In The Bitter Glass
Tuck's Stories
Let me say up front that this is not comfy. In some ways it feels like I am trotting out the dirty underwear of my soul for all the world to see. But I've lived long enough to know that people find help and comfort in the strangest places; so, out comes the underwear, and if even one struggling soul finds here something they need, then I can live with the embarrassment. +Tuck+
I. Strange Little Girl
I remember....being very shy, uncertain in new social situations; with adults, yes, but especially with peers. This Was as far back as I can remember; indeed, is still so today, though I've learned to 'pretend' well enough to get by, even be mistaken for an extrovert. In those days, though, I could not 'pretend' yet. I had trouble making friends and was often the target of peers looking for someone to bully and taunt...
The lack of friends did not bother me so much; I preferred to be alone. I'd walk alone, play alone. I especially liked being outside on cold cloudy windy days. Such weather suited my mood. I liked to read, too, and play indoors with my toy horses, making up whole fantasy worlds....-I do remember sitting on a neighbor's swingset on a grey Saturday afternoon in November, nine years old and wailing to the wind, "but why aren't I popular???" Not that I wanted or cared to be at the top of the social heap, but to me, then, "popular" meant simply that people left you alone and didn't pick on you, tease you, laugh at you for being different, not knowing "the rules" of social interaction, not being good at sports, for dressing funny, thinking differently...
All I ever wanted was to be left alone.
Even my teachers picked on me in sixth grade, I was that pathetic. I remember having trouble getting to sleep every Sunday night; indeed, almost any night that Mom was working - night nurse, 5-6 nights in a row. Dad was there but it wasn't the same, and I was desperately afraid of everything: that Mom would get killed in an accident and never come home again, that the house would catch fire, that Something - monster, burglar, psycho-killer - would get into my room. -But I was especially afraid of fire. I'd have recurring nightmares about the house being on fire and my legs leaden, moving so slowly, unable to get out or find my teddy bear or Mom or my baby brother....
...but childhood was far from terrible, really. I was loved and well-cared-for, and I had my times when I could be happy, comfortable, even quite silly, jumping around and being loud and showing off like "normal" kids will. Or I'd sit and read, lots and lots of books; and I took pride in my straight-A's and my musical abilities. And every so often I'd have a good stretch at school, when I was "okay" with the other kids - or at least hiding the non-okayness a little better. But mostly I remember... the sadness, the apartness. Sitting in the back of the classroom by the fishtank, and wishing I could be the fish with nothing to do but swim around, not needing or being expected to interact with other people. I was scared a lot and lonely a lot and sad a lot.. Sometimes I told Mom about it, but she worked nights, slept as best she could by day. She was tired and unhappy and -- looking back now -- dreadfully depressed, herself, and had only so much to give, though she loved us as best her own problems and sicknesses would allow.
And sometimes Dad would ask me what was wrong, and it was hard to tell him because he was so overpowering, and I'd tell him in my unsure halting way and he'd say, in true left-brain accountant well-meaningness, "well, that's silly" or "that's not such a big deal" or "these problems really aren't problems at all".....and he *meant* well, I can't fault him there, but he had no idea - how could he? - how devastating his perfectly logical adult assessments of the situation were to the nine-, ten-, twelve-year old who was in the feelings, in the situations, living the "little, childish" problems at the time.....Dad, too, had his problems and concerns and heartaches and angers, and he loved us well, but he loved also from within these limitations.
Parents are human. I know that now. But not then. -I remember thinking that "if I clean the house while Mommy's sleeping, she'll be happier" or "if I didn't bother Mommy during the day and kept my little brother and me quiet, she'd sleep better and be happier" or "Mommy's mad and crying and miserable again and it's all my fault" -- my fault. -If I didn't act like such a kid, making messes and constantly asking questions and arguing with my brother; if I wasn't so weird; if I hadn't been born, even, then they'd be happy. I know better than that - now; but that doesn't always placate the strange little girl who is still and always in here.
II. "The Happiest Years Of Your Life"
I remember - as a teen - being incredibly functional on an academic level: A/B student all the way, most teachers loved me, good with writing, good with music, my social life improved as I got into high school and found somewhat like-minded folk to be with and learned how to at least get along somewhat better, socially..... making a physical ugly-duckling-to-swan transition in mid-teens helped, too, in a culture so obsessed with faces and hair and bustlines. Late bloomer, learned how to smile and charm and laugh and care deeply for my friends and loved ones, the peergroup's "Dear Abby" - and I was pretty and always had a boyfriend.....and I really *was* happy, in some senses.....but always there was the melancholy, under and around and through it all.....like a streak of indigo in an otherwise brightly-colored painting, like a shadow in the corner, like a black hole just outside my field of gravity, always there, always threatening to suck me in.....
-The winter-into-spring of my sixteenth year....it was just so grey, so leaden, I remember sitting at the table in the lunchroom, alone - as I preferred it, I didn't want to talk to people just then - and the noise and babble of the lunchroom, the hallways, the bus, the crowds at the Mall, all coming through my mind as water through a far-underground drainpipe. Not part of me, not part of my world. I felt underwater that winter, so leaden and so sad, and I didn't know why....
....And so it was with me, to some extent, from then on out. Sometimes the grey overwhelmed me, sometimes it just lurked in a small corner of my mind, but always it was there......I think I just learned to fake especially well, to live over top of it. -In the winter of my twentieth year, I actually sought counseling for the first time. I remember sitting in front of the big kitchen window in the old apartment; called off work again, blown off classes again, clutching a cup of cold tea in my hands, huddled in my bathrobe and staring out the window at the barren treebranches, crying and not knowing why, only that I felt so low, so sad, and so much to be done and I was screwing up so badly at everything and I just couldn't do it.....
....And the nice people at the psychiatric clinic poked me and prodded me and asked me tons of questions and finally said that based on their blood test+physical exam results, I was Officially Not Depressed [TM], and never mind how I was feeling; but, if I wanted to do short-term therapy, they'd diagnose me with a "personality disorder" for insurance purposes......
...yeah, right.
III. The Bipolar Fairy Comes To Stay
And so I faked it some more, and managed - more or less, sometimes more and sometimes less - until the birth of my daughter in December 1995. Then I was consumed in all the feelings supposedly common to new mothers in the first couple of weeks after birthing: crying jags, persistent "black cloud around head" feelings, couldn't eat, sleep, think straight or deal with anything, anxious and paranoid about everything and everybody, wild intense mood swings.... Trouble was, these feelings did not go away on schedule; in fact, they intensified. To the point where I had to seek the nice M.D.... who took one look at the symptoms and my daughter's age, diagnosed post-partum depression, and sent me home with a prescription for Paxil, a common antidepressant similar to Prozac. It was a logical, sensible guess on his part.
But in my case, it was dead wrong.
A few days after the birth, I had confided to a friend that I felt as though I were being "completely overwritten". Little did I know at the time: I was. The physical, hormonal and emotional stresses of pregnancy and childbirth came together - at least, this is my gut sense and the nice psychiatrist's best guess - to trip the "switch" for active onset of bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder, which I had apparently inherited as something of a family heirloom from my mother and, probably, untold generations before her. -It started out in a depressive trough and so looked exactly like textbook postpartum depression.
And so, the Paxil worked beautifully....for a few months. I could function, I could concentrate well enough at work, I could enjoy life and get things done, I could get out of bed in the mornings. -Then something went amiss. I couldn't sleep at all; or when I did, I had terrible demoniac nightmares. I was convinced that vampires were in my child's bedroom at night and so insisted she sleep in bed with me. I was exhausted, knew it, felt it, but literally could not stop careening through my days and nights, doing and doing and doing things, no matter how much I wanted to. I was impatient and short-tempered, rude and snappish even with superiors at work, prone to flares of temper or tears. My mind was racing all the time, cascades and crashings of thought and jumbled emotion and worry. I would start five different projects and not be able to finish any of them, simply staring from one to another to another, not sure what to do. I could fly into a screeching rage at the slightest provocation. I was - so I'm told - talking of ending my life, though I honestly have no memory of this. I remember feeling like I wanted to drive off a bridge or otherwise end it, but not telling anyone. There were other things my family told me I did and said, that I also didn't remember. I was sleepwalking, slightly; finding myself in my daughter's room at night, not sure how or when I got there. I was making journal entries like these:
July 16, 1996 (Tuesday): a ****ing bad day. Started
very sleepy (and slept 10:30pm-6:30am with only 1 15-minute wakeup
to tend the baby, so lack of sleep not the factor). Situation
marginally improved with 1 cup of coffee. Panicky feelings, don't want
to deal with money stuff. Took care of business finally -- picture worse than thought.
A lot. Fought urges to scratch at self; fantasized about beating myself into
a pulp, also about either running away to another city, or else suiciding. I would never
suicide, but that it's even crossing my mind is frightening.
This isn't like me. -My general upset-ness, instability, are being noticed now
by outsiders. I feel guilty and responsible for everything "wrong" in my life
and the lives of others around me. Feel like I'm utterly failing
as a mother because I don't handle our money right and I don't "feel loving feelings
for my baby" like I think I should....she would be better off with my parents.
...I'm terrified. I was supposed to be getting better with meds and therapy.
Instead I feel like I'm going the other way. And I'm terrified I'm going
to turn into my mother....
Yep, I was a messed-up little girl right about then.
-My family, bless 'em, dragged me off to the clinic and let them know what was going on; and several weeks went by which I honestly remember very little of except that I did a lot of crying and that meds changes are truly evil. Somewhere in there I met with my nice current doctor, who diagnosed me first cyclothymic, then with something called "Bipolar II" (which is like manic-depression only with very little of the 'manic' so it can easily mask as depression with occasional good days). He put me on a combination of two medicines - one to drag my mood and functionality out of the subcellar, and one to keep me from going through the roof with those wild mood swings and "can't stop" feelings. After some tweaking of dosages, they seemed to work fairly well. And - slowly, over time - the madness dissipated, and I was able to reclaim my life, bit by bit.
IV. Living With It
When explaining it to others in the past, I have described chronic mood disorders as something roughly akin to diabetes. It's not curable yet, but it's manageable. Everybody manages it in a slightly different way; what works for me, won't work for my mother, and so forth. Once it moves in, it's there to stay -- sometimes more in your way, sometimes less. Sometimes you can go long stretches of time and forget you're even living with it. Othertimes, it's sitting on your chest like a 200-pound hyena and it's all you can do to keep breathing.
Me? -I've been very lucky. My family and friends are educated and supportive. I can hold a job, take good care of my daughter, get the life stuff like dishes and bills more-or-less done. (Sometimes more, sometimes less.) I'm experimenting with taking some coursework again at the seminary; I almost - almost - can let myself think beyond hamster-wheel survival and Dream a longterm future for myself. I still "have this illness" -- long stretches of feeling greyed-out and tired, punctuated by short intense bursts of energy that's sometimes good, sometimes just makes me impossible to live with -- but in no wise am I going to let this illness "have me".
This stops here, for now, a little unfinished. I'm still living out the To Be Continued.