Spoon issues

Spoon theory, for the uninitiated, is a way for people with a host of behavioral issues to explain how they deal with stress.

You are given a certain amount of spoons every day from the great spoon-giver. Each spoon represents the amount of social interaction or physical activity a person can expend before the need for what we’ll call regeneration.

Regeneration usually, for most of us, means spending time alone with our thoughts to process the situation and regain emotional strength to go out into the world and interact again. Those of us who live with social anxiety use spoon theory as a simple way to explain what we go through but we don’t really expect people to understand it. At least I don’t. It’s impossible to empathize unless you can feel it.

Anyway, I have problems on weekends recovering from work. It’s really starting to piss me off, perhaps more so now that it’s so obvious. When things were bad, weekends melted together with workdays since the level of stress and hyper-vigilance was constant. 

Although the ‘bad times’ I experienced are receding into the past, the emotional scars remain. I feel them every time I drive onto the property at work. The subdued, yet ever-present feeling that I am always one word away from having the moon and stars fall on me again is always there. 

But the overt threat of losing my job or being shot by the police in a botched ‘health and safety check’ is gone and now weekends should be a time for me to ‘do’ and enjoy more than sit and worry.

And yet, Saturday morning arrives and I make it to the couch and find I have a monumental task trying to raise myself back up again and get on with the day. Other than the bed, the couch is my ‘safe place.’ 

Yesterday I went to the cast dinner for the performance of Listen to Your Mother, an event I have been very much looking forward to.

But yesterday morning I felt entirely empty of strength and filled with worries. It took everything I had to get ready for this happy event. The cast had lunch at Lidia’s and read our written stories to each other. My worries included how I, as the only man in a 12-person cast would be received, and the usual fears about driving downtown exacerbated by the St. Patrick’s Day parade being held at the same time.

As usual, my fears were groundless. Listening to everyone’s stories was literally a transcendent experience.  Being around such creative and intelligent people was like breathing pure oxygen for me. 

And yet, when I got home, in no time flat, the feeling of excitement and stimulation drained quickly and I was back on the couch, dog tired, wired and fried.

And mad.

I am so sick of this. 

I should be over this. But I should have realized long ago that my conditions, which have waxed and waned my whole life, will be with me always. Thirty years of meds, shrinks, zen training, ‘lifestyle changes,’ weight loss and exercise have not exorcised this beast. I will carry it to my grave. 

It is my shadow. I can, under certain conditions, banish it for a period of time or land up in hypomania – where I’m in a fun and creative period making everyone else’s lives miserable.

But it always comes back.

I vent to my wife but she’s heard it all before and I know that my moods affect hers. So I try to keep the feels to myself.

“Why couldn’t this feeling last just a few hours longer,” I asked my wife and the universe. 

Why indeed? Would it be so much to ask to at least go to bed feeling the warm afterglow of an enriching, life-affirming experience?

But that’s not the way things work. Every day is a fight, sometimes easier than the day before, sometimes not. Two days are never the same and the differences in mood and energy from one day to the next can be so stark as to be scary.

I must realize that getting angry at the situation or getting angry at myself for not being able to maintain a steady mood state will get me nowhere except more frustrated. 

Somehow, at this late stage of a lifelong struggle, I must learn to accept the situation with grace, appreciating the good periods as well as the bad. 

Easier said.

Touched by Fire

Carla (Katie Holmes) and Marco (Luke Kirby), prepare to be taken to their home planet. No, I'm not kidding

So, I watched the movie ‘Touched by Fire’ yesterday, by myself, while my wife was out shopping. Well, about 2/3rds of it because she came back.

I didn’t want here to see my reactions to the film. And, to be honest, I wanted to watch it alone, just in case there were any reactions. And there were. 

This requires an explanation which I’ve tried to give my wife in my own recently disjointed style of explaining myself. There are activities at home which, while they may seem innocuous to the outside observer, would make me feel self-conscious if anyone saw them.

Often, I wander from room to room, stopping to examine things, especially in the basement where I pull out old artifacts of a previous life or stare at fading photographs of a family long gone. I realize so much of this is self-torture, yet I’m drawn to it anyway.

I’ll talk to myself – long rambling soliloquies that either try to explain my actions to myself for the 119^th time or a string of things I need to remember or comments on current events. I can only do this alone for reasons that, for anyone similarly afflicted, are all too obvious.

Many times, I’m buried in the Internet (interesting choice of words) doing what I usually do: finding the information that reinforces my cynical and negative view of humankind. I guess if human society is stark raving mad, I must not be so bad. Current events are reinforcing this view at a prodigious rate.

So, we come to the movie. Briefly, it’s about two young people, probably in their mid-20s, both afflicted by bipolar, both having trouble staying on their meds. They annoy their families, are given to delusional, grandiose thinking and land up meeting each other in a mental hospital where their manias merge like two flaming suns and lead then down the rocket slide to near total insanity.

They are both rescued, a few times, a return to the mental hospital where they are put back on medication. Although the staff tries to keep them apart for their own good, they find each other again, a pregnancy results with all its usual complications and . . . well, I won’t ruin the ending. 

The important thing to me was how much I saw of myself in the characters. Now in middle age where the body (and the medications) start to regulate the amount of mischief the mania mind can accomplish, I had to think back when I was in my 20s and 30s with more freedom to act on my delusions and yes, I can see more of myself in their behavior. It just came out in different ways and circumstances. No two bipolars are alike, after all.

And the movie couple are bipolar1 and I am a twosie which means my whipsaws between depression and mania are not so sharp. Also, not being on your meds makes both the ones and twos equally capable of fucking up their own and others’ lives. Us twosies tend to fall much more on the depressive side of the scale but in some of us, although our manias are less bombastic, they can last longer and, in some cases, do more long term damage to our lives and others around us. 

What happens to Marco is what many guys with bipolar disorder struggle with. He finds that on his meds when he attempts to have sex with Carla he feels nothing and can’t get into it at all. The mind is willing, to a certain degree, but there seems to be a governor on the body’s and mind’s ability to carry out the act. This is MAJOR issues with men on medications for bipolar. The other problem is that the meds, while keeping your behavior and thoughts within a socially acceptable range, also tend to crush the creativity and heightened enjoyment of life most people in mania experience.

At one point in the movie, Carla assures him, based on what their psychiatrists say, that he will gradually be able to experience the full range of motions (not always true). Marco replies he doesn’t want the full range of motions – he wants mania. 

Whether you’re a onsie or twosie, great things can be accomplished on mania. Much of it is artistic – writing, painting, dance, etc. Much of it is activity based – a sudden compulsion that the whole house is now out of style and needs a complete makeover – and you do it. I can still remember gardening at night (yes I know it’s an R.E.M. song). Personal relationships are at risk – everyone else suddenly seems more attractive and interesting than your partner and you want to feel the rush of what it’s like to start a new relationship – no matter who gets hurt, because you’re not thinking of that. Sometimes you just want to get away – to travel and grab as many experiences you can while family members are left baffled by this sudden compulsion to take an instant vacation – alone. And then there are the other compulsions toward great creation and schemes. 

My mania gave me the incredible (to me now) ability to build a bookstore out of nothing including all the planning and design. My ex-wife wandered into my store for the first time and her jaw dropped. “You actually made it happen,” she said amazed. “You actually did it.”

So it cost me a marriage. But what an accomplishment!

At some point when the maniacal haze burns itself out or when the meds start working, the bipolar person has a crushing realization, a kind of ‘what in God, possessed me to DO that?’ The refrain is similar: it seemed like a fantastic idea at the time. Many times, in this phase which is often accompanied by depression and severe regret, we want to apologize to all the people whose lives we’ve upended or hurt. And apologize over and over again.

But after the mania burns out and time passes and we’re good little boys and girls and take our meds, there comes a longing for the energy and excitement of that time. Things get hum-drum and boring playing at life using the normal rules. We miss a time when things were fresh, new and exciting. We don’t forget the wreckage we left behind but we’d just like to feel what we felt when we were able to accomplish something so grand and glorious. Because now we can’t.

Because now we’re accomplishing holding down a job, taking care of our living spaces and significant others and marching slowly and safely through a life that no longer inspires us. And death awaits. For many men, it’s the long, slow, middle aged march to the grave where, instead of firing up grand, exciting ideas in your mind, you spend more time checking your bank accounts and what’s in your retirement savings. Hardly seems like living. 

You make and lose a lot of friends along the way until you’re left either partially or totally alone. I miss the parties of my youth but I can tick off the last five times recently I tried to become part of a group in some way and landed up either alienating or being alienated from them. 

And we begin to think that for our own good, perhaps we should just stay at home when we can, inside our homes with our significant others and limit human action to Facebook, where we run in to trouble anyway.

Notice how many times I have switched between ‘I’ and ‘we’ in this piece? Draw your own conclusions. 

Would I recommend ‘Fire of the Mind?’ Yes, even though the writing falls into sentimental claptrap, stock parental characters give stock parental lines and some of the acting and writing could have used a bit more of a realistic makeover. It’s enough, as usual, to make any afflicted person steer away from being honest about their condition to anyone, especially to mental health professionals.

I’m cautious that the film will not dispel but reinforce stereotypes about bipolar people and people with other mental illnesses in general. Is it worth the attempt? After all, ‘Rainman’ did so well to raise the awareness of autism, didn’t it? Well, if you want an honest answer to that question, ask anyone on the autism scale who has seen the movie. And so it is the same here too.

I suppose we could make the distinction between bipolar people who are relatively easy to spot and the vast majority of those who sit quietly next to you on the bus or plane, who write the articles you read, make the food you eat, create the art in galleries you marvel at, etc. And you’d never really know. How about the person at the business meeting who has an idea and his/her enthusiasm is so infectious, that everyone in the room is fired up by the idea (which may or not be feasible since the long-term prospects may not have been considered) that they jump out of their chairs in support and the boss says “we need more people like him/her around here!”

Yeah, they could be. 

Because life and relationships are long, we reveal ourselves in some way eventually. Either peers don’t recognize this sudden change of energy and idealism or regard it as symptomatic of some other factor or mental illness. Many times, I’m sure, people think the bipolar person has discovered some new kind of recreational drug when they truth is, they’ve actually stopped taking a drug.

The author David Foster Wallace, whose affliction and brilliance is reflected in his writing, was similarly tortured with what most professionals diagnosed as depression which began as a child and which he referred to as ‘the bad thing.’ He was able to create brilliant work while making his way, somewhat awkwardly, through the world of normals. He worried however, as the pressure grew from those in publishing and his fans to continue to produce even better writing, that the meds were inhibiting his creativity. In fact, I suspect ‘Infinite Jest’ was probably written off his meds.

Anyway, Wallace stopped taking his Nardil which led to severe behavior issues. At this point, both Wallace and his shrinks flailed around for something else that would work – anything that would work. In desperation, Wallace went back on Nardil but it no longer worked for him. As we say in the world of psychotropic meds, once a med craps out on you, it craps out forever.

Long story short, Wallace tragically hung himself. 

But when you take an honest look at Wallace’s behavior throughout his life, I think a strong case can be made that he was also on the bipolar scale. My early diagnosis of depression or major depressive disorder, masked the bipolar that was hiding behind the depression. Remember, your psychiatrist/psychologist only sees you for one hour bits of time where you could be anywhere on the scale. They don’t live with you, go to work with you, see your personal interactions. They know what you tell them, true or false (or somewhere in the middle) for the slim hour a week they see you. They really don’t know you. Sometimes no one really does. 

So, we’re left with a confusing mix of people with bipolar, ones and twos, with varying symptoms that wax and wane due to many different reasons. And movies can never really display a compendium of the average bipolar person. Movies must be entertaining and broad to be profitable. We get that. So, it’s a double-edged sword of hoping for awareness while fearing further stigma.

But, rounding out this terribly long post, ‘Touched by Fire’ did deliver a few serious gut punches to me. I could predict some of the action. I could see myself in some of the situations or dialogue. And if you’re wondering, yes, sex between two people in high mania could move mountains. . . before destroying them.

So, with all of those caveats, it’s worth seeing. If nothing else, I could identify with some of it which made me feel a little more comfortable with myself while still mourning what was and what will never be again – and for good reason. The ending imparts that lesson.

Ruinations on Bipolar and Life

It's taken me the better part of my life to realize that I have always carried this disease of the brain and I shall take it to my grave.

It has been the catalyst of a series of up and down mood swings which have largely determined the trajectory of my life. How much control did I really have? How much control does an alcoholic have? A drug addict? There were times I felt I was totally in control. Those were the most dangerous and destructive times of my life.

So sometimes I think that when I am feeling my most down I am the safest. I am aware totally of what is happening to me and even though the feelings suck, to put it mildly, I am well aware of my capability and liabilities under this conditions.

When I have been at my most confident is when I have taken leave of my senses - sometimes partially and sometimes almost totally.

Of course as years go by and my memory becomes like a sharp knife poking at my conscience, I look back and wonder how I could have made such destructive and hurtful decisions. The terrifying thing is that it all seemed like a good and exciting idea - at the time.

Bipolar people are good at apologizing. One might say that when we come to our senses, we are the masters of drawn, out, maudlin, emotional apologies. This is not to say they are not genuine - they are for we are not psychopaths. It's just when we are moved to apologize for past acts we're in a state of 'thoughtful depression' and more succeptible to grand, moving spectacles of 'I'm sorry.'

After awhile, the apologies pile up over the years and our memories torture us with the things that might have been had we, somehow, been able to seize upon some kind of will and behave with rationality, empathy and compassion. We tend to leave a lot of broken and dazed victims in our wake, especially those we love.

I don't have the answer. This blog for instance, is one I cannot write continuously. I write, not only when I feel the need to, but when I mentally and physically can. You can talk about spoon theory but there are other things at play. The brain fog, the apathy, the belief that no one gives a damn about what you have to write and whether the medications are working better than usual.

Writing, work, family relations, sociability - it's all the same. Sometimes our interactions operate smoothly, like a well-maintained car. Sometimes we can get by with the engine sputtering. Other times, it's crash and burn. We try to anticipate, read our own bodies and minds and take medications when we feel we need them. It is the ultimate inexact science.

I think the older one gets, the danger is that one becomes battle weary. I know I fight that every day. It gets harder to cherish the good days because they seem futile. We know the bad days will at least even them out. It's just a matter of time. It's like being being in a nice prison with plenty of food, recreation and creature comforts. Just every so often, for no reason at all, you get thrown into solitary confinement. Maybe for a day, maybe for a week.

I often wondered how I would do in solitary confinement. I have the ability to stare at a wall for hours and live in my head. Hopefully, I'll never find out.

This essay was inspired by a meme I saw on twitter this morning. It read "describing your mental illness is like trying to describe color to a blind person."

I though about that for a little while. I have tried every way I can from when I was a child to a young adult to now to provide an explanation that would make sense to the normals. The best thing I can come up with is this: other people are competing for space in my brain.

I sit in my living room, the cat is cozied up to me and late afternoon light is streaming through the front window. The only sound, other than my typing, is the tick tock of the cuckoo clock - the one that was a wedding present in 1984 from a long lost sister-in-law. She had good taste. It's a nice clock.

But I become very aware of the silence otherwise and my need to say something, regardless of how mundane or ponderous my prose might be. I feel that I can't say much anymore. I am marked at work and can no longer try to seek understanding. I still find it incredible that I must have apologized a couple of hundred times for what I said but my employer could not bring themselves to apologize even once for what I was put through. Not even for almost getting shot in front of my wife.

As John Wayne said - it's a sign of weakness. And weakness is not tolerated unless you have rank and status. So it is with my employer. But I will write anyway. If they lay claim to my words, I will burn them. They have already laid claim to my behavior and my livelihood - they will not have my words. Never again.

No one realizes how incredibly difficult it is for someone with my condition to function in a system where they are not respected. Every day I feel like I am being treated with kid gloves no matter how professional my work and behavior may be. Zero tolerance, zero humanity.

I guess that is why I sit here and listen to the clock tick and wonder what it all was for. It has been a ride to be sure. I wish I had not left so much wreckage in my wake. Wherever death takes me, I am sure that will be levied on the debit side of my account. I want it not to be over just yet. Even though everything seems to be winding down slowly, I would like just a few more adventures; a few more grand things to look forward to before the brain fog closes in for good.

I was in the Costco today. For some strange reason, I became sad. The same way I do in the halls of the Home Depot. I remember a going down similar halls on my last great adventure a decade ago - a grand achievement made during my last great manic period - and a great disaster that cost me a marriage.

Ten years before that, there was another grand manic period that accomplished the same thing - a great return to my career and a shattered marriage.

But during those times, the senses were heightened and the fire was in my belly. The air smelled different, the sun shone brighter, I had energy, enthusiasm and drive. I could do anything I set my mind to.

Such great accomplishments aside such great tragedies, such is life, I suppose for people like us.

I would like not to feel the chain-weights of depression and lethargy; of hopelessness and dysthemia. But the only other option is another flame out. As exciting as might seem, I would rather be this morose medicated mess that the streaking star that leaves eventual regret.

And the clock ticks and I think - is that all there is now? Why can't I have one last spurt of creativity and energy without the resultant destructiveness? Why does it have to be one or the other?

I don't know. Such is my and many others lot in life, I guess.

Does any of this make any sense?

Me and a tree

In the backyard there was a pine tree. 

  Where I used to sit on the roof. The tree is marked with an arrow. The pool was not there when I climbed it.

On the trunk, some branches had been cut off leaving protrusions that one could imagine as ladder rungs. Up about 12 feet there was a Y-shaped branch split that my neighbor, a guy a few years older than me, would climb up and sit on.

Just for reference, I was eight-years-old.

He would try to cajole me to come up.

“Aw come on,” he’d say. “It’s easy.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I’d say. “I don’t think my parents want me to climb up there and I don’t think they want you up there either.”

But if my parents weren’t home, he didn’t care what I said.

The bully kid a few doors down would come over and make fun of me for not climbing the tree. I guess it was a rite of manhood that my fear of heights was preventing me from passing. He was the kind of kid that would hit me in the head with a baseball when we played ‘running bases.’

So I as did then and do now, I stewed and ruminated until the whole issue got under my skin. 

You ever see weightlifters psych themselves out before a big lift? I saw this guy on TV walking around the barbell shouting about how he was not going to let this weight ruin his day. And then he lifted it. 

I was thinking the same thing about this tree. 

I waited until none of the neighbor kids were around and gingerly climbed up the first few ‘rungs.’ That was easy – I’d done that before. 

There were the last two larger tree branches and I grabbed one with both hands and went over on my stomach with an audible “oof!”

I had one more to go to the Y branch which was about a foot wide on both sides. I remember looking down. I remember thinking going up one more branch would be a lot easier than going down at this point. And then I could say I did it.

With one more heave, I did and sat on the Y branch with a sense of accomplishment. I imagined myself as the frog from the story that sat on the largest lily pad and “was the king of all he could see.”

That sense of accomplishment lasted about a minute. I looked down and all of the sudden the branches that seemed so doable going up now seemed so perilous going down. It was all a matter of perspective, another lesson I would learn that day. Looking up, the Y branch didn’t seem like such a high place. Looking down from it was akin to the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

So there I sat, trying to think my way out of this when the neighbor kid comes sauntering over.

“Hey you finally did it,” he said.

“Yep,” I said. “I made it.”

“So come on down and we’ll play catch,” said the neighbor kid.

“Ummmmmm . . . in a while,” I stammered.

“When,” he asked.

I looked at him and he looked at me and he knew. 

“You’re too scared to come down from there aint’cha,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. 

“OK look, I’ll help ya,” the neighbor said. “I’ll stand here under the tree and guide ya down. OK first slide down and put your foot on that one branch.”

I did and then froze.

“OK, swing your other foot over to the same branch,” he said.

Yep, I was stuck with my legs doing the splits, ass-side up in a tree.

To make an excruciating story shorter, gradually, other neighborhood kids came over to gawk at my ass in the tree, each one alternating between giving me advice and laughing at me. One kid, I don’t know who, just said “jump – “you won’t get hurt bad.”

Oh, that was all I needed to hear.

Then my dad came home. He looked around at his son making a spectacle of himself in his own backyard.

“Geez-us-Christ get down from the tree already,” was the first thing dad said. 

The neighbor on the other side came over. He went hunting with my dad.

“Well, well, well,” he said with that Southern Ohio drawl. “Your boy seems to be stuck in the tree.” 

So he stood under me and offered some advice. I managed to get my other leg down and now my hands were on one branch and my feet on another. Next was the tough part. I had to bend down from here and squat to get my feet to the next branch down. After that, it was only the smaller rung-like branches and I was home free.

But if I squatted, I was afraid of losing my balance. I was already embarrassed and I felt falling would add more embarrassment and a broken neck.  I’ve always feared the worst, as you know.

Eventually, dad got so frustrated with me; he stood directly under me and ordered me, as only a Marine can, to get down one more branch.

What I did was slither down vertically, shaking like a leaf in a, well, you know; doing a kind of half-sit until I was sitting on the lower branch. From there, I lowered myself and my dad grabbed me and pulled me to the ground.

Everyone had a good laugh and since the show was over, they left. I felt like Charlie Brown. I always wished Charlie Brown was real so I could commiserate with him.

I don’t remember what dad said. He wasn’t as mad as he was channeling a yet-to-be Hank Hill: that boy ain’t right.

I did the walk of shame back to the house. 

On the last day at the house after selling it, I went to the backyard as part of my ‘goodbye house tour’ and took one last look at the tree, remembering that humiliation from 42 years before.

It’s strange how we forget so much in our single digit years and the things we remember are usually moments of joy and triumph mixed with moments of shame and pain. I guess that’s normal.

What isn’t normal is this: I believe that tree, in all its innocence, started me down the road to being risk-averse. I guess that’s the nice way to put it.

I never climbed a tree again and remained scared of heights. There are folks who get an adrenaline rush from things like skydiving, motorcycle riding, bungee jumping and so on. I will never know that.

How I got through the obstacle course in basic training is still a wonder to me. Extreme peer pressure and a screaming drill sergeant will do that. In like for Ft. Jackson’s Victory Tower, – a tangle of logs to climb and ropes to swing from, one of the drill sergeants saw the fear in my face. 

“Hey you got one of your troops that’s looking a little too hard at that tower,” one drill told my drill.

I found myself on one side of the rope swing (over a net) and everyone was calling my name and it felt just like. . . you know. I had no choice -- I grabbed the rope and jumped. I didn’t quite make it and my jaw hit the lower log post with a resounding ‘thwack.’ I ate out of one side of my mouth for a week.

I remember that moment as I looked at the tree, cursing it and myself. Thankfully, one only had to do the tower once. The ropes gave me calluses I still have on my hands.

The funny thing is when I get a real good dose of hypomania, I’ll take all kind of risks with relationships, careers and money. But I still will not take physical risks. 

Some people wear their bruises, bone breaks and scars with pride. It is a sign they have challenged themselves and have no regrets. 

I look at them and feel small and wonder what part of life I have missed. 

I took one last look at the tree, sighed, took my wife’s hand and walked slowly back to the house and to the rest of my life.

Footnote: on this day in 1987, I shipped off to basic training at Fort Jackson, SC.Hua!