Julie Clarenbach

You matter.

The Rules

By Leave a Comment

bright green and yellow flat fields against a cloudy skyOne of the places where Catharine’s various diagnoses conflict is in making daily decisions about time.

Her bipolar/anxiety/PTSD mean that she needs to limit her expenditures of energy, lest she crash her mood. Her ADD, on the other hand, makes it really hard to remember that context and make reasonable judgements therein. So, in the interest of trying to prevent meltdowns before they happen, we’ve developed some rules.

  • Self-care is the absolute priority, and that translates to eating three meals at reasonable times, taking all her meds, having at least one nap (two if necessary), and going to bed at a reasonable hour.
  • We can collectively have, at most, three doctors appointments a week, lest I lose my mind. (I have to do all the driving, so….)
  • No more than two appointments of any kind in a day, unless they’re both virtual, and then a third could be okay if everything else is generally stable (i.e., rock-bottom self-care has been good, mood isn’t wobbly, the appointments she has had and the work she’s done hasn’t been unduly emotionally stressful).
  • The time between lunch and dinner is downtime for her, since she likes to work in the morning and evening. (And downtime doesn’t mean being on work email.) (She’s really bad at downtime.)

She’s working on doing things like listening to her body and responding with what it needs (nap if she’s tired, food if she’s hungry, etc.), but that’s pretty advanced and it’s easy for her to be disconnected when she’s eyeballs deep in People On The Internet. So we have rules.

And then there are the days when it all goes wrong.

Not only did she have three calls already scheduled on a day when she accidentally missed her morning anti-anxiety meds and was really tired from staying up reading, she added two more on the fly, one of them smack in the middle of what was supposed to be downtime.

Since one of the original ones was after lunch, there were two appointments fucking with her nap/downtime, despite my having suggested at breakfast, in light of the bad sleep, that she might consider two naps today. (In fact, at lunch she told me she was still considering two naps, and when I asked her when those two naps would take place, she realized she somehow thought they’d both happen between 3:30 and 5. Now and not now, I swear.)

She told me she was canceling one scheduled call, and I said great! Then you’ll only have four appointments instead of five! I wasn’t exactly sarcastic, but I wasn’t exactly not sarcastic, either.

She tilted her head and said, “Really, four?”

I counted them off on my fingers. “K, S, R, S again, and J would have been five! So much for that rule.”

And then she laughed and said, “I totally forgot that rule existed. It’s not that I disregarded it. I completely forgot it existed.”

Oh, ADD. You’re such a pain in the ass.

At least it made me laugh.

What We’re Dealing With

By Leave a Comment

plant with bright green leavesI don’t think I’ve really explained what we’re dealing with over here, the particular constellation of things we have to negotiate in our daily lives. So in the interest of contextualizing the rest of the conversation, here are the highlights.

Catharine’s main diagnosis is bipolar I with psychotic features (specifically, she heard voices). Her bipolar tends to the depressive side, but she’s had some mania, hypomania, or mixed episodes here and there. She also has anxiety, PTSD, and ADD. We’re lucky that her mental illnesses have been very responsive to meds, and that those same meds have kept working. (We’re also very lucky that my work gives great insurance, that we’ve been able to find excellent psychiatrists, and we’ve been able to swing paying them out of pocket when they didn’t take insurance.)

She didn’t get all of these diagnoses at once, of course. The bipolar diagnosis and treatment came first, and once that was basically stable, it became clear that other things were in play. She’s only been effectively treated for the anxiety since January, and ADD meds have only been in play for two months. Both of these have been game changers, but it’s early days.

On top of all of these things, she’s got physical limitations — dicey lungs because of pulmonary emboli, knees she sprained and injured multiple times without effective recovery, so that now they’re painful a lot of the time, and various other aches and pains and issues, some of which are related to her being fat, but none of which are simply reducible to her being fat. (Hey guess what? Fat shaming isn’t a thing we do here, just in case you were wondering.)

Me, I have the kind of chronic health problems that are both debilitating and vague, so that it’s hard to pin down a diagnosis or find effective treatment. My sinuses are consistently inflamed and congested. I get migraines, complete with prodrome (neck aches, moodiness, and vision changes) and postdrome (fatigue). I have varying levels of fatigue, and when the fatigue gets past a certain point, it comes with brain fog, muscle pain, and sensitivity to every damn thing. I have the characteristic Post-Exertional Malaise of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which means that instead of exercise gradually enabling me to do more, as is true for most people, going beyond my very narrow limits actually puts me in a fatigue flare that severely limits what I can do for several days or longer. I have endometriosis, which was fairly debilitating until I cut dairy and gluten out of my diet, but even though I don’t have the pain anymore, it’s still causing all kinds of wreckage to my abdomen. And, as one of my doctors once joked, I’m allergic to everything green and growing.

We’re a really fun household, is what I’m saying.

On Fighting

By Leave a Comment

foreground of evergreens, with a river and mountains in the backgroundMany years ago, when we were attempting to see a couple’s counselor to deal with Catharine’s ADD (total fail, but that’s another story), which at the time she couldn’t take meds for, the counselor looked at us and asked, “Are you always this nice to one another?”

We looked at each other with faintly puzzled looks and said, “Well, yes.” The counselor got tears in her eyes and said something banal and we all moved on.

But that moment has stuck with me, because its true that we are really nice to one another. We say please and thank you and excuse me. We inquire after one another’s days. We try to be thoughtful about what the other one wants and needs. (Mixed success on that one. ADD is a bitch.)

I don’t know if we fight more or less than other couples. I’m pretty suspicious when people say they never fight at all, because sharing space with another human being is bound to cause friction at some point. (There’s a reason one of the Buddhist sages said that if you want to be enlightened, get married, because marriage is going to show you every single damn one of your buttons. Also, Catharine once lived with nuns, and they had all kinds of strategies to deal with this difficult reality of humans living with other humans.)

We fight pretty regularly, because Catharine’s ADD is exasperating and can often cause things said politely not to register because they don’t have enough emotion behind them, and I’m stubborn and I have a temper.

But here’s the thing. We fight kindly. We always have.

If I had to articulate our implicit ground rules, they look like this: no name-calling. No characterizing. As much as possible, own your own emotions. No insults. No dismissing. No contempt. No walking away, although asking for a pause so you can breathe and get a little more centered is not just permitted but encouraged. We try not to be defensive, but that’s a hard one and we don’t always succeed. We try to remember that we are on the same team and the same side.

It’s also true that our fighting has evolved. Over the years we’ve learned to recognize various signposts that suggest that what’s going on — or at least what needs to be dealt with first — is really anxiety or depression or depletion or something else. Over the years we’ve learned to see the beginnings of argument spirals that always go to the same place, so we can collectively refuse to go there.

But if I had to point to what has kept us together, being kind even when we fight is a huge one.