mental illness

Goodbye, 2017

December 27, 2017 By Julie Leave a Comment

It’s no surprise to anyone to hear me say that 2017 has, in so very many ways, sucked. The election, the anxiety and trauma responses so many of us experienced after the election and the inauguration, the ongoing and unceasing political shitstorm that meant that every day had as many crises and news stories as full months had in previous years, the series of climate-change fueled natural disasters, the drumbeat of oncoming environmental catastrophe — it’s been brutal.

At the end of 2016, we felt well and truly shattered. I was realizing, for the first time, that what I had known were some fucked up childhood dynamics were embedded in my body as trauma. Exactly one year ago today, Carrie Fisher died, which, especially combined with the election, began a slow downward slide for Catharine. We knew that we needed 2017 to be about healing, so we cleared the decks and got down to business. We both got therapists. I put off looking for a new job because a transition that fundamental to our daily lives would take up energy we just couldn’t spare.

Things got worse before they got better. My therapist and I embarked on EMDR, and while EMDR is fucking magical in a lot of ways, it also unlocked a lot of stored up grief. That was fun. It also highlighted a lot of dynamics between us we needed to shift, and we’re still working on those. My naturopath and I tried a bunch of different things before we hit on one that actually seems to be making a material difference to the CFS (low-dose naltrexone, for those of you who might be looking for ideas).

Catharine’s depression and anxiety got worse and worse in this slow, oh so slow way that kept looking like maybe it was just situational until she was suddenly, drastically unsafe, and for the first time in 25 years she needed a few days in the psych hospital. As these things go, it was a reasonably good experience once she got admitted, and they got her meds changed, and things improved. Another meds adjustment later in the year went badly when her psych was out of the country, but things are now stable and we’ve got some good rules of thumb about how, when, and how quickly to adjust meds (and how to prioritize household stability in the process). She’s more stable and less anxious than she’s ever been in her adult life.

Because we made space for healing, because we were lucky enough to find/have good providers who could help us, because we were able to find things that worked, we’re at a really different place here at the end of 2017 than we were at the end of 2016. We’re able to start thinking about who we want to be and what we want to do from these spaces of more stability and more energy. Neither of us is cured. We aren’t well, in the sense that either of us can act as if we don’t have the issues or conditions we have. But we can make plans we have a better shot of being able to carry out.

For me those plans are still nascent. I’m still figuring out what they might look like, although they probably look like small daily routines that may or may not add up to something bigger over time. I’m not quite ready to say hello to 2018. But I am ready to say goodbye to 2017, and not entirely in the good riddance sense. As awful as this year has been in so many ways, as brutal as the day to day has felt, I’m deeply grateful for the healing we’ve found and created.

So thank you, 2017, for showing me what needed to be healed and being the space in which that healing could occur. Thank you for Catharine’s healing. Thank you for the ways our mutual healing has allowed our relationship to settle into something deeper and more resilient, more mutually supportive. Thank you for all of the incredibly smart people I’ve met online, with whom I have connected, learned, mourned, raged, and laughed. Thank you for in-person friendships with like-minded people, for that glorious solar eclipse, for music that has made me want to dance, for books and tv that have soothed my soul, and for Saturn moving into Capricorn. Thank you for being a year that I will forever remember as a turning point.

Hello, Again

August 23, 2017 By Julie Leave a Comment

Tree trunk with a fallen tree covered in moss, green grass, pine boughs Well, that didn’t go as planned.

Although the election made it clear that everything was going to hell in a handbasket, I kind of thought things at home were going to continue going along reasonably steadily. The Universe took one look at that assumption and laughed her ass off. Just to catch you up:

The night of the election, about an hour into the results, I felt myself going into a kind of fugue state. I had to stop watching, take myself to bed, and just … avoid everything but the very highest-level news. It took me about three weeks to get out of the full-body panic state, and I started looking for a good trauma-based therapist, because clearly the election was bringing up some old shit I didn’t even know was in there. I found one, thank everything holy, and I’ve been doing EMDR-based therapy since January. It’s been really helping, but I’m still having to curate my news intake, even though I get all my news from Twitter. (I follow awesome people on Twitter.) Sometimes I can keep up with what’s going on, and sometimes I just have to log off, for my own sanity.
We had an unusually horrid winter — multiple snowstorms, including one that closed in on a foot, and this in a city with like two plows, and us not owning a snow shovel — and then a summer that included a week of nearly record breaking temperatures that only avoided breaking records because of wildfire smoke that made everything look like a dystopian hellscape and us all cough like lifelong smokers.
Somewhere around the end of January, Catharine’s mood started a slow downward slide that culminated in her needing to be briefly hospitalized, something she hasn’t needed in 25 years. We found out a lot about the resources our current city offers, which are surprisingly robust. The subsequent meds changes are ongoing, and there was one recently she had an extremely unusual reaction to that gave us about five weeks of extremely labile, unpredictable moods. Super fun!
Around the same time Catharine went into the hospital, ElderStatesCat went into the cat hospital for a radioactive thyroid treatment that kept her away from home for 10 days. YoungestCat held it together through all the chaos, but when that all calmed down, spent about six weeks attacking me at dawn and dusk. Here in the Pacific Northwest, dawn and dusk at the height of summer are inside my sleeping hours.
Work has gotten both better (less chaotic) and worse (somehow also more stressful?)
On the upside, I finally got treatment for my migraines that has settled the daily headaches down to the week before my period and the occasional one in punishment for eating pizza, and an experimental treatment for my chronic fatigue, in combination with the EMDR, means I’ve had more energy.

As you can imagine, since our levels of cope weren’t high to begin with, we have been operating on “just the basics” mode. The problem is that “just the basics” mode doesn’t work as an indefinite setting. We have coped by throwing money at the problem. We both have therapists. People come to clean our house. Our groceries get delivered and we are experimenting with Blue Apron (we cook but we don’t really have to meal plan or shop for ingredients). We still get delivery more often than is ideal.

But we don’t live in a complete sty and it all leaves me enough cope to do the laundry, keep the plants alive, and manage things like meds refills and fetching cat food and remembering to get the trashcan to the curb. (Oh! And she got her damn driver’s license renewed, so I am not the only driver in the house anymore!)

And now, now it seems like things might be calming down (knock on wood). I went, alone, to watch the eclipse in its totality. I was able to drop the long-dead external hard drive off for recovery. I’m here, writing to you. There’s just a little more slack in the system. And there are so many things I want to talk to you about.

The Very Hardest Thing

September 18, 2016 By Julie Leave a Comment

In the 13 years of our romantic relationship, my wife and I have been through a lot.

We’ve lost one father, two grandmothers, and three critters. We decided to have a kid, didn’t get pregnant, decided to adopt, went through the home study process, then decided to be childless. We moved twice, once 150 miles to a city in which most of our friends lived, once 3,000 miles to a place we knew very few people. There have been at least three major career shifts between us. She went to graduate school. I had three surgeries. She had two hospitalizations. We’ve together collected about a dozen diagnoses on top of two or three we started with.

It’s been a ride, is what I’m saying.

On the one hand, it’s our life. It’s normal to us, to a certain extent, and so much of it showed up gradually. We got to get used to things.

On the other, you could forgive us for occasionally needing to lay on the floor and marvel at our collective ability to cope.

Even in this midst of all of this really hard stuff, the hardest things to deal with have been my wife’s mental illness and ADD. They’re so constant, and at the same time so variable. They’re isolating, to both of us. They need so much attention and care and discipline. They conflict so wildly with one another.

And, most of all, they and the patterns we’ve formed around them have made it really hard to have a true partnership, a balanced relationship of mutual support. So many things have gotten so much better over the last dozen years since she was first diagnosed, but we haven’t yet been successful in sustaining new patterns.

I’m leery of talking about this in one way, because so much of the discourse around people with mental illness is how hard it is for their families, as if they are only a burden, as if the perspectives of the people living with mental illness aren’t relevant, as if they are problems to be managed. So many of those narratives are born out of parent/child dynamics that always have power differentials built in, and those dynamics often get replicated in other relationships.

So maybe there’s something radical about starting from the assumption that we can and should have a balanced, equal, mutually supportive relationship, that we have responsibilities to one another and to ourselves.

I don’t think we’re alone in our desire to have that kind of relationship or our struggles to get there. There just hasn’t been a lot of space in the bigger conversation.

I want to write our way into better patterns, more insight, and greater skill. I can only write from my own perspective in this relationship, but I write with the full support of Catharine.

It won’t always be pretty and intellectual. Sometimes I’m so angry I want to blow up the world. But I have faith that showing up to the work and sharing that work with others who know can change things for the better.