anxiety – Page 2

orange sunrise sky through dark clouds, behind a sillouette of fir trees and a house In so many ways, things are wildly better than they’ve ever been. And that’s why we’re having big, hard, conversations multiple times a week.

Let me explain.

Until recently, we’ve been smack in the middle of some transition or crisis pretty much all the time. But now no one has died, no one has a new diagnosis, we aren’t moving, no one is switching careers or even jobs, no one is going back to school, and while money isn’t everything we’d like it to be, we’re okay. This is a new state for us, things being stable and reasonably sane. When you’re busy moving, or coping with a new illness or diagnosis, or switching careers, or dealing with someone dying, you just don’t have the resources to dig in to the bigger issues. You’re just trying to survive, day by day.

On top of that, Catharine’s anxiety wasn’t well-controlled until January. Until it was, we had no idea just how much her anxiety, and the meltdowns that went with it, were running the show. Until we weren’t having to manage her being anxious to various degrees every minute of every day, we couldn’t address bigger problems because any attempt brought the anxiety rushing to the fore, and then we had to focus on it.

So it’s because things are going so relatively well that we’re now mired in such difficulties. Thirteen plus years of un- or under-treated mental illness combined with a hell of a lot of transition means there’s a lot of shit to unpack, a lot of patterns to rewrite.

And — I’ll be honest here — sometimes I’d really like to know when we’ll get to the “things are really good” part. Things are so much better than they used to be, and we’re still so far away from what I want things to be like. Some days I feel at peace with that, confident that we’ll get there. Some days my anger that we aren’t there yet turns into despair that we’ll never get there.

As a friend of Catharine’s says, “the only way out is through, and the only way through is art.” So I write.

I write because all those years of anger and frustration and resentment need to come out into the fresh air so they can dissipate. I write because there are so many layers, so many intersecting things, that writing is a key way for me to untangle them. I write because I need to center my own experience for myself.

It’s not that I don’t also express these things to Catharine. I do, and she hears me, and we’re working through it all, slowly. But part of writing is throwing off the shame of having stress in my marriage, of not having a perfect relationship. It’s letting go of being the protector, making sure no one could think anything bad about her. It’s showing up to the messy, complicated, beauty of what healing looks like, for both of us.

plant with bright green leaves I 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.

The Only Way Out Is Through

What We’re Dealing With