Decade

A year ago today, I kissed you, Sam. I don't know if you heard it in my voice, but when you put your hand on the doorknob, I panicked. "Wait! We need to talk." I just said the first thing that I could think of so that you wouldn't walk out of that room.

It was the best decision I'd ever made. 

You came back. We talked. "Let's try this," I said and put my lips on yours. That was the best decision I'd ever made. 

Since then, we've both made good and poor decisions (an understatement, I know), but we've had our decade to make them, and I'm grateful. I may not express it well, but you are the love of my life, and you always will be. My heart still leaps up. You still make my knees weak. We still generate the heat of a trillion suns. I hope for other decades, each expanding and contracting in my memory like this one has.

A moment: You catch the key I throw from the balcony. Ten million moments: I watch you laugh, your beautiful crinkles at the corners of your eyes. A moment: I say "my love" to you the first time, still afraid to say "I love you." Ten billion moments: you take my breath as easily as you take my hand.

I love you, Sam. A million trillion love units.

Kiss me, I'm shitfaced

I become more and more annoyed each year at St. Pat's day celebrations. Ooh, Irish for a day--what a great reason to get drunk and act like an asshat. After all, that's what being Irish is all about. People are planting bombs in Castlewellan, while the idiots here drink car bombs. 

Okay, that's not really why I'm irked. I could list all of the reasons why it doesn't make sense (e.g., these protestants should be wearing orange) or why it's offensive, but when it comes right down to it, I just resent these people drinking it up yesterday at the Edge. They remind me of those kids in grade school who used to call me "p'tato-head." 

Fiscal Discipline

I don't have any.

Disappointment

So Katherine disappointed me. I'm going to call her, and we'll talk about her issues with mental illness and suicide. That's fine. It's just not what I want in a friend. 

I'm trying very hard to be open to other people and their friendship, but I'm such a bad judge of others. I trust too much or too little, and I don't know which is happening until it's too late. 

Aside from Katherine's and my conversation, the party was fun. I enjoyed it, and I think my guests enjoyed themselves. 

Anniverse

Last March, I started writing this blog. I was beginning to feel better (I thought), and I had some stuff to say. For example, I noted that my blood serum level for lithium was on the low end of therapeutic but that Chris said it was fine when combined with lamictal. How wrong was that!

The onset of mania often escapes notice, masquerading as just feeling better. Looking back, I see that last April marked the peak of blog-writing, coming in at 21 posts. I made a little graph to test a hypothesis: did the number of blog posts for each month indicate vacillating moods? The results are in. Last April (21), September (14), and this February (10) look like spikes in an otherwise downward trend. I should say, however, that May's posts were fewer than April's, but they were prolix. It's an illustration of how mood works in me. More posts mean more to say, but fewer posts can still mean pressured speech and a desire to get out all of the stuff I have to say, all at once.

I don't know what counts as the onset of mania and what just counts as feeling better. I don't know how to measure how I feel, even, as I wrote some posts that seemed lighter in tone because I was hiding my misery so that no one stopped me from fulfilling my plans. When mood is the question, nothing becomes an answer.

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.

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.