Somewhere a few posts back I had a revelation about myself and why I blog under a nom de plume. I’d thought it had to do with being bipolar and some of the whacky stuff that brings into my life. I didn’t realize the glaring fact that in my real life virtually everyone knows I’m bipolar, and many of them know I periodically see bouncing orange balls that don’t exist. People I’ve worked with often know, because it came up naturally in conversation, even. Since I do happen to be an artist, people find it normal and often even some sort of badge of pride that I’m bipolar. Think Van Gogh, I guess. I’m lucky that way. So… if everyone knows that, why on earth reach for some anonymity?

*BANG* Right between the eyes.

The childhood sexual, emotional, and physical abuse.

*wilt into a heap on the floor*

Oh I do not want to admit that. I don’t want to admit that I feel like I have to hide myself because I was abused as a child. It wasn’t even my fault that I was abused as a kid. Yet my shame knows so few limits that I cringe timidly behind a pen name and every trick for blogging anonymously that I can bring to bear. I worry someone may out me.  I worry that my mother, who I both love and hate might find my blog here and see what I’ve written about her neglect that was a helpmate to my other abuses. I don’t want to look at or acknowledge any of it.

Useful to know. Hard to deal with.

Oh, and if you do happen to know what my real name is, keep your lips zipped still, please. I’ll get past it when it works for me.

Why am I one of the lucky ones?  Today I’m lucky because even though it hurts a lot to realize this, I can handle it. I don’t feel a need to do anything more drastic than write a blog post about it. That is a lucky, wonderful, and hard-earned thing.

You know, I often gabble about problems without making any mention of successes with them.  I tend to miss the successes mainly because I’m uncomfortable with praise internal or external and also successes don’t need fixing. But I’m actually proud of myself today for the way I handled a tough situation yesterday, and begone to any mental dust thrown up to tell me otherwise.  

I briefly mentioned hallucinating yesterday in my earlier post. My therapist and doctor both believe this is due to the slew of bronchitis meds on top of my regular cocktail of bipolar drugs.  Whatever caused it, I did hallucinate, and it scared the bejeezus out of me because I was behind the wheel of my car at the time. That’s never happened to me before. I handled it well, got home safe, no one got hurt, I’ve made arrangements to not drive until I’m off all these crazy-making sterioids and such, informed my support folks, made arrangements for someone to help with my business if needed, and I am proud of all that. I done good.

The biggest thing I’m proud of, though, is that my DBT skills held, even in the face of hallucinations.  OMG, is that something to be proud of or what?  Amen sistah, it sure is!

I was pacing around the front yard while waiting for my friend to take me to the therapist and doctor. I was getting out some of the anger energy about having to deal with that crap, and what went through my head?  Not the eternally repeating  worn out record of self-abuse that I’ve been so good at for so long. Instead, my self-talk went like this… I’m scared and angry about all this and I know I’ll be ok. It won’t do me in or ruin my life. I handled it well, and that is wonderful to be able to do when the brain is obviously kicking up some weird dust here.  I must look crazy as a loon pacing in a circle in the front yard with a cane. That’s ok even if that’s so. I need to walk out some of  these feelings instead of bottling it up, and I look however I look. I’ll never be able to drive again!  Nope, chicky. I’ll be able to drive again once this stuff gets straightened out and it will get straightened out. Yes, it feels freaky frightening and scary and sad and hopeless and shameful, but  it’s ok to feel that way. The feeling won’t last forever. It is darned well normal to feel frightened and all those things when you’ve been hallucinating while driving.  You got home safe, no one got hurt, and you’ve handled it fantastic, babe. You did really well with a cruddy situation. You go girl! Dialectics and positive self-talk and mindfulness, amazing and wonderful.

So even when things are crap, there are still things to feel proud of myself for, and I can handle life well.  What a new concept for me.  Yay for me!

QOTD: “Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.” Russel Simmons

I always wanted to be the kind of artist that does big, meaningful things. I don’t mean large in size, but large in concept and impact. I never seemed to be abel to pull it off, though. Even when I actually got the point across full force, no one knew I’d gotten the point across. How weird is that? They stand there saying it’s too bourgoise and dull and vapid and so on. A piece about suburbia.  And doh that’s exactly what I wanted to show them.  But not, they didn’t realize.  And I got a rotten review because I laughed at them inside and wouldn’t speak up.

I also wanted to make beautiful things.  That was so not in fashion when I was in art school.  Beautiful was out. Don’t do that. It’s too ordinary. You need to get your point across vividly. Trash was in.  Comb the alleyways for things to pull out of trashbins to make art. Well hell’s bells, that sort of art stinks.  Literally. And often figuratively.  I ended up in one of the “decorative” or “practical” or whatever the other term is arts because I did want to make beautiful things.

And of course there with my beautiful things they thought my tendency to make “pointed” art was odd. But them I told what the point was. Why there and not with the others?  Safer?  Because it wasn’t “real art”?

I painted too. There’s something a bit scary about how I stood in that turpentine soaked environment and chain smoked as I worked with oil paints.  I’m not sure if I was mad or if the school was mad to allow it.  We never exploded though, which is probably a good thing.  My painting was not the least bit decorative.  It was strong.  I was fascinated with light, making light shine through the canvas with my paints.  And showing dreams, unrealities that just touched on reality. Enough to be scary I guess. My first painting instructor (bloody idiot) kept telling me in painting critiques that I needed to see a psychiatrist.  Finally at the end, I asked to see him after critique.  In front of god and all the other students I told him that my mental health was none of his concern, that I happened to be seeing a psychiatrist, and that he should confine himself to critiquing the painting and nothing else because nothing else was any of him damned business.  He said I was crazy and not to ever take one of his classes again.  To this day I have no idea what I did to deserve this treatment.  Why did he think he had any right to say anything about my life except whether my p ainting was good or bad or whatever?  The joke was on him.  I’d already signed up for his class the next semester, because however weird he was, he was also a good painting teacher.  I thought about changing to another class, then decided I wouldn’t bother.  The truth was that I was mad about the man and it was so right to me inside that he kept trying to crush me.  Oddly enough, he gave me highest marks for that class. I deserved them, but I was surprised he gave them to me anyway. On the first day of the next semester, he found me sitting up in the window smoking a cigarette as I always had the semester before. He looked shocked and asked what was I doing there.  I just grinned and told him that he couldn’t make me not be in his class.  He turned away and we never  spoke to each other again.  He did from there on, however, confine his critiques to my painting with no other editorials.  Such a triumph.

I think I was 18 then.  I’d started art school at the university just after I turned 17. Dropping out of high school accelerated things a bit. I found out later that my mother had told the dean that I wanted to go into graphic arts.  The dean told her that looking at my portfolio, there was no way I would, that I would go into fine arts.  Hmmm. I did.  And there, at that school, decorative arts were considered fine arts. Too bad the rest of the world isn’t that way.

Yes folks, WC, Border, everyone, I will talk to the tdoc about my rambling energized head today. I see her in a few hours.  She’s so weird herself sometimes though.  One time I came in, hardly able to stay in my seat, tapping my foot, couldn’t keep focused and she said I was a little excitable and that was it.  I do wonder sometimes if having a DBT perspective makes therapists a bit understated.  But then there’s the other end where they try to through you in the hospital for crying when you are talking about being sexually abused as a child. That whelp was going to throw me in involuntarily for crying over that.  Bleh.  Am I making all this stuff up?  I wonder sometimes.  I don’t think I am. Should I not be concerned about it?

At what point is it enough to actually do something about, this non-reaction to being me crawling up the wall?  I mean, in her eyes.  In mine, it’s before I feel miserable with it or do something weirdly destructive to my life. For her?  I don’t know.  Her reaction last time to my being freaked out depressed mixed was to ask if I wanted to go home and talk some other time.  Don’t get me wrong. I think a lot of her. If all she was going to do was talk to me about problem-solving, going home and talking some other time was the right choice.  I survived unscathed and got over that state, so maybe it was the right choice all around.  But sometimes I feel like I’m howling into a dark well at midnight hoping that the good witch will notice I’m alive.  Anyway, yeah, I’ll talk to her. Maybe I’ll print this out so I can remember what the heck I was thinking.

I tend to forget stuff at therapy appointments. If I feel ok at the time, I forget most of the not-ok moments the week before.  It’s like they have no weight or importance.  Hacked my leg half off trying to split wood… oh that?  Yeah well that was kind of painful, but I’ll get a prosthesis.  I don’t mean to forget. I try to remember. It’s just like it vanishes behind a curtain that’s hard to see through and near impossible to lift.

Crap, my ability to spell and get the right words out there has gone to the dogs.  Edit edit edit. Spell check spell check spell check. I didn’t used to have to do that.  It’s cuz I’m getting old. Nevermind I’m soaking my brain in drugs that do things to my neurotransmitters. It’s just that I’m getting old.

Am I being cranky?  Probably.  I should go do something useful.  Or at least not crankiful.

The word of the day: Crankiful.  Adjective. Full of crankiness; very cranky. Used in a sentence.  Jane was very crankiful the day her car broke down.

Trigger Warning

I’m feeling better, so back to pondering. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to ponder today. Just imagine it, ok?

I have some issues with diagnoses. Cutting or other self injury (SI) is one diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Along with repeated suicide attempts.
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…that I’m much more comfortable “talking” on my blog about bipolar stuff than the rest. The rest mostly being the various abuses I survived. Or the addictions I survived. Or the rape. Or the mugging at gunpoint.  Or. Or. Or.  Yes, the bipolar disorder is a total pain in the ass.  It’s hard to live when you know your brain can suddenly fling you into seeming ecstasy or hell at any point no matter what’s going on.  It’s hard to trust.  But compound that with the other crap, which beats at me when good or bad things do happen around me.  How will I ever learn to trust when for so so many years I could trust neither myself nor the world around me?

Bit by bit I struggle with trust, and all the shards of myself.  So many pieces to deal with.  Even when I feel pretty well like I do now, this stuff has the power to bring me to my knees.  But when I feel pretty well is the best, safest time to deal with it.  Dealing with the abuse and such has the power to lay me flat and nearly kill me when I’m already in a bad place.  I’m coming to trust I can survive dealing with it. Slowly coming to that.  I have to remind myself things like that about dealing with it when I’m pretty well. That I’ve survived the actuality and the bits I’ve faced so far. Bloody hell it hurts, though.  I’d often rather go hide in a closet than struggle with all this trust and shit anymore.

Closets not withstanding, I’m doing better with dealing with the abuse and whatnot too.  I need to recognize that.  

Until I was in my early 30’s I only knew I hated my abusers, but didn’t know why.   After the most powerful of them died, the memories came flooding back in living color, dolby surround sound, the whole wad.  I’d never heard of the idea of “planted” repressed memories at the time.  There was no one to plant the idea in my head at the time anyway.  I just suddenly knew viscerally why I hated those family members who abused me worst, my father and his mother.  And I hated them and myself and my life for it.

As I’ve scraped away the barnacles of hate and fear attached to what those two did to me, I’ve discovered more and more layers of pain and betrayal. Why DIDN’T my mother see that her baby with the eterally painful crotch was being abused?  Why didn’t she ever do anything?  Why did those horrid great-aunts have to torture me, though not so horridly, along with their sister?  Why did they put up with it?  Why couldn’t I save my brother from the same fate as me?  When I offered up my life for him, why wasn’t it enough?

No wonder I became a drug addict. No wonder when I was raped I didn’t tell anyone for 20 years. No wonder I tried to kill myself several times, or ended up in the mental wards several times. No wonder the landscape between my ears is a wreck.  I had no chance for a normal life. It’s kind of amazing I’ve lived long enough to tell anything about it.

At least now I do trust I’m going to live soberly to tell, to try to heal, to go on.  That’s something. That’s definitely something.

I started thinking of labels because of my recent post on tolerance.

After later reading that post I realized it’s not that I’m intolerant of mental illness, per se. I’m scared of it, whether in myself or others. Understandably so, considering that mental illness has wreaked havoc on my life since birth. OK, I’ll toss the intolerant label for myself away. Perhaps hypervigilant would be better. But whatever the label is, the fact of it is still the same.

I get labeled by others too, as do we all, expecially when it comes to being “mentally interesting” or having a mental illness. My labels always strike me as alternately funny and damning. Sometimes the labels are helpful and sometimes they’re not.

I have been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder – NOS. OK, fair enough. I’d had psychiatrists over the last 20 years say they thought I was probably bipolar, but never saw the up side of it to cement the diagnosis because I kept leaving treatment when I started feeling better because I was getting hypomanic. Why go to the doctor for feeling like superwoman? The bipolar disorder shoe fits, quite clearly.

But what the hell is NOS? Not otherwise specified. I get the unspecified label because… I’m not sure why. I have had mixed manic episodes and hypomanic episodes and major depression episodes on and off since puberty that have no relation to what’s going on in my life, with and without psychotic features. That would be normally labeled bipolar I. The NOS may refer to the rapid cycling issue that occurs some years especially the last few, or it may have been a typo in diagnostic coding, since the same psychiatrist that diagnosed me as bipolar NOS told me that my diagnosis was Bipolar Disorder I, Most Recent Episode Mixed. Who knows. But it’s useful to acknowledge the bipolar disorder in some way, because it means I now have access to meds that actually help, and I can live without suddenly being blindsided by suddenly going loopy one way or another.

Then a few months after getting the official BP-NOS diagnosis, I got an additional label: Borderline Personality Disorder, which was said to be related to the problems I’ve had due to childhood sexual abuse and such. That label was tacked on to my list of mental illness by a mental health professional who’d known me for 12 whole minutes at the time. I find that curious that someone, however nice, can make a good guess at diagnosis after 12 minutes unless one is dancing on the ceiling, catatonic, or some spectacular behavior. However, the popular “fix” for it these days is Dialectical Behavior Therapy. DBT can be helpful to anyone on some level, whether they have a mental illness or not, so I figured, go with the therapy whether they’ve got the diagnosis right or not, it has a scatter shot effect anyway. Unusually enough, after about 2 months, my individual therapist said that I seemed to have a grip on the DBT principles already, and it was obvious my life was improving.

Complex-PTSD came up after 5 or 6 months of seeing my individual DBT therapist. She said that having gotten to know me and done an extensive history, she thought that C-PTSD was a more appropriate label for my problems related to childhood sexual abuse and such rather than BPD. Yes, they have some common features, but they’re not the same thing and are not treated the same. Oh joyous day!

In other words, they’re struggling to find a label or set of labels that fit me. It’s annoying because the mental health care folks treat me differently in terms of respect and hope and care because of one more or less label. So does the public in general. And the treatments for each one vary in emphasis or content, and that causes understandable problems. I’ve been on the label-go-round since I was 12. It took them 30 years to figure out this set of labels, and who knows which are more accurate in the end, but at least the treatments are more helpful than the ones in the past.

Labels aren’t always bad, though they’re often annoying to me. Sometimes they’re useful. I hope your labels are useful to you.

I was whizzing around the web today trying to forget the bs going on around me. I stumbled across a site called “Untreatable’s Blog -Borderline Personality Self Harm Depression“. Quite the title.

Apparently Untreatable has been diagnosed with Severe Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic features, Borderline Personality Disorder, Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Hmmms. I can see why Untreatable feels untreatable. It sounds kind of familiar, after all.

I’ve been variously diagnosed over the years as severe major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, severe neurosis, severe PMS/PMDD, Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder NOS (rapid cycling), Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (aka Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and somehow the docs missed the anorexia and substance abuse disorder as official diagnoses. Enough to make ya hurl huh? The docs seem to have settled for now labelling me with Bipolar Disorder NOS (rapid cycling), and Complex Traumatic Stress Disorder/or Borderline Personality Disorder. They can’t seem to make up their minds on that last bit. Do I feel untreatable? Sometimes I most definitely do. Other times not so much. I often wonder if I’m deluding myself those other times.

Right now that’s on my mind. Yes, I have been mostly stable for over a year. Except for hearing music that isn’t there and smelling bananas that aren’t there. And having to fight to get myself to bed or do my work or not bite someone’s head off when they’re being stupid sometimes because I’m hyper. The question is: Is that enough? True, I’m no longer so depressed I can’t get out of bed, and I’m no longer self-harming, and I’m not running amok about the net finding someone to fall in love with out of the blue and move in with, and I’m not digging myself further into debt. And the DBT is going well, but how the heck do you tell if you’re back together from that? Is that all enough?

The new pdoc, as I mentioned before, found the smelling non-existant bananas somewhat alarming. So ok, we tried going up on my meds. Didn’t work, so now trying a new med. Dammit, this could be an endless cycle, I sometimes think. Get one or two things in whack then discover something out of whack, so try this other thing. How on earth do you know if it’s enough?

What is sane enough anyway? Do you assess it by lack of hallucinatory songs and fruits? By lack of self- or other-harm? By graduating from DBT and taking your meds properly for X amount of time? Could it just be enough to have a decent life where you don’t treat anyone like crap including yourself and you’re reasonably content to live that way? I hope so.

By the way, the green aura from the Lamictal is almost totally gone. Just a tiny bit of green around the edges. Woo!