Begin at the Beginning: The UltraSimple Journaling Exercise

List the three most physically toxic habits you have (smoking, caffeine, not resting, sugar etc)

1. Not paying attention to what I eat (eating unconsciously, ignoring allergic reactions to foods, eating poor quality food)

2. Using caffeine in place of rest

3. Considering junk food an answer to all my problems

List the three most toxic mental habits you have:

1. Believing pessimism to be realism

2. Reacting impulsively to negative emotions and stress

3. Procrastination

List your three most toxic relationships. What purpose do they serve? What prevents you from giving them up?

1. FOOD – I don’t eat for reasons of hunger anymore, I eat both for pleasure and for punishment. I use it to numb both emotions and physical pain, but due to allergic reactions I often end up in worse pain for a few minutes of ‘high.’ I starve myself after I binge, or eat to the point of pain when something has gone wrong in my personal life. I can’t give it up because we obviously need food to live, so I can’t quit it like most people can quit their drugs of choice. I can, however, live happily with far less junk and more vegetables/fruits/lean protein/water.

2. MOM- My most toxic and most rewarding at the same time. I love my Mother to the point of codependency, knowing we keep each other from getting healthier and moving on in our lives. I don’t want to lose my closeness with my Mother, but I need to lose the extreme enmeshment if I want to improve my quality of life.

3. MEMORY OF D- D has become a legend in my own mind, and it’s for good reason: We had amazing times together. But he was also the source of a massive amount of pain and wasted time/opportunity. If I ever hope to have a healthy relationship that could lead to the marriage and kids I’d like, I need to de-deify D.

What would your life look like without these habits, relationships and toxic behaviors:

I have no idea, to the point that it’s actually scary. It’s strange that I don’t know how to see further into the future when all I do is worry about it and I am never living in the moment.

In Which I am Suddenly 15 Again…

So, my parents are leaving me to care for the house and the stroke victim cat…

For 5 days. 5 whole days. My darling, doting Mother is doing her best not to seem like she is shitting herself, and I appreciate the effort. She has quietly alerted both my brothers, both next door neighbors and a few sundry acquaintances that I will be (dramatic music) ON MY OWN. 

This would all seem relatively normal in the context of the wayward teenager I once was…but as a 30 year old with chronic ill health recently sprung from the cuckoo’s nest, it makes me feel…well…special.

Logic understands, Crazy is pouting.

I find that Logic is personified in my head as looking somewhat like Maureen O’Hara (although m’lady is serving up some serious crazy eyes in that Wiki pic). I suppose I see Logic as a sort of proper, cheerless, pale lady of stature who sits quietly judging in the corner at the party while everyone else gets shitfaced.

Crazy, on the other hand…

..is somewhere between Emilie Autumn, Juliette Lewis and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Crazy is a bit sexy, a bit loud, a bit off kilter…always farrrr more reactive and unpredictable. While I am trying, these days, to listen to Logic so I can move from being a fat, sick, failed 30 year old PSO living with my parents to some form of successful….Crazy is a bit of a siren song.

What has being a good girl gotten you lately?

While Logic quietly begged my patience in that hospital bed, even she snapped her tether and threw up her hands at the words ‘Drug addict’ and ‘she’ll have to be here for awhile’ being spoken. See? Even a creature like Logic can give up when the shit is rolling at break neck speed down the hill. Crazy was excited to be let loose, and damn it felt good…

I have never, ever, EVER been ‘that’ kind of psych patient…

…Nor have I been that kind of person…any negative feelings I’ve ever had, even towards others, I turned inward. I’ve always been a bit of a cannibal, eating my frustrations, my self loathing, the anger I didn’t feel free to express….And I had a kind of snobbery about it, to be honest….I never yelled, screamed, threw things, nor have I ever been forcefully sedated or restrained. Even at my worst, people barely have to raise their voice to me to get me to comply.

But this one time…

When Logic said ‘Fuck it’ and let Crazy out to play, I got to say what I wanted. Again, it was a lot like being a teenager…even though I wasn’t even saying the worst of what I was thinking, my Mother’s jaw dropped it what seemed like a caricature of Victorian horror at my outburst….which only spurred the ER doctor on, trying to quietly tell my parents that she had dealt with many mentally unstable addicts and I was ‘No different.’

It really didn’t matter if Logic or Crazy was in charge, no one was listening to me.

My Mother asked me ‘Do you really think this is helping your cause?’ and I replied, ‘What has being a good girl gotten me?’

‘At least, this way, I get to tell these bitches what I think of them and I FEEL BETTER.’

So, fuck it. Let them feel vindicated in their assumptions. Either way, it didn’t change what happened in the next 3 days.

In the Hands of Doctor Indian Elvis

I had a sinking feeling from the moment I saw his picture….

…it was hard NOT to have a sinking feeling when you are shipped to a hellhole at the ass end of the bay area on an involuntary psych hold you believe unjustified….but I felt a sliver of hope when I was told that if I was communicative, open and honest with the doctor overseeing me there was a chance this could be resolved quickly and quietly.

Each doctor’s picture was on the wall for our convenience…

….And among three other rather frumpish gentlemen, the types I assume patronized the company I work for after coming home from such stressful day jobs, there was a picture of a relatively young Indian man…his dyed hair slicked back and a somewhat inappropriately chest baring designer shirt the focus of said photo. He reminded me somewhat vaguely of a very vain gym teacher I had all through my formative years crossed with the bad guy from Slumdog Millionaire. I wasn’t hopeful…but the Logic said ‘Stay calm. Do not prejudge the situation. He is probably a perfectly reasonable man.’

And it was not the first time Logic was proven wrong….

Doctor Indian Elvis and I did not get along from the start, where he introduced himself by talking over my head to the assembled staff ‘She is good girl? Not giving you trouble?’ Being a woman of 30 treated straight of the bat like a mentally challenged puppy…..Logic begged me still to keep a cool head while Crazy was revving her engines…’You’re trapped, you’re trapped, you’re trapped…no one is going to listen to you, no one gives a shit, you are FUCKED.’

While Logic was more sensible, Crazy always tended to talk MUCH LOUDER…..

There was one point where he asked me if I was a pill popper….those exact words….and when I was a little startled by the frank language he took my muteness for further proof of my mental incompetence and pantomimed eating pills like M&Ms….there was something in that gesture that killed Logic’s steadfast and true voice, giving Crazy the opening to whisper in her leering, slightly hysterical tone:

‘You are never getting out of here.’

 

 

Dear ER Doctor,

On the worst night that succeeded the worst day of my life, I found myself under your care. You labeled me a suicidal drug addict, treated me with the palpable distaste you thought such a creature deserved, and even went as far as to pull my parents aside in the middle of a crowded ER and tell them you had seen many disturbed junkies and that I would need to be ‘locked up for awhile’ for my own good.

Here’s the thing…

I was neither suicidal nor am I a drug addict. You labeled me as both without listening to a word I said. I know my body….a body that has been wracked with chronic health issues and severe pain recently. It has made me feel hopeless and depressed that the issues haven’t been able to be controlled by the usual means.

I have been in pain for 13 years

…And in those 13 years I have been on many opiates and NSAIDS. I have abused none of them…I take them when prescribed, as prescribed, despite the looks and the judgement that gets passed when asking for them. That’s 13 years I have NEVER had a problem with abuse or chemical dependency.

Yes, I was depressed. Wouldn’t you be?

The average length of my back injury flare ups were two weeks at the most. The night in question I found myself under your ‘care’ it was going on 2 and a half months of pain. I had stopped driving. My best friend had just moved out of state. My psychiatrist hadn’t filled one of my meds and I was in a state of DAWS. 

I was in pain and under an extreme amount of stress.

You made no effort to empathize with me or help me in anyway after inacting a 51/50 and told me I would be held against my will until they could find a facility to transfer me to to see out the remainder of my involuntary hold. A man was brought in, drunk and high on meth, and his physical discomfort as he spit, screamed and beat the staff was attended to with far more care and concern then I was afforded.

I snapped.

…Not even as much as I truly wanted to, but I started yelling. Became ‘combative.’ My Mother seemed mortified at how ‘rude’ I was being, and I told her ‘I’ve been a good girl all day today….what has it gotten me? They still treat me like trash. This way at least I get to vent my feelings honestly.’ She apologized over and over to you, dear doctor. You said I wasn’t the first addict you’d dealt with and wouldn’t be the last.

People with real pain are not always addicts.

You assumed I was, though, much like the doctors I would meet in the subsequent days. And I was treated with disdain, and my private matters and your assumptions about them were let out for the world to see.

I have no way of proving this…

….I am sitting here in a lot of pain, but having taken nothing. Why? Because I don’t want to be treated the way you treated me..so  I don’t want to go to the doctor or the ER. I sit here suffering because you confirmed for me the worst fears I had about being treated like a junkie and a mental case.

Next time someone comes in to your ER with pain and depression, please look at them differently then you looked at me. Please try and consider that they may be a human who is desperate for help, and not a con artist. Please try and treat them like a human. Please remember your oath. Please.

-TS

Really, when you think about it, it’s the spine that pulled reality TV taut..

Wait, let me start over. As you will come to know, I tend to pop in in the middle of a thought….drives my Mother CRAZY.

But, really, what I was thinking about was the fact we are all a bit voyeuristic.

There’s a feeling of the grass being greener, especially when wondering about someone richer, more successful, or possibly just sexier in general.

We all wonder about the lives of people who have what we don’t…and we are deeply unhappy if we discover that the glamour of their existence is not what we thought.

That’s where the production aspect of the modern reality TV show comes in…we want to know people who are beautiful living exotic, dramatic lives..we really don’t want to see the average joe (we ESPECIALLY don’t want to see the average jane) going to a 9 to 5 job, coming home to TV and a leftovers then falling asleep in a cloud of preservative farts.
So, when I tell you the truth about my life, it’s going to seem like a gross exageration. I wouldn’t even really believe it if someone else were to tell it to me…and, to be honest, a lot of it is in the telling.
I’ve always been a story teller.

Even as a child, I had this idea of my life in the cinematic sense..something in my brain always watched my life from the outside in, putting each experience into episodes…looking back now I think it was a coping mechanism as well as my creative muscle flexing from an early age. However, it would get me into a lot of trouble and prevent me from experiencing life in the moment. Really, I think it was a symptom of the anxiety and depression that would color a lot of my adult experiences.
So, here we are at story number one: I struggle with mental illness.

I am trying to reframe the story even as I type this, because for so many years of my life the frame that defined my existence was: I am mentally ill. While there is a certain comfort in labels, there is inherent danger in them….it can be comforting to define yourself, to have lines to color inside of in childlike comfort, but we can also become attached to them and all the negativity and preconceived notions that we may have been raised with.
Anyway: fuck it. I’m nuts. Have been for awhile.
That’s the crazy tip of the crazy iceberg.