Julie Clarenbach

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A Unified Theory of Me

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small pebbles with tufts of grass growing through them and a larger rock in the upper leftI’ve been struggling a little bit lately, because there are other things I want to write about that don’t quite fit the theme here. I want to write about genre fiction (and write book reviews of genre fiction). I want to write about writing. I want to write about social justice — both about mental illness and beyond mental illness. I want to write, period, about whatever comes up, a lot of which will still be about mental and chronic illness and relationship, because that is really the center of my life.

I’ve considered creating a different space for the genre fiction stuff, but I’ve actually gotten tired of trying to hive myself off into pieces: this part of me thinks critically about topic X; that part of me reads fluff. I’m tired both existentially (I just cannot be bothered, folks) and I’m tired philosophically (the false dichotomy of “serious” and “unserious” is built out of kyriarchical oppression and it is bullshit).

When I think about the people whose blogs and Twitter I like to read, it’s the people who are complex, who are multi-faceted, who show me not necessarily all of their most personal details (although as a writer I’m always fascinated by those as well), but who are giving me a sense of a real person behind the digital persona, a person who grows and changes, a person who has questions and runs into things, a person who delights in idiosyncratic things and has a specific sense of humor and gets angry in a particular way.

So that’s what I want to do here. You’ll see the site morph a little over the next little bit as I structure it differently to make room, and I’ll use categories so people can find blog posts relevant to their interests. Sometimes you want the part you want. But I’d like to bring all of me to the table, or as much of me as is appropriate in this setting. We’ll see what that amounts to.

The Importance of Solitude in the Care and Feeding of Julies

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small pinkish purple flowers on spiky dark green conifer stemsCatharine and I regularly joke that we’re doing things backwards. Because I work remotely for a company in DC (and my family lives out there), I periodically fly east for a little over a week while she stays home. Because we both work from home, that means I spend nine days running around from meeting to dinner to hangout while she sits at home by herself, having her meetings and doing her work, but physically alone.

In the Myers-Briggs system, I am all I. She is all E. If you know anything about introversion/extroversion, you can see what a problem this is.

I come back happy to have seen all of my people but absolutely, completely fucking drained. I want to hole up in a dark cave and not speak another word for three straight weeks.

She, on the other hand, is desperate for human company. The words have kind of built up inside her and are bursting to get out.

We’ve found ways to not make this a complete disaster. She has coffee with people and has a friend or two over to take the edge off; I gird my loins and accept that there will still be some people time even though I really don’t want to have any. We make it work, although the first week back is usually a little rocky.

If only she were the one who traveled and I was the one who got to stay home, things would be kind of perfect. I’d get the week of beautiful solitude, after which I’d be all calm and filled up, and she’d come home from a trip physically exhausted but emotionally replete.

But since this isn’t how it is, and since we do both work from home, we had drifted into a pattern whereby we were home, together, basically 24/7 unless someone had a doctor’s appointment. And since Catharine only goes to doctor’s appointments by herself during my work hours, the only times I had when I was home alone were the (very) occasional weekend coffees or preaching dates.

A few weeks ago, I said to my therapist that I just want a fucking break. For better or worse, my brain is a sheepdog, and if I am not alone, some part of my brain is busy keep tracking of all of my sheep, which means I cannot fully relax. That’s true even apart from the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into (I once told my friend her 5yo had climbed onto the kitchen counter and was getting something out of a cabinet while we were in the living room — she looked at me like I was from Mars, but sure enough, there he was on the counter), but it’s made worse because of the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into. I’m also just energetically sensitive. If people are around, I’m picking up on their emotional states, which makes it really hard for me to get clarity on my own.

She pointed out that solitude isn’t exactly something unattainable and asked me if Catharine would be amenable. Once upon a time, she took my need for solitude personally, because it poked all of her abandonment buttons, but time and repetition and lots of conversation have convinced her that it’s nothing to do with her personally — it’s about me and my needs. So yes, she’s amenable. We’ve even talked about it before. We’re just really bad at consistent follow through. Or, at least, our life makes consistent follow through challenging.

So we talked about it again, and the deal is now that every weekend, I get a few hours home alone. Catharine either goes to church or a coffee shop or a workshop or wherever. I don’t care which day it is, and I don’t care where she goes. So far my alone time has coincided with migraine spikes, but everything has coincided with migraine spikes lately, so that’s not exactly noteworthy. We’re going to see if this is enough, or if we need to add a quarterly hotel staycation to the rotation.

For so long, everything was weighted to what she needed, because the consequences to her not getting what she needed were so much more immediate and obvious. We’re trying to course correct, because just because I’m not going to literally die or fall apart in the short term doesn’t mean my needs shouldn’t be an equal part of the picture. We’re getting better at it. But it’s still hard to rewrite the internal assumptions.

Oh, My Poor Inflamed Brain

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close up of red berries, small purple flowers, green smooth leaves, and a large peach roseAt my last neurology appointment, my doctor put me on a new migraine preventative, because the old one wasn’t quite getting the job done. It was reducing the incidence of medium and big ones, but it wasn’t getting rid of my everyday, low-grade headache. This new one was originally designed as a tricyclic antidepressant, which explains why my pharmacist was so suspicious of it when I was first prescribed it. (As soon as he realized it was for migraine, not depression, he was on board.) And, best of all, it worked! My daily headaches went away, and while I still got migraines, they were fewer and less painful. Excellent.

Except, as it turns out, the damn thing was giving me tachycardia. So I duly emailed my neuro, she asked me to back down my dose to see if a lower dose would eliminate the side effect, I did, it didn’t, I emailed again, and she told me to titrate it all the way down.

My brain is pissed. It really liked this drug, you see, and this drug got taken away from it. I think my body also takes longer than the average bear to adjust to things, so the standard two-week-per-dose taper was probably not quite enough.

As a result, I had 24 straight days of migraine with pain at a 3 or worse. I can’t take the emergency meds often — triptans can only be taken rarely lest they cause rebounds — and I was saving those for the days when the pain climbed up to a 5/6. Nothing else in my toolkit was doing anything at all. A 3 on the pain scale might not sound bad, and in relative terms it isn’t, but the sheer relentlessness of it just wore me down.

I finally emailed my neuro to ask what we could do while my brain calmed down and before my appointment next week, because I was running out of cope. She prescribed an NSAID that knocked it down to a 1. Today it climbed back up to a 2, but I’ve also got PMS, and my migraines tend to get a little worse with PMS.

I knew, all that time when it was a 3 or higher, just how much it was knocking out my ability to write, or really think, or have ideas, or do much of anything, but it’s astonishing how much of myself showed back up as soon as the pain was dialed back down. So often, with the chronic stuff, we just have to keep marching along, because we have no idea when things are going to improve and life goes on. But hot damn is it rough. All I wanted to do was to lie down and cry (except that would have made the migraine worse) and whine about how awful and unfair it was. Even now, when things are better, even if not all the way better, there’s a part of me that is really sad that the last four weeks of my life got so derailed.

All of which is to say, hi. I’m hoping we can keep the inflammation in my brain to a dull roar so I can return to writing and thinking, because there’s so much I want to say here. I just need the brain space to be able to say it.