dispatches from crazyville

I was talking with a student who recently started taking medication. The medication she takes is used to treat bipolar disorder. She said, “I don’t want to be bipolar.”

Nobody wants to be sick. We might want something we get because we are sick, but deep down, we want to be well. And, deep down, we want others to be well.

There’s this trend I’ve noticed in people writing about their experiences with mental illness. People write about their experiences as though they’re trying to one-up or out-crazy each other. Like, “I cut myself ten million times.” Then the next person is like, “Well I drank Windex with razorblades in it” or some shit. This bothers me. For a long time I couldn’t figure out why. Why would someone want to be crazier than someone else? Which makes it seem like people really do want to be sick.

As I mentioned in “Stigma,” I’ve heard people say that people cut to get attention. Everybody wants attention. Universally, people need acknowledgment and connection. That’s not the only reason, or even the main reason, people hurt themselves. People don’t tend to refuse to read books because the authors–let’s say someone like Joyce Carol Oates who publishes prodigiously–by publishing a book, are trying to get attention. Many people respect authors who are trying to express their truths and have their voices heard. No one seems to respect the person who cuts, or the truths they have to tell. People who hurt themselves are expressing and externalizing a tremendous amount of pain in a dysfunctional way. Ignoring something, especially cutting, does not make it go away.

It’s not that people want to be sick. It’s that people need something, and they believe that being sicker will somehow fill their needs. If you’re crazy, really crazy, crazier than anyone else, maybe you’ll get the attention/admiration of someone because of your suffering. And if a person is operating under that presumption and believes that’s the only truth, getting better is terrifying. How will their needs ever be met if they’re common, if they’re just like everyone else? And they desperately need something.

But trying to outcrazy others leads the uncrazies to conclude it’s all for attention. And sometimes uncrazies react with anger, as though crazy behavior takes away something from them. That upsets me, too.

I have more to say about this, but I’m not sure what it is yet.

i rock and sing to my son at bedtime. he falls asleep on my lap and i’m consumed with love for him. so sad knowing he’s growing up and by necessity away from me, independent. and i look forward to enjoying spending all his growing up time with him, as i am in love with this moment of rocking him in the dark. the thought of him moving away to college is choking me, and it’s far away, but it seems also like i’ll blink and he’ll be calling me from some far away place. and i won’t get to hold his body on my lap anymore. and i thought of mothers all over the place, next door, in darfur, in iraq, loving their children, and those children growing up, and they are us. everybody is somebody’s baby.

and suddenly the most important thing i know to do is to be kind to people. how can i be afraid of people when everybody is just the baby of someone? how could i be cruel to a baby?

for a couple weeks after this struck me, i was light. i felt buoyant. like i had figured out the meaning of life.

the idea of someone saying something mean to my son, which i know will happen as soon as his peers are constructing sentences, imagining that look of confusion and hurt on his face, crushes me. then i think of the mothers who lose their children in all manner of horrific ways, and then i think of war. and i know this baby will have to register for the selective service. and i think of him going to war. and then i know for sure i must work for peace. i must work for peace. then i think of the mothers whose children are perpetrators of violence, whose sons stalk women, or solicit sex from children, or who make the orders to crash the plane into the building. what of these mothers?

then i think about my mother. i’m her baby. she loves me this much.

then i think about this blog. anonymous, because i am ashamed, still, of the truth of my body, the scars on my arms, hands, legs. what if my mother knew?

then i think about my son. what if he knew? what kind of burden would that be to a person, to know his mother tried to destroy herself? and it is true. it is my story. i wonder if my mother was self-destructive.

then i imagine my son hurting himself on purpose so clearly i reach out to tell him to stop, to love his body, his little perfect body. don’t hurt yourself. i love you.

and i know why all the people were so upset. because when someone you love hurts, you hurt. and that’s why i didn’t tell anyone. i didn’t want to hurt people. but i would want him to tell me if he was hurting. i would want to share it. because i love him.

i try to imagine sharing my hurt with him. when he’s older. and, again, it scares the shit out of me. i don’t want to hurt him. but i don’t want to lie to him or hide from him either. i’m not talking about when he’s five or anything.

with this blog, i think a lot about the times when i’ve been self-destructive, and times i want to be self-destructive. and i want to treat myself with kindness and gentleness as i would treat my son, as i would want my son to treat himself. and others. and i want others to do the same. my students. my colleagues. my neighbors. the soldiers. women in prison. everybody.

i guess i don’t know what i believe about truth and love.

i don’t know if i should publish this post or not. comments are welcome.

driving, and trying to sit with hurting, without holding it, without letting it go, just being there in it, and it’s a pain of separation, a desperate bubbly pain in my chest, a swallowing hurting, a brick balloon of a pain. i sat with myself and did not turn away, resist, change the subject, shut down, i just felt my feelings. i imagined myself marching into my chest and hugging the hard chalky edges of helplessness compressing my heart and realizing it weighs nothing. but when the heart inflates. jesus. bigger than this fucking body, bigger than i knew. this pain is not my pain. it is human suffering. my heart is full of it. the strength in feeling this deeply is that this enormous hurt springs from enormous love, but i thought i would die. i thought of all the people i will miss when we move across the country and i thought there is no one else like them and i love them i am expansive with my love for them and their love for me, and there are people in washington i will love because a person is all people. and i felt boundless, connected. to me. to everything. and this terror of isolation that lives in me is terror. not fear. not anxiety. jagged, strangling terror. but we are not separate. isolation is an illusion. i can cut myself off from myself, from others, but i am never separate. we’re all constitutionally bound together, matter, energy. you don’t leave me when i move away.

this blog skips around a lot, i know, and i post erratically. i’ll try to post regularly and organize it when school ends.

here’s a poem i wrote yesterday. it’s by no means a great, finished poem, but it’s my post for today.

I.

Fear plops down on my

heart like my heart is

a parkbench he was meant to

inhabit. But my heart is a balloon,

not a bench. I watch from behind a hedge.

He must weigh a thousand tons.

I can see his crack as he slurps down

a whopper, a milkshake,

grows more comfortable.

I hurdle the hedge, my body

a battleax, and hack into

his flesh, thick as a redwood

with time and rich food. I chop with

wild panic for days, alone,

but Fear does not budge.

I collapse. Face to face with Fear, I see

a trillion year old baby

still waiting

to be loved.

People like Tom Cruise perpetuate the stigma of mental illness. The idea that there’s no need for psychotropic drugs. His rant on the Today show was caustic. When people spout that train of thought, I feel despairing, like they’d rather me just be dead. These are powerful, mind-altering drugs. Yes. And that happens to be what I need to stay alive. Vitamins and exercise? Check. Not cutting it. Individuals need to decide for themselves what works. No matter how Tom Cruise perceives himself, he is not an expert on what I do or do not need. What he believes in works for him, and I don’t know his life.

Some of the students I teach cut themselves. Thin lacerations glare from their arms and I burn with shame and sadness and rage. And an embarrassing envy. I want to tell them to stop it, to grow up, to talk, to slow down, to breathe, to do something small and nice for someone else and stop obsessing about themselves. That there are other ways to cope. That if you have to hurt, there are other ways: run, squeeze ice cubes, dunk your head in a sink full of ice water.

I am talking to myself.

Several staff members were standing in the office during lunch one day in my second year of teaching, and one teacher said, “Did you notice S’s arms? She’s cutting herself.”

I suddenly felt claustrophobic.

“She’s just doing that for attention,” said an administrator. “It’s not even cuts, it’s like scratches.”

As though self-harm is nothing to worry about unless the harm is severe. Or it’s nothing to worry about if a person does it just to get attention.

I burned with shame and sadness and rage all over again. A lot of people believe the behaviors that are byproducts of illness, such as self-injury, are dramatic ways of getting attention. There’s some sort of weird social contract to ignore the flawed logic of that line of thought: healthy people don’t use such elaborate measures to get their needs met. And truly, if someone needs attention that bad, why would you ignore or dismiss what they’re doing and continue to deny them attention? My recovery has been inhibited by me internalizing society’s views. I’m just as guilty: I still judge myself and others based on misconceptions about mental illness.

Physical illness is more quantifiable. No one would say people with diabetes’ inability to control their blood sugar is a lack of self-control that they can overcome with some self-discipline. It’s widely accepted that people with diabetes need their insulin to function. To survive. No one says they’re just trying to get attention. Or to just get over it. After all, if they’re able to function, they’re not in a coma, right?

That mental illness is so stigmatized is problematic on many levels. The individual costs are significant. Guilt and shame often accompany symptoms that are difficult to manage in themselves. People are reticent to talk about it for fear of being dismissed by others, especially after celebrities’ troubled lives–like Brittney Spears and Anne Heche–become subjects of public ridicule. The “public” often fears the “mentally ill” because of media images like Sybil and Hannibal Lecter, et al. Then, when mental illness looks like Girl, Interrupted, then the attitude shifts to “get over yourself,” which, to my knowledge, has never helped anyone’s recovery.

But the problem is also systemic. A lot of people–47 million Americans–don’t have access to health insurance, making preventative mental healthcare–therapy, counseling,medication–financially unviable for them. Many people who do have insurance are allowed 20 or fewer visits per year to therapists and psychiatrists combined. Emergency services exist, but if help had been available along the way, the person might not have ended up in emergency care.

I am lucky enough to work in a place that offers health insurance. Another problem with insurance is the list of available providers. When I was searching for a psychiatrist and called the providers on the list, either they were not taking new patients, or they were not accepting my insurance plan. Even though they were on the list, they said they’d stopped accepting Anthem. Other problems I ran into are that many don’t schedule appointments after 5 pm, which means I would have to miss work for appointments, or that I couldn’t get in to see a doctor until four months from when I was calling. I ended up at the university outpatient hospital, a training ground for new psychiatrists. I know doctors have to train on someone. However, it means that I get a new doctor every year. I’ve seen four different doctors in the past four years. It’s really hard to start a new relationship every year, to go through the painful stuff I’ve already rehashed yet again, and to develop trust that they will help me to stay healthy.

I don’t know what the solution is. More access to mental healthcare, mental health information being available to the masses. But what all people need–the ill, the well, the in-between–rather than a pep-talk, or, worse, bullying, is understanding and compassion. It doesn’t take anything away from you to offer someone else compassion. Please.

I sat in a desk in the back of the classroom next to the door. I sat in the same spot in every class. Just in case. Ms. Z, my religion teacher, was telling us that we needed to make a mobile for the next nine weeks, one ornament/image thing to symbolize each week. The girl next to me tapped my arm and asked me a question. I stared back at her. The girl looked at me expectantly, then turned and repeated her question to the girl in front of her. I didn’t talk in school that year because I had vowed not to make friends in high school. After four years they would be gone. I couldn’t risk emotional investment. The pros couldn’t possibly outweigh the cons. What would I make for this stupid project? Knives was all I could think. Knives. I hated everybody.

I’d been friends with M, this girl down the street, since I was six, most of my life, and suddenly, she got this loser boyfriend and dropped me. I would ask her to go places and she would be like, “I’m waiting for C to call.” I was jealous and couldn’t explain why. I was crushed because she wouldn’t spend time with me. I was in love with her but didn’t recognize that in myself. I couldn’t be gay. I mean, I didn’t know any gay people, and gay people felt weird inside. I didn’t feel weird inside. Of course, I wished the boys I dated were more like my friends who were girls, and I once asked M to make out with me. (She refused.) Still didn’t register with me that I might be gay. She could have dug my heart out of my chest with a spoon and it would have felt soothing compared to how I felt about being cut off from her. I couldn’t talk about it with anyone because I knew everyone would dismiss me as an angsty teen. (Which I was. Notebooksfull of angsty poetry to prove it.) Plus, if I talked to someone, I might like them, then they would eventually betray me and I would have this pain all over again. Cutting myself, oddly, relieved that pain.

The second situation was that I had attended a K-8 grammar school from kindergarten through 8th grade. Graduating was hard because that place was a second home. I fit in there. But I didn’t want to admit that I was sad, because to be sad about that was to be weak. I guarded that secret, crying every night in bed. What kind of lame kid was I who was that attached to school?

Then there was religion class. I hated religion. I was convinced religion teachers in Catholic schools were all Satan’s minions, working to turn people away from the church. It worked on me. The hypocrisy infuriated me. Here are the rules of the Bible. Here are the rules of the Pope. Except, you don’t have to follow the archaic ones you don’t believe in. Like, use birth control if you want to. Get divorced if you need to. But for Christ’s sake, don’t be gay. And too bad if you’re a woman. When it finally occurred to me that god might just be made up, I was utterly resentful that all these people I trusted had told me god was absolute, that the rules of Catholicism were The Rules. It was an elaborate lie. I had to take religion all four years of high school and sit through classes based on a socially acceptable psychosis? And now I had to make a goddamned mobile? Jesus fucking Christ.

What else had they lied to me about? Oh my god. I felt like I was dangling from nothing, like there was no place to stand. I couldn’t trust anyone. Not even myself. What if everything I “knew” was a lie?

I stopped sleeping for awhile because I didn’t want to wake up and go to school. I stayed up late to watch Silk Stalkings, a show that was like Baywatch meets Law & Order. It was vapid, but my dad and I watched it every night. It was a way to connect with my dad without having to talk. I didn’t want morning to come. I didn’t want to wake up and go to school. Everyone there thought I was a freak because I never talked or changed my facial expression, and I wasn’t rich like the other girls, and I didn’t care about who was fucking whom, or purses, or make up, or hating my parents, or curfews, or drinking. When my dad would come into my bedroom in the morning to wake me, I would kick him or swing at him. After a few weeks of that, he got me an alarm clock.

Not sleeping didn’t make things any easier.

Then, I decided that I should get a boyfriend. So I talked enough to get one. I wore make up and short shorts. I wrote a dirty letter. He was a gross little boy who I wished was M. The dirty letter was found by my parents who then lost all respect for and trust in me. They wouldn’t let me out of the house. That was the end. I had no human connections. I bought a pair of 10-eye Doc Marten’s and started taking four and five hour long walks by myself. I always stopped by the lake at some point in the walk. There was an overpass I would sit under and let the thunder of the cars above me vibrate in my chest. The boots bit through my heels. My socks would be bloody when I took them off.

Finally, my parents took me to a psychologist. She was an ex-nun who wore appliqued sweaters, thick pantyhose, and a grim look. She sat with her feet propped on a footstool. I stared at her ’70s thin-strapped, chunkheeled sandals through three sessions. I guess my parents were worried about me, but what they told me was that they were having my IQ tested. I was scared. I knew they thought something was wrong with me, that I was crazy.

I took the IQ test at a psychiatric hospital. The short wrinkley woman who administered the test left me with this pearl of wisdom: It’s hard being a teenager.

This is a summary of what the psychologist told me: You’re smart. Top 2% of the population. You are creative. You use your intelligence and creativity to manipulate people. You’re power-seeking, attention-seeking, indirect, and passive aggressive.

Then she was like, “Do you think you need to come back?”

No, thank you. Asshole.

Initially, I was livid. Slowly, I decided she was right. I was all those terrible things. I was smart, but I used my powers for evil. I didn’t deserve to feel good. My parents didn’t trust me, they thought I was crazy enough to take me to a psychologist, the psychologist diagnosed me a jerk, my friend liked a dumbass dropout druggie better than she liked me, everyone was a hypocrite, there was no god, my whole life was a lie.

What was the point of being alive? I had never asked to be born in the first place.

I decorated my skin.