my amazing friends and family show me — I am leading a charmed life.  It may sound cockeyed, but then so have I been cockeyed for pretty much all of my life.  ;)

You may not be hearing from me much, as I have instructions not to sit for long, and when I do rest, the only way that I’m comfortable for any length of time is if I lay down and stick two big pillows beneath my hips.  You try working on a laptop at that angle.

But I’ve been playing on Twitter; if you don’t already know me there, my handle is @BlushingScarlet.  That I can do from my phone, which is easier to stick on my stomach and type with.  I’m going to still do everything I can to be a good admin for A Canvas Of The Minds, which now has so many wonderful authors that they can easily run they site without me (which is good, I may not be writing much there for the present).*  I’m reading posts from my phone, and clicking the “Like” button is my version of “I was here, thank you for giving me something worthwhile to read”, and sometimes I will attempt a comment — though those can get a little too runaway for a phone and a girl like me.

My personal correspondence is going to be a little slower.  And by that I mean even slower than normal.  Same with comment responses.  But just know it isn’t because I’ve forgotten, okay?  I love you all so very much.

I’ll leave you with the pictures I took in the ER while high as a kite on Dilaudid, Prednisone, Valium, and at least one or two other things.  I honestly just remember there were multiple shots and I swallowed a cupful of pills, and those of you who know me well know that for me to have been that willing to put so much blind faith in any doctor, things were pretty bad.  But I had fun trying to take pictures amid the tangle of wires (blood pressure cuff on my left arm, pulse oximeter on my right pinky, oxygen hooked up to my nose, mp3 player headphones in my ears to help zen me out) in my little ER bed.  Thank God the nurse left the sides up, I probably would have fallen out.

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And also, I give you the immortal words of Jon Bon Jovi, from the song Its My Life: “My heart is like an open highway/Like Frankie said, ‘I did it My Way‘”

“Don’t bend, don’t break, baby, don’t back down. . .”

I won’t if you won’t.

Kisses,
Ruby

*Speaking of Canvas, we can now boast of two Freshly Pressed authors! In case you missed it, DeeDee was Pressed in December for her piece Coming Out Bipolar, Round 1, and just this past week Alice was Pressed for her piece Epic Quests and crap like that. Congratulations to them both; they write good shit, and more importantly, they’re good eggs. Now they just have to get something they’ve written for Canvas Pressed!

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Tears In Heaven

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To say that my Babygirl was an easy child wouldn’t even be half right. She brought out something magical in me, and I gave back all that was wonderful to her. But, occasionally, we did have a tough day.

I remember one of those days specifically, she had been cranky and I had been irritable. We were on our way home, and this song came on the radio. I vividly recall sitting at a stoplight, thinking to myself, What would this man do to have just one day like we’ve had, one more fussy, cranky, irritable day with his son? What wouldn’t he give to be as lucky as I am right now?

 
We live a charmed life, my Babygirl and me.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Implications Speak More Loudly Than Words

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So.  That jerk behind the blog A Clown On Fire just made me do two things I need to be doing less of: think and cry.

Let me explain.  He actually did something very sweet (don’t tell him I told you, it’ll ruin his image of himself).  I was involved in a conversation on Twitter with his lovely wife, Sara (of Laments and Lullabies), and another dear friend of ours, DeeDee (of Disorderly Chickadee) about. . . well there were many things, but it led up to smoothies and alcohol.  I informed them that I was “on the wagon”, as it is put, and Eric immediately chimed in with praise, tweeting, “Good for you, Ruby.”

In about 30 seconds, things got a little muddy in my mind.  Because my reason for choosing to never again drink is a good one.  It’s a very important one.  It’s a mentally healthy one.  And it isn’t an easy choice.  Actually, it’s really fucking hard.  I’m not an alcoholic, I can honestly say that there has only been one time in all of my 32 years that I have used alcohol in any way that crossed the line between “acceptable” and “not”.  Ideas, by the way, that are completely individual and as unique as each person who has ever imbibed.  Point being, while I didn’t drink often or much, I really loved occasionally to have a  few bloody marys, a couple of glasses of champagne, a really yummy cosmo, or my favorite strawberry margaritas.

Except.

Except I began to notice something.  I have been stable and healthy and happy for eight-and-a-half months now.  And in that time, I’ve discovered a few major things that were lost in the confusion of bipolar and its sidekicks.  One of the things I discovered is that when I drink, the three or four days following I am very, very. . .  There needs to be a word for this, but I can’t find one (and not for lack of a thesaurus).  If I hadn’t been where I’ve been, I might say depressed.  But it isn’t like that.  Certainly it’s a much stronger, different state than sad.  Heartsick comes close, but soulsick captures it better.  That’s about how I feel.  And it’s strong enough, and it affects me enough that I did the math and decided it was a really bad idea for me to drink.  At all.  Ever again.

I’ve had quite a few conversations with friends and family members about this.  And reactions have varied from ‘Oh, I feel that way, too’ — no, you don’t, if you did you would either have stopped drinking or be drunk all the time, trust me on this — to ‘Well, that’s smart.  Good for you.’  Only the ‘good for yous’ I have gotten are about on par with what I would get if I told someone I was exercising more.  Kind of a ‘That’s nice, it’s healthy, but it isn’t really much of a thing.’

Why is that?

Everyone acts as if me quitting drinking isn’t really very important.  As I said, I’ve never had any problems with alcohol, I’ve never even drunk-dialed an ex, therefore my consumption/lack of consumption really only affected one person.  So I guess, in the end, I shouldn’t expect any kind of ticker tape parade.  Alcohol is such a staple in most people’s lives that it really has to be fucking you up before they are willing to admit that making a decision to rid your own life of it forever is something difficult for you and worth recognition.*

Which is why those three little words, “Good for you”, catching me completely off my guard (and clearly in a vulnerable spot), reduced me to tears.

So thank you for your words of support, Eric.  They mean more to me than I ever want anyone to know.

*To be inescapably clear, I am not dismissing, criticizing, or trying to minimize how amazing it is for an alcoholic, or someone abusing alcohol in any way, to make the decision to become sober.  I actually don’t have the words to express how incredible and courageous that is.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

How Far We Have Come

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I wrote the following in my gratitude journal today, after coming across the text snippet.  For those of you who don’t follow that blog, I’ll share it with you here.

I am grateful for the relatively minimal number of meds I now take with such maximal results.  An excerpt from something I wrote about two-and-a-half years ago:

By contrast, daily I now take four different medications (all to treat what ails me, none for management of side effects) daily.  I also take three supplements every day.  The first is a mega-dose of folic acid (4mg) to try prevent any damage to the baby I don’t intend to conceive.  That probably sounds a bit strange, reading the post I wrote about how women should be as responsible as possible in this area will explain it much better.  The second is CoQ10, on the advice of my primary.  It’s a non-essential, he just said something to me like “with all the stuff you’ve put in your body in the past few years, it’s not a bad idea”, and I decided he made a good point there.  And the third is to give me thick, pretty hair.  Seriously.  I think it works well, and it isn’t ridiculously expensive, so I take it.  But once again, non-essential.

Finally, I have three semi-somewhat-kind-of-regular PRNs (as needed).  And one of them is for migraines, not mood.

I do have a difficult time conceptualizing what things were like for me, for all of those years.  It’s also occurred to me as I was writing this, at the risk of sounding corny — don’t give up.  Look at how far I have come.  No, it wasn’t the most fun time in my life, but seriously, I am in such a happy, stable place that it is mind-boggling.

I got here.  You can get here, too.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Addiction Thing

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Do you know, it’s been so long for me, I’m kind of having some difficulty figuring out how to start talking about what I dealt with when I was fighting my mental illness dragons?  I’m only about seven months out, and I don’t pretend that what I live with will not have to be accounted for and managed for the rest of my days.  There’s this enormous disconnect, though.  Because I know I’ve won.  I spent about six years solid in a terrible war, one I had given up hope of ever winning fully, toward the end.  And here I am now. . .  This life is so different from that one, it’s difficult for me to bring back the sense of it.

But it’s still there, in its strange, separate space.  I haven’t forgotten.  Maybe it’s my mind’s gift to itself that I don’t have the sense of those dragons tearing at me.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t know how they did.

And to think, this wasn’t even meant to be so terribly heavy as all that.  But even I don’t know what my fingers are going to say until they get down to it.

One thing I was always grateful for was the absence of what I would come to call “the addiction gene” in me.  I never smoked cigarettes. When I was young I played around with pot for maybe a year, but it never did anything for me, so I just stopped bothering, and I never got into anything “harder”.

I have taken Vicodin for my migraines for more than 16 years.  Pretty much always as prescribed, though I’m not going to say that in all those years I never doubled up a dose because I was in so much pain.

Alcohol was fun in my early 20s, but I never drank like most people I knew.  I was always the designated driver, and while occasionally I would get good and tight at home or at my sister’s, it was very much a rarity.  Recently I decided I needed to stop consuming any alcohol, because even just having a drink or two makes me severely maudlin for three or four days after.  I’m sad that I can’t have my strawberry margs anymore, but the havoc drink wrought in my mind – and to some degree, my life – it just isn’t worth the trade.

And last year, last year I was on Valium for my mania, because we had run out of ideas.  Valium is not meant to be a long-term, three-times-a-day solution to anything, because the incidence of addiction is so high.  My current psychiatrist doesn’t like to prescribe it at all; I had to fight for a dozen pills earlier in the summer when I was dealing with anxiety that nothing I’d tried would alleviate (it turned out to be from the premenstrual dysphoria, and those Valium I fought for helped very much indeed).  I’m actually getting ready to go to the mat with him over it again, but that’s a different story.  Coming down off of months on that particular drug was probably the most hellish substance withdrawal I ever dealt with in my life, but I did it and I did it twice over.  There was never any question in my mind that I could.

When the Let’s Talk About section on A Canvas Of The Minds was launched a year ago with the topic of Self-Medicating, our authors discussed things like self-injury, shoplifting, drugs, drinking, sex, eating disorders, and more.  The closest I came to having something to say on that subject was to discuss my shopping habits, the over-spending and credit card use that got me to the point of needing to file for bankruptcy.  And as it turns out, I’m not really sure that falls into the category of self-medication, especially not in the broader context of addiction.

Thing is, I know how incredibly lucky I am.  I’ve always known.  Addiction runs through both sides of my family.  Some have been spared, some have beaten it, some are managing it, and one beautiful soul died because of it.  My Uncle Jimmy, my dad’s baby brother, he died about ten years ago after struggling for years with addiction to, primarily, Vicodin.  Of all things.  The same crap I’ve been prescribed for migraines since my teens, and never had any issues with.  The hydrocodone wasn’t what got him, it was the acetaminophen that it’s typically cut with.  And when I say “cut”, I mean the way prescription Vicodin from your local pharmacy is prepared.  Most states won’t sell straight hydrocodone, you either get it in Vicodin or Vicoprofen (ibuprofen replacing acetaminophen in that).  So eventually, his liver couldn’t handle it.  He didn’t overdose in one sad event.  Over years, my dear sweet uncle was taken out by the likes of Tylenol.  And heavier and heavier this post gets.

But he is my guardian angel, that I know, though I only met him a very few times.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never had issues with addiction, which is so commonly concurrent with bipolar disorder.  I don’t know all the finer points, but I do know he’s been looking out for me for a long time.  Even when I was 11 and he was in his late 30s, we were kindred spirits.  Death sure as hell didn’t keep him from watching over and taking care of me.

Do you want to know, finally, what I set out to write this post about?  What has become my one addiction in life, one that I recognized this morning had actually become a problem for me?  I officially give you permission to laugh, because after all of that build-up, I kind of have to.

Chai tea lattes from Starbucks.  I know, right?

It started out as a drink I just really liked.  At some point I discovered that the combination of the heat, whatever blend of spices is in the chai syrup, plus the caffeine helped with my migraines.  Okay, that is to me still a legitimate reason for drinking them.  I also found that sitting and sipping these hot drinks was a comfort for me, a way to soothe anxiety (in spite of the caffeine), depression, mania, a whole host of symptoms and manifestations of the various things that made up my personal Alphabet Soup.  And that was fine, too; I could happily rationalize the hell out of that, anything that was so innocuous and helped quieten the dragons in my mind was (and is) okay by me.

And really, in the grand scheme of things, there isn’t anything terrible about me drinking chai.  Yes, right now where I am financially, it’s not such an easy habit to sustain. And yes, I have to be careful to watch my blood pressure when combining any amount of caffeine with the Carbatrol I take (or so says my doctor – more or less).  But what really got me this morning was, well, me.

I’d fallen asleep on the couch watching a movie.  I woke up this morning, and my first clear, conscious thought was, ‘What time is it?  Is Starbucks open?’  I proceeded to grab my tumbler, a five dollar bill, and my keys.  I was in my pajamas, which is no big deal, I go places in my pajamas frequently (especially Starbucks).  But my hair was sticking up funny on one side, I looked genuinely strung out, and for the first time since I’ve been well, I didn’t even attempt to make myself slightly less horrifying.  I just went for it.

And I thought, as I drove to get my “fix”, ‘Something ain’t right here, girly.’  The sunrise was gorgeous (oh wow, was it ever!), the temperature was just perfect, I had Simon and Garfunkel’s America playing, and things fell into place in my head and I realized the jig was up.

There’s nothing wrong with me enjoying my chai.  The baristas at my local Starbucks are lovely to start my day chatting to.  But right now, this shit owns me.  And yes, I know there are much worse things to be owned by.  And yes, I feel a taste of the absurd given all that I wrote leading up to this.  But what it comes down to is that nothing owns me, nothing ever has, nothing ever will, and I have to find a way to walk away from something that has become so much more than a “guilty pleasure”.  Everything in moderation, if I can manage the moderation.  If I can’t. . .  Bye-bye, sweet spices and milk and steamy goodness.  Not even for you will I let go of one tiny bit of my self-containment.

I don’t blame this tumbler.  It’s merely a pawn.


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Jackie Wilson Said

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That song, seriously. . .  I can be in the foulest, most miserable of moods, and the moment I hear the opening, my face splits into this big old grin.  I can’t help it!  Which, if you know the song, is very fitting.

So this post was meant to be written two weeks ago, give or take.  But in my way were exhaustion, some really intense interpersonal shit, Canvas’ one year, the discovery that I have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, outing my real identity on Canvas and on here, and cramps that were the most painful experience of my life, save maybe one or two migraines.  I suspect that given all of that, you will forgive its tardiness.  And if not, I don’t really care much anyway.

Oh, and also I’ve mislaid the cord that connects my phone and my computer, so getting the pictures I want for this post is proving tricky.

Two Thursdays ago I got to take my Sunshine (age nine) and her sister Wild Thing (age four) for the day to just play.  I started the day off right by sneaking in to their garage while they still slept and going to town on their mom’s punching bag.  There is a place I might start back to kickboxing, and I wanted to make sure I remembered my form.  You do different things with your arms and your body etc. for different types of punches and kicks.

It took me about two minutes to establish that I remembered, and then I just ripped into that thing.  I needed to.  And the big surprise for me was that after years of being basically sedentary, I can still hit the top of the bag with a back roundhouse kick.  Not only can I hit it, I can hit it hard.  And not fall over.  That’s power right there.

Next on the agenda for the day was a pancake breakfast with the girls (hooray!).  But no, actually next was Punnett squares with the girls’ mom.  She’s gone back to school and was working on Mendelian genetics for Biology, and between what she learned and what I recalled, she got what she needed to do her assignment.  And I remembered that I lurve Mendelian genetics so incredibly much.  No, seriously.

Of course they got hot chocolate with breakfast!

At that point I had two extremely hungry girls to contend with.  It was only like ten in the morning, and none of us had eaten anything, and the girls had been up since seven, what was the big deal?  Oh, and the place we were going to eat was about 40 minutes away.  And we had to contend with a half an hour wait.  And those two girls were brilliant, not one complaint, not the slightest peep of a whine.  And the pancakes and French toast were beyond worth it.  One thing to do if you are ever here is to hit up Snooze for breakfast.  Just be prepared to wait.

My girls fell so in love with the place that they insisted later on to their mom and dad that they had to go back the next day!

Because I can be both in charge and fun!

In any case, after breakfast it was over to the beauty shop.  See, I had given Sunshine some clip-in hair strands for her birthday a while back.  One of them matched the streak in mine, and one of them was this platinum blonde that I told her I would dye for her if she liked.  She liked.  She and Wild Thing spent about 20 minutes deciding on the right blue, and I walked out with two nail polishes for myself, as well. I blame the girls. They were a corrupting influence!

We came back to my house and had so much fun.  They made me pictures, and I dyed hair, and they ran around the back yard, and I discovered I have a mild grass allergy, and I got out for them the hose and the watering can, then Sunshine discovered a nest of yellow jackets in the watering can (so I stuffed the top up with a tea towel, I wasn’t going near it just then), and we all played hide-and-seek, and by the time the sky started to threaten rain, the girls both were soaked and I was exhausted.  I figured out that attacking a punching bag when you’re out of shape is not the way to start a day when you’re going to be chasing children.  Whoops.

Hair is so much easier to dye when it isn’t attached to a head (ew).

So I got the girls towels to make into togas, and I went to put their clothes in the dryer.  Those are the funny little moments I enjoy, pulling squished flowers out of the pockets of Wild Thing’s pants and laying them out on the dryer.  Later, very slowly and gently combing the tangles out of her wet hair.  I am the master of toddler tangles, if you want to know. I learned fast, and I learned well, thanks to Babygirl.

Then, the kids got themselves re-dressed.  I tidied up the house.  And they both fell asleep watching The Muppets.  They look so little and perfect when they’re sleeping.  Another moment I could crawl inside of and stay forever.

I would have joined the nap-fest, too, but we didn’t have much time after that.  Because we had to be back to their house for. . .

A jewelry party!  Except by that point in the day, it felt more to me like a. . . jewelry. . .  party.  Ungh.  The girls’ mom has a friend who is trying to get set up selling jewelry (because apparently that’s the new Tupperware), and she’s a very nice lady, so I agreed to attend.

And it was marvelous.  Not really the party, but the fact that six months ago I would have been in tears at the thought of going, after the long and exhausting day that I’d had.  But I went, I had fun, I bought jewelry, I sat on the back porch and talked with the girls’ dad for a bit (he’s one of a very select group of men that I consider not just “my friends’ husbands” but “friends” in their own right as well).  And I went home after dark!  Woo-hoo!

I was barely able to drag myself up to bed, but I loved it.

We’ve come a long way, baby!  ;)

I got to rest for 30 seconds before it was insisted I join in hide-and-seek.


© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Will You Be There To Catch Me If I Fall?

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For 31 years of my life, this one was a done deal.  Okay, I can’t speak to my younger years entirely, but something happened to me around age 14 that made me my own and only support.  I had my first breakdown, and in true Ruby style, it was one hell of a mess.

Crying hysterically when your mother tries to drop you off at school may sometimes be normal for some adolescents.  But I was never bullied, I had lots of friends, and I wasn’t afraid of any of the teachers.  So for me it was a bit extreme.  To my mother’s credit, she knew this was not one of those “You’ll feel better when you get to school” things, and she didn’t force me to go in.

Hiding in the basement, cowering in terror from your very good friends when they try to come and find you at your house after school definitely does not fall on the spectrum of normal for a 14-year-old girl.  It would be more than a decade before I had any idea why I did it.  Even before then, I never really thought about how incredibly strange my behavior was.  And no one was home with me to see the degree to which things had deteriorated.

Now don’t take that to mean I had absentee parents.  They simply both held jobs, and as the crying and anxiety seemed to relax almost entirely when my mother brought me back home in the mornings, she went to work at hers (not without reservations, I’m sure).

At some point I pulled myself back together.  I couldn’t really tell you how.  It probably had something to do with the looming threat of not graduating the eighth grade and getting the fuck out of that school forever.  Even if my days in middle school weren’t as miserable as some, that place still sucked.  There’s a reason they parcel those three years away into their own little hell.  That way you can get through them and start semi-fresh somewhere else.

There are a lot of now infamous parent/teacher/principal/student conferences that went on while they tried to figure out what to do with me, as I was so far behind in so many classes.  May it suffice to say I gave a lot of the staff a lot of hell, but in a very adult, don’t-you-dare-talk-to-me-like-I-am-a-freaking-child kind of way.  I was pretty incredible, even my parents thought so.  My theory on why I was graduated is that I had one or two good teachers who were on my side and realized that there wasn’t really anything else they could teach me, and the others just wanted me the hell out of their lives.

Point being, after I got back up onto my feet, I made the decision that no one was ever going to see me off of them again.  Fuck all to what was going on, I could hide it.

And I did, with one exception when I was 16.  Never mind the details, but it caused a shift in my perspective.  It was no longer I’m going to hide this, damnit.  It ceased to be an issue of pride and independence and turned into a belief that ultimately, I really was the only one I could rely on to take care of myself, at least emotionally and mentally.

And for the next 15 years, that was my life.  I had friends, I had family, and I had doctors, eventually.  And they were all good people looking to help me in my time of terrible distress.  But I wouldn’t have it.  Not really.  Yes, I sobbed in my mother’s arms more times than I’m sure I ever did as a child.  Yes, my father cleaned up my financial messes and babysat with me during the days as I went through electroconvulsive therapy.  Yes, my friends made themselves available to me to the degree that they were able to and then some – but they did all have children, most were spread across the country, and for a lot of that time I wasn’t really with it.  And yes, on more than one occasion I know I begged for help from my psychiatrist.  I had even begun to develop a strong support network through blogging.

But still, when I got down to cases, I was the only one I could count on.

It’s funny how the most unexpected things can change your whole perspective.

Last Winter, I spent about three days in the worst migraine I had ever lived in my life.  By the third day I couldn’t even think, and when I went to speak to my mother in the early morning hours on a Saturday, when she was getting ready for work, I was pushing back hard on the tears.  You cannot cry when your head feels like that.  Crying equals more pain.

The solution she quickly came to was for my father to take me to the urgent care.  Sensible enough, except my father hates all things medical, he doesn’t deal so well with them, and dear Lord, in the past five years had I put him through enough doctor and emergency room visits to last several lifetimes, and I just didn’t want him to take me, honestly.

I expressed something like this to my mom, tears rolling down my face in spite of myself, and she told me that maybe that was something my father was meant to learn from all of these experiences, how to be able to deal with the medical world (my mother is so very Catholic and, I swear, everything with her is “meant to be”).

I don’t think my dad learned anything that day, but I got to thinking about what maybe I was supposed to learn from all that had happened to me in the preceding five-and-a-half years (yes, I’ve got some of it in me, too).  And sometime after the Vicodin and the ice packs and attempting to sleep and the muscle relaxers and throwing up, I came to the most amazing realization.

I have so many people in my life who are reaching out their hands to catch me.

I have friends who would put a roof over my head and food in my mouth should I land on their doorsteps.  I have aunts and uncles and cousins of my parents who would take me into their lives in an instant.  I have two grandfathers who would give me shelter and love and whatever I could need.  I have so many wonderful cousins.  One particular branch have absorbed me into their lives and made me feel like closer family than I technically am, and never so much as blinked when I asked them to help me find a pharmacy where they live and drive me there (twice) because I was going off-the-wall manic.  I have my parents, I have always had my parents, but I feel differently about their taking care of me than I ever did before.  I have so many of you lovelies, who would scoop me up and tuck me into your lives and set me on the road to recovery in an instant.

I have the whole beautiful world.  There will always be an endless number of kind hands, even if they are the hands of strangers, reaching out, willing and wanting to help me should I need it.

Kind of amazing when you think about it.

There won’t be another breakdown.  I may have my moments here and there, but I can say with absolute confidence and certainty that I will never go back to where I have been.  But while I can’t list for you all the things that journey through Hell (capital H) taught me, one of them was definitely how to let love in.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.