A bad day

this major mental illness thing is no joke.

it's funny--even though I now have a real diagnosis from reputable, diplomaed, liscened therapists and psychiatrists I still have a hard time with that major mental illness label. It's not just the label. it's that I spent so long hearing that I was just making things up, that nothing was "Wrong" with me, that I was selfish and sttention seeking, etc...maybe you get the picture. maybe you don't. Maybe you;d have to be me to really understand it, and since you're not me, well...all I can say is these taunting voices are constantly in my head like the buzzing of flies and whenever I try to talk to anyone about my feelings and experience the flies get very loud.

anyway, yesterday was a really bad day. I've been suffering increasing anxiety for weeks now--the kind of anxiety that makes you scared to go out of the house in case someone, god forbid, should actually see you much less try to talk to you. I keep thinking people are coming to get me and although I know in my head that no one is going to some drag me out of my bed and pillory me in the middle of the night in my soul I really don;t know it. I keep expecting that I'll be punished for something, some unmentionable crime I've committed totally unaware. The crime of just being. because in my soul I feel that I'm bad. My therapist keeps telling me I don;t do bad things; in fact, I'm a strangely good and compassionate person. But that doesn;t help. It's that Calvinist idea of grace getting in the way--that if you're on the list you;re good andif not you're irredeemable no matter what acts you may perform in this life. I know I come down on the irredeemable side just for getting born. I don't have to be a mass murderer or anything. It doesn't make any difference, just as doing good things do not add to my total goodness.

well, I finally called my psychiatrist who prescribed more anti-anxiety medication, tank all the gods so I'm doing better today. but he asked me, was there anything about this time of year that I had associations with that might make this a troublesome time. And I started crying uncontrollably and remembered my high school....not just high school, but grade school, from third grade on up. An abominably abusive place. For ten years I had to go and be mentally, verbally, emotionally and even sexually abused at this school. And there was no one to talk to about it. My parents just told me--making matters worse--that I should be grateful for the opportunity to go there because if I didn;t I would be forced to go to the DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOLS--said in tones that made me understand that this was the lowest circle of hell, at least in my parents' estimation and I was a terribly ungrateful and selfish child for wanting not to be abused every day of my life. I even had to go to day camp there in the summer so there was no escape. Ever. I was scared all the time. When I tried to talk to the teachers about this they blew me off, probably because my mother was also a teacher there. Or maybe they had been told not to listen to me, I don;t know.

It was the most terrible thing remembering this, like I was back there again, helpless, with no where to turn. I cried myself into a migraine.

Then I went to see my therapist. I don;t remember everything I told her but she's of the opinion that I'm in a rapid cycling mixed state, which is something Bipolar people get that I don;t understand, and that I should tell my pdoc what I had told her. But if I can't remember, how can I tell him? the one good thing though, is that I finally convinced her that these voices in my head that contradict everything I say are NOT just old tapes and not just memories of things people have said to me in the past--they're living and present and I don't feel they're part of me at all. I don;t think they're a hallucination either. It's like...struggling always against some loud noise that blots out my own thoughts and makes it impossible for me to speak. And if anyone contradicts something I say, the voices just say, "See, what did I tell you?" So talking about what's going on with me is incredibly difficult.

Anyway, I have permission to take it easy and let the new meds do their work. Which is what I plan to do now that I'm done writing this.

And if you didn;t think I was crazy before I bet you sure do now. I don;t mind though. It feels more honest.

It feels weird sometimes to post these things on the internet where anyone can see them. But I feel a lot less exposed here than I do in general, so that's okay too.

My Day, and welcome to it.

Some of you may know and most of you may not know that I'm Bipolar and I suffer from PTSD. Because of this, I haven't ever held a job for longer than two years and the last time I "worked" was some ten years ago. I feel really guilty about this. Even when my therapist and my pdoc say it would be a BAD IDEA for me to try to get a job as of yet, I feel guilty. I feel like I don;t contribute anything to our household. I feel bad that my husband has to be the wage-earner eventhough he's told me repeatedly that he'd rather have less money and a sane wife than someone who's suicidal from going to a job she hates. It's not just a particular job. It's any job. The concept of JOB, to me, means pain, never earning enough, never having tiome to yourself, being exhausted all the time...you get the picture.

So Anyway, this summer I took the plunge and decided to apply for disability because I can't work.

It's hard for me to say "can't work." In my brain I believe I just WON'T work because I'm lazy. But I've been told I can't work and I try to believe that. It's hard.

Well, I just got a big package of MORE FORMS to fill out to verify the extent of my disability. The very first question was, "Give a detailed description of your day from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed at night." The problem with this is that they only allowed you about a third of a page to give this detailed description. I had to continue on the back of the page but it still wasn't enough. A real analysis would go something like this:

"I get up really late because I want to be asleep all the time because my bed is the only place I really feel safe. I pour myself a cup of coffee left over from the coffee my husband made in the morning. I feel bad that I don;t get up earlier and see him off to work or school, and that I don't have a job of my own. I spend a few moments thinking about how lazy I am. Then I spend about two hours in front of my computer perusing internet headlines and visiting various forums where I have the only friends in my life because I'm so afraid of real people that I don't have any real friends. After I've done this for a while, I begin to feel guilty because I'm spending time on something so unimportant, so I get up from my chair and make breakfast, which is always the same thing (yoghurt and granola with a sliced banana, if anyone cares). I take my numerous meds if I remember. Usually it takes me a while to remember and I have a moment of, "Oh, meds, right, I'm not normal." After this I clean up the kichen a little so at least last night's dishes aren't strewn all over the palce. I wash my face and wonder if I'm going to get dressed today. About this time, I start having an anxiety attack because I start thinking of all the things I should be doing, like cleaning the house and weeding in the garden and going downtown to check the post. My palms start sweating. Sometimes I manage to force myself to go out despite the panic and sometimes I don't. So I spend the rest of my day feeling bad because I didn't go out and do things. I berate myself constantly for the state of my yard and house. I tell myself I know people with far greater disabilities than I have who not only manage to do all these things but have jobs as well and kids too, and I wonder if I''m just a lazy piece of shit.

I try to read sometimes but I can't concentrate on anything more than about 30 minutes before I have to put it away and do something else. I stare at my flute case and think about practicing and don;t. Then I spend some time feeling bad about that. After which I probably play computer games and continue to cruise the internet for a while. I think about writing and don't. I feel guilty about that. I tell myself that a real writer would just get over all this, that it's the censor in me trying to make me not write and I should fight it but I don;t feel I have what it takes to fight--or is that just an excuse?

When my husband comes home we sit around for a while and stare at the walls, him because he's so tired from working or from school and me because I can;t think of anything to say. He asks me how my day has been and it's always the same. After a while we throw together some dinner and I think about all the elaborate Indian dinners I used to cook before I got so depressed, that I can't be bothered to deal with now. Sometimes I'm not even up to cooking and my husband does it.

After dinner, we sit around and drool some more before my husband starts on his homework. I try to read some more but usually end up playing computer games until bedtime and thinking about all the things I used to do.

And that's what MY day looks like. How's yours?

Today: Words

I'm always amazed, when I read other writers' works, how many words are misused. I can;t beoieve they slip past the editors, copy editors, and proofreaders. Like, in one quite excellent book, the author kept talking about "The yolk of slavery," which gave me an great image of slaves with eggs all over their heads but I think was not what the author had in mind. It's "Yoke" in that sense, my dear.

So today, for your edification (and to take out some of my frustrations), here are some commonly misused words and their definitions.

Nauseated Vs. Nauseous.
Nauseated is how you feel after you eat something bad, or when you have the flu. Nauseous is something disgusting. So you might be nauseated after eating a nauseous mess of porridge. You don;t feel nauseous; that would mean you;re likely to make someone sick. Well, I've known a few people like that.

Aggravated Vs. Irritated
You're irritated with a person. A condition is aggravated by something. You might be irritated because the cream your doctor prescribed aggravated the boils on your bum. You are not aggravated. Your skin, however, might be irritated as a result of the aggravation. (Thanks to Robbie Merliss, O.D. for this one)

Venemous Vs. Poisonous
Something is venemous if it bites you and you get sick. Something is poisonous if you bite IT and you get sick. So snakes are venemous, not poisonous (unlesss you happen to eat bad snake meat and become nauseated).

Whence, Hence, Thence etc.
I'm always amazed at how often I see these misused. Whence means "from where." So saying "From Whence..." is redundant. Likewise hence means "from here" and thence means "from there." You don;t need the "from to be stated again when using any of these words, even if you think it sounds better. It's just wrong. Their relations, whither, hither and thither are similar. Whither means "To where." Hither means "to here." Thither means "to there." So you don;t need to say "to whither are you going?" It's redundant. please try to remember this one as it drives me bananas.

Wherefore?
Wherefore means "why." Juliet says "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" because she's wondering why he has to be who he is, NOT because she's wondering where he's got to.

Its vs. It's
Another of my pet peeves. Its (no apostrophe) is the possesive of the pronoun "It." It's means "it is" or sometimes "it has." Remember: It's a shame that the cat lost its collar. If you can't replace one word with two, there's no call for the apostrophe.

Lie vs. Lay
lie is an intrasitive verb. this means it does not take an object. Lay is a transitive verb. this means it DOES take an object, always. You LIE down. A hen LAYS an egg.

And that's enough instruction for today. I hope you have found the above useful and informative!

Anxiety and Guilt

bad day for me today. I woke up later than I would have liked and still wanted to pull the covers over my head and hide. moved slowly through all my morning routine and could barely get dressed (if you call natty old sweatpants and a t-shirt dressed...). Couldn't stop thinking of all the things I meant to do today, SHOULD be doing and the more I thought about them the worse I felt.

anxiety like a lump in the pit of my stomach. sweaty palms. it's a body sensation, no thought to it, just "run away, run away." Apparently the thought of all the things I meant to do--like going downtown--triggered my flight or fight response. Apparently this is part of PTSD and I'm just going to have to live with it happening from time to time. So nothing got done.

and to make matters worse there's the guilt. my therapist says I feel guilt when I don;t do something I think others want me to do or do something I think others don;t want me to do, but the only person putting pressure on me today is me. unless you count the ever-present societal expectation that a person should be a certain way. or maybe it's my belief that other people think I should be a certain way? I don't know.

guilt feels like...fear to me. not good to say a feeling feels like another feeling, but that's as close as I can get. it feels like the fear of being punished. So does anxiety. so I wonder if for me anxiety and guilt are somehow inextricably linked. Like feeling a whip across your shoulders. In school we used to call it "the hunched feeling."

Sometimes, like now, I get these horrible moments of deja vu and I'm sure something bad is going to happen. I see myself writing this exact blog and I know I've seen this scene or montage before and then something bad happened. like a phone call telling me my husband has been in an accident or something--that's what I always expect. It's just a moment then it's gone but the fear remains.

I have no more thoughts about this, but I was trying to write a blog and I think I succeeded in that. So I'm done now.

Passion--where's mine?

My husband makes wands. Wands for Harry Potter fans, wands for witchy types, just nice carved wands for anyone who might want to have a wand in his or her life. Last week he walked into the Witchy Shoppe in the city and sold eleven of the things in a go without even trying. He doesn;t make them because he can sell them; that was just a nice bonus. He's always had a thing for sticks and the wand thing grew out of it naturally. Now he's working on a website devoted to his wands.

Or I have another friend who quilts. Her latest project is called "Catnaps:" small quilts for cats. She has a lovely website too. But she doesn't make them because she can sell them; she's said herself that's just an excuse. She likes to quilt. More than that, she loves fabric. The quilts and the website are an excuse for her to get more and more fabric. To indulge in this thing she's passionate about.

I think about things like this and wonder where my passion has gone.

I had a lot of it when I was younger--like in high school. For music, for writing, for painting, for all kinds of stuff. Well, we;re all passionate in High School...but don't most of us keep some of that passion as we age? Whether we put it into a career or a hobby, don'e we feel something for what we do?

I don't. At least, not mostly. I do remember feeling some passion when I was working on the stories for Dragons of the Mind, but that was so long ago I can hardly remember what it felt like. Mostly, my life is one of extreme...flatness: odd for someone with Bipolar Disorder, but there it is. I just don't feel interested in the things I do. Not the way I have sometimes in the past.

I think it's weird for a creative person to feel so little. Because I can still create, but it doesn't feed me in any way, you know? It's just something I do automatically. Or don't do recently, because I'm so fed up with this whole business of finding everything so boring.

Some of it could have to do with the meds I'm on to "even out my mood." Because my fits of passion could easily have been episodes of mania. I think they were. But I also remember being into stuff without being manic about it. I don;t feel into anything these days. It's all just...flat, like I said.

Where's my passion gone? Sometimes I think they beat it out of me in the hospital. Sometimes I think it was gone before the first time I was hospitalised. Like something broke in me and though I've been in therapy for years that thing has never been recovered. I wonder if it ever CAN be recovered or healed. When I think about what I would need for that to happen I think of things that seem impossible, like selling a million copies of my book or winning the World Fantasy Award or stuff like that. But I don't know if even that would help, or if it would just provide some more outside motivation to keep going when what I want is internal, not external.

In college I wrote a poem:

Once everything was a poem.
Now nothing is.
Not even this.

That best describes what I'm talking about, Once everything was involving, a source of inspiration and creativity. Now I have to work at it all the time. Now I have to pretend, and I don't like pretending.

When I try to talk to other writers about this they looks at me like I'm crazy. I mean, the common wisdom of the time is to follow your passion--if your passion is writing then write! They can't conceive of writing without it, which I do every day.

How do you follow your bliss when there is none?

What I've been doing...

So what have I been doing in the last few days, other than fretting about the situation I posted about last, smoking WAY too much and playing Bookworm Adventures until my eyes fall out?

Well, I've been thinking a lot about She Moved Through The Fair, the next book in my Caitlin Ross series. In it, Caitlin tracks a destructive magical amulet through the week-long Gordarosa Harvest Festival and eventually finds it closer to home than she suspected.

SMTtF started as a mundane murder mystery. In fact, it was the first Caitling Ross story I thought of (with the help of my darling and creative husband) some five or six years ago. Consequently, it's changed a lot since then. For one thing, Caitlin was a simple musician, without any of the more arcane elements to her persona that we come to hear of in The Unquiet Grave. For another, for all you people who are interested in the writer's process, it was written in the third person. And Timber had red hair.

But the biggest stumbling block I'm having now is that it was mundane. A Ha! you say, That's where the magic amulet comes in. And you'd be right. I invented the amulet when I was about halfway through TUQG so that there would be a reason for this book to be a Caitlin Ross story and not just a random Cozy.

But I'm having trouble remembering just how the amulet fits in to the murders. That's what I get for not writing things down I suppose. I know I had a Great Idea and pretty much the whole book planned out at one point. But did I take notes? Of course not. I thought I would remember. Of course years have gone by since the Great Idea and I DON'T remember. And I feel like I can't get started writing until I do.

Editorial meeting, help! This is where I need a team of writers to back me up with little notecards all filled with ideas that I can pin up on a bulletin board, just so I can keep track of what's going on. Because I have at least six Caitlin Ross books in my mind at this point--enough to keep me going for several years if they ever become more than vague notions (or should I ever sell a book to a real publisher or win the lottery so I can keep publishing them by myself).

Oh, and in case you've been wondering, the narrator of "Gifts of a Generous Heart" in Dragons of the Mind WAS indeed Caitlin Ross.

I've also been thinking about writing a letter to my mother, but that's another story that would entail the use of much tobacco and perhaps some whiskey.

Got My Mad On

So, the last few days have not been good ones for me. Why? I'll tell you:

Background: some of you may know this, but several years ago I was in a band with a woman who I had known for some years and was close friends with--or thought I was close friends with. To make a long story short, her disruptive and hostile behavious in the band, her compulsive lying behind my back and her refusal to do the work that was needed to play her part caused the end of the band and the end of our friendship. In fact, I haven't spoken to her in some six years.

Well, this woman is involved in the same volunteer organisation that I'm involved in (fortunately we don;t ever come into contact and never have to interact). A few days ago, another person in this organisation sent out an email to the listserve requesting that people who hadn;t RSVP to a meeting he was setting up with the intention of bringing the volunteers closer together and finding new ways we could contribute to the organisation. Sounds like a good idea, no? Well, this woman didn;t think so and she worte back a long screed--which she posted publicly--about why it was a bad idea and unnecessary and all that. This post was, in my eye and ear--for my husband reminds me that when we read stuff she's posted we can;t help but hear her intonation and see her expressions and they have had a lasting effect--patronising and condescending and pretty much out of line, especially to be posted for all to see. Well, the person organising the meeting took it like a gentleman and I suppose that should have been the end of it. But both my husband and I were so riled that he couldn;t help but comment on what he saw as the inappropriateness of the original post, saying that he thought the forum was a place to exchange ideas in a supportive atmosphere not to condescend to and lambaste people for their ideas and willingness to go one step further than absolutely required.

Of course this caused a huge stink. One person wrote back, "A good lanbasting...is good clean fun," a sentiment with which I can't agree, having been on the receiving end of too many of them to count. Lambasting someone for his idea is hurtful and non-constructive. And I said as much, and I added privately that this particular woman couldn't leave the organisation soon enough to suit me if that was her attitude. Boy, I shouldn;t have said that! I was told in no uncertain terms that that was out of line as she had contributed so many volunteer hours. Excuse me, but there's more to volunteering than hours put in, in my book.

Well, anyway, just when the flap had started to die down, this woman posted again saying that the matter should have been between her and the other person involved and it was really no one else's business to comment on it. excuse me? then why did you post on a public forum, you moron? In my opinion, this was another attempt on her part to create dissent where there shouldn't really have been that much--a simple yes or no reply to the invitation would have sufficed. She went on to say that "If you want to REALLY contribute to this organisation," one should find out how much money she's giving to the next fundraiser and match it. Boy did that make my blood boil. It all comes down to money, does it? Well, we all can;t be living off trust funds like some people I could name. I feel like posting the Biblical parable about the poor woman who gave her last three coppers to the alms box and what the Jeez said to the Pharisee who derided her for it.

If anything, this should have proved to people how destructive this woman is, but no. No one seems to get it and if I say anything it's just put down to my being crazy with a grudge about the band stuff. I hate that. One person said, "My bullshit meter rates (this woman) as okay." I want to tell him his bullshit meter must be broken and I hope he never has the opportunity to find out just how broken it is.

But there's a conspiracy of silence among some elements of this town about just how dysfunctional it is. That's something I really can;t cope with. And this whole thing has brought up the band issues and the lying and the hostility and all again for me when I thought I was fairly over it. So I've been mad and sick at my stomach, not to mention believing that everyone is going to come down on me and burn me at the stake for what I've said. But come on. I broke off a 25-year friendship with this woman over her behaviour. Do you think I;d do that on a whim? Can you get that there might be some ruth on my side of the issue? Obviously not.

So that's why the last few days have not been good for me. Hope yours have been better.

One good thing came of it: I was so mad I cleaned my house. Now THAT'S mad!