Crazy Like Me

 

"Everybody needs his memories.  They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

                                                                               --Saul Bellow

 

About three weeks ago, I was a minor celebrity about town.  I was the “feature” in the Sunday profile column of The Meadville Tribune that typically celebrates our small city’s successful entrepreneurs, cupcake mavens, beekeepers, quilters, and kindergarten teachers.  Initially, the reporter contacted me and said he’d heard some amazing things about me in the vein of successful-woman-about-town: 1. That I was (still) a Professor at Allegheny College while raising two children and writing my books; and, more compelling, 2. Did I really climb Mt. Olympus while nine months pregnant?

“I’m sorry to have to say,” I wrote back in my email, “but I think someone has overestimated my accomplishments.  I was a Professor at Allegheny, but I’ve left the College due to medical difficulties.  And while I have climbed Mt. Olympus and did travel to Greece when I was nine months pregnant, I didn’t do both simultaneously.  I think my Ob/Gyn would have had me committed, much less my psychiatrist.  However, I would be willing to share my other story, which your readers might find interesting.  Maybe more so, though it is a different kind of adventure.  The reason I left teaching is because I was unable to find a way to recover from anorexia and find stability with my struggles from Bipolar Disorder.  So I did what was necessary for my health and well-being—not easy given that teaching was what I always wanted to do with my life, given that was basically my dream job—but rather than die while working, I needed to prioritize living.  I’ve found as I’ve been in recovery that part of what keeps me moving forward is to be a resource for others who are also struggling with mental illness and trying to get well and find balance so I am working against the shame of suffering from mental illness.  Part of my mission is the blog that I write.  Let me know if you are interested.”

Well, he was interested, and I went public in my city in a BIG way, in a way I’ve never done before.  Not only was a detailed summary of my “story” published, but so was my picture—the prettiest mug shot I could come up with.  More than vanity, though.  There is a belief that someone who is seriously mentally ill can only “look” one way—unkempt, frazzled, tangled hair, stinking of piss and shit, shuffling down the street, muttering to herself.  That she, or he, is “other,” so far removed from anyone you could really know.  That she, or he, is either the person hanging around a dumpster, rocking back and forth in a corner, or institutionalized.  Surely, that’s what serious mental illness looks like.  And you wouldn’t have anything to do with someone like that, would you?  You wouldn’t let someone like that around your kids, would you?  You would never fall in love with someone like that, who had a label, a diagnosis like that, would you?

Here’s the truth.  Two months ago, I had to find a new psychiatrist because my current one was moving on to a new position.  He referred me to another psychiatrist in the area, someone with the right credentials, with the right depth and breadth of experience.  We spoke and he wanted to review my records before seeing me for my evaluative appointment.  So I had them sent.  And waited and waited and waited.  Finally, he called.

“Ms. Bakken,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve had a chance to look through your records.  They’re quite extensive.”

I laughed nervously.  I’ve never looked through my records, could only imagine what the 20 or so hospitalizations, the 30+ Electroconvulsive Treatments, and the potential 3 different psychiatrists’ diagnoses might all add up to in the end.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Bakken, but I won’t be able to take you on as a patient.  Your mental illness is too severe for me to treat.  The range of severity is too extensive.  I hope you can understand.”

If one can nod dumbly into the phone, than that’s what I did.  In fact, idiotically, I reassured him.  “Of course.  I know how difficult I must be.  Don’t worry.  I’ll find someone else.”

It took ages to find someone else, but now I have and my “severe mental illness” doesn’t scare him off.  Which is also to say, if, before now, I haven’t scared you off, don’t let this admission scare you away.  Don’t let these words, uttered by someone in your life, or someone who could be in your life, scare you off. 

Of course, there are moments—ten minutes, a few hours, a few days—when I do scare my husband and family and friends.  Usually, that’s when I’m not following my agreed upon plan that helps me stay stable and keeps anorexia, mania and the suicidal fangs of depression at bay.

Here’s the gift, and it’s not just my gift to you who might be struggling to get well and come across this blog and see that it’s possible not just to hang in there but to climb out—and to climb out each and every time, as pointless and exhausting as it might seem.  To climb out and breathe each time a bigger breath and say to everyone who loves you and who also fights for you, but especially to the doctor who believes you are too ill to help, “Fuck ill.  I am well.”

But the gift given back to me?  The more I am free with my story, the more I am helped in my adventure into love and wellness.  Two days after the article was published, I received a letter from a man who told me about his wife who had died six months earlier after a long bout with melanoma.  But his wife always talked about the time I came to visit her book club—how much that meant to her, how my book inspired her, how my talking to her and her friends was so generous and warm.  That even in the months preceding her death, she talked about me—that I made that much of an impact.  I would not have remembered this but for the article and the follow-up letter. 

To be honest, because of the massive memory loss, the complete almost 10-year retrograde memory wipe-out from the Electroconvulsive treatments, I don’t remember that visit, and part of me feels desperately guilty about this.  But his letter is the gift of memory.  Because I parted with shame and fear, because I allowed myself to be seen in a small Sunday article as severely mentally ill, with the pretty, charming photograph of me juxtaposed beside it, I was given back a piece of my past that reminded me that I mattered, that in the years I normally consign to the dumpster because I was on my crazy rampage, years I just assume should truly be forgotten, there are these miraculous, salvageable moments.  A woman held on to memories of me in her dying days.

 

     

Ready to Run in Recovery

On Saturday, Derby Day, I won first place in my age group (40-44) for a 5k running race.  And while nobody covered me in a glorious blanket of 564 roses, I was given a medal, an actual hang-around-your-neck medal, my first—my first for running, anyway--but perhaps my most meaningful as it was the first time back competing in a race since I had to bow out, most unceremoniously, five years ago because I was emaciated, suffered from irregular heart rhythms, and hypotension, all by products of anorexia.  But on Saturday, under clear blue skies, in crisp morning air, my legs prickled with goose bumps, breathing in and out, in and out, glad to be alive and there, I stood at the starting line with all the other runners ready to run.

Let me say that again.  Ready to run.  Not ready to win.  This is important and something that I am still learning in my recovering from all of IT’s manifestations—Anorexia, Bipolar Disorder, Alcoholism, Self-Injury.  Ignore the voice that says: Be Perfect.  Be the best.  Anything else is shit, is failure, is grounds for starvation/ruminative self-loathing/drinking to excess/cutting.  That’s how Anorexia works best.  Lose 10 pounds.  Now another 10.  Now another 10.  You are still too fat.  Still not good enough.  Still not the thinnest in the room, in the hospital.  Worthless if you are just mediocre, finishing fourth, or worse, always second. 

I can turn anything into a competition—usually against myself since I no longer play team sports.  I time myself at little tasks—I have to unload the dishwasher before a round of commercials is over on TV.  Ridiculous, I know, but when I hear the third commercial begin, my chest tightens, and I pick up my already frenetic pace.  I justify this by telling myself I’m making mundane chores interesting, but really, it’s compulsive.  Like shaving my legs in the shower—again, part of a time game—so, no shaving cream = precious seconds saved to come in under my five minute goal.  There’s the grocery store game where I’ll given myself x number of minutes to get in and out depending on how many items are on the list and whether the kids are hanging from the cart.  All of this is to say it is very hard for me to turn off the voice in my head that is always competing for The Woman Who Could Chug the Most Beers (Won that one in Jamaica on Spring Break one year), The Woman Who Had Fast-Track Admission to the Psych Ward (Well, almost, but everybody did know my name…), The Woman with The Most Scars on Her Arms (100+ but fading now so what does that mean when they’re gone?).

But I wasn’t thinking about winning at that starting line.  Instead, I was filled with gratitude.  How lucky I was, and am, to be connected again to my body which is healthy.  Unbelievably healthy because truly, I should be dead many, many times over.  I have tried to kill this body with deliberate means.  I have woken up in emergency rooms and in an intensive care unit rescued by strangers from my suicide attempts.  All of the alcohol my body has processed and recovered from (not to mention my brain).  All of the wounds my body has healed because that’s what it does when it is trying to recover from my best, competitive attempts to die.  All of the pounds lost and regained and lost and regained and lost and regained and lost and finally, hopefully for good, regained.  This body standing in shorts and a tank top and sneakers, ready to run because it was healthy.  A healthy body in the middle of a pack of what looked like other healthy bodies, other people ready to bolt into the wind and sunshine, ready to run the course.

I’ve won medals before, and trophies.  I’ve played sports my whole life, but with the attitude of DO OR DIE.  Competitive tennis from the age of five to eighteen, bruises purpled my shins because every time I flubbed a shot, really screwed one up, I’d whack myself in the shin with the tennis racquet.  No joy in the playing, because there was no playing—there was just me executing a perfect performance and when I failed, as I always did, I enacted penalties. 

Ready to run.  I ran.  Without expectations.  Just do what you can do, I told myself over and over.  Of course, it was a race, so I wasn’t going to lollygag and keep vigil at the dead possum or chit chat with other runners.  I was there to run my best, which meant with all I could give, but which also meant without IT’s voice.  So when I crossed the finish line and saw that my time was faster that I imagined, because I’d been feeling a bit fatigued by the long hill, I was already elated.  And then when they posted the results and I saw my finish, and later still, when I received the medal, I knew what the medal was about: ready to run into my life and into hope.             

 

Tickets to Greece, So What?: Or, Thanks Bipolar Depression

I am listening to my daughter sew together a bright, green platypus, her machine humming non-stop with imaginative (bright green? platypus? what else do you do with scraps?!) industry.  Her original design was a duck, but the beak, in execution, turned out to be a bit long and wide and floppy, so she improvised and re-imagined her pattern, which really only called for her to say, “Platypus” instead of “Duck,” to be flexible in vision and creation.  Not to be rigid in expectation.

 

I could learn something from her.  What have I been doing simultaneously down the hall in the den?  Sending an email to Dr. B., at his request, assuring him that I will not act on any suicidal impulses and if they do become acute, I will call him immediately.  The black dog of Bipolar Depression once again has its fangs around my heels—for three weeks now--and though I’m doing my best to hang on and wait it out, this down cycle is thoroughly exhausting.  If you’ve ever played the game “Don’t Break the Ice,” that’s what this feels like: Depression is the hammer tap, tap, tapping away at each little block of ice which falls through, so that you’re left wondering when all the surface will finally give way, and finally you’ll sink underwater for good.  Welcoming that shattering, that final fall.  And I do mean the little hammer is tapping away all day long at your brain—a low grade headache comes along with this.  And the desire to snip all communication lines. 

All day long, your brain peruses its own internal suicidal ideation flip-book.  Everything spurs images of possible self-injury or suicide.  Driving home from the airport the other night, I spent ninety minutes trying to keep myself on the road rather than in the ditch.  Stupid ideas seem plausible.  Maybe a misstep off a curb could lead to a fall in front of a car?  Just now, I was thinking about my daughter’s sewing and how in earlier times, a prescription for depression might have been industriousness and a basket of mending and I saw myself with my heart poked through with a knitting needle.  Horrific, self-indulgent crap.  But it’s hard to imagine a platypus when you can’t even turn on the machine.

 

Hard to imagine going to Greece and that doesn't even require imagination since I've been there a dozen times over the past eighteen years.  We just bought our tickets and while it's still almost two months away, most of me couldn't care less, which is not like me at all.  Not care about guaranteed sunshine?  About swimming laps in my beloved Aegean?  About the platters of olives and juicy tomatoes and warm feta and ripe peaches?  I write this now and it is as if I am trying to talk myself into the desire to leave this tedious depressed self, this bleak Me who is, but who is not, Me.  What I know to be true is traveling away from here, this place where I live, Meadville, and traveling away from this place that I live, Me, will not cure Me, will not shake the dog from my heels.  All I can do is hope that by departure time rolls around, the dog will have slunk back to its cave and my wounds will have scabbed over and I will be able to taste the salt and the sweet again, and will be able to feel the pleasure of floating in the sea under warm sunshine again.

 

I know this will pass.  It pisses me off to say it.  I hate platitudes.  “This too shall pass.”  Because what I want to say is, “Fine.  It will pass.  But the Depression will come again.  So where’s the meaning in it?  How am I any better for it?”  Really, I don’t know that getting through these down cycles makes me any stronger each and every time because there’s just a numbing sameness to the Depressions.  What I do know is that I need to start to rethink how I use my time outside of the mire—my time in vision and creation, when I am humming along, when my ducks can become platypuses.       

Mind the Gap: Eating Disorders and Clothing Fit

 

 

Yesterday, I was swiveling back and forth in the beauty salon chair, paging through the latest issue of Vogue, waiting for the timer to ping! so my stylist could wash out the purple-that-will-turn-black dye from my hair.  One of the results of being Black Irish?  Silver stands started showing up in my late thirties—and they’re not the cascading Emmylou Harris kind of silver, but the wiry crone variety.  So, I do my best to fight time and get to read all the magazines I don’t buy for myself for the forty minutes or so it takes for the magic to work.

Except this time what should have been a vapid fashion ad knocked the breath out of me.  A model, beautiful, of course, long, almost colorless blonde hair, pinned in a half up-do, wearing a halter top, no doubt made of calf-skin, or some material that cost more than my monthly mortgage payment.  She teetered on rickety heels, from what I can remember, not much to them other than strings across her toes and around ankles.  Her face was glacially clean, as if she had spent a week scrubbing it so only the clean angles of her bones, which were beautiful and hard, were left.  But all of this, really, is ordinary—you can flip to most pages in Vogue or Elle and find this presentation.  What stopped me was this:

The gap.

Between her pants and her body.

Rather the waist of the pants and her waist.

Her pants didn’t fit.

The anorexic gap.

I looked at the model and though: Either A.) They put her in pants that were too big or B.) She is too small.  I dismissed A.) Because from what I know of the industry, they generally use a fit size of 0 or 00, so that would be just silly for a 0 or 00 to be too big; which means she is B.) Too small?  Or maybe  C.) WORSE.  The ad deliberately makes her look like she is too small for the clothes, that she is underweight, has grown out of/is undersized for the clothes she is wearing.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go on a diatribe against the modeling industry and their links to eating disorders.  Certainly the industry didn’t cause my eating disorder.  As most of us know, Eating Disorders are complex, have many “causes,” though I prefer the term “triggers,” and these triggers work in chaotic combinations.  Obviously, when it comes to Body Image triggers, seeing images of underweight bodies as represented by women in the modeling industry can be a trigger as they can be used as ideal aspirations.  But for me, and for many women who have or are struggling with Eating Disorders, we move past these “ideal aspirations” into Anorexia.  You don’t usually see the emaciated, feeding-tubed woman skipping around in her cute, green ballet flats and flouncy champagne pink skirt on the cover of the latest J. Crew catalogue, do you?  Not exactly going to sell a lot of cashmere cardigans.

So I saw that gap, that space between the pants fitting and the pants not fitting, the pants touching and not touching, and I felt that old, or not so old trigger, rear its ugly head.  Because for me, when I was deep in Anorexia, that was my yardstick.  First, it was trading pants sizes down.  A sense of accomplishment.  This is too big, let’s move smaller.  This is too big, too.  Smaller still.  Smaller still.  Smaller still.  Until I got as small as I could go.  As small as the sizes would go.  Until there was the gap.  And then the gap became me.  See?  Nothing can touch you.  That’s how you know that you are small enough.  That’s how you know you haven’t become big again.  That’s how you know that you are okay.  If the waist touches you, then you are fat, big, wrong, a failure.  Just like the Tube announces in London: MIND THE GAP.

But there was this moment, close to the end of it all, close to when I was sent away for my last inpatient Eating Disorders recovery, when I was in a store trying to buy a dress for some party.  I grabbed three or four in the smallest size and went into the dressing room which had a three-way mirror.  Ages since I’d looked at myself in any real way and suddenly I was face-to-face-limb-to-limb-stomach-to-ass with myself and I was breathless because I didn’t recognize who I was.  But…I wasn’t about to find out because I wasn’t ready yet, so I quickly slipped Dress #1 over my head.  Enormous.  Dress #2.  Enormous.  Dress #3.  Enormous.  Nothing fit at all.  I had fallen into the gap and disappeared.

My clothes fit today, even if there are days when I resent that.  Sometimes I catch myself wishing for my jeans to start sliding off my hipbones.  Or I start wondering what the point of exercise is if not to lose weight.  Or just the need to keep on top of myself to eat consistently if I am exercising because that’s how I maintain a healthy weight and prevent disappearing back into the gap.  Which is funny. If anyone is as old as me and remembers back in the early, early ‘80’s, The Gap’s ad campaign had a jingle that went, “Fall into The Gap.”  Of course, about luring you into their stores.  But for me, is the perfect antithetical complement to the Tube’s “Mind the Gap.”  It is so easy for me to fall back into the gap, into the kind of thinking that triggers Eating Disordered thoughts and behaviors—a slippery slope.  It is much harder, but payoff means living in recovery, if I am mindful, always, of the gap.

     

Surrender to the Second Act

                                                  

Ladies and Gentlemen!  My deep apologies for the extended intermission.  I know you’ve grown restless, but please, bear with me for just a while longer.  Avail yourself of the concession stand.  Of course, it’s Recovery themed, so Mixed-Berry Smoothies, Lattés, Dark Chocolate-Cashew Brittle, and Hand-pressed Fruit Roll-ups inscribed with AA’s Twelve Steps.  It seems there’s been a malfunction with the curtain’s pulley system.  The microphone, as you can tell, is inconsistent in volume.  And the chorus—essential back-up for our headliner!  They sing AND dance.  Tap dance.  The tiny metal pieces keep skittering off their shoes and buttons keep popping off in the most inappropriate places  So we need to get them all refitted before we can send them out. 

But really, I know you know the show could go on without all this.  Our headliner could just say, “To hell with the back-up!”  I mean, a chorus is helpful, but not essential.  Every now and then, you need to take the stage alone.  Sing a cappella.  Deliver the empowered monologue.  So of course, she could just push through the curtains and Get On With the Show!  We’re all restless, aren’t we, to see what’s next?  So what’s the problem?  Is our star being petulant?  Demanding?

Oh shit.  I was never meant for Broadway.  I’m just petrified, caught in-between Acts.  I knew exactly what to do in Act One of my life.  I had the script typed and bound and memorized from the time I was a kid: 1. Be very, very smart and be as perfect as possible in school because that will earn you admiration and approval which is just as good (or equal to) love; 2. Follow the rules (that you will be taught) to become the kind of writer that you want to be; 3. Choose your role model (Writer/Professor) and follow their path, but try to outdo them—do it faster and all at once (Writer/PhD/Book/Wife/Mother/Tenure-Track Professor); 4. Ignore Craziness/Eating Disorder/Alcoholism.  As the heavy red curtain falls, (let’s add gilt trim) I am lying in a hospital bed, my hacked up arms wrapped in gauze, suicidal, hung-over, and twenty pounds under-weight, about to be given the ultimatum (to be redundant) of a lifetime, from my husband: “If you don’t stop drinking stop cutting stop starving you can’t come home to the kids and me.”

So here I am waiting in the brilliance of Intermission.  Waiting and wandering and working on well-being.  It’s been two years since that ultimatum, two years since I last had a drink, two years of sobriety, from alcohol, anyway.  Time to regain much of my physical health.  I no longer wake up at night because my heart beats so fast against my chest I think it might punch through, I no longer hide cuts on my arms under bandages and sweaters.  I no longer stockpile medication to take by the fistful when things get “that bad.”  Time to gain stability--for once in my adult life.  It’s been almost eighteen months since I’ve been inside a hospital—mostly due vigilance, though in part due to Dr. B. telling me that the next time I go inpatient I’ll either go to the state hospital or to a group home.  What can I say?  It seems ultimatums work.  Time to work through my SHAME, Shame, shame.  Today, I was telling a friend that I know my shame over being an alcoholic, over having Bipolar Disorder, over struggling with an Eating Disorder has largely left me when I realized I no longer taste the bloody metal in my mouth every time I’m confronted with some moment from the past tied to my drinking, manic-depression, starving, or purging.  Rather, I’m usually grateful because I can see myself in those awful, tortured, sad, past imperfect scenes as someone who was (and still is) worthy of compassion, help and forgiveness and in need of succor.

Most importantly?  Intermission has given me (most obviously) time.  A break.  A rest.  But now it’s time for the Second Act.  Spring Ahead.  The clock moves forward.  And guess what?  I’m sitting in my dressing room, scared shit.  Because I don’t know what to do or who to be when I leave and go back on stage.  I don’t have a clear place to go once I let go of the last page of Act One.  No more Professor Kerry dream.  That PhD that’s framed sits in my office up in the attic of my house, not in an office on campus anymore.  No more Sure Thing, Sure Bet, Do This, and I Know I Get That.  And I should feel liberated, right?  I get to start over—rethink what I want from my life, rethink how I want to direct my talents.  But I’m 40 and have two kids and am married and by now, should be adding to my retirement fund, or at least have some idea as to what my Second Act could be.  Instead, I’m just sitting here looking at a whole rack of potential costumes, eyeing their feathers and frills and sequins and baubles, but I don’t see one for me.  Okay, maybe the green Flapper number, but that would require some moonshine Gin drink and I can’t have that, soooo.

Maybe I just can’t see my Second Act yet—can’t see past my own past, if that makes sense.  The worst kind of stage fright. 

But this is not who I am, burying myself inside Intermission.  Just break down the word.  “Inter”-“Mission.”  Between missions.  Act One was only the first mission of my life.  Act Two is going to be the second mission of my life—and I need to think of this AS an actual Mission—a calling that I am charged with carrying out, something that reaches beyond myself, though using my talents, for some larger purpose.  The idea of this feels grandiose, feels like maybe I’m betraying my dream from Act One.  Makes me feel guilty, like I’m wasting those PhD years.  And yet.  Didn’t those years also lead me to blackouts and scars and starvation and Electric Shock Therapy and hospitals and countless separations from my family and suicide attempts and finally, thank god, Intermission?

Ladies and Gentlemen!  Please excuse the lack of fanfare.  We apologize in advance.  The chorus will not be onstage.  The curtain does not work.  The microphone is shot.  But the lights!  Cue the lights!

I’m here.  Center stage.  Open to suggestions.  Humble and Hopeful and Heartful.   

 

     

 

 

Dear Valentine

 

Dear Valentine,

Yes, this is self-addressed, though no need for the stamp, as maybe you will allow a momentary grace period for that kinder, sweeter (though not in the Confectioner’s sugar sort of way), dare-I-say-more loving voice that occupies 1/1000^th of your brain to speak on this, the day given over for L-O-V-E to speak.  Though now that you bring up your disdain for anything trite (the hastily remembered supermarket Red Rose bouquet swathed in Baby’s Breath, the mass manufactured diamond cascade heart necklaces sold in the chain outlets, “Because nothing says You Love Her like…,” the pressured expectations of performative sex in brand new, itchy, ill-fitting lingerie).  You can go on and on, right?  All that loving sweetness sold in aisle 6. 

But what about that lovely thoroughbred down at the barn that you used to feed a few sugar cubes to when you were done brushing him down after your riding lesson?  His smooth, warm tongue against your palm quickly lapping up the sugar, crunching the crystals.  A small gift for his patience with your human stupidity as you made mistake after mistake during your lesson, for his forbearance of your human weight on his back.  And your own children?  Seducing them with double-layer chocolate cake?  You could be making them wheat grass smoothies for dessert or oatmeal raisin bars.  But you want the oohs and aahs, the deep sighs of pleasure and the chocolate smeary kisses.  There is love in all that.

No need for embarrassment or shame.  Remember when you were a little girl and you used to spend hours making Valentines for your friends and parents and crushes?  Red construction paper, red foil, and white doilies.  Intricate designs.  Layered designs.  Each card contained a specific intention and message.  Not just a slapdash “I Love You” on the bottom of a factory made card.  But “You Are Worth the Time.”  “You are Worth the Effort.”  “You Are One of a Kind.”  “You Are Not Perfectly Aligned.  But You Are Perfect To Me.” 

What are all the loving words you need to hear from me today?  You avoid hearing them all the time, choosing to listen to your more cynical self.  Just today, you went searching for the origins of Valentine’s Day because you remembered a thread of the story and wanted to “prove” the holiday was truly one for sentimental suckers.  Right?  So yes, you found out the holiday has its origins in ancient Rome, when women would wait, willingly, in line for men to beat them with goat skins in the belief that it would increase their fertility, and then basically allow themselves to be raped for two days.  Did you go to CVS then to see if there were any chocolate boxes depicting this scene on the cover? 

If you search for negative interference, that’s what you’ll find.  If you want to let your defenses down for one minute—no Roman centurion is going to whack you with a goat skin, trust me on this—then you might be able to hear the message that girl is scribbling to you now—even though there is 30 years between you, even though she has not yet cut up her arms, or picked up a drink, or starved herself, or had a manic break--on that doily heart. 

I Love You.

You Make My Heart Beat Like Crazy.

I Will Never Love Anyone Like I Love You.

You Are So Beautiful To Me.

Will You Be Mine.

That doily heart.  Paper thin, so fragile.  Like a real heart.  Like her heart.  Like your heart.  But not like her heart or yours at all.   Because the heart is a muscle, not paper at all, beating 100,000 a day, breaking over and over, but reassembling itself again and again in love, out of love, for love.

The Happiness Un-Project

Athena, my dog, who is almost always happy.

 

My kids are in the breakfast room digging for a dinosaur.  A Tyrannosaurus Rex to be exact.  In miniature scale, pre-packaged by the Smithsonian buried in manufactured, sand-like, cement-like, wooden-mallet-breakable material.  They are both wearing plastic lab goggles and swishing away the gray dust with paintbrushes, happy, as well, archaeo-paleontologists can be in the middle of a kitchen in a house built in the 1890’s in Northwestern Pennsylvania in the dead of winter.  Which is to say, after their heaping bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios (kiddie crack), and the day off from school (Teacher Work Day), very, very, very happy.

Happiness has been the subject of discussion for the past two of my meetings in a row—Wednesday at my Dual Diagnosis meeting (both addicted to a substance and suffering from a psychiatric condition) and last night at AA.  How do we—I—find happiness inside recovery?  Happiness seems to be the subject of blogs and books and conferences.  There’s The Happiness Project, the bestseller about transforming your life over the course of a year into a happier one.  I’m sure there’s even a Happiness! paint color at Home Depot.  And Happiness! Chia seeds.  Maybe even a Happiness! Pooper scooper.  I’ve only known HAPPY in that fast, out-of-control way when my family begins to wonder if I need my meds checked.  Too much pressured happiness has too often been a predictor of mania, and then the resulting depressive crash.    

It’s difficult to say this, but I’m not sure I even know what extended happiness is—the kind that is generated from within, that withstands the vicissitudes of exterior circumstances.  My entire life—at least what I can remember—my happiness has been dependent upon my own achievements and earning the approval of others through achievements.  Impressing my parents with perfect grades (though there was the expectation, too, of that—no mediocrity permitted); impressing my teachers with my drive to be more creative and ask for extra, harder work and make it all look so easy (because it usually was); impressing anybody I met in any way I could—did I mention I could out drink you beer-for-beer, shot-for-shot? 

I have stacks of journals I have kept going all the way back to the 5^th grade, and except for the cut-out TeenBeat photo of Rob Lowe, surrounded by a glued-on glitter heart, most of these journals are filled with scathing self-criticism and desperate unhappiness—the kind that generally does not lift.  Or, only lifts when I have circumstantial spikes of joy.  The initial throes of passion and love.  The initial weeks of pregnancy and then birth.  The initial week or two after my book, Necessary Lies, was published.  Each time I’ve come home after being hospitalized—in the psychiatric hospital or an Eating Disorders unit.  Return!  Renewal!  Joy!  Or, only lifts when I’m manic.  Or, only lifts when the pharmacological cocktail gets set (for the first time after my first “break,” a post-partum quasi-psychotic episode) and reset and reset ad infinitum.

When it doesn’t last, I feel like a failure.  How hard can happiness be?  Especially now that I’m sober for almost two years?  I wrote about this in my last post.  This vision I have for myself?  Wanting to be the woman who wakes up every morning in the white nightgown, arms stretched overhead, sun streaming through the windows?  (A dear friend read this post and even sent me that nightgown! Thank you, Amy!)  But here’s the thing: 1. I think I got that image from an anti-depressant commercial; 2. I live in Northwestern Pennsylvania and next to Seattle, we get the least amount of sunshine in the United States, and, we get 8 months of winter; and 3. Right now, I wake up in the dark, to my son and daughter squashed between my husband and me, and a 65 pound Labrador Retriever jammed up against us all.  That calm, untangled, sunbathed vision is pretty far from lived experience.  Not to mention that I have never really been a morning person, so I don’t know if I can change my internal clock.

Which is similar to what I’ve been trying to do in sobriety and I don’t know if it’s been making me happy.  I’ve been reaching for happiness, and only finding frustration these past few months.  For instance, a number of people have been urging me to pursue meditation, including just about every health magazine, centered-celebrity-who-has-a-guru, and new research about the benefits in terms of changing brain patterns in depression and Bipolar disorder.  I’m trying to become someone who says “Yes,” so how could I say “No” to this?  So far, though, it has been an exercise in frustration.  Believe me, I’ve started small—5 minutes—no expectations, no judgments.  Maybe it’s the manic side of me, the need to be in constant motion.  I remember as a kid being stuck in traffic with my mom on the Long Island Expressway; the tie-up could be for one or two miles, and we’d move a few inches at a time, but she’d be pretty aggressive about her inches, and saying, over and over to the driver in front of her, “Oh c’mon. Let’s go.”  (Sitting in traffic, I also learned how to string together individual curse words so that they would form compound words: Goddammitshitsonofabitch)  Even then, I had a pretty good idea that the driver in front of us wasn’t the cause of the hold-up, but I, too, began to feel the build-up of pressure, tension in my chest, just wanting him to go, go, go, move, move, move, because we had to get going, we had somewhere to be, he was holding us up.

That’s the feeling I get when I sit down to meditate.  Even when I try counting breaths.  So when the five minutes are over, I am relieved, not grateful, not relaxed, not centered, certainly not any closer to happiness, except happy it’s over and I can get up and get back to my day.  I wish I could be better—more peaceful, more OM, able to float the surface.  But I certainly don’t want to make Happiness a project, work, something that exhausts me in its pursuit, something that feels more and more elusive the harder I pound the pavement running after it.  The other evening, I wasted over an hour on the J. Crew website.  I received a very generous Christmas gift card, and usually, I can find something I both love and want—generally a sweater because I’m always cold here, and I can never have enough sweaters.  I sat on the couch, and scrolled through everything within price range, then scrolled through again and again, becoming more and more frustrated with myself.  Surely, there was something I wanted?  There was always something I wanted at that store but generally couldn’t afford, and now I could afford something, and wanted nothing?  Anger because all day I had been looking forward to this mini-shopping trip to make me happy.  Instead, I was leaving empty-handed, no shopping cart full of happiness.  Delayed gratification—I’ll spend it later—but somehow, more important, more telling, delayed happiness.

Idiot, right, to get so worked up over a failed J Crew online shopping foray?  But it taught me something about how I’ve been treating my right to happiness.  Delayed gratification.  I’ll be worthy of—ready for—happiness when I finally get stability, when I am finally a “good/right/perfect” wife and mother, when I finally finish my next book, when I finally am a professor again at another university and no longer have to be ashamed to walk around where I live and can get off medical disability, when I have finally achieved everything I set out to achieve and can make every version of myself at every age proud to be me.

Goddammitshitsonofabitch!  Of course I’m going to fail that eleven year old girl who wanted to be a writer, a Supreme Court Justice, and marry Rob Lowe.  I’m going to fail the seventeen year old girl who never wanted to get married or have kids because she was going to run off to Paris and live in a garret and devote her life to writing, even if she starved (well, I got that part down) and died young (avoided that by a miracle).  I’m going to fail the twenty-something who married a fellow writer and believed idealistically that their love would heal whatever was not right inside her damaged brain.  I’m going to fail the woman in her thirties over and over who hung on, believing sheer force of will could keep the perfect storm of alcoholism, an eating disorder, and Bipolar disorder from decimating her life as a professor, a writer, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and all around decent human being. 

But mostly, I’m going to fail who I am now, in this moment.  Because what must be essential to my sustained happiness now is releasing those standards of happiness, the happiness built on achievements.  Not that I’m suggesting I release ambition, otherwise I would simply go into hibernation, moving only to dress, feed, and send my kids out the door (and occasionally use the Happiness! pooper scooper in the backyard).  Maybe it can come from recognizing it while its joys are coursing through me.  Like now.  Writing.  Creating movement and meaning beyond myself to you through quick strikes on a keyboard, watching understanding build across and down a page, being surprised as connections are made in the puzzle of thoughts.  And except when ECT memory fog hits and I lose the thread of words or just simply words?  I’m happy.       

New Year's Irresolutions

                                                     Sid Vicious, Sex Pistols

I am never one for New Year’s Resolutions because I find that I tend to be, by nature or Bipolarity, irresolute. In past years, I neatly and with serious intent, wrote out my list in my specially set-aside “Spiritual Growth” journals, and within days (if not hours) acted contrary to the lists’ aims.  I chewed my nails and cuticles, dumped my clothes in piles on the floor, engaged in mean-spirited gossip, yelled at my kids and husband when cranky and tired, said “no” when I meant “yes” and vice versa, forgot to practice yoga at dawn (refused to wake at dawn), forgot to floss with any regularity, forgot to brush the dogs’ teeth, meant to be kinder and gentler with myself and instead criticized and harangued myself more, and before sobriety and relative sanity, wound up with more hangovers and blackouts and scars on my arms and closer-to-death pounds lost and weeks spent in the psych ward.  This is where lists of Resolute Should’s and Should Not’s, Do’s and Do Not’s leave me. 

Really, though, I should be celebrating my biggest accomplishment of  the past year and one half-- keeping my ass (which now has hard won pounds of womanly flesh on it, thank you very much) out of the psychiatric hospital and at the round table of AA.  My main Resolution every New Day?  Please God/Spirit/Higher Power/Whoever is Listening/Kerry at Your Best Self:  Please stay here and sane and stable and home because you are doing just fine and doing just what is necessary and look at how far you have come.  Your husband is away again at a conference because he believes and trusts in you.  And your children are sitting at your feet, by the fire (a real one, not a fire of your making requiring an emergency room, but one you made in the fireplace), and you made dinner and the kids are drawing and chattering—silly stuff, take-for-granted things that not long ago you couldn’t take for granted.   

Sometimes, though, I get overwhelmed by New Year regrets—i.e., All of the things I did not do in the previous twelve months that I should have done and hence whip myself over now in guilt and shame.  Such as?  Finish my novel, (after all, I’m on Disability so I should have all the time in the world.)  Such as?  Work on Self-compassion.  I’m on Disability for Bipolar Disorder yet I still believe I’m Wonder Woman and should be able to cure this with mere mind-over-matter reasoning—and finish the novel and climb out of the hole most of my thirties had left me in and expect that I should write with the warp speed of mind on mania that I had been doing throughout most of my unmedicated twenties (my slower pace is acceptable—I just published a new story this last month).  Such as?  Become the perfect wife/mother/daughter/daughter-in-law/sister/sister-in-law/friend to make up for all those years of being the hideous nightmare.  Of course, perfection is impossible and carries its own brittle, frenzied hideousness.  But every now and then my gut twists with a longing to redo what I screwed up.  Such as?  When Sophia mentions her 5^th birthday party she had at her grandmother’s one summer, and asks if I remember then says, “Oh yeah, you weren’t there.  You were in the hospital.”  Such as?  All of the drunks, all of the furious manic tirades, all of the frenzied scenes of self-harm, all of the suicide attempts that I don’t remember because I was too far gone or because ECT has wiped out those memories.   

And it’s the regrets I feel when I’m reminded every now and then by people who lived through those years with me, exactly what they lived through.  Recovery requires allowing others to be honest about what it felt like for them to live through those crazy years.  Recovery programs call it “making amends.”  You offer an honest apology for specific ways in which your specific craziness hurt other people—and other people have a chance to let you know how your craziness hurt them.  Of course, in some ways, with drinking, and now “not drinking,” it’s a bit easier because at least, in the moment, there’s a temporary reliability that my drinking will hopefully not hurt anyone again.  But with my Bipolar Disorder?  I can’t stop the mood swings. I can do my best to minimize impact and to plan for emergency de-escalation.  But this doesn’t go away.  And this is where some of the greatest year-end regrets come in: how much time I’ve wasted in depression or mania; how much time I’ve spent as guinea pig to one drug or another; how much time I’ve spent allowing myself to be beaten down by this fight. 

Because here’s the secret resolution: I want to be the woman who wears the pretty white pajamas  and wakes up in bed in the morning with a smile on her face, stretching her arms overhead, her brain bathed in its own glorious, internal sunshine.  I want to be the woman who is confident that joy is mine for the day, that nothing, absolutely nothing that comes from internal black, chaotic brainwaves will destabilize this.  Confident.  Reliable.  Lasting more than an hour.

But as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been listing to the background noise of “My Way.”  I wish I could say it was Frank Sinatra’s classier voice.  Alas, it’s the much crasser Sid Vicious of the “Sex Pistols.”  Clearly, his example is not the one I want to follow—dead in a New York City hotel of a heroin overdose.  But his (albeit) pretty wretched singing does seem to speak to why I shouldn’t be wallowing in my regrets at this point: “Regrets, I’ve had a few/ But then again, too few to mention/ I did what I had to do/ I saw it through without exemption/ I planned each chartered course/ Each careful step along the highway/ And more, much more than this/ I did it my way.”  Not that I’m saying I had to travel to the bottom of the well and put my family through hell, or that I should just say, “Screw regrets!”  But I’ve made formal amends and continue to make living amends, and am doing my best (most days) to live a gathered, thoughtful, sane life, one that requires foresight—vision with wisdom.  No need for irresolute wish lists!

     

A Museum's Education: Madness, "Madame X," and My Body 

 

 

 Exhibit #2: “I Wake to Your Screams,” Kathe Kowalski (from the S Series, 1979-1991), The Erie Museum of Art

Again, a museum.  Again, spiritual instruction. 

My intention was to drop the kids off at The Erie Art Museum for a 3 hour Lego Build/Stop Action Film class and head directly to Starbucks for a mammoth Venti Chai Latte, followed by aimless (no discretionary funds) browsing at the mall.  Generally, I avoid malls—something about the fluorescent lighting bearing down on me, coupled with Christmas Muzak and chirpy sales associates is debilitating.  I usually leave with a headache and pair of unnecessarily expensive, new jeans (I already own 8 pairs, but Surely!  Surely! A more perfect pair is out there?).

Instead of heading for the museum exit, I took a detour.  Reflexive pleasure.  When I was a teenager, I used to take the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan and walk and walk and walk all the way up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then spend the day wandering the halls, stopping wherever I wanted for as long as I wanted—a beautiful marble kouros, his one leg thrust forward in brazen nudity, and his hair falling in rippled stone (I loved this brash boy); Modigliani’s “Reclining Nude,” her face turned toward the viewer, her body unabashedly stretched across the canvas, dark hair cast behind her shoulders (she looked like my possible future self!); a green silk and leather French corset from the 18^th century, the baleen stays and tight lacing both seductive and horrific (my hands encircling my waist could in no way approximate 16 inches).  What didn’t follow me from one hall to the next?  IT’s incessant chatter sizing me up and finding me wanting in everything: You are ugly and unlovable and fat and ungainly and stupid and crazy.

How could any of that overtake the breathtaking courage of Madame Pierre Gautreau, the poised model for John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X.”  Madame Gautreau wears daring black eveningwear—a plunging sweetheart neckline, straps made of pearl and metal, creamy skin, reddish hair pinned up, neck turned away in a graceful curve (I wanted to run my finger down her neck!), and her profile succinct, controlled, and wonderfully sharp.  She knows she is both arresting and desirable.  Men will love her--easily, giddily, foolishly—but she will always own herself.  Standing in front of her portrait, her imposing, self-assured silence filled up the wobbly, anxious silence within me and I knew I was (or would be, once the strictures of my life circumstances were released) my own self—I could look at you or not; talk to you or not; kiss you or not; make love to you or not. 

Of course, the moment I left the Museum to walk back to Penn Station, I was cinched back into my corset—eyes on the ground, speed walking, passively ignoring the remarks from men in suits brushing against me, men at construction sites collectively shouting at me, men in front of convenience stores clutching paper-bagged, beer bottles and leering at me.  How to be Madame X?

So the detour to the Erie Art Museum’s Bacon Gallery and its new exhibit: “Full Exposure: The Uncompromising Life and Lens of Kathe Kowalski.”  Silver gelatin photographs of people living inside their struggles.  People in nursing homes, in abject poverty, in prison.  The photos aren’t voyeuristic, but compassionate: studied glances of people trying to live in spite of their unjust due.  Though in the photos, the subjects never looked posed, are not preening, have not composed their presentation in order to sway our opinion.  They are as they are.  Often frighteningly real.  Just as I saw future possible selves in Modiglinani’s “Reclining Nude,” and Sargent’s “Madame X,” I also saw future selves in their photos and I was unsettled.  No, more than that.  I wanted to back pedal out of the gallery and go back to aristocratic composure. These series of photographs might not seem self-reflective—poverty, prison, nursing homes?—but I found versions of myself on all the gallery’s walls. 

In the photographs of poverty, the subjects are often overwhelmed by their chaotic, messy surroundings.  Everything haphazard.  The people—adults and children—seem both hardened and fraught, possess a cool awareness that this is what their life, thus far, amounts to—buried under numbing poverty.  I am not poor and I have never known poverty, but I know what that internal scrabbling against absolute destitution feels like, though mine has been against emotional and spiritual destitution.  I know what that panic of nothing left-nothing left-nothing left feels like, though mine has been in regards to hitting the bottom of the empty well. 

Prison?  I have never been incarcerated so I cannot even begin to presume I know what it means to be confined behind bars, to have life and free will restricted to that extent.  But certainly, I have been incarcerated inside the unforgiving system of Bipolar Disorder and an Eating Disorder, of perfectionism and despair, of Alcoholism and its four walls. 

But the photographs that truly have stayed with me are the ones of women in nursing homes.  Some of these women are young—perhaps illness (physical or developmental) has made them patients.  But it is the hint of their mental illness—the spastic splaying across a wheelchair (not at all reclining), the head thrown back and mouth opened wide in an cackling, full-body laugh (indecorous, the French Salon might say)—that scares me so.  That could be me.  I am that close sometimes to the tipping point.  To running into the street naked, arms slashed up, banging my head against the pavement.  Losing explicit control.  (This is why I am a writer—the orderly, precise progression of words into sentences into paragraphs helps keep the psychotic demons at bay.)

And then there are the photos of Kowlaski’s own mother who had Alzheimer’s.  In almost every frame, the woman is half-dressed in a dingy slip or her underwear is half-tugged up her thighs, or she is naked and folded up on her bed, and often, sentences and phrases (“I wake to your screams”) are written around the photographs speaking to her imagined internal state.  I didn’t know how to look at these photos; all I wanted to do was look away.

Yes, part of it was fear.  The subject was elderly and vulnerable (though protected by her illness): wrinkles cross-hatching her entire body, flaccid breasts sagging down to her belly like socks filled with change, arms and legs flabby and slack.  This is what I could look like in 40 years.  Could?  No, will likely look like.  No, stop prevaricating.  Will look like.  40 years already and what do I have to show for it?  (Insert IT’s malevolent chatter: You fucked up.  Lost your job.  Where’s the 2^nd book?  How fat is your psychiatric record?  Why do you put up with yourself and your failings?  Just put an end to yourself already!)  And what is more, because of the 30+ ECT treatments, my brain scan might suggest my (in the words of my neurologist) “resultant memory deficits and mild cognitive decline,” could be a precursor to Alzheimer’s.  Hell, I see my neurologist next week and he’s going to decide if in fact I DO need to be on Alzheimer’s medication. 

This is the image of myself that I find impossible to contemplate, let alone live with: language (i.e., being a “writer”) gone, self-awareness gone, me standing in a room, naked, not minding that I’m being looked at.  Though one could argue that Modigliani’s nude and Madame Gautreau are the positive, other side of this—they don’t mind being looked at either.  No one here has any shame.  Why do I cling to shame?  What protective costume does it offer me?    

But to be honest, another part of why I wanted to look away was initial revulsion.  The old, flabby, imperfect body.  Here, Anorexia’s voice butted in.  Starving myself was not just about starving myself to get to the lowest possible weight while subsisting on the least amount of calories.  An Eating Disorder is often about taking complete control—at least on the surface—of one’s body.  I could determine what I wanted my body to do; I could imagine my own corset and whittle myself down to what was only necessary; my body would never betray me with a flabby thigh, a stomach roll, an uncouth laugh.  All baleen stays in place and everything cinched in tight, then tighter, then tighter.  I remember reading an article about autopsies doctors would do on women who wore corsets.  Their internal organs were rearranged to fit inside the stricture.  Their lungs compressed so all they could manage were asthmatic breaths.  Those fainting couches were there for more than languorous purposes.  With Anorexia, I became an overly circumscribed inmate taking itty bitty steps, huffing infinitesimal breaths, refusing to rebel against the warden, IT, and I almost died.

But that elderly, infirm woman looking back at me?  What would she see and say?  Because, of course, Alzheimer’s pushes out the censors.  Why are you being so stupid?  The body is not some detached object to manipulate, to carve, to starve, to cut off, to disown.  You can choose what to fill your emptiness with—shame and fear and loathing and despair; or the voice of your nude and Madame X, and even, yes, me.  We are who WE are.  Here, in front of your gaze, you can’t touch us, you can’t even know us because we are not owned or known by our bodies.  We are what is contained beneath our majestic and fearsome hides, impervious to time and wasting.  We are all long dead, but we are here.  So stop fucking around and wasting your time dithering in your cell.  Write and your insides will fill again.

Or something like that.