New York Christmas, day 3

We walked up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Well, we walked up the last six flights of stairs anyway. 

Ahead of us, an old man, puffed along and it was a matter of pride as much as endurance to not give up.

There is something interesting that hsbhapenednin the last three months as I have worked on adjusting my attitude towards my body: exertion is no less difficult but choosing to begin is more likely. That is, I don't enjoy the gym even an iota more than I ever did, but my willingness to put myself in a situation that moves my body has shifted.

Looking down, then, into the streets we have walked gives me some perspective about what I have successfully accomplished and that awareness fills me with pride.

Walking throughout Manhattan and indulging our nerdy selves (Star Wars and then Hunger Games exhibits?! Yeah!) helped me to settle down into the truth of this trip: I needed to be exhausted in different ways. I needed to shine because of choices that I made, somewhat selfishly, that helped me to feel settled and satisfied. That I need to not lose sight of who I am as a person, outside of my obligatory "roles" as mother and teacher, friend and colleague.

Our Broadway choice, Hamilton, quenched a thirst we didn't know we had and it was marvellous.

New York Christmas, day 2

There is a perception that holiday seasons, especially Christmas, produce an excess of moments that feel almost miraculous. Moments that seem made for the word awesome at it's most literal sense. 

We feel cynical and jaded at a world that is too loud, too violent, too sharp against the soft edges of our innocence to truly feel in awe of the world.

My husband is described as a well-grounded realist, if one is kind, and a sarcastic cynic, if one is honest. As you might imagine, it takes a lot to fill him with awe. But today? Today had moments that were awesome.

We went to the New York Public Library and there, unexpectedly, we got to see a Gutenberg Bible. It's meticulous illumination work and intriguing hand lettered margin notes left us both in a state of profound awe. The historical significance of this book from 1456, there right in front of us here, made us walk in thoughtful contemplation, pondering mhow society shifted so massively in the post-Gutenberg world. 

To pair this, then, with the Museum of Natural History with its timeline of human origins

and the 10:26 scale representation in the Rose Centre was nothing short of mind blowing. Time, distance, importance of humanity? How relative we were, how insignificant our worries, how trite our lives felt against the magnitude of space, the infinitesimally fragments of all the known world.

And so, pondering the greatness of everything, we walked together in the rain through Central Park, 

and took in the lighting of the Rockefeller Tree 

and understood that our place in the world couldn't be understood in simple ways but would be endured in simple joys, together. And that fact settled inside me, a kernel of surety in a life that so often has none.

And that? Is awesome.

New York Christmas, day 1

It is December 1st and I am in New York City for the first time. After enduring a day of travel to get here that included numerous delays and turbulent moments, my husband and I are enjoying the amazing freedom of child free companionship. 

In the months between the last post and now, I have committed myself to changing my perspective.

I go to the gym in the hopes that I can gain a new appreciation for how my body moves, how I can work to make it stronger and more capable, how to love more comfortably in my skin. This process is long and arduous. It continues despite my struggles to make it so.

My work/life balance is exactly as it needs to be, despite a frisson of guilt even at the minimal hours I now teach. The proverbial foot in the door is so hard for a Type A gal like me but the resultant joy I have connecting with my children makes this decision an absolute no-brainer. There is no substitution for my time with them.

And because my time is so focused on where my children are right now, it is hard to ensure that I am also focusing on my own well-being.

I struggle with the guilt and freedom of exploring this new adventure, despite the fact that both of us have undoubtedly earned every moment of this trip. 

Parenting is hard and thirteen years of marriage has been filled with ups and downs but on this New York Christmas honeymoon, I am so thankful for everything that has lead me here.

The relief of rage

Days are hard enough to get through when there are just the ordinary hustle to deal with--day camp drop offs, kids to harangue, meals to make, rooms to clean. Days with depression are like doing all of that with a muffling blanket, a strangle of tension that fluctuates in the quiver of emotion that lie just beneath.

It has been awhile since I was able to pinpoint what my emotional state is, in actuality. I can say I am fine but it has no relevance to being fine. I am neither here nor there; I feel unidentifiable. 

Sometimes, as with today, I can drown out the numbness but the only emotion that does so successfully is rage. And while snapping that fine line feels good--and by good, I mean I can feel it and that sensation pulls me away from the desperate void-it is not good in reality for anyone involved. 

It is a debacle of harsh words, bubbling like over simmered poison, hissing on the unsuspecting bystanders, scalding those unhappily on my periphery. 

The resulting withdrawal on all sides--lo, self preservation, arise and be present--simply lapses back into the shadows and my rage limps back from whence it came. 

And so it goes.

Let's Stop Faking It

The last week or so has seen an uptick in the Semicolon Project and the connected hashtag #semicolonEDU. As an educator with many present conversations about mental health, it has become increasingly important for me, personally and professionally, to step up to the conversation plate. 

Mental illness, unlike physical illness, seems complicated by people's desire (in everyday ways) to "fix" what is wrong. There seems to be some notion that people can "choose" their way out of mental illness where no one would even postulate that someone with a broken leg could possibly "Just think positively! Think of not broken legs!" to "get over it". 

The endless parade of well-intentioned but maliciously harmful cheerleading makes the temptation to "fake it" undeniable. Putting on a facade, however, exacerbates the situation in all fronts.

After all, if you are not your genuine true self--mental illness and all--how is your relationship with anyone established? What is the level of mistrust that must inherently exist if you fear reprisal for revealing yourself? What shame do you perpetuate upon your own psyche by not allowing the other person to choose for themselves how they will respond to your illness? And what a relief it might be to find that it is you, in your entirety, they may cherish in the end. That, given the ability to walk away, they choose to stay. 

 When I began therapy, I did so without telling anyone else. No one else was aware of how much I was hurting, no one else knew how deeply I wounded myself, no one knew how thin the thread of my connectedness was.

About three months into it, the therapist asked why I hadn't told my husband and what I feared by revealing the truth of my illness, the width of the chasm. My heart raced at the very notion. I was so good at hiding, so adept at throwing up bald-faced distractors, could I really let my vulnerabilities come forward? But if not with my husband, with whom could I entrust myself? 

I was petrified to see the range of emotions I thought would play across his face. Could I handle seeing disgust, revulsion, rejection? But we couldn't continue this way either. If he didn't know me as I truly was, wasn't my marriage a sham anyway? A mockery of what I had promised him in our wedding vows? It took another month, at least, to tell him.

It was mostly wordless. I showed him and braced myself. At first, brow furrowed in confusion, he didn't understand. He couldn't correlate my state of being with the facade of my life. And he was startled at the relevelation. Shocked, even. 

But what he didn't do was show disgust or revulsion. He scooped me closer and held me gently. And his tenderness shredded me and made me whole. 

It is a journey of infinitesimally small steps forward, out of the darkness. Although the carefully layered front may never disappear entirely, stripping myself down to the stark and scary truth feels like an ultimate necessity. 

Society needs to know that the boldness of my revelations about mental illness are what make me strong, make me a good mother, and engage the core of my pedagogy as an educator. 

The Struggle of Some Day

Some day is a phrase I often mutter to myself. Some day I'll finish this project or that one. Some day I will wake up feeling energized and enthusiastic. Some day I will find that reserve of patience that gentles my words. 

Some day feels like a benediction--the shade of hope that all that I strive for will come to fruition. Some day feels like a curse--a Sysiphesian cycle of chasing one's goals to no avail. 

Although the notion is contradictory, it is possible to feel both sides of some day simultaneously. I begin most tasks with some momentum, even as frissons of hopelessness hang like tendrils of dread at all that lies ahead. But I begin anyway.

Struggle is, even at its worst, a reminder of life that is lived, not just breaths into a void.  

Trigger Warning: Rape

I read a book about rape today.Usually reading about rape draws me back, like a rope that snakes me in, wraps itself around me in complicated and confusing ways.  There is a frisson of anticipation that accompanies the uptick of heart rate, a dampening of emotion that tempers the sharpness of breath.  There is guilt, And shame.  And rawness.

But my reaction to this book was different today.  Mostly because the protagonist was feeling all the things that I felt.  So I didn't have to.

In the actions of her character, the conflicted choices, the emotions that took her by storm and by calm, in turns, in the therapy sessions she attended, I didn't have to,  I didn't have to push off the shame of the moment.  I didn't have to consider whether the actions or reactions to events were immorally complicit.  I didn't have to feel responsible for the choices she made, I just had to acknowledge that everything she felt was inside me too.  And that her redemption could also be mine.

And now it is three o'clock in the morning and I need something more to filter this experience through.

I haven't ever talked so openly about this before and I feel unsure why I am here, and now.  But I leave it here as a reminder to myself that the story that aches to be told has no statute of limitation in my heart.

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.