A dirty secret

One of the mental habits I'd like to break myself of: hating just a little bit people with great experiences, like loving a hometown, enjoying the memory of grade school, having great parents. Sam and I watched most of Dan in Real Life, a lovely movie with Steve Carrell playing Dan. Although the main character is tortured and morose, his family is extraordinary. I guess they have to be for the movie to work, but I found myself tearing up. Is this self-pity in action? Is it longing? Is it evil? Whatever it is, I need to figure out how I can stop feeling this way and realize some of my own good luck.

The social worker

Mary Ann Howell, my assigned social worker, is a walking disaster. A little backstory: this balding, rotund woman was supposed to be a key support for me when I was in the VITA unit, but she has fucked up at every turn. She likes to blame those fuck-ups on me. The most important task I gave her was to send a short letter to the deans of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School and to the Director of Graduate Studies in my department. 

After--literally--several weeks, she finally accomplished this task poorly and after a lot of foot-dragging. This week I received a packet of letters, back-dated by several days and mailed in a hand-addressed envelop. She sent these letters to the associate deans of those schools, rather than to whom I told her. She didn't identify me as a graduate student in the English Department, so they have this random name of someone somehow connected to the university, probably.

What's worst is that one of the letters was incorrectly addressed to "Mildred" Bergquist, rather than Francille Bergquist. The grammar is terrible. She has effectively lessened my credibility rather than added to the solution. This is enough to make me seek out her boss and make a formal complaint.

Thin-skinned

Sensitivity is a word that moves in contradictory ways. If Tim (to pluck a name from the air) is sensitive, he may be careful about his own feelings or about someone else's feelings. Tim cannot perform both tasks of attention. 

I have a private set of beliefs about how people should treat me. If a person (Melody, to pluck another name from the aether) breaks Rule 3--it hurts when two other people leave the table and leave me behind alone--I experience that broken rule as Melody's insensitivity. I give Melody the agency to hurt me in ways I secretly define as insensitive. I'm on the lookout for Melody's cruel intentions. This requires a second belief, that I can determine why Melody would leave me sitting alone. 

Through power of my tacit belief system, I managed to isolate myself in an attempt to keep other people from hurting me so much. My self-quarantine blinded me to the feelings of everyone else. And my ability to intellectualize everything rests on something even more fundamental: I patrol a border between what I think and what I feel, a dichotomy constructed very early in my life. 

I'm still the 5-year-old cryer standing by the swing set with sand on the front of her sailor dress, waiting for her turn. I still want that moment of a bird-like freedom when it feels like I just might swing into the clear blue sky. Instead, I will fall back, feet plowing furrows in the sand, dirty hands held out in anticipation of being pushed off the swing again.

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.

To Sam

Sam, I have never better broken a rule. Here's a golden oldie from Phillip Sidney as a tribute:

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange one for another given;

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:

There never was a bargain better driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his would received from my sight;

My heart was wounded with his wounded heart; 

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:

Both equal hurt, in this changed sought our bliss,

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his.

My true love hath my heart and I have his.

Ground rules

Okay, here are some ground rules in the crazy-person hospital: no alcohol of any type, including that which is found in shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant; no computers, which means no working; no cigarettes, no laces for shoes; no belts; no personal connections among patients. Some of these rules worked better than others. I mean, there's a reason why deodorant has alcohol in it.

Some ground rules for this blog: no pulling punches; no publishing all of my nut-case journal entries; no editing for length when content is more important (in other words, I can be much more wordy than I am here); no hiding from myself or from you, my friends.

I must ask you to abide one rule: please comment, even if only to indicate that you've read what I've written. Blogging can be a lonely pursuit. I imagine that someone reads any of this and finds meaning in it, but in my heart, conjecture rules. I imagine the worst, and silence can turn into anything, really. 

So, please comment, please. Even if only to tell me that you get the message. It doesn't have to be complex. Just let me know you're out there.

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.

Next, an account from the inside

For the next weeks, I'll write about what I found in my journal. It'll hasten (I hope) my catharsis. I hope it will ease your own. 

Hiatus broken

I tried to kill myself. It's a senseless act, and the only one responsible for it is me. Now that I've figured some things out, I'm going to spill them on this blog. 

The first (and most important) issue is horrifying to me and to my friends: If a person wants to kill herself and thinks about death constantly, she's not going to let on how awful she's feeling. Otherwise someone could stop her. So, please don't think that anyone's at fault except for me. I struggled with bipolar disorder, thought I was don't all the right things (therapy + meds), and I still felt miserable. I'll always struggle with my illness on some level. But I must never again fall for the illusion of suicide as an answer to the constant questions that plague me. I'm making my promise here: I will not do it again. I plan to learn how to come up with solutions and how not to dwell on death as though it were a sweet exit from an otherwise terrible life. 

The second insight: I should have called someone first and I should have been emotionally open enough so that I could figure out who I should have called. I isolated myself. It's no one's fault but my own. I tend to deflect my feelings by intellectualizing them, like researching the best ways to killing myself. (It's actually quite difficult to do, apparently.) Too often have I tried to keep up my emotions at bay, until it's too much to bear. So I need to let my guard down. It'll hurt but not nearly as much as I have hurt in the past.

Third, suicide leaves no notes. It silently embraces the abyss. The abject punctures the myth of self-knowledge. As Kristeva puts it (and yes, I'm doing this even here), "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life." She believes that we trail our abjection through life, like the shadow one wants to flee but is always attached to us. 

Again, with a little less drama: each person carries her own corpse around, hurrying away from death as much as she fastens herself to it. I guess that is still a little too poetic, and I'll try to say it better next time. The long and the short of it is that my mistakes will dog me for life. My regret, my shame, my despair. 

S., I'm so sorry that I did this wrong to myself and to my friends and to you. I cannot say it enough.