Paranoia Doesn't Mean I'm Not Right

Before I checked myself into the psych hospital at the tail edges of my little meltdown/nervous breakdown, I let a few people know so they wouldn't worry. Among the people I told was a man who I report to for my favorite part-time job, the man who talked me into this job. His email reply was short, but supportive.

I emailed him when I got out, mentioning how I'd not done well on the job before I went in and wondering what he wanted to do about that. He usually emails me or calls me a lot during a week just to keep me up to date and to keep in touch.

I've had one text message, basically the same as the one he sent before I went in. And that's it. According to another member of the team, this man who supported me seems to have the same phobia that another good friend of mine (same age cohort as the man with the job): a fear that people with "mental illness" are never as stable or dependable as "normal, healthy" people and as such should be avoided as employees. At least, that's my fear and my current perception of this situation. 

And this situation and these reactions, ladies, gentlemen, and others, are why I choose to make this blog as anonymous as is reasonable and why I have not told my more stable job about it. I'm paranoid, but not a complete idiot. Just a partial one with a lazy streak.

The Cure

If you could be completely "cured" of your oddities — your moods, your tics, your dysfunctions — would you?

In the past, I have fought against reining in my moods because I didn't "want to lose my creativity or lose my real self." I was in my early 20s then and felt that having large mood swings were integral to who I was and that losing them would make me dull and boring. I fought my therapist on this point and, after a particularly bad phase agreed to consciously control my mood swings. Guess what? They weren't integral to my personality and losing the extremes didn't make me dull or boring. 

I fought going on medication for my depression, because I didn't want drugs and I was afraid they would tamp down my personality, make me dull. Neither happened in that case, either. It took years, but I finally accepted that I would need to be on some medication for my whole life. I became okay with that.

I have not come to terms with the amount and levels of medications I am currently on. I have good reason to be against this on a long-term basis because last year at this time I was on just two of these meds, and at significantly lower dosages. It's my belief, thought, and opinion that once I've healed to some specific extent, or once I've dealt with enough trauma through therapy, or once a fairy drops enough pixie dust in my hair, I will be able to drop back to last year's medication regimen! 

Last year, I felt good. I felt right. I've always had and always will have mood cycles — we all do, but most people's don't affect how well they function — but they were controlled both by the medication and by me. My anxieties — free-floating, social, PTSD-related — were controlled, probably almost all by the medication. Or else, enough was controlled by the medication that the rest of any anxieties became insignificant, maybe weren't even there because the big stuff was fine. But I felt Just Right. The way I would feel if I hadn't had to struggle with this mental and emotional crap.

I'd love to be cured of needing medications. I'd love to be fully functional for the rest of my life without wondering if and when another bomb will drop me into the Abyss again. But would it be good for me to be entirely free of them? And would being free of my "cycling mood disorder of unknown origin" and my PTSD and other anxieties also "free" me of my idiosyncrasies and quirks? I know that I've always been afraid of losing myself and all my quirky bits. So afraid that a "cure" will cure me right into being just like "the norm" rather than the endearing little statistical outlier I have always been.

I've learned self-discipline (which I always seem to forget about) when I began to control my mood swings. I learned self-awareness by becoming aware when my moods were becoming negative; I could use the discipline and skills to dampen the intensity. Maybe I would have learned them some other way, but maybe I wouldn't.

However, there is no reason to stay handicapped if you don't have to be. My mental and emotional turmoil have handicapped me for months, keeping me from being able to even look for work, thus taking me to the very brink of absolute poverty (I'm not kidding here — I need money NOW). I would agree to be cured of my mood disorder and my anxieties, but not my personality or my way of looking at things from my own special perspective or even those times when I think I'm being perfectly normal and everyone else is looking at me like "and how long have you been visiting our planet?"

I'm pretty sure that no one knows where mood disorder stops and personality quirk begins. Maybe it's all just about how well you function.

Karen the Wonder Therapist wants me to not define myself as "mentally ill" or by my mental and emotional problems. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't; it depends on how they are affecting my life. I have felt terribly ill since my mom died and have been barely functional for most of the time since then. Insurance isn't paying for my therapy — they obviously have decided I'm not sick — but I'm not exactly well.

I'm just me, swimming around in the Sea of Life, looking for hospitable land and trying to not drown in the meantime. I really could use a life preserver about now.

Losing it

The cruelest thing about mental illness is the loss of one's true self. Trauma such as sexual abuse can have the same effect: you mask or hide your true self for survival.

At one time, long, long ago, I was a cheerful, outgoing, talkative little girl. I was bright enough that the school considered bumping me over 3rd grade. I wish they had: I had social issues even among my own grade-mates. Jumping a year wouldn't have hurt me that way at all. And I was so all-consumingly bored by everything but math — and that just stomped me into the ground.  So all that boredom squashed me a bit. Don't stand out. Eventually I took only the classes I knew I could get As in so as to please my parents.

But the effects of the abuse hit me at puberty and I became shy and awkward and tended to slouch and mumble by about the age of 10 or 11. My parents couldn't even get me to take the check up to the restaurant cashier and pay it; I wouldn't go without my brother. Thus began my social phobia and ended my fearlessness.

I wasn't supposed to use the words or the knowledge that I had from reading or my gifted class — that was showing off and unacceptable. (My parents probably didn't understand everything I said by the time I was 12.) But my brother could show off any physical prowess he had. That was okay.

I wasn't supposed to correct adults, even if the teacher was teaching something wrong or an adult went back on what they said. Squash. I lost my vocabulary. I lost a lot of my brightness; I became dull.

At least I kept my room clean and tidy. Very. I liked clean and tidy and organized, even when I became a teen. No tossing clothes around and being a general slob.

I was a bit untidy in my mid-20s, when i shared a house with two guy friends. I was so miserable, still borderline suicidal (still considered it an option if I couldn't handle things), no boyfriend so I felt ugly and unloved. I began keeping my clothing in a nest around me in my bed — a queen mattress on the floor. I liked my weird-shaped room in the attic but I froze in the winter. That might have sparked the nesting.

When my best friend Steve and I shared an apartment together, I kept my space and the house clean and tidy in partnership with Steve. He, too, has always been neat and tidy, so it was easy to be that way. And I was that way with Marlys when I roomed with her. I wasn't too untidy when I moved in with Thom, but he kept all his computer stuff in a mess, so it began.

When I moved into my own house in my early 30s, at first I was very tidy. That's what I like. I loved sweeping the old oak floors. I loved that house. But then I hit a major depression, so bad that I even took two leaves of absence from work for mental health reasons. My house became the Pit of Chaos. My Mom and her second husband came and helped me clean up once. I tried, but was only able to keep parts of my home clean. Never the kitchen. I stopped cooking much at all. This continued to the coast and was the worst ever in my little apartment at the end of my life on the coast; I never even unpacked for the year I lived there. I felt lost and hopeless and terrified, with a wide-open future in front of me. Being alone in my apartment where I live now, I achieved only moderate tidiness, but it was better than nothing. I was still over-stressed. I had lost the tidy, organized, happy me.

When I moved back to Oregon to take care of Mom, I wanted to keep the tidiness up to her standards. It was bad enough she had to deal with cancer; i wasn't going to make her uncomfortable with clutter. So I kept things up fairly well. Mom had a cleaner come every other week, which was very helpful because that was beyond me. I didn't cook much for us. But I kept the clutter to a minimum and mom was comfortable in her beloved home with the brand-new kitchen until she died.

Return to Houston: my home hasn't been this bad since those bad days in Seattle in the house I loved. There are papers, mostly mail and discarded empty envelopes, all over the floor. No single surface is clean and tidy. My clothes are piled in bins and on the white wire shelf in the closet. No, I don't have a chest of drawers, or enough shelves in the book shelf. I don't use the desk because it has the TV and more stuff on top of it.

I hate this, hate this, hate this. I want clean and tidy. I want my life to be simple and easy to maintain. The times when I've achieved that, even briefly, I have experienced peacefulness and happiness. To say that this mess is contributing to my depression and anxiety is an understatement. But I don't have the energy to pick up. I'm behind on my bills, on the estate's bills. I don't even know where they all are. I am unhappy in part because my home is a mess, and when I'm this unhappy I cannot keep it clean and organized: it's a Catch-22.

I need help. Don't seem able to provide it to myself; that's something else I've lost.

Are any of those things even findable?