Category Archives: Independence

The Finish Line

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Last week my life as I had blissfully known it, for the past year at least, came to an end.

I have been struggling very hard to write something to update everyone, and failing, and failing, and failing.

I wanted to explain more of the situation, but that’s not going to happen, so here are the bare bones.

I can no longer take Carbatrol, which has been my mainstay in mood stabilization.  Not ever again.

It's the Great Big Book of Everything, with everything inside. . ."

It’s the Great Big Book of Everything, with everything inside. . .

I have been through every drug and then some; when I stopped counting in 2010, there had been more than 70.  So I am at a point of patching together what I call the “least worst” solutions for my future.  I have a three-inch thick binder filled with my notes, my doctors’ notes, medication inserts, pharmacy info, articles from different websites, and I’m basically using that, along with a grip of reference books, to decide which drugs were the most effective and the least intolerable.

It’s only been five days, but things have really gone incredibly badly to start.  I don’t want to talk about it.

I’m actually very well-equipped for this, in one way, in an important way.  I have been through this fire, for five-and-a-half years I went through it, and I came out the other side alive.  I know what to expect, and I know that I can get through again.

The thing that is knocking at my infrastructure is that I honestly and truly believed that this was it for me, I had found my cocktail and that was what I would be taking until I drew my last breath.

Also, there is the added element that I’m giving serious thought to looking for a new psychiatrist.  I am undecided here, as I need to sit down and discuss some things with mine first.  Additionally, I went through this process a little more than a year ago, for the first time since I’d sought help in 2006.  I got my first psychiatrist on the second try, and I didn’t know how lucky I was.

When I went through my search last time, I had very few doctors recommended to me, because my then-psychiatrist and my primary just didn’t believe there were many equipped to handle my case.  And, in fact, of those few, all but two said that they didn’t think they could help, because they honestly didn’t know what could be done that hadn’t already been tried.  I appreciated that frankness.

Essentially, what that means is if I do need to find a new doctor (still a big if), there is more than likely only one whom I can go to locally.  And that’s if he is still around, and still taking new patients. I do have information I saved on several national options, but there are enormous practical and financial considerations there. So, we shall see.

My parents are being very supportive, in their way.  After Thursday’s appointment, I told them I am no longer going to discuss with them what medications I am taking, because the last thing I need to be thinking when trying to figure out how to make the best out of a bad thing is, ‘Mom and Dad are going to freak out about this one.’  That really should not be in my mind at all.  Mom took it surprisingly well, she understood completely; Dad, well he will learn to deal with it.  He just loves his baby daughter and worries about me so much.  They both do, after these past years of seeing me hysterical and blanked out and taking me thrice weekly for ECT and rushing me to the ED many times and sitting up nights watching me because they were worried I would stop breathing.  Those are memories a parent can never erase.

So that’s the gist of it.  That’s how my life changed completely over one Thursday in January.  I was one month and four days shy of a perfect year.  But I’m glad I didn’t know that time had an expiration date stamped on it, because if I had, I wouldn’t have loved it as carelessly and blissfully as I did.  I wouldn’t have assumed and made plans and, yes, taken things for granted.  Taking things for granted is not always the monster it’s made out to be, my loves.  And if I have to spend another six-and-a-half years, or the rest of my life, striving for eleven months more like these just past, I will say that it’s worth the trade.  The reward is worth the fight.  More than worth it.

 

The rest of the crew.

More of the crew.

I’ll get through and find something, but it’s probably going to be an endless road of different drugs and dosage adjustments and changing this for that.  I won’t say I’m delighted, but neither will I sit here and wonder and wail that I can’t deal with that prospect.  To me it has never been a question of “how long” or “an end” or “too much”, it just is and I keep going, because this is the life I am living, and that is the only choice I have.  To keep going, to plunge ahead, to try something else.

I will always keep myself afloat, even if it means clinging to the fin of a shark.

© 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.

Dust Off Your Highest Hopes

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution.  Now raise your hand if you have ever completely failed on one — or most.

Yeah, me too.  Actually, I think I got wise to the whole resolution game before I was nine.  That was how old I was the last time I made a New Year’s resolution.  And no, I don’t remember what it was.

The thing is, failing at a New Year’s resolution isn’t really a very painful experience, like failing at a goal you set for yourself some other time of the year.  Why not?  Because you know that countless other people are failing at theirs as well.  You aren’t alone.  It’s a time of year when we can actually all have a bit of a laugh and understanding for our failures.  It’s almost expected.  We do it together.

Well, I have a better idea for something we can all do together to begin this year.  I say we hope for ourselves.

In 2012, I got the thing in my life that mattered most, the thing I thought I had given up hoping for on any real, fundamental level.  After half my life dealing with raging mental illness, and the last six years (give or take) causing such acute suffering that I didn’t even know who I was anymore, I had given up ever seeing myself again.  I never gave up believing that something would help glue together the pieces into a semblance of myself, but that wonderful, beautiful, bright, happy, intelligent, crazy, head-in-the-clouds-and-hands-in-the-stars me. . . she wasn’t coming back.

Only she did.  She’s here.

Last March, one Sunday I woke up and I was the girl I’d been ten years ago.  And I knew that she would never go again.  I have to keep taking medication, yes, and I’ve had some hiccups, true enough.  But I knew that Sunday I had somehow fought through all of those years to get me back.  I believed it that first day, and I believe it all these months later.

So let’s do something else this New Year’s Eve, and let’s do it together.  Let’s hope.

I may not be the most interactive blogger when I write, but this post is designed differently (and take advantage of that, as it may be the only one!).  I’m going to share with all of you, my loves, the things I am hoping for in the year to come.  Things for me, in my life.  Yes, I hope for a kinder, more peaceful world, and I hope that my girls will continue to find the happiness in growing up and be spared as much as possible from the pain.  Of course I hope for those things.  Everyone hopes for things such as those.

I hope to do more things like this, with this lady (who has not signed a photo release) if possible

I hope to do more things like this, with this lady (who has not signed a photo release) if possible

 
 
In this post, though, the hopes I will share with you will be my hopes, for my life.  Things upon which I have some direct effect, and things upon which I may have none.  And I would love so very much for you to share yours with me in the comments.  As many as you would like.  You may find this a little scary, when you really get down to it.  I certainly do.  Because hope touches the most intimate and secret places in our hearts, and it is often something we don’t share with anyone.

 
 
But here I go:

  • I hope to be good and properly swept off my feet this year.  I’ve been in love, and I have even let my heart and senses get ahead of my brain (but not since I was 16).  I don’t care if it’s love, and I don’t care if it lasts for a year or a week.  I just want to lose all sense of “should I?” and go for it.
  • I hope to be able to get out and live on my own.  My parents are lovely to have taken me this far, but I need my own space in which I can properly enjoy being me again.  I don’t care if it’s a one-room studio, or if it’s drafty, or if I have to walk a million stairs.  As long as it has a proper kitchen, washer and dryer hookups, and a bathtub!
  • I hope I can have regular dates with my Babygirl once again (lunch on Sundays, perhaps).  She is at a place where I feel like she needs me more, and I have always needed her.  The difference is that now I can be there for her in a tangible way.
  • I hope to get back to kickboxing (I had a nice start pre-mono) and rebuild my strength, my endurance, my confidence, and my body, too.  Kickboxing does wonders for me as a mood stabilizer as well, so there really is no downside.
  • I hope to do a lot more traveling, both domestically and (kicking in some major hopes) internationally.  Rome, Venice, get ready for Ruby!
  • I hope all the necessaries can align for me to get that tattoo I’ve been planning for some time.  Artist, money, me. . .  It matters.
  • I hope to learn film development.  And yes, I mean color as well.  Every time someone tells me how incredibly difficult color is, it makes me want it more and more.  Again, there are many things that must align in this equation.
  • I hope I can spend more and more time reading.  I’ve said previously that I was grateful to just be able to read again at all, and so I was, and so I’ll always be.  But that doesn’t have to be the end of it, and I believe that if I work on it, and never say enough, I may be able to get back to reading the way that I used to.  To devouring.
  • I hope to get back to writing more.  Blogging, yes, but more writing for myself.  Journaling, writing fiction, sending letters and emails, even.  I intend to feed my imagination so much that it has no choice but to bleed through my fingers onto the page.
  • I hope to actually do something with my recently discovered love of oil pastels.  It may turn out beautifully, it may turn out like the scribblings of a two-year-old, it will most likely turn out somewhere in the middle, but I want it to turn out.  I want to lose The Fear.
  • I hope, in addition to the general travel wish, to spend a great deal of time at the beach.  Or, more precisely, in the ocean!

There you are.  From my heart to yours.  Now share with me what you have in your heart.  What do you hope for in the year to come?

I hope you all have a wonderful year, full of hope, and I send you my love.

Addendum: Hopes have no expiration dates, and this post is not just a New Year’s Eve thing. Keep sharing the things you want for this year (nothing as ugly as “must dos”, but the beautiful “I hopes” — see below for the things others have contributed, if you’re confused), because if you accomplish nothing else, in doing so you spread a little more joy into the world. Also, if you decide to share your hopes on your own blog, let me know with a link!

Oooh, Meizac wrote a post, Meizac wrote a post! Go forth and read: My hopes for the year to come

© 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.

“Difficult”

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Difficult.  Overwhelming.  Exhausting.  All words that have been used to describe me for most of my life, in and out of episodes of illness, bipolar notwithstanding.

And they aren’t inaccurate.  I am passionate about almost all matters, and positively hellacious about the remainder of them.  I have mellowed in my old age, but I still pour my heart and my soul and my everything into anything I believe in.  It’s why you’ll see me disappear from here for days to weeks, because I haven’t anything to say that pulls at me and begs to be put down into words.  When I was in school, I wrote every single paper the night before — they refused to come out any sooner.  Some I even turned in late, because they weren’t done cooking in my mind; and while I could have written a good piece and turned it in on time, if I waited a day or two longer, out came something truly excellent.  And though at times I would fake it in many subjects, I never, never would when it came to writing.  Not only was it a mortal sin, the possibility just absolutely did not exist in my mind.

Oh yes, many of my teachers found me “difficult” in school. I spoke my mind without restraint, I corrected them when they were wrong, and worst of all, I didn’t show them the respect they automatically deserved simply because they had decided to become teachers. I expected them to earn it, just like everyone else; my parents raised me to treat everyone this way — teacher, janitor, classmate, doctor — everyone began on an equal footing. Those teachers who appreciated me and didn’t label me in any way as “difficult” were the wonderful individuals who got it.  They saw the differences in me for what they were: self-possession, creativity, intelligence, sensitivity, passion, and an incredibly strong moral compass.  And they encouraged and supported me far beyond what their job description required.  The result was more than them gaining my respect in equal measure; from my third grade teacher to my Anatomy and Physiology professor (and quite a number in the intervening years), I remember them all vividly. They each gave me something special, and they left upon me an indelible mark so uniquely their own. I was sometimes still a smartass — that’s something rarely ever suppressed in me — but I was a polite, kind smartass (you know what I mean).

Over the years, I’ve lost more friends than I have kept because I am “difficult”.  In some cases it was my choice, but more often it was due to friends’ inability to understand me. I view the world with a very different perspective than most people, and I live my life accordingly. When I was younger, I was free-spirited and so absolutely sure of myself. But as we grew older, many friends came to be uncomfortable with the same wild eccentricities and unshakable character I have possessed all of my life. I have a wall that surrounds me, that has always surrounded me. I imagine I was born with it, and it has always kept me very independent and secure in myself. (“They got a wall in China/It’s a thousand miles long/To keep out the foreigners/They made it strong/And I’ve got a wall around me/That you can’t even see/It took a little time/To get next to me” ~ Paul Simon)  I can and do let those who are very strong and brave inside, because it is not a place for the faint of heart. And those dear souls who understand what it takes have been in — and even out — of my life for years, but I am blessed that they see that I am worth it.  I may be temperamental, moody, distant, emotional, overwhelming, exuberant, and at times just a bowl of crazy flakes, but I love them, I love their kids and their families, and I would do absolutely anything for them.  And they have loved me, not in spite of all that, but because of it.

Not surprisingly, the only people in my life who don’t find me difficult, overwhelming, and exhausting are my girls.  I am full of the kind of joie de vivre that most people either lose or have beaten out of them on their journey to adulthood.  I cheered them on with unabashed delight when they were learning to feed themselves (Babygirl gave me some funny looks for that one, but she loved it). I’ll climb a tree (in a skirt) with my girls, though I haven’t been up one in 20 years.  I encourage them and permit no room for self-doubt or restrictions when they paint (getting messy is part of the fun!) or do anything creative, and more often than not, I join in.  I get on Skype or the telephone to do reading homework with them, and I buy them books for absolutely no reason except that they love them and so do I.

I have bipolar disorder, this is true, and when I was so profoundly ill for so many years, I lost a couple of people from my life that I would wish back into it in an instant — except that things would never be anything like what they used to be between us.  It’s the nature of the beast, and I have made my peace with it.  I can’t say that was me (or anyone) being “difficult”; I won’t accept that word to describe me during a period of time that was so painful and so protracted that much of it I don’t remember, and what I do scares me even now, when I know I will never go back there.  I did what I could even then to try to save the last threads of these relationships, but sometimes things are just too far gone between people.

And now that I am well?  Now that I deal with sadness and heartache instead of depression, and joy and exuberance instead of mania?  Well, the sadness and the heartache are definitely far from on par with what most people experience, as are the joy and the exuberance.  My life is unusual and crazy and full of passion and love and heartbreak, because I am unusual and crazy and full of passion and love and heartbreak.

I am difficult.  I am overwhelming.  I am exhausting.  That’s something most people can’t deal with in their lives, not really, and I understand that.  But after 32 years of being this way, and never doubting that this is exactly who and how I am meant to be, you’ll see no changes in my nature.  This is me, and I’m not going to become someone else for anyone in this world, no matter how much I love them.  That’s not to say that I am in all ways rigid and invariable; like the tree I climbed with my girls, I have branches that are strong, flexible, and accommodating to embrace those closest to my heart.  But my trunk only grows stronger and more solid with each passing year.

Proof of my exploits as Rima, the (backyard) jungle girl. Though my girls told me to go inside and put on pants, I wasn’t wasting time with such silliness when it looked like so much fun!
P.S.  It was.  :P

Addendum: It seems this was my 300th post. I think that means something.

© 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.

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.

These Boots Were Made For Many Things

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After remembrance of things past in Before There Ever Was A Tuesday. . ., and subsequent discussions with Suzie Ivy and PAZ, I thought it might be fun to take photos of my boots for yinz to see.  Now this isn’t as easy as it sounds, with a camera phone and a tremor, but I think you’ll get the general idea.

So, without further ado. . .

The Docs of my youth.

 

My Undergrounds, which I prefer to call my shit-kickers.

 

My practical, but still sassy, brown boots.

 

My gorgeous cowgirl boots.

 

My drop-dead black boots, which don’t look like so much from the front. . .

 

But from the back. . . well, I really couldn’t get a clear shot (you try bending over backwards and trying to take a good picture some time).  But they lace up and they are sex on heels.

Kisses from my closet ~

© 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.

Before There Ever Was A Tuesday. . .

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. . .  There was a Soho.  And she loved rude boys with serious mohawks, piercings, and lots of tattoos.  And she loved going to shows, and running around in her 18 eye silver Doc Martins, causing trouble with bottle rockets, glitter, and on one very interesting evening, spaghetti.  She was something else, let me tell you.  And I love her with all of my heart and soul.


(This song and video are solely the property of their respective owners and artists. Absolutely no copyright infringement is intended.)

P.S. I just tried on the Docs (because yes, of course I kept them!), and while I love me some stilettos, no shoes have ever made me feel half of what those boots do. . . Damn!

© 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.

On Being A Bitch

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(I really wanted to first write a post on all the sweet comments and commiserations and sympathy I got from the lovelies who responded to my most recent post, but I guess this needs must come out now.) 

My mother and I were heading upstairs a few minutes ago, her to go to sleep, me, apparently to write this post (though at the time I had no thought nor intention, the fact that I am now hitting the keys with a formed idea tells me it was a forgone conclusion).

Mom said to me, “You’re so sweet.”

I thought about it, and struggled for half a moment, before responding, truthfully, “Sometimes.  Sometimes I’m just a bitch.”

My lovely mother responded with something like incredulity (on my behalf).  ”What, like I’m not ever a bitch?”

You would have to know my mom and me and have been privy to years of us in our most intimate moments to follow the rest of the conversation.  But the gist was about how when my mom is a bitch, it’s in an ‘I’m tired, I’ve had a long day/week/month, I need some space, I’ll snap at you’ way.  Every man, woman, and child had been a bitch like that.  And yes, through the years, she has sometimes upped her game and been a real bitch, but it has been rare.

Even at her worst, though, her most intense, out-of-control-bitch-ness, I don’t think she has ever come close to me (and she agrees, though she loves me much too much to outright say so).  My level of bitch cannot even be explained away as mood disorder related, though on some occasions that has added fuel to the fire.  I am something that there isn’t even properly a word for, when I am a “bitch.”

Because when I am a bitch, I am intense, intelligent, persuasive, subversive, focused, relentless, forceful, and ten million kinds of dangerous.  I could probably do more damage than an H-bomb.  Seriously.  Ask anyone who has known me intimately and at length. Actually, don’t.

I don’t bring out the bitch very much any more.  I keep her in check, because I know well the harm she can do.  She can destroy nations (though her work typically runs on a slightly smaller scale), because she has a pretty spotless history.  All of her crusades have been honest, informed, and honorable.  How powerful is that?  A bitch who only ever fights for causes that are noble and worthy of her faith, and who can stand up to everything that is dished out at her and still walk away without a spot or a stain.  Gives me chills.

Liberty Leading The People ~ Eugene Delacroix

So yes, I have reined in the wrath, and I have learned to wield my power responsibly.  And I have gone from Liberty Leading The People to La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Which has actually brought me full circle in a way that is not worth my words to explain.  

I present, instead, a visual for all of you. I’m not sure whether to be proud of myself or frightened. Probably both.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci ~ Frank Cadogan Cowper


© 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.

Sometimes You Have To Stop With The Commenting. . .

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. . . and just write a damned post of your own, already.  This is something that often keeps my comments on other bloggers’ posts to a minimum, honestly.  A post will get me thinking more and more and I will try to respond in a comment and it will turn into such a long and involved soliloquy that I have to interrupt myself and say, ‘Ruby!  Five hundred words does not a comment make!  Write it up as a damned post, already!’

And so I will.

This post is brought to you by DeeDee, author of Disorderly Chickadee.  She has recently added her fiery and indomitable voice to A Canvas Of The Minds (if you don’t know what that is, then click!), and a question posed in her very first post, Where Do I Begin?, got me all excited to write.  The question in question was, “Where does my condition end, and I begin?”

I have a much more well-defined – yet still extremely nebulous – answer for this one than the majority of people carrying mental illness diagnoses, I suspect.  To the anxiety components, I have mentioned before (y’know, somewhere in the annals of this blog) that I come from a long line of bona fide worriers.  From my great-grandmother, to my grandfather, and on to my mother has passed this trembling torch.  None of them would ever be classed as having an anxiety disorder (I can speak with total certainty about my mother and my grandfather, to be fair I did not know my great-grandmother, but my mom did).  My mother has to take some Valium before flying, but that hardly counts.  At its very worst it would be a mild phobia, specifically pteromerhanophobia (good lord, now there’s a word).

For whatever reason, that torch exploded into an inferno in me.  But that isn’t something I want to focus on here.  I don’t embrace it.  Anxiety, in any form, I am learning to solidly kick the ass of.  Anxiety, even worry is never useful or productive.  Concern is something we should all have, but once it goes beyond that stage – pfft.

Let’s talk about bipolar disorder in the context of where it ends and I begin.

The first thing I will tell you is that I was here first.  BD came later, after I had myself quite well-established, thank you very much.  This is probably what has saved me time and again, by the way.  Having such an incredibly well-defined sense of myself since. . . I don’t know what age.  To hear my mom talk, and to rely on memories and other internal evidence, I was probably born with that.  Yes, I was so fortunate as to grow up in a house with a loving family who encouraged this sensibility in me, but there is something else, something inside of me that would still be there had I grown up otherwise.

In any case, manic-depression was an uninvited guest to the party that is me.

But maybe it thought it was invited.  Maybe it got confused.  Because the other thing that’s highly pertinent is that I have what is informally called “a bipolar-type personality.”  I don’t know how common this is in others who carry this diagnosis (or, for that matter, in those who don’t).  It certainly isn’t often heard of, or if it is, only in the context of confusion and what is me, wait, is this the disorder, I don’t know!  But I know.  And the people who have known me longest know.  And even my darling PCP knows that when I am not in an episode, when I am completely and utterly symptom-free (ahem, now), I am still wild and unpredictable and madly passionate by temperament.  Always have been, always will be.  That’s just Ruby.

Which is not to say I cannot differentiate between symptom and personality trait. Actually, it is meant to say the exact opposite.  I certainly can, and with rare precision.  But having this temperament inherently made it much more difficult for me to do so, and made my disordered ups and downs infinitely easier for me to disguise.

It did something else.  It fractured relationships after I chose to seek treatment.  Not so many, but some very important ones.  It fractured them because people who loved me, people who wanted most desperately and tried so very, very hard to understand it all – through years, exhausting years of me trying to ‘get well’ – simply couldn’t.  Because now, things that I was putting forth as symptoms. . .  Well those aren’t symptoms, they’re just Ruby being Ruby.  She’s always been like that.

When in fact I hadn’t, I had just hidden the transition, the massive tectonic shift inside of me so beautifully, and not sought for help until more than a decade-and-a-half after the fact.

Oh well, right?  It’s no one’s fault.  These people didn’t want to lose me in their lives any more than I wanted to lose them.  It took me a while, but I did come to understand that.

And I wouldn’t choose to be any other way, or to walk any other path than the one I have.

Moral of the story:  ”And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne

© 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 Sum Of My Parts Is More Than I Am

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And that isn’t a bad thing.

It feels very strange and foreign to be sitting here typing this.  How long has it been?  Four days.  It’s funny how much time you can fit into four days.  I feel like I haven’t done this in something more like months, for two reasons.

The first reason is that these past four days have been fairly difficult, as days go.  The benzo withdrawal – well for now I think I see the other side, but it was definitely something to get to this point.  I drew the drapes and hunkered down, both literally and figuratively.  But the figurative part, the part where I shut down and shut out everyone and everything, that wasn’t such a bad thing either, though it felt that way at times.  It segues nicely into my second reason.

Reason two: extensive thoughtfulness and self-examination.  Some of it has been conscious and extremely deliberate, some of it has just been the result of shutting out the drone of other voices and the constant babble and noise that is the soundtrack of the world in which I reside.

You see, I’ve been spending a great deal of time alone with myself for a while now, in one sense.  I’ve been avoiding interacting with people “in real time,” face-to-face or on the telephone.  But I still blogged some, emailed and read other blogs and Facebooked and kept up with the external Rattle and Hum.  These past few days though, not so much, leading up to not at all.

Depressive isolating, right?  Wrong.  I entertained that idea some, but that’s not what it’s been at all.  I’ve just had a great deal to figure out.

When I was first formally diagnosed as bipolar, I didn’t tell anyone for a few months.  I wasn’t shocked, or even surprised, I knew exactly what I would hear going into the process.  Nor was I ashamed or afraid of what my family and friends would think.  Everyone close to me knew I was having a very difficult time of it and seeing a psychiatrist regularly.  Hell, my parents were footing 20% of the bill for the appointments (the part the insurance didn’t cover – yes, I am aware that I have very good insurance).

I didn’t tell anyone because I needed time to process and decide what the diagnosis meant to me, without any outside thoughts or any form of input.  Much as I knew about manic-depression and was already certain that was what was going on with me, there was a slight disconnect between knowing it inside and having an external source, a doctor whom I had a burgeoning trust in, officially confirm that diagnosis.  Some processing and shifting and reshuffling and sorting had to take place within, and I knew it had to take place without any external influence to disrupt all of that.  By the time I was through, I was secure enough in how I felt that I could talk to others without fear of their thoughts and opinions coloring my own.

That’s how I had always lived.  My conceptualization of things was the only one that mattered, at least when it came to me and my life.  I would listen to the thoughts and advice of those whom I respected, and on rare occasions I would even allow some of it to penetrate my tempered steel skull.

These past years, while I was in professional treatment, a paradigm shift occurred.  From what I can tell by my memory and journals and other external references, it actually occurred very suddenly, over a period of just six months.  And it was enormous, tantamount to a profound shift in the earth’s major tectonic plates.  I’m still working on isolating a cause – maybe I never will – but it decidedly produced volcanic eruptions and deep earthquakes, which resulted in nearly complete and total internal destruction.

The nearly part is the part that saved me.  But two years later I am still excavating and rebuilding the parts of me that survived.  It’s a slow, difficult task.  Sometimes I move forward, sometimes I slide far, far back.  But what I have, the bits and pieces of me that survived, well they’re pretty amazing.  There is so much to work with inside of me.  I am like a long lost temple containing riches beyond my wildest dreams.

I used to know that so implicitly, it was woven into me and probably the most central truth in my life.  My mother tells me that even when I was very young, I had such a strong, secure sense of myself, a confidence such that she never worried because she knew that whatever happened, I would always land on my feet.  I never thought about it, I didn’t ever have to remind myself of my value.  That certainty was so deep that I can only relate it to the beating of a heart.  You never have to nudge your heart and say, “Hey in there, wake up.  You’re slacking with the whole circulation of blood throughout the entirety of my body business.”  At least that’s how a heart works when it’s functioning properly, and you don’t need a pacemaker or anything else external to help it along.

Maybe that’s why all of my efforts to get back on my feet have been unsuccessful thus far.  I’ve been building the right things, I’ve been building great things, but the foundation has been faulty.  Sooner or later anything you build will crumble and collapse if the foundation isn’t firmly in place.

So that means my immediate task is to perfect and fortify mine.

Moral of the story:  ”The trick isn’t in living forever. . .  It’s in living with yourself forever.”

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2011. 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.