Throw Out a Lifeline

The last I wrote here I'd had a breakdown. A pretty good one. I didn't take my meds for a week. I wasn't eating. I had hit apathy so hard that nothing mattered at all to me. Part of this, Jb and I am sure is that I lost my therapist for about three weeks while she was nursing her son who'd shattered his foot and had to have multiple surgeries. I don't think I understood how very important therapy had become for me. How balanced it helped to keep me.

My dose has changed again. 100MG of Zoloft, 300MG of Lamictal twice a day, and Klonopin 3 times a day. We're winnowing the meds down, which is one of the reasons I like this psych. He had tried me on Lithium, and I couldn't stay hydrated enough to keep up with the shakes and disoriented, vertigo-like sensations. So we dropped as not a good drug for me.

In between, I've been moving along as well as I'm able. I had a week and a half after the major depression where I couldn't sleep. I'd be up until 5 am and running on 4 hours of sleep a day. I was restless in bed, could not fall asleep, thinking and thinking and thinking. I think I might have swung up into a bit of a hypo mode. Anyway, now that's gone, as if hypo episodes burn my body out, and now I'm feeling exhausted and unmotivated and all around... feh.

An amazing thing happened last night, though. Jb came with me to therapy. He actually wanted to. How many guys would do that for you? My therapist thinks he's the best thing on two legs. It was a productive session. I think he got to say a lot of things that were on his mind, and none of them exactly hurt or were negative toward me, but I couldn't help feeling guilty, and ashamed, and humbled by how much he truly cares for me, regardless of my condition. There was so much love and worry there that it really made me tear up.

So. Apparently, I have the best boyfriend in the world.

Last tidbit about what I've been dealing with. Balance issues. I'm still having them. In fact, right after the therapy appoint when we got home, I literally fell on my ass when I got out of the car and rolled down the grassy slope. I'm always tottering. I almost fell on Jb while he was lying on the bed, and when I was cleaning the other week, I feel smack on the metal garbage can we keep in the front room. I've bruises on my arm, bruises on my foot where I dropped a fan on it, and I've fallen into the closet door in the bathroom more times than I can count.

What else. I've a DHHS appointment to review my foodstamps and temporary disability. It's at 8am, and there's really no way we can work the single car situation with Jb working. I've called to see if they'll reschedule, but I had to leave a message. I'll try again later because frankly, I don't trust them to get back to me.

And the SSDI. I got the info about my doctors, though I couldn't get all the dates of tests and visits. I had to fudge and guess years of when I saw some of them. Best I could do. But I can't seem to get further than that. I brought up the online application page and just sat there looking at it for an hour, overwhelmed and unable to start it.

And Away She Rides

I'm soaring right now. It's 11:53pm and my eyes want sleep, but inside, inside I'm wired. I've been like this most of the day, neither here nor there, not able to concentrate on any one thing. Spurts of productivity followed by spurts of a scatter shot mind. Tonight's trigger is Carbon Leaf, "Under the Wire," "Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat" and "The Girl and Her Horse." When Dar Williams used to send me flying with songs like "The Ocean" and "Iowa," I used to wonder if certain chords triggered certain states. If there was a correlation between sound and mood. If songs in the key of G were the ones most likely to set me galloping, and maybe those in the key of E, maybe those were the ones that sunk me. Sure, stress, seasonal change, major life changes, these are all triggers, but I swear that my daily triggers are much smaller: music, poetry, books, writing, ideas. I'm two for two today. I'm reading the kind of good, effortless writing that kills, sets the characters off in my head, until I'm doing as much fantasizing about the book as I am reading it. Ten pages read, twenty minute intersessions, lost in make believe and a vast inner world that's all too easy to slip into. And music, if it strikes me, I listen to over, and over, and over, ad nauseum. I can't get enough of the high it sends me on, of the thought of an open road, an open window, wind whipping fresh in my face. It's the runaways, and they're worse at night. Night drives are as much a trigger as the result of a trigger. They're my great escape, my run for the border. Something has to fill me up inside, freedom, miles, lights. And I want one tonight, but Jb can't keep up with me tonight. So I'll lie in bed, good and sweet, and my mind will go 'round and 'round, setting up scenarios, letting characters come to the fore, focusing on phrases, the repetition of words, until words are only sound, and the sounds become foreign, and I keep repeating them, repetition bringing them back 'round to meaning. But there's no sleep in that, not until my body simply gives way, or my mind runs out.

Running: An Essay in Five Parts

I

"I awoke today and found
the frost perched on the town.
It hovered in a frozen sky,
then it gobbled summer down.
When the sun turns traitor cold,
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row,

I get the urge for going,
But I never seem to go.
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown;
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in."

Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

Spring and Fall always bring The Runaways. But other things can trigger them: a song, stress, a show on tv, an argument, lack of sunlight and activity, anything that overwhelms me emotionally or physically. Jb has told me more than once that he finds it hard to understand me because I don't let things go. But for me, it's not that I don't let them go, or that I don't want to; it's that I can't. The wanting, the emotion, the physical embodiment of that emotion, and all I have is the thin layer of my skin to keep it all in. And sometimes it sleeps, and sometimes it wakes, and when it wakes, it starts off with a soft whimpering, then a mewling, then a bawling, until with tiny fists, it's battering for my attention, to do what it would have me do, and I know this: by now, I am half mad with the need to be up and gone. Half crazy with the itching of it, as if it's a rash you'd scratch and scratch until you were bleeding, and still not care that you were. All that matters is the itch, and somehow, you have to quiet it.

II

"Now the warriors of winter,
They gave a cold triumphant shout,
And all that stays is dying,
And all that lives is gettin' out.
See the geese in chevron flight,
Flapping and racing on before the snow.

They got the urge for going,
And they got the wings so they can go."

Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

When I'm stuck, when I can't up and go, whether for lack of money, a job that ties me down, responsibilities to some Other, I become claustrophobic. The world closes in around me, trapping me on all sides, squeezing in on me until the walls of the world have locked me in, and I know I am dying, and that everything around me is dying for lack of air. Madness to go is screaming and pushing at a vacuum-sealed vault it can't escape. But sometimes, blessedly, it does, and when I had my first taste of adulthood and freedom, when I had access to money and means, I ran away, desperate for the running. Even as a child, I stood, face pressed to the glass windows of an Oasis in Illinois, watching the cars speeding by below, and envying them with a hunger a child shouldn't know. And even now, there's nothing I like better than being on an open road, going somewhere, going anywhere, the allure of truck stops and rest areas foreign and enticing, a mere stopping point on an exodus of Biblical proportions. And that's what it always feels like once I break away: as if the world was made for only me, and only I can truly appreciate it. What was dull and dingy is now Technicolor in my world, and the trees flash by in their glowing blur, and I count hawks, but never the miles.

III

"I'll ply the fire with kindling now.
I'll pull the blankets up to my chin.
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and
I'll fold my wandering in."

Joni Mitchell, "Urge for Going"

I haven't been able to be up and gone in nearly three years, and it's a bit like going cold turkey. When the madness takes hold of me, I lock it down, repress it. I learned early as a child that society and mothers expect quiet children, so I kept it all in, as the Beautiful South song goes. And then, free of home, I began to let it all out, acting out as I never could when I was young. In college, though, everyone ran away, and they called it Spring Break. So, there was Cancun where I couldn't be bothered to be dragged around the markets and the bars, where I maxed out my credit card to become a certified scuba diver, leaving my friends to drink themselves merry or stupid. Every day, Klaus ran us 5 miles out and 150 feet down, and all that mattered was the running. And there was the time I met my husband, flying into the unknown with $100 in my pocket, and no guarantee this boy I'd met online would be there at the gate. When I finally married, I could count the times I ran away on two hands. There was the cold feet of my engagement, the sudden trip up to Milwaukee, and my best friend whispering that he could never made me happy. And there was my bachelorette party: a trip up to Madison, Madtown, me and my best friend and a toilet that wouldn't work.

IV

Of course, once I was married, there was the money, and Saugatuck, MI. Something there staved off the hunger longest, and I went back, again and again, staying in a hidden cottage off the main street, set up in such a way that the craziest of travelers could pretend to set up house there, behind the wine store, and buy plum wine and cream sherry, and walk down the street for Framboise at a British pub or peanut butter soup at the coffeehouse. Saugatuck called to me in such a compelling way that I once drove through a blizzard to get there, spinning out six times on the Michigan freeway. And then there was the summer, when Saugatuck was just a starting point for a week-long birthday run up to Petosky, where I was determined to camp, alone, in the state park, then further up to Mackinaw to spend my birthday with wine and chocolate covered strawberries in a claw foot tub, then further still to the Upper Peninsula and a town called Paradise that had one hotel, and one restaurant, and a convenient store that never stayed open. Dar Williams sang "Traveling Again (Traveling I)" the whole drive up:

"Have I got everything? Am I ready to go?
Is it going to be wild, is it gonna be the best time?
Or am I just a-saying so-o-o-o? Am I ready to go?
What do I hear when I say I hear the call of the road?

I think it started with driving.
More speed, more deals,
More sky, more wheels,
More things to leave behind.
Now it's all in a day for the modern mind.
And I am traveling, again,
Calling this a ghost town, and where is the heartland?
And I'm afraid, oh, was there any good reason, that I had to go?
When all I know is I can never come back.

Traveling, I made a friend.
He had a trouble in his head.
And all he could say's that he knew that the bottle
Drank the woman from his bed, from his bed.
He said, "I'm not gonna lose that way again."
But sober is just like driving.
More joy, more dread,
someone turns her head,
And smiles and disappears.
He's gotta take it like it is, and it goes too fast,
And he is just like me, caught in-between.
No sage advisor. Does weary mean wiser?
And someday will I sing the mountains that carried me away
From home and hometown boys like you?

Yeah, but what about us? Was it really that bad?
Oh, it's hard to believe I want a highway road stop
More than all the times we had, on little dirt roads.
What am I reaching for that's better than a hand to hold?

It really was about driving.
Not fame, not wealth.
Not driving away from myself.
It's just myself drove away from me.
And now I gotta get it back, and it goes so fast.
So, I am traveling again.
Sitting at the all-nite, picking up a pen.
And I'm afraid, oh, was there any good reason
That I had to go? When all I know is I am all alone again.
And you are the ghost town, and I am the heartland.
And I can say, oh, that's a very good reason
That I had to go, but now all I know is I can never come back.
And I will never go back."

I made it up to Whitefish Point on Dar Williams that summer, to see the bell of the Edmond Fitzgerald, and everything that was mystical and new, from the way Gordon Lightfoot's "The Edmund Fitzgerald" began playing softly over the museum's speakers right as I stepped up to view the remains of the American lake freighter, to the way I lived out Stan Roger's song, "White Squall," by touring the Soo Locks along the Canadian borderline. It was the summer of my greatest Runaway, and everything shined clear as Lake Huron.

V

"Baby, let me set you down.
You look so troubled, and I think I know.
Just when you think you've come around,
There you go.

Now, I know the business of the heart,
And it'll get you anyway it can.
You need someone to walk with in the dark. Well,
I'm your man."

Shawn Colvin, "Trouble"

And then there was Jb, who caught me up when I ran away to Knoxville -- and from my marriage. There had been other boys who had tried to catch me, and some boys that I had tried to catch. One even spoke about me as if I was a bird in the hand, ready to fly at the slightest provocation, and at the time, he was more right than he knew. But Jb caught me and twirled me around and set me back down on my feet, and for the first time in ten years, someone insisted I stay. And there I was: in a relationship with a man who would not tolerate my runaways, who claimed we were "in this together," and strangely enough, something in me sighed, as if I suddenly realized that all that running had left me exhausted and footsore. And that should be my happy ending. But the whirl of bipolar never quite goes away, and there are nights, like last night, watching Firefly, cowboys in space, laconic and always on the move, that brought the Runaways back. And the move is closing in around me, suffocating me, so that there is no air, no air. I can't breathe. And all I can think of is a run to the water.

But Jb knows how to deal with my runaways. I'm not sure he knows that he knows how to do this thing, but like a dog kept on a short leash, because of bills or poverty, he makes it possible for me to slip off that leash, if only for an hour or two, and he lets me run. Short trips into the "country," long drives to nowhere and anywhere that a quarter of a tank of gas can get us. And we roll the windows down and turn the music up, and I'd put my head out the window and push my face up toward the sun, just to feel the warmth and the wind, if I didn't think I'd look as crazy as I sometimes feel. But we sing along to every song we know, and we sing loud, and off-key, and we shoot each other laughing looks, and for that little while, I finally feel unfettered and free, and miracle of miracles, Jb's saved me from myself.

7:15 a.m. Triggers

One of the things I've begun to worry about is the possibility of a downward trend. The more I've gone over my past in my mind, trying to find the truth of my diagnosis, the more I've seen trends. Example? I get the Runaways in spring and fall. And my triggers tend to be major life events: going to college, switching my major, leaving college, getting married, moving, new jobs, buying a house, leaving graduate school, moving out of state, separating from my ex, beginning a new life with a new boyfriend, my father's illness, death, loss of a job.

Jb and I move in one week. Moving is always stressful for me, especially now when my motivation is low, and it seems a monumental task to get all of our junk into boxes and out of here. I'm worried it'll trigger something, send me up into a hypomania, where I couldn't be more thrilled with our new place, everything is wonderful, everything is fabulous! Or it could send me down into depression, where everything is new, everything needs to be learned over. There's no nearby store I can walk to, all the bus routes are different, a less than easy commute to the metro, everything is strange, and there I'll sit, without a job, without t.v. or internet for days because Comcast screwed up, surrounded by boxes I've no idea what to do with.

I think I'll be thrilled at first, a new start, a fresh apartment: hardware floors, white light coming from three windows, a bright new world. And no one loves a fresh start like me. I feel the need for them periodically, a sudden irrepressible urge to pack it all up, throw it all in, and start over, as if I could outrun my problems, my moods, my responsibility. Build a new life, rebuild myself, find my better self, one who doesn't screw up, one who doesn't mess things up. A better relationship, a better me, a better, brighter look on life. Like Annie Gallup says, "Anything Is Possible (Reprise):"

It was a phone booth in the middle of the Midwest
It was raining like the devil. I was depressed
I watched a pickup truck slowly float by with its hazards blinking
Windshield wipers slapping, I said, "I keep thinking
If I can hold it all together just one day maybe two
It'll all make sense and I'll believe it's really true
I wish I could take comfort in steady slow improving
But I'm scared most of the time. I don't feel safe
Unless I'm moving"
Ooh, yeah, anything is possible

Too much of that rings home: "I keep thinking: if I could hold it all together, just one day, maybe two. It'll all make sense, and I'll believe it's really true. I wish I could take comfort in this steady slow improving, but I'm scared most of the time. I don't feel safe, unless I'm moving." That's the depression, the Runaways, and my frustration with the long haul of recovery and meds. It's all there in one verse. And I don't know why, suddenly, my head is full of verses and lyrics, poems and lines. I've read in a couple of blogs that bipolar patients seems caught up in music, poems, latching onto lines the way they latch onto sanity, repeating things over and over in their mind. When I began this blog, all I could think about was Dorothy Parker's poem, "The Veteran:" "Inertia rides and riddles me," repeating that one line over and over. Inertia rides and riddles me, inertia rides and riddles me, inertia rides and riddles me. There's something compulsive in that, and something delusional in the way I put so much emotional investment into lyrics and lines, as if they could speak for me when I'm too befuddled to find the words myself.

2:32 p.m. Feh.

Might be hitting a downswing. Might be the change in meds. Stayed up late last night, got up earlier, around 7ish. First time I've seen Jb before he headed off to work in a while. Played with a "new" pally on WoW for a bit, then went back to bed. Woke up again around noonish when Jb called.

Actually, now that I think on it, woke up cranky this morning. Jb and I got into it before he left without so much as a kiss and a very meh "goodbye." Was cranky, too, when Jb called around noon. I'm just loads of fun after being woken up and waking up already in a "mood."

Was thinking last night before bed that Jb ought to be a co-author of this blog. It'd be interesting to see what he has to say about how I affect him, and what sort of symptoms he's seeing in me. It'd be helpful to have some of his thoughts down if I have to go for disability. Because I'm not always rational enough to be objective about how I'm acting or what I'm doing. I doubt he'd be into doing something like that, though.

I have been feeling the compulsion to buy things and go places. Luckily, we don't have money, so the trips I used to take spur of the moment aren't possible anymore. When I discussed this with Jb, he took our bank card out of my wallet and took it to work with him and proceeded to tell me that if he ever came home and found me gone, I'd come home to an empty apartment. I vaguely mentioned taking the car to go see my parents for a week or so. This was vehemently veto'd.

I was productive today, but only because when Jb called at noon, he sorta got on my case about needing to pack. So I packed the booze with a winter coat (for cushioning), I packed the binders with our cds, movies, and games, as well as his Magic card binders and transferred his loose cards to a sturdier box with a top. There's some miscellaneous cds in ziploc bags in there, too, as well as my knitting and another winter coat (again, for cushioning). I taped up the box of my Framboise, too, because that's the important stuff (i.e. my favorite).