Diagnosis: Flashback

I don't remember much about the day my therapist tried to tell me the name of the beast that held me. I don't know what the weather was like or what month it might have been. I don't know what conversations lead up to that moment. I don't recall anything except the residue of shock.

I barely made it every week to my sessions, despite knowing deep inside that it was those sessions that staved off the desperation I felt inside. I just couldn't admit how very much I needed her, needed the slow and steady patience, needed the questions direct and pointed. 

I could agree to the physical presence of entering the mental health ward at the hospital but each week was a fight to be there, mentally checked in and psychologically willing to engage in change.

I was hurting myself so badly and so carelessly that she wondered aloud every single week if I had taken it far enough to consider further action. I knew that phrase meant hospitalization. She wasn't a psychiatrist, however, so that probably saved me more times than I care to admit, even now. Our sessions were extended time and time again. A reminder of just what level of intervention was, in fact, necessary.

What frightens me now, through the clear and unvarnished lens of hindsight, is that she was already so concerned and I wasn't even coming clean with her about how badly I was doing. Each week she'd ask me on a scale of one to ten how badly I had hurt myself and I would tell her it was 7 or 8, knowing as I sat there that I was bleeding, barely capable of walking without visibly wincing, in constant and unyielding self-inflicted pain and that, realistically, I was closer to a 9 or 10. But I couldn't admit to anyone just how badly things had gotten and how sick I really was.

I argued with her at every level. I always had a response, smart alecky retorts that sparred and bantered with her at every turn.

I was a pain in the ass. And my pride prevented me from hearing the truth of my situation. 

And so when she brought up a label, my first reaction was vehement denial. 

Bi-polar? Me? No way. I couldn't have anything on record, not in her notes of the sessions, not in the suggestions to consider the evidence. I had a reputation to maintain, a career to build, children to raise. I wouldn't, couldn't, be seen as anything that would suggest otherwise. On the outside, at least, I needed to keep my shit together. 

I went home and plowed the Internet, desperate to refute every iota of diagnosis. 

I won the right to have it kept off-record. I demanded that my continued attendance at our weekly sessions hinged squarely upon not hearing it spoken of directly ever again. And she acquiesced. 

But we both knew she was right in more ways than she was not right. It wasn't a perfect fit, as labels rarely are, but it was a truth that sat upon me then and sits upon me now. 

I am better than I was 5 years ago. But there are "promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep"

;

"A semicolon is used when an author could have chosen to end their sentence but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life"

#semicolonEDU

Moving Beyond the Moment of Diagnosis

Last Wednesday, I sat across from the psychiatrist who would tell me that we have exhausted the "wait and see" options for my 12 year old's situation and that we should consider the plunge forward into more strident interventions.

I was ready to hear her tell me the relative promise of the pros and the slim margin of cons to medication, and she did. She laid everything out, speaking in gentle, somewhat hesitant and careful ways. She is practiced in the art of identifying anxiety and could navigate those waters with what appeared effortless and natural ease.

I asked, as she was ready to wrap things up, what diagnosis, if any could be reached. After a year of watching, waiting, and wondering. I needed to know if what it was had a name, had a reality. She told me, up front, that with mental health cases like these, labels are perfunctory at best, and rife with maybes and variables that feel compliant with diagnosis one moment, and contra-indicative the next. And once she had couched the idea in the safety of "maybe", she told me.

My daughter has Generalized Anxiety Disorder. And that her level is Severe, despite J's atypical presentation.

I felt like she punched me in the gut.

I know I asked. I know that I had prepared myself, somewhat, to hear those words spoken. I know that, given all that we heard and felt and seen, it was accurate. But I wanted her to say it was mild, moderate at worst. I wanted my kid, selfishly, perhaps, to not be at the highest alarm rate, the fastest triage, the leap to the top of a heap no one wanted to be King of.

I knew, too, in that split second of wishful thinking, that I could never have realistically believed that to be true. That all the evidence--the triage nurse in the Emergency Room who arranged a private and observed room for her and told me that she was triaged as "priority", the psychiatrist who bumped her to be seen within the month, the other psychiatrist who had a personal phone conversation with the principal and agreed, sight unseen, to take her as a patient without sitting on the wait list...all the evidence that should have pointed to the reality of this moment.

The rest of the appointment passed by in a bit of a fugue.

I feel somewhat conflicted about diagnosis. On the one hand it is a relief to just *know* that it really isn't something we could just have dealt with at home (that people were wrong when they said she was just "being dramatic", that she was "like any other teenager", that she could just "get over it", or that we, as parents, weren't just being permissive and enabling.)

But.

A diagnosis means that there is a new round of advocacy ahead, doctor visits and therapy. None of it is more than I want to do, but it does require some fortitude as we move forward.

Struggling to be Undaunted

I am struggling today. I feel like I shouldn't be struggling. The sun is shining, the political landscape has broken wide open and people are slowly learning the rules of engagement (after a mostly silent acceptance of the status quo), my children have trucked along to school, the house is quiet. 

So I pull on black clothing, a nod to the YA novel Divergent, and the protagonist who, like me, doubts her abilities but forces herself through situations out of sheer will. She is not Dauntless but that is her front, her public face, her bravado. Perhaps I can leech some of this fictional bravery into me (the English teacher in me can appreciate the irony of this).

I am not undaunted. I do not feel particularly brave. My inner monologue is rife with stinging criticism and sharp regret. My choices, haphazard, perhaps.

I feel my energy waning; the slow slide of apathy encroaching in my idling thoughts, in my oddly sluggish movements (even while running), in my lack of awareness.

I am sicker than I thought. I am #NotMyselfToday

An Illusion of Balance

Balancing life is a struggle enough when everything is going well. Life is, after all, a way of shifting priorities back and forth as things become emergent & pressing, then shallower and faded.

But life with mental illness lacks the possibility of balance. This is a bold statement but, in my experience, there is no possibility of identifying priorities when the hairs on your arm stand up at every decision, when your heart is wrung out at the chance, just the chance, that the fallout will collapse the world. Every tingled sense of heightened anxiety magnified by the deep shame of paralysis, of failing to see the logical sense stopped there in its tracks. 

There is a psychological and sociological belief in the power of fight or flight. That, instinctually, humans tailor their behaviours to maximize their well-being and survival. That somewhere hidden in the crevices of our common pool, there exists a fundamental ability to save ourselves. 

I like to believe this is true, even as I tumble headlong through behaviours and mind sets that are antithetical to keeping afloat. I have to believe it, somewhere inside of me, even if I can't recognize it in any of its manifestations. 

Every moment I spend feels wasted on the here and the now. There is always something else that I feel I ought to be doing instead. Yet, here I am. And why does the guilt of this moment, this momentary priority of sorting and rummaging through my psyche, feel unworthy? Whose judgement thunders so?

It is an illusion, balance is. There isn't a place in mental illness where a wholesome side of family (with its own predilections) holds court with work (and its circus worth ring about) in perfect synchronicity. I can't even sell it as a possibility for anyone who doesn't suffer from mental illness, nevermind someone whose brain chemistry might be failing them at every turn. 

Yet we spend billions of financial moments and devote countless dollars of time to this striving. And to what end? 

Walking Around: Ripples in Chaos

I have started many blogs and, for various reasons, have fallen away from them over time. Lately, the urge to write has been gnawing at me but needs some separation from what came before. I am not suggesting that the happiness or angst of the blogs that came before would be "tainted" or needs to exist separately from this part of our lives. It is not a way to closet or hide what is, inextricably, part of the fabric of our family. Instead, I feel compelled to write about it manically, that it needs attention in a wholly new space and, perhaps, with a fresher audience's eyes, more to clarify my own thoughts and swirling understandings.

It is no secret that our family struggles with mental illness. It is no secret that it effects every single person, like a ripple, even through otherwise choppy waters. It is an odd image, isnt it? After all, if the water is already disturbed, how deep can a ripple shake it further? What is the true cost of *just one more thing*?

You'll indulge my metaphor, even if it falls apart, somewhat. It is the only fitting thing to describe how I exist in this here, in this now. Sometimes the waters ebbs and sometimes it flows. Some moments float along, deceptively calm; the undercurrent swift, deep, and unpredictable in its hunger to drag me under, to toy with me, to crush me before releasing me, gurgling in delight as I bob forth, gasping for air, frantic for the shoreline.

One of the things people will often tell me is that I *look* okay. As though there is an expectation of physical weakness in emotional turmoil. As though the veracity of my claim is thrown in doubt because I present a facade that passes as good. Great, even. But faces, bodies, or even actions aren't what is important in mental illness. I can look fine to you and you will never know whether I am unable to catch my figurative breath, whether I am, in that moment, a nose under the water, or if I have just broken through the surface.

And I can't even tell sometimes where I am either. And that inability to feel anything in a concrete way often manifests itself in just saying, I'm fine. When I am most certainly not fine. When I am so far from ok that I cant even conceive what fine might actually look like. Because, it feels like it has always been this way. That this fogginess shredding my moments, my hours, my days, is a normal state of fine, when it is, in fact, *phine*

Click here to jump to Canadian Mental Health Week info.

And so it goes.