sticks and rocks and stars

Dear Lithium,

So I guess that's it. We're done. You were abusive, so it's for the best. No more amiloride to treat the incontinence. No more kidney damage. I might be able to go off the thyroid med eventually. The final straw was when you went toxic. Full blown, slow creep. Fine motor skills have been on the fritz for years, but the gross ones went too, I would try to pay attention in conversations, but you'd snatch them away no matter how hard I tried. Which when I told people about, I was discredited so viciously. And then the over exaggerated doctors at the ER, because you can't treat the crazy like normal rational people. No matter how organized and communicative and observant I am about my health.

My brain feels clearer than it has in years. Like I can think again. Not manic thoughts. Just thoughts.
I'm with Abilify again. I'm worried about the akathisia coming back. And the metabolic impact. I'm moving things slowly. Little bit by little bit. It's been over a month now and it's tolerable. But it looks like drinking will likely be back out of the question. Which means I shouldn't, really.

I wish I could just stick with Lamictal. There might be fine motor issues with that (or the pain could be arthritis starting to rear its head). But it's pretty mellow.

Really, I wish I could quit you all. It's a slap in the face to see "mentally ill" on a doctor's chart. I'm not just a crazy to be blanketly lumped with everything. It's bipolar. Manic Depressive. And I manage it well. I feel the extremes, but others rarely notice. I've always been functional. I'm told I carry it well. It's chemical, it's biological, it's like any other physical ailment. Except, you know, it makes me completely dismissible.

You know, Lithum. The one good thing about you was you were a great excuse for not being able to get pregnant. Who wants your kid? Let's be realistic.

But I guess that's it. We're done.

~Me

the thought occurred today, while "listening" to a friend on gchat talk about her newest pseudo relationship and reconciling the last one, listening to my mother's complaints for my half hour break, and listening to my baby brother for an hour while grocery shopping after work, and getting calls from my ex so he could monologue at me, that there are very few people in my life who actually listen to me. this is particularly frustrating because the past few days i have wanted to SCREAM. either the new suite has a ghost, or i'm having auditory hallucinations. i've been anxious and unable to focus. i've had the telltale racing thoughts. and i am pissed as all fucking hell that i need to take thyroid medication because the lithium has trashed that and the medication is so damned DIFFICULT. must be taken an hour before or two hours after food. cannot be taken within 4 hours of iron, calcium or zinc. EVERYTHING has iron and/or calcium. no, really, everything. the three impede absorption. and, unlike the psych meds, which there is a hope of coming off of at one point, my thyroid is probably trashed for life. i am so frustrated, and completely exhausted. i really should write here more, re the lack of feeling listened to, but see exhaustion. sigh.

i told a friend i'd help her out with a one day festival that's a tiny sub-event of burning man. so i'm spending my night listening to and watching demos from performers and hopefuls so we can place them on stages. some thoughts:

~dj/house music is yet another reason i don't go to clubs. if i want to listen to repetitive, slow-changing largely instrumental music, i'll listen to phillip glass, thank you very much

~most files of said dj/house music's wave forms look like interesting dildos when compressed

~i really wish i could go to bed, but it's a google doc that i'm making notes in, and i want to get through it all before people have a chance to look and judge me for my silly temp reminder comments

~fuck that, i'm barely a third of the way through and i've been at it for over an hour

~it is very frustrating that one cannot adjust the zoom in google docs

`i admit temporary defeat

i work in an office that, at one point, had up to 8 dogs a day in it. Now there's a cap at 4 dogs a day. 3 of them are, daily, the owners' black and white yippy dogs who spend 8+ hours in the office. they go out for a walk maybe once a day. with leashes on their collars, but the owner never holds the leashes and just lets them wander mini-city streets. so these dogs poop and pee and vomit all over the office. when vip's come, the dogs do not stay at home, no, they come in and we just burn a shitton of incense so we smell like a bunch of pot smoking hippies with dogs instead of just runofthemill crazies with dogs.

i'm dog sitting right now for friends down the street. i was originally told that i just had to feed the dogs in the morning and the fish and leave them to it, the doggie door was open 24/7, because when they were locked in at night, they pooped on the carpet. and then last night, by first night of sitting, the neighbors call to complain about barking all night, so daddies email me from europe, where they've been for the past 2 months, to say they need to be walked at night to finish their business, and then the door closed and reopened in the morning.

i am not looking forward to tomorrow morning.

so never having owned a dog, i've never really had to walk one, and certainly have never had to put a dog into a harness. grace a dieu a friend happened to be at hand and helped me, by which i mean, completely did herself, the harnessing process for these two little guys. because in the middle of it, a friend called me hysterical because her sorta kinda boyfriend just told her he slept with someone else a month ago. So I'm walking a dog, my friend with the other, trying to play sympathetic friend/therapist while on guard for and plastic-bagging doggie doodoo. so now i smell like soap, rather than incense, covering doggie stench. aside from instituting no phone calls after 11/once i've gone to the doggie duty, i don't know quite how i'm going to manage tomorrow night. wednesday, the next door neighbor is supposed to be back home, so the door can be left open because she can hear them, and she is there so she can feed them. please oh please oh please oh please. i *might* get paid for this some now that there's walking and pooping involved.

but i hate your dog. it is not your child. it is an animal. it can only be moderately trained, and will never clearly communicate. i will never dog sit again. ever. i will watch your cat, because your cat is toilet trained, and does not need to be walked. but i fucking hate your dog.

it's the kind of grey out today that makes the streets and sidewalks look wet even though they aren't. it's not the greenish grey of an impending thunderstorm. it's more a yellowish grey. like there's rain in the air, but the air won't let it go.

i woke up today to the grey light, the damp chilled air coming in my window, and the sound of cars driving through wet streets. the rhythmic shhhhhhhheee, the rise and fall. i burrowed into my summertime bed and listened. i didn't really have any thoughts, wasn't remembering anything with words. but it felt safe and comfortable and right. when i was in high school, i used to try to find the perfect song to play, the right book to read, the right lighting for sitting in my room poetically as it rained. i was trying so hard, i couldn't see it was beautiful all by itself.

when i finally got my self put together, kneesocks with a sweater awaiting me at work, and got out the door, i inspected the ground for rain. i couldn't tell, because of the yellow grey. when i got on the street to work, the street outside my window, half the street was wet, the other half dry, and it ended after a few tenths of a mile. it was depressing to find out, in a way wholly different and more frustrating than the pleasant melancholy of the rain.

i miss living with seasons and weather. my first year out here, that winter we had tons of rain, flash floods, winds. even thunderstorms. the air got red, instead of green, before the big storms. I miss the uplifting melancholy of fall, the beauty of the leaves changing, the crispness of the air, the sharp brilliant blue of the sky. when winter starts to give way to spring, the quests for the first sprouting flowers. the joy, and the rain, watching lightning from the open garage. i miss changing clothes. i miss wearing petticoats.

i miss having joints that can handle the cold. i hate feeling like i'm trapped in the dull brown desert.

I.
today was a very creative day. i haven't been good at taking time to be creative. i think i'm going to schedule a minimum of 3 hours a week for myself, one saturday, one sunday, and one over the course of the week. it was good, relaxing. a friend was over to sew snap tape on her pants to make tear away pants for her upcoming very first real burlesque act. i worked on a cross stitch i had hoped to have done for my father's birthday in june. but sewing circle lasted a good 5.5 hours. and then after she left, i went for a walk, then watched a movie and sewed again. and now that i've watched it, i want to read and discuss and do Analysis, which is a different sort of creativity.


II.

i just finished watching "brief conversations with hideous men." i was poking at hulu thursday while at work and alone in the suite, saw it was available, and saw it was expiring this weekend. it was one of those back of the mind meaning to see type movies. it's based on a david foster wallace book, you see, and he was the writer in residence or some such position at my college, and being an english major, i probably saw him in passing once or twice, but i never had the energy, focus, or drive to audition for any creative writing classes. i heard of him second and third hand, and always meant to read something of his. so watching this movie seemed like a good cheaters way to start. there was a saturday meeting of the english department when he hung himself, i believe it was. it was after i'd left, but i still knew people who were there who told me.

brief conversations with hideous men. it reminds me of an english class my senior year, race, gender & science fiction. not in the syllabus, but in the personal content of the class. the class had two dear friends and one awkward boy connection and a class blog and the realization that every single race or gender focused book in the course had at least one rape.

my brain is having a very hard time reigning this into coherent, linear though, so i apologize in advance for any incoherencies.

the movie dealt with men in the post-feminist movement world, being interviewed by a woman at a university, and her personal life, and a student's paper and two students academic argument about modern woman. the university woman is the only significant female character. the movie largely reaffirmed my belief that i'm far batter off being romantically interested in women, and aren't i lucky to be wired in a way to prefer them. but another running thread through part of the film is rape, and the concept of a male being raped.

in my class, on the blog especially, a lot of the students whined about the race and gender. i put some very venomous posts up, explaining why it mattered, and you can't just choose to ignore it, particularly in a class focusing on it.

the rape part hit hard. it was almost like, to be empowered, you had to be raped. overcoming normal difficulties just wasn't enough. and having been date raped and doped up on pain killers and fucked at and then, oops, come morning my intestines exploded and i almost died, i have a hard time with rape. and people joking about it, or belittling it. i mean, i was never okay with it, but post-experiences, it's more visceral.

what was particularly hard was not just vilifying men in arguments, making it inclusive of men, because they can be raped too. because the guy in the class that i'd had a one night stand with talked to me rather deeply first and told me about being bipolar and refusing medication, and being raped. and so after my freakout the next morning (we hadn't used protection because we both stated no penetration as a boundary) and subsequent calming down, i tried to talk to him and see how he was, and got radio silence. so there's a part of me that wonders is i took advantage of him, put him back in the same space as when he was raped. so knowing he was in the class, and what he had said, and what had passed between us, it was really hard to walk the line, not just make it a specifically cast power dynamic, but a generalized power dynamic.

in the movie, when it comes up, at first it's introduced in the abstract, then as happening to his sister, then to him. he's talking about horrible, depraved things being good for a person. he keeps asking does it matter if it's [person/more personal]. it was very uncomfortable. because, while you're definitely entitled to your own opinion, i don't like when people try to foist theirs upon others. and while, at times, i think everything that happened in my life is important and i wouldn't change any of it, even the awful stuff, i increasingly regret the roads not taken and could very much do with not having some of my very negative experiences.

i have a friend who, in college, when she was looking at being a woman's studies major, was working on developing a paper for a class and was told to contact another professor about, roughly, marginalization of black lesbians and the need to pick one of the identities over the other. she got an email back from this professor telling her she was making up ridiculous segregation and trying to make something from nothing and being offensive thinking she knew anything about this. when my friend wrote back saying she was a black lesbian, and was friends with may black lesbians, and was asking about a trend noticed from personal experience, the professor was suddenly all helpful and apologized, saying based on how she spelled her name, she assumed my friend was white.

i'm not sure how i feel about the mentality that one's opinion only matters, is only REALLY valid, if it's related to personal experience. i think it often bothers me, though. it doesn't allow for a sympathetic ally, or a third party perspective, something removed and possibly more rational.

i liked the way the story was told in the story. i could have done without the commercials, but such is the price of hulu. there were some really interesting moments of overlap of scenes. it wasn't entirely linear, which i liked. i will likely watch it again after reading the book.

III.

my apartment is a wreck and i haven't done anything today.

so i'm going to start by cross posting from fucking meds.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Risperidone

I started taking you June 22, 2010. And I must say, I do appreciate that I no longer hear and see things, because, dear teenage self, hallucinations are not cool and romantic and comforting. No, they are scary as fuck.

But Risperidone, this is where you stop being a dear. This is where you start being a demon. I do not enjoy that you make my head fuzzy and dull. I dislike the inability to think of words. I could do without this on-set of hormonally-induced migraine with vomiting that, when I called my psychiatrist to ask for assistance, she gave me brief sympathy and the comment that I was starting to sound manic again, and the direction to increase the dosage of you, Risperidone, by fifty percent. And why do I blame you for these migraines, demon Risperidone? Because you raise prolactin levels and I know you are doing this because I am FREAKING LACTATING. I am in no way, shape, or form pregnant, yet dribble I do from time to time. I'm like the manic Mary of the mental illness concept-child. A concept who apparently needs milk.

So Risperidone, I am soon off to the doctor to get a starter pack of a new med that could give me a life threatening rash, and I may not be able to come completely off of you, but I oh so look forward to the prospect of not being a headachey, vomiting, milkable mess.

Good riddance, I hope I hope I hope,

capricia

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

so, i've got the crazy. have for a while, learned to cope with depression, was a decent arrangement we'd come to. then after a year and a half of working part time as a teacher and cobbling together other creative and diverse jobs, i started working fulltime for a soulless reality tv production company, and i got acne, and i got bipolar I.

i always used to think being bipolar would be awesome. lots of energy, get things done, get really gregarious. it sounds exciting, especially, i think, if you're already depressed. you can't bargain away your depression, but if there could be a positive flip side, that would be Something.

but the decisions made aren't good ones, and i didn't get to channel all this extra energy. when the best decision you can make out of the ones you've presented yourself is to sleep with you manipulative, certifiably crazy, leech-like pushy ex's girlfriend with him in the room and you not liking men a'tall anymore...it's a problem. the singular determination to grow a full vegetable garden inside the second story apartment, by the scorching window, is, though some might call it admirable, decidedly crazy. and there's this intensity, whatever the obsession of the moment is, it is a matter of life and death, it MUST be done, to its fullest, RIGHT NOW.

it is, quite simply, exhausting, damaging, and frustrating.

being hypomanic is great, getting useful things done, still sleeping reasonably, still have a sense of focus on reality. but it doesn't stick. and it escalates maddeningly easily, and there's no clear line between the two. at all.

i managed to keep it mostly away from work. but people started telling me to lay off the caffeine (which i don't consume), slow down, explain what i need again because i don't make any sense. it was mortifying.

because when i start to get crazy, a small part of me dissociates. always has. i've mostly tamed it so it's not always hyper critical 24/7. but there's a part that knows i'm making poor decisions, that steers me towards the least damaging of a rotten selection. that knows i'm spinning out of control and am not social, but scary. that is fully aware of the fact that the music i'm hearing isn't there, that there really isn't a dog behind me, that those are newspaper and magazine dispensers, not hunched over homeless people on the street. but it's a difficult voice to listen to, especially since it makes me feel more insane.

when i was around 10 or 12, i read "i never promised you a rose garden." i fell madly in love with schizophrenia, with hallucinations, with insanity. slightly older, i was utterly entranced with drugs, hallucinogenics. it sounded like the height of ecstasy to me.

i want to go back in time and throttle my teenaged self, on the off chance that it would somehow make this go away, that i wished this on myself.

my mother always gets angry at me when i talk about being crazy limiting me, limiting what i can expect from myself on a daily basis. "look at the professor from 'A Beautiful Mind,' he doesn't let his problems get in his way," and she says it like i'm dealing with the most trivial thing. but there are limitations. i'm on a medication that relaxes my eye muscles so i can't focus. it's particularly bad with reading, especially on the computer. it's problematic for someone who works on a computer. my eyes are in a constant state of hurt as a result. sleep schedules are strict and imposing--i don't get to say how much i sleep. it feels like whining about bullshit, but--well, where else can i? certainly not in public. not at work, where i risk giving a round about excuse to get fired. not among anyone i know, save in hushed corners. i take 11 bits of pill a day for my brain, and i can't function long without them, i'm wholly dependent on these fucking chemicals, but it's not real, it's in my head, it's all a matter of mind over matter. it's enough to drive you insane.

i'm pissed as fuck about the whole situation, but i don't have any place to channel, to use the anger. when i speak up, when i scream, my voice sounds ridiculous. but that's for another post.

i'm going to try to make this a place all about my head. i have a boring me journal for the day to day. but it's also very much a part of me right now, and i refuse to censor myself in my own space. sooooo yeah. welcome to me.