More journal entries

On February 7, I promised pieces of my journal entries for three reasons:

1. I want to remember how punishing my stay in the VITA unit was.
2. I want to remember the insights I had during my stay.
3. I want to convey to you what it was like in there.

During the long night of January 24, I had trouble sleeping in part because of a huge medication change. To pass the time, I started a short story, "The Designated Hitler." Here are the first few sentences: "She had a bulge, tender and hot, on the inside of right elbow. And she cried because she could cry because she was not dead. '"Am I the monster or the miracle?' she asked herself."

The next day, on the 25th, I wrote: "Having a really hard time." On the 26th, a doctor lent me a book by Kay Redfielf Jamison, called An Unquiet Mind. Jamison quoted someone named Hugo Woolf: 

 "To be sure, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how, well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds."

The quotation still reverberates for me because--and this one is funny--I want to avoid intellectualizing my feelings. It's easy to hold feelings back by thinking about them instead of experiencing them. I am a woman of extremes, we now all know, and trying to cry a little is scary to me still. I was afraid I would never stop crying, and I'm working really hard on realizing that I can stop when I let it out a little at a time, when I feel sad about something specific, rather than about my lot in life. You'll see me cry, which is also scary but I'm trying to work on letting people in. I'll write more about my hospital experiences, but also about my triumphs of heart and hand. Stay tuned to this station.

Insurance

Is scary. They list everything they might cover, what they plan to cover, but I want them to be a little more definitive. Okay, a lot more definitive. 

In other news, I'm loving Kimya Dawson. And I'm remembering that accessaries aren't so bad. 

I'm still trying to figure out a lot of things and to recall more things about my recent experiences. I want to learn how to express more love. Oddly, I don't myself have a lexicon for love, for which flaw I blame my parents. It's the only dependable use they have. 

This blog has several different kinds of posts, and to my mind, right now, the current trend is toward edited, thought-out entries and sprawling posts, with little oversight and lots of digression and spilling-over sentiments. Sometimes the later kind transform their ideas and emotions so that a more carefully crafted post can contain them. Sometimes it's all just raw.

First day: 1/26

Caution: What follows is raw, like a wound that seeps. Names are changed to protect sinners and saints, mostly because sometimes you get both in one package. This is a portion of what I wrote, and it is perhaps the most palpable for me. It tells one of the sets of feelings associated with my suicide. 

My life is unmanageable. I'm powerless over my bipolar disorder. How could I not be? I need to find a way to manage not just my bipolar disorder but how I feel about my bipolar disorder. C. talks about remission, like cancer. The word itself is connected to the word intermission, a short break that happens once. Between the large portions of time. Remission may happen more than once, and the concomitant is that depression and mania may happen again and again. I'm still fairly young, and the prospect of experiencing this set of feelings again and again is enormity itself. So my life, my disorder, my moods and thoughts are unmanageable. I am powerless.

On 1/26 I began writing in a journal, which serves now as a memory device. I'll try not to edit the very difficult stuff. I wrote a lot on 1/26 because Dr. M took me off all meds, including meds for sleep. I was pissed the entire night. Next, Part 2 of this same day, in which I explain the various kinds of bipolar disorder.

First, some categorization

In the first few posts, I'm going to try to convey what happened in VITA (Vanderbilt Institute for the Treatment of Addiction). I was in that ward because the other adult wards had no available beds. It was actually quite useful to be in the VITA ward. For once, I was the sane person in a room full of crazies. More on the ward itself later. First, some sense of the schedule.

• Vital signs: blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. They collected these "signs" three times a day: 6:00a, 9:50a, 3:15p
• Meals three times a day: 7:45a, 12:00p, 5:15p
• Groups: 9:00a, 11:00a, 1:00p, 4:00p, 6:30p, 8:00p. The last time I list here was devoted to AA meetings. 
• Sleep: lights out at 11:00p, with little dispensation.
• Other activities filled up the spaces in between. Here are the times that were unstructured: 8:15a–9:00a, 10:15a–11:00a, 12:30p–1:00p, 2:00p–4:00p, 6:30p–8:00p, 9:00p–11:00p. A total of just over 7 hours, dispersed through the day. Part-time time you might say.

In the coming days, I'll encapsulate material from my journal. Much of it is raw. Some of it may be crude reckoning of my faults, but I hope that by evaluating it, I'll remember how dangerous and terrible were the events that got me to this point in time. Finally, I may give additional commentary on those journal entries that are unfair or unreasonable.

Please know that I do this to help, not to indulge in self-pity, or punishment, or in any way boastful. I deeply regret what I did.