moominmuppet | Maybe it applies to more than slugs...

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Maybe it applies to more than slugs...

As Hagrid says, "Better out than in!"

marnaneltaranen: *snugs* good morning, love
marnaneltaranen: how are you?
ccfSarah: *hugs*
ccfSarah: Eh, ok. Life is fine, but I'm in a funk.
marnaneltaranen: Oh, I'm sorry. What's up?
ccfSarah: I think it's just a depression. I'm not sure yet, though. Might just be a bad couple of days, moodwise.
ccfSarah: http://moominmuppet.livejournal.com/853478.html
marnaneltaranen: I'm sorry to hear it *hugs*
marnaneltaranen: *looks*
ccfSarah: particularly the comments
marnaneltaranen: "Oh, shit, am I feeling too good? Is it a hypomanic phase? Is my judgement going to shit? Am I making an idiot out of myself?"
marnaneltaranen: That makes a lot of sense
ccfSarah: *nod*
marnaneltaranen: Although by the time I realise I'm in a manic phase I'm usually already dancing around the room singing show tunes. :-)
ccfSarah: I've gotten hypersuspicious of any mood change. I was talking to Mom about that -- about my very flat affect, and distrust of emotion.
ccfSarah: Part of it's recent stuff, but a large part of it is very similar to her experience.
marnaneltaranen: right. it runs in your family?
ccfSarah: That the flattened affect is self-protective; a result of the hypervigilance about the bipolar.
marnaneltaranen: *nods*
ccfSarah: Mom's very severely bipolar. In and out of the hospital.
marnaneltaranen: Oh, goodness :-(
ccfSarah: (which is also part of what scares me about all of it -- seeing a much more "worst case scenario" so up close and personal, and wondering if that's my future)
ccfSarah: I didn't realize you didn't know that about her, actually.
marnaneltaranen: You mentioned she'd been in and out of the hospital, but not why.
ccfSarah: Oh, yeah. Rapid-cycling atypical Bipolar II.
ccfSarah: plus she has neurological damage that likely resulted from one of her meds a number of years back.
marnaneltaranen: Oh, shit.
ccfSarah: She's hell to treat; nothing seems to work for long.
ccfSarah: She went through ECT last summer; that was horrible. 6-8 weeks of no memories at all.
ccfSarah: And only gradually recovering most of them.
ccfSarah: Right now she's doing better than I've seen her in years.
ccfSarah: I can have real conversations with her again; she doesn't sound stoned out of her gourd.
marnaneltaranen: Oh, I'm so sorry. How awful. :-(
ccfSarah: (funny, though -- I'm much more comfortable talking to Mom high than talking to Dad high -- at least with Mom it generally puts us in the same realm)
marnaneltaranen: *smiles*
ccfSarah: And one of the really scary things is that I know how much, much horribly worse everything in her life would be if Dad hadn't been there over the years.
ccfSarah: If he hadn't been willing to stick it out "til death do us part".
ccfSarah: She's one of the luckiest severely mentally ill people I know.
ccfSarah: If I go down that road, I seem to be going solo.
ccfSarah: That does _not_ put me in the "luckiest mentally ill people I know" category.
ccfSarah: But I wouldn't want to ask anyone to go through what Dad has, either.
ccfSarah: So the idea that I might get worse scares the living shit out of me.
marnaneltaranen: Right.
marnaneltaranen: What was she like at your age? Anything like you are now?
ccfSarah: I'm just starting to get to the same age that I can remember her at.
marnaneltaranen: Right.
ccfSarah: I was 4 when she 31.
ccfSarah: And she was much less emotionally controlled, in some ways, but much more functional in others.
ccfSarah: Her bipolar wasn't diagnosed until relatively late in life, though, and she wasn't medicated back then.
ccfSarah: She was... unpredictable.
ccfSarah: I grew up alternately fighting with her cats-and-dogs (like plenty of kids do) and trying to protect her, because I was so aware of how easily and badly she hurt.
marnaneltaranen: right.
ccfSarah: I didn't see Dad as "human" until much later in life. In fact, I think I very much _needed_ to see him as relatively infallible.
ccfSarah: I know exactly when I realized Mom was a person, and not just a parent. I was 5.
marnaneltaranen: You remember the moment?
ccfSarah: Yup.
ccfSarah: Grandma had just disowned her again, over the phone. She was sitting at the kitchen table sobbing like a child. It was heartbreaking.
marnaneltaranen: Oh, goodness.
marnaneltaranen: that's awful.
ccfSarah: Yeah. I know a lot of it was hidden from me/us, though.
ccfSarah: I didn't find out how suicidal she was all through that time until years later.
ccfSarah: Apparently she spent a lot of time trying to figure out how she could be absolutely certain it would appear accidental, and it would be final.
ccfSarah: (she wasn't willing to leave us kids coping with the idea of her suicide)
ccfSarah: (or her being in a vegetative state)
marnaneltaranen: right, I can grok that very well.
ccfSarah: So we're mostly just lucky she didn't come up with a plan she had 100% faith in.
marnaneltaranen: right.
ccfSarah: And that she had Dad. That's been especially crucial in the last 15 years or so.
marnaneltaranen: right. lucky for her.
ccfSarah: For a good chunk of that, she hasn't been competent to care for herself. I expect she'd likely be in some sort of custodial situation without him.
ccfSarah: Although now she's doing well enough that might not be the case anymore. I'm not sure.
marnaneltaranen: right.
marnaneltaranen: But when she went on medication, that didn't help much?
ccfSarah: Well, it seems to be partially responsible for the "neurological event" that totally fucked her brain.
ccfSarah: So I'm kind of bitter about that.
ccfSarah: But sometimes the meds help, sometimes they don't.
ccfSarah: The insurance company bullshit often contributes to problems.
marnaneltaranen: That's what the dr told me when I first went on psychotropes.
marnaneltaranen: "We don't know what this will do to you. We can just try it."
ccfSarah: And when a set of meds does work, it doesn't work for more than a while, generally.
ccfSarah: She's difficult enough to treat that they've written and published case studies about her.
marnaneltaranen: gosh.
ccfSarah: As for the "neurological event" -- I still don't understand everything around that.
ccfSarah: It caused partial facial paralysis and complete incoherence for months, though.
ccfSarah: We didn't know if she was ever coming back.
marnaneltaranen: Oh, goodness.
ccfSarah: I'd talk to her, she'd get confused about when I'd be home from (high) school. This was when I'd already been out of college for a year, and hadn't lived in the same state as her in five years.
ccfSarah: She couldn't finish sentences.
marnaneltaranen: Like when someone gets Alzheimer's or something.
ccfSarah: It was a lot like she was after ECT, actually.
marnaneltaranen: eep.
marnaneltaranen: So she was fucked up by undiagnosed mental health issues, and then after diagnosis she was fucked up by the treatment instead.
ccfSarah: Yup.
ccfSarah: And having watched Grandma do the "mentally ill, alienating everyone, dying alone and penniless" thing wasn't really cheery either.
marnaneltaranen: :-(
ccfSarah: I think a lot of what I'm having problems coping with in life at the moment is stuff about generational turnover.
marnaneltaranen: How do you mean?
ccfSarah: Grandma dying, Mom and Dad preparing for retirement, and I'm not the "child" generation anymore. But I don't seem to be doing "adult" very well at all, either.
ccfSarah: And I'm definitely not at the point in my life I expected I would be when this generational turnover happened.
ccfSarah: It seems like a bunch of my own longstanding expectations broadsided me really badly with the combination of the generational thing and the loss of chosen family/future thing happening around the same time.
marnaneltaranen: Right.
ccfSarah: So I'm all emotionally wound up, and having trouble connecting with people, and I'm freaking out about that more because it's running smack into those expectations, and emphasizing how far I am from them.
ccfSarah: Which mostly just results in me sitting around, being pissed off at myself about what a loser I'm being, and feeling hopeless about the future, not because it couldn't be fixed, but because I seem to be too much of a loser to fix it.
marnaneltaranen: So it's self-defeating. You fail to be the family adult and you can never be the adult because you keep failing.
ccfSarah: Yeah, something like that.
ccfSarah: And I think the biggest thing I feel like a failure about is that I'm not happy.
marnaneltaranen: You're not happy?
ccfSarah: There wasn't a whole lot of "you have to be XYZ" about expectations, but there was the "do what makes you happy" thing. And that's a common value among my social group, too.
marnaneltaranen: right.
ccfSarah: So that's the primary failure.
ccfSarah: No, I'm definitely not happy. Haven't been in ages.
marnaneltaranen: More than in a bipolar sort of not happy way, but generally.
ccfSarah: Right.
ccfSarah: I'm not succeeding in any way that matters to me.
marnaneltaranen: :-(
ccfSarah: I'm neither within a family, helping support/nuture that, nor am I doing anything particularly momentous with the rest of my life. Nor am I connecting well with other human beings, or with joy and beauty in the world.
ccfSarah: That sounds like cross-the-board failure to me.
ccfSarah: I'm living a small, stunted life.
marnaneltaranen: And you can't find any way out of that because failure feels like something you are, not something you do?
ccfSarah: Because all the things I value have to do with emotional connection and openness, and I can't seem to acheive much of that at all.
marnaneltaranen: Is that since the recent emotional turmoil, or has it been going on longer than that?
ccfSarah: What do you mean by 'recent'?
ccfSarah: It's been about the past two years, basically.
ccfSarah: chosen family dissolution, followed by Grandma's death about six months later.
ccfSarah: The problems in my life prior to that time were a different, although likely equally severe, sort.
ccfSarah: Prior to that, my fuckups were largely about getting over-involved and over-emotional.
marnaneltaranen: so you find yourself being a new and different Sarah, and you don't like it as much?
ccfSarah: And I've swung completely to the other end of the spectrum, and can't find my way back to the middle.
marnaneltaranen: right.
ccfSarah: Exactly. I'm deeply displeased and disappointed in who I've turned out to be.
marnaneltaranen: *hugs* I'm sorry. I wish I had something I could say or do to help.
ccfSarah: Thanks.
ccfSarah: It does seem to slowly be getting better, in terms of the emotional connection stuff.
marnaneltaranen: Well, that's one thing.
ccfSarah: I'm still not where I want to be, but I'm a lot better than I was a year ago.
marnaneltaranen: I hope it continues with getting where you want to get.
ccfSarah: Yeah, me too.
ccfSarah: Mind if I post most of this?
marnaneltaranen: sure! go ahead
ccfSarah: Thanks.

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This is what I am hoping for you. An internal landscape that cannot be altered by outside events or erratic brain chemistry. An undefinable Something which says "I'm me, I'm fabulous and that's just fine!"

Thanks; I think that's a lot of what I'm trying to find.

/me is bipolar too. Here's how I described it back in January:

Think about it this way. When you have an emotion, it means something. When you are sad, you are sad about *something*. When you are happy, you are happy about *something*. When you are hurt, you are hurt by *something*. Every emotion I have is suspect. Every feeling I have could be the product of brain chemistry gone awry. Imagine ignoring every emotion because it could be a lie.

With the meds, I'm learning to trust certain emotions. Happiness is different from manic. Sadness is different from depression. Content is different from neutral. Hurt is real when it doesn't instantly destroy me. I'm learning to face emotions when they occur and process them, even potential emotional hallucinations. I'm learning to ride the rollercoaster instead of fighting it. I'm learning to label emotional states as false and refuse to let them affect my long term thought patterns.

Sound familiar?

Also, I'd like to challenge your statement of failure. Not connecting well with other human beings? We seem to be starting to connect well. Wait. Unless I'm not human? :)

Sounds very familiar, although I wish I could say I'd had better luck with medications. I'm debating whether to re-explore them again, so we'll see.

Also, I'd like to challenge your statement of failure. Not connecting well with other human beings? We seem to be starting to connect well. Wait. Unless I'm not human? :)

*smile* That's the part that has been improving. The length of the arm in "keeping people at arm's length" has been shortening, and I've stopped avoiding all new contacts. The place where I'm still having the most major issues is with my closest relationships. There's a level of intimacy that I used to allow and enjoy, and haven't really been able to in the more recent past. I've gotten very bad and suspicious about asking anyone for anything I need emotionally, and about just dropping my barriers and being with people I trust. The clearest external sign of all this is that I've stopped having sex, because it feels all sorts of fucked up when I can't manage to be emotionally and psychologically fully present with the people I love in that circumstance. I'm hoping that will change sooner rather than later; I miss those connections.

That's the part that has been improving. The length of the arm in "keeping people at arm's length" has been shortening, and I've stopped avoiding all new contacts.

Is there anything I/we can do to help?

Thanks; I think it's mostly internal stuff that has to sort out, though.

Which isn't to say my friendships haven't been helping just by being your wonderful selves, but aside from an awareness that I'm moving really slowly on anything to do with intimacy (and I'm mostly refering to emotional intimacy; the sexual is a side-effect), which folks already seem sensitive to, I can't think of anything.

well, then, *hugs*. Move as slowly as you need to. :)

I have no real words of wisdom to add

Take the meds, chart the highs and lows so you can start to see what the cycle is (i know not easy)

Make a list of what you have done to make the world better, and your part in the good fight.

Know grace is never easy.

Ash

Take the meds, chart the highs and lows so you can start to see what the cycle is (i know not easy)

I'm not on any meds for the psych stuff at this point; I've had a lot of bad luck with them in the past, although I'm considering re-exploring. Part of the reason I write about these things in LJ, though, in both public and private posts, is for charting purposes. The big problem I find is that I get so emotional and upset reading back through them, that I have trouble just doing the charting from it. Some days I wish I could pay a total stranger to read the whole damn journal and chart it for me, since they wouldn't care about "good memories/bad memories" *grin*

Thanks.

I suggest Lamictal for brain meds. It's just a mood stabilizer and I've had great (aka no side effect) experiences with it.

*nod* I've been through a bunch of the anti-seizure meds that are used for bipolar. Lamictal is one from that class I haven't tried, though.

Given that I don't recall particularly dramatic improvements in stability during the six or seven years we tried them, I'm not sure whether other life factors were functioning as confounding factors, or whether they just don't seem to do much for me (if I've inherited Mom's weird reactions to psych meds, this wouldn't be all that surprising).

Part of the curse of bipolarity is partial reaction to psych meds. Figuring out the brain cocktail is so annoying...

I do understand the meds thing

I have been in an ongoing "negotation" with the clinic I go to about my meds. So far the depresion can be delt with, but the PTSD meds i keep getting either make me thow up or become zombie woman, or are the type if you stop taking them you can get seiziers not a good thing when you have ADD and often forget things

while you might not be able to read all the entrys how about putting a letter grade in the subject so that if you do a calander view with subjects you can get a quick look at how your doing long term

and if you use the mood icons just skippping from one to another might help

Ahs

That's exactly what I was thinking just before I read it. You should get someone to read and chart it. Or uh... have someone else do it since if you had them do it then they wouldn't be a total stranger anymore.

I used to make a graph. That way I could just put a dot where I was feeling (between manic and depressed). At the end of the week I would connect the dots to see how far I went up and down. That way, I could see the flow without having to read through depressing stuff.

I can emphasize with a lot of this. I feel as if I've lost any standards by which I can judge myself. I am so distant from the life that I lived before my divorce and so damaged by its end that I have trouble not viewing myself as a completely different person with completely different values. However, since I can't rationally examine myself pre-crisis, I don't have any basis for that view. Nor do I have any ideals or standards for who I should be now. I find myself deferring a lot to general society standards. I base my notions of personal success on how clean my house is, and my professional life and physical appearance. I mistrust relationships to such a degree that success and failure in them registers as another point of cynicism. I think that I'd like to change this and have real interactions with other people again, but I can't seem to shake my general world view that if it involves another human its going to lead to suffering.

Likely, the best thing for me to do would be to start reconnecting with myb predivorce self and not view that person as a total deluded failure. I was remembering this morning the mechanic that used to fix Leyloken & my cars and sometimes for free because he thought we were such a nice sparkly young couple with so much potential. I think that my inability to view Leyloken as anything other than lazy, overly self-indulgent and treacherous makes it hard to give any value to who I was given that I was so wrapped up in him.

I used to distinguish my identity from my parents in so many ways. Lately, I distinguish myself from my mother based on intelligence and style and from my father because I'm less self-absorbed, but thats about it. I've come to see myself entirely as an intellectual and physical person and not at all as a spiritual/emotional one. Emotion simply equals my crazy mood swings that make life harder...

Yeah, all of this resonates a lot for me, too. It's really almost odd how similarly we've reacted and changed. We shared a lot of viewpoints then, we share a lot of viewpoints now, but they're completely different than they were, and we seem similarly discomfited by that.

Nor do I have any ideals or standards for who I should be now. I find myself deferring a lot to general society standards. I base my notions of personal success on how clean my house is, and my professional life and physical appearance.

I've been freaking about how much my sense of normal and acceptable has started to get constrained by my coworkers/dominant culture in general. I don't seem to have the confidence to defend and maintain my perspectives the way I used to. I feel like maybe I'm becoming a "good girl" again in ways I haven't been since high school.

I mistrust relationships to such a degree that success and failure in them registers as another point of cynicism. I think that I'd like to change this and have real interactions with other people again, but I can't seem to shake my general world view that if it involves another human its going to lead to suffering.

I hear you there.

I think that my inability to view Leyloken as anything other than lazy, overly self-indulgent and treacherous makes it hard to give any value to who I was given that I was so wrapped up in him.

*nod* And there, too, although obviously to a much lesser degree. But still -- someone I've known for almost a decade, someone who was family, someone I then fell for, and still my judgement was that fucked? It makes it really hard to use the usual excuses.

we were such a nice sparkly young couple with so much potential.

But you were, in so many ways. And there were the fucked up parts that hurt you both so badly, and prevented it from being maintainable in the long run, but don't doubt the beauty was there, and was real. The error wasn't in the loving, but in the knowing when to let go. We all wanted to believe there was a way of saving what was past saving, by the end. And I know he wanted to believe it to; I remember him crying on my shoulder.

I think I did the same thing in my relationship with Mike; I didn't call it quits soon enough; I kept fighting for it in the way romantics say one should (complete with "happy ending" implication), and damaged the possibility of friendship between us, instead.

That's been one of the hardest lessons for me, and one I'm still struggling with understanding without over-reacting to. I've always been so big on sticking through things, it's been a core value, and I think I've finally learned that sometimes that's just not the solution, and that I don't have to carry guilt for the rest of my life if I decide not to. I still don't know how to identify the point when "beyond saving" has been reached, but at least now I know to watch for my own tendency to go beyond it.

Romance stories definitely don't tell you that sometimes you have to walk away. sigh.

i hope this doesn't sound fucked up, but i didn't realize how much we have in common, in terms of outlook. i don't know what else to say (depression and intimacy issues of my own)

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Maybe it applies to more than slugs...

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