Cheer Up, Emo Kid

I made a mistake last night.  I was sad and hurting, and no one was awake to talk to, so I took my scissors, and I hurt myself.  It's long sleeves for awhile now, unless I want to end up in the psych ward again.  But this isn't a post about that.  I don't regret hurting myself, really.  I needed it, as horrible as that sounds.  Instead, I wanted to touch on the belief a lot of people have about cutting.

There's a permeating belief that is you cut, and talk about cutting, you're doing it for attention.  Obviously, I'm talking about it.  I'm telling you, Faceless Internet, I sat in my bed at five this morning and drug a pair of scissors over my left arm again and again and again.

But I don't care if you care.  I don't care what you think.  I'm talking about it because this is my blog, this is my life, and it's here so I can talk about hard things, about overcoming and occasionally being beaten down by depression.  It's an outlet, not an outreach.

I've mentioned the cutting on another forum, though.  I told two friends of mine this morning.  It wasn't about attention, but even if it was, a joke about "cheering up, emo kid" or "attention whore" wouldn't change it.  Even if someone is cutting for attention, does it not seem seriously wrong that someone would hurt themselves for attention?  I admit, I have cut for attention before.  I was lonely, hurting, and depressed.  It was the only way I knew to ask for help, and it didn't work.

The doctor in the psych ward suggested I was there for the attention, that I wasn't serious about hurting myself.  And trust me, I wanted to punch him.  So I don't have scars.  I'm careful about things like that--I don't cut deep, but on a bad day every part of my body that can be covered is normally marked.  "Attention" is a word thrown around a lot by people--even in people in the mental health profession.  If you seek help, you're doing it for the attention.  Occasionally you'll get a mental health professional telling you you're strong. Which is true, if you have a mental illness and you try to beat it.  Which is true, if you ask for help, even if it is by taking off your jacket in front of the right people, and showing your scars.

I had a distinct point in my mind when I began this entry, but right now I'm at a loss.  Just think about it, though, next time you want to brand someone an attention whore for their self injury:  Maybe they do want attention, but they still need help.

Pretty Little Pearls

Finally!  I have a camera to post photos of my design work, so I can be a little less depressing and a little more creative with what I post here.

A few blog posts back I mentioned the bracelet I was making all the female cousins in my family which included my grandmother's pearls.  This is the bracelet I did for me:

One of the black beads on my cousin N's bracelet broke, so I'll be sanding her down a new one, which I am not looking forward to, but I really can't complain.  I'm buying an electric bead reamer ASAP, so hopefully my reaming problems will end soon.

As of now, I am working on a necklace for another family member, and two I want to make for me.

I'm very much at a loss of what to say currently, actually.  I forgot my medication for three days in a row, and while I remembered to take it eventually I'm still feeling off.  I'm a little worried it's the depression is getting worse, but I'll give it a few days before I think about asking for upping my dosage again.

I also got a prescription for Ambien, so I've been able to sleep the past three days, which has been mainly what I've been doing.

Speaking Out

Christmas was a strange holiday--probably the best I've ever had, but strange.  I wasn't sure how to what to write about, or how, but a comment on a previous post, and Christmas Eve is making me want to touch on the subject of how open I am about mental illness, both online and in real life.

I do not hide the fact I am mentally ill online.  It's not a matter of attention whoring, it's simply because reading about others' experiences have helped me, and writing about it helps me.  I also hope maybe sometimes someone sees this blog and feels a little less alone in their depression.  But being open online and in person are totally different things, I've realized.

When I was in the ER after my suicide attempt, I spoke to my ex boyfriend.  I told him why and what happened, and last week I found out he took it upon himself to tell someone I know.  It was perhaps the most betrayed I have ever felt, in my life.  My mental illness is a personal thing, and one thing I have the power over is who I tell, and how and when I tell them.  And while I have told nearly everyone I know, I still pick and choose, I am careful about how I explain, and what I explain.  I still haven't told anyone I'm Borderline, even.  MDD, I figure, is enough to let people know for now.  BPD is trickier to explain, and harder to accept.

This Christmas Eve, I faced my mother's side of the family for the first time since my hospitalization.  The uncle who I am moving in with knew, of course.  As did my one aunt, who had originally offered to let me stay with her when I was discharged.  My other uncle asked stilted questions about school, and we stared awkwardly when I said I had dropped out.  Later, he would apologize profusely to my mother, "I didn't know something was wrong.  I'm sorry, she's talking to N now."  N. is my aunt, his wife.  She took it upon herself to pull me aside and tell me break ups were hard and she had a hard time growing up, too.  I took it upon myself to get highly offended and state "I have depression.  I live in an abusive household.  This is not about a break up."  I didn't even want to talk about "growing up being hard"--I take care of my parent's finances, I fix my house, feed/take care of myself.  Just because I am living with my parents and unable to work or attend college does not mean I am not an adult.

To be fair, N. meant well.  She did not mean to insult, but I was surprised she didn't understand more, being that she is a nurse.  I have realized people tend to have to a few basic reactions:

The Accepting, "I'm Here For You" Reaction:  Surprisingly, this is the reaction most of my friends have had.  My one friend started crying and told me to call her if I needed anything.  A few began to understand my isolation, and risky behavior.  Other simply smiled and went along with my need to have a good time and forget about things.  Just because I'm sick doesn't mean I want to dwell on it all the time.  And mostly, offline, I don't.  This is the most surprising reaction, and the one I am most grateful for.  When people respond with this, I know they're worthwhile.

The Awkward Reaction:  "I don't know what to say" is the favored term for these people.  They stare a little, and start treating you different.  They feel the constant need to mention your illness and ask if you need to talk (which is different from saying "I'm here if you need me").  They pressure.  They push.  They don't say it, but you can tell they somehow see you different, as broken.  Strangely, one person who reacted this way had a mental illness too.  It was as if somehow, due to my suicide attempt and hospitalization, I became contagious.  My crazy would sink into her crazy.  This is probably my least favorite of reactions, because while they mean well, they make things worse.

The Bob the Builders:  These people think they know more about your illness than you do.  They think they can "fix" you.  No matter how you explain the illness, they insist they know better.  "Why did you like the hospital?  It was a prison!" suggests one.  "If you met the right man you wouldn't be sad!" insists another.  Most of these tend to be men.  Most of these want to date me.  Nothing better than a hot crazy chick who needs a hug and some dick to be fixed, right?  They lecture about the mental health system, or refuse to understand it's a chemical imbalance.  Sometimes they try to relate by retelling their group therapy experiences and how I'd be better off without my psychiatrist (who I love).  They don't understand that I need group therapy, that I need the five people who work on my mental health case (I have a doctor, a therapist, a case worker, a social worker, and another therapist), and that without mental health system I would be dead or comatose.  They don't understand that I do not remember the month leading up to my hospitalization or that these people legitimately help me.  I am "fixable" but I can't be fixed through the path I currently travel.  Only they can fix me.

The "Pity Me" Reaction:  This reason is why I will never tell my paternal grandmother about my illness.  The moment I did, it would not become about me.  My grandmother would call all her friends and regale them with stories about her "broken granddaughter", about how I can't sleep or eat and I was in the hospital.  About how I can't attend school or work full time because of my illness.  "Isn't it so sad?" she would ask, and I would become a spectacle.  Her little bit of Sunday gossip so her friends look at her with sad eyes and say "I'm sorry about your Anu.  It must be so hard for you", never mind the fact she has told me before I am a disappointment for how I live my life.  In some ways I think this is what I became to my ex.  "Feel bad for me, the girl I broke up with is clearly crazy.  Isn't it so good I got away from her?  My life is so much better now!" and then people agree, make him feel good for hurting me.  I become another reason for a pity party.

That said, I refuse to lie about my illness.  I refuse to feel the shame a lot of people feel about having a mental illness.  I am sick, but I am not broken.  I am not messed up, and I do not need to be fixed, especially by someone else.  Any fixing and changing I do, I do for me, by myself--sometimes with the help of a therapist.  So many people I met in the Acute Partial Program I was in, told their families, every day, they were going to work.  But me?  I won't lie.  I'd rather educate, and if someone wants to think less of me for it, then I know they don't belong in my life.

I spent six years hiding my depression, and feeling ashamed at how I felt--because I didn't know why.  But I have answers now, and I know I don't have to do this on my own.  And if I can change the way one single person feels about mental illness, or can help someone feel better about their own, then I consider speaking out worth it.  I know a lot of the group sessions offered in my county are run by people who have mental illness and became successful and want to help others with their illnesses--one day I am going to be one of those people, just you wait.

Home for the Holidays

So the holidays are almost here and for the first time in my life I am excited for Christmas.  My mother and I are not Christian, although she does believe in God, and I just like the holiday.  Normally Christmas was the holiday of "appeasing the grandmother", however, and this is the first time I have ever been excited for it, predominantly because I am not visiting my grandmother, but instead staying home and relaxing all day.

My father, of course, is angry, and my grandmother won't talk to me or my mother, but I know this is the best choice for me.  My therapist agrees, because of the stress of the holidays and because of my grandmother's overbearing disappointment in me.  I have enough self-esteem issues, I don't need to hear about how she is disappointed in her little college-drop-out granddaughter.  She absolutely does not understand that I made the best choice for me, that I have an illness, that I need to get better and I won't by being who she wants.  My father does not understand this either.  These are just two of the people I've lost in this struggle, but if they can't support me now I suppose I have to accept they aren't really family or meant for me at all.

My mother and I are making sirloin steak tomorrow, with teriyaki rice, and loose corn.  Add a little A1 sauce, and it will be perfect.  It's one of my favorite meals, and that plus the fact I can stay in and watch movies, maybe catch up with Lost, means so, so, so much to me.  I really do get to have a "merry" Christmas for the first time in my life.

Tonight my ma and I are going to her brother's house for a party with her family.  I'm excited to give my cousins the bracelets I made, and I'm excited to try to be part of the family for once.  I've always been on the sidelines of my family, never quite fitting in, but through managing my mental illness I've realized I do have something to offer to my family.  It will be scary getting up and talking to people, being part of the whole for once, but I feel this is a step I need to take.

Connection

I can't wait until I have a camera, so I can post pictures of my jewelry here.

One of the talents I have found in myself since thing got bad, is my talent for jewelry making.  My mother wears some of the jewelry I make, and she gets so many compliments.  I've been asked for orders for bracelets, and such, and my mother entrusted me with making seven bracelets out of her mother's good pearls for myself and my female cousins.  She was going to go to a professional, but then said she thought I was more talented and creative, and she would pay me the same price.  My mother wouldn't have offered if she really didn't think so either.

Beading keeps me sane, and these seven bracelets are keeping me strong in ways I did not expect.  My grandmother died when I was in the fourth or fifth grade.  She had been the woman who had raised me while my parents worked full time.  She taught me to play solitaire, let me watch TV, played games with me.  She was kind, and I still remember her face and smile.  I did not cry at her funeral, though.  I don't remember feeling intense sadness at her loss until now.  I finished my own bracelet first, and have been wearing it since, and I am astounded at the strength it have given me, at how much I really do miss my grandmother.

This is perhaps one of the strangest realizations I have experience since my depression.  Both the realization of my own talent, and the connection I feel for the first time for someone who has passed.  In some ways I feel like this project is the only thing keeping me from cutting, and I'm worried about when it's over.  In other ways, I cannot wait until Christmas Eve, when my cousins see the bracelets.  I want to see the look on their faces.  My one cousin, G, has seen some of my work and apparently loves it.  She reminds me of myself as a middle schooler, and I think her opinion is the one that means the most to me.  I'm thinking of asking her if she wants me to teach her to bead.  She's creative and I think she'll enjoy it.

I've never felt connected to my family until now.  It's a surprising and happy experience to realize that I want to.  I feel as though I have my grandmother to thank for that.

I love you, Grandma.  Thank you for this gift, this strength, and for the time we did have together.

What You Love

Things have been so strange the past few days.  I have one cut on my right hip from a failure, blisters on my fingers from beading too much.  I need strength, but I do not know if I have it.

I do the things I love.  I dance and work on jewelry, color and read, skate and sleep.  I think about how I still love him, and don't know why he doesn't talk to me anymore, about why he never returned my message.  I wonder where I went wrong.  I dreamt of him last night, woke up so confused.  I have dates, and friends, but some days I still don't even want to leave the house.  Some days I wonder if last spring and summer were real.  I already don't remember the month of November, maybe everything else was a dream.  But I still have his hoodie and his mark on my heart, so I know it must have been real.

Where did everything go wrong?  Was it because he simply wasn't the man I thought he was?  Was it because I loved him fully and completely, but he would not let himself love me?  Is it my fault for being borderline, depressed?  Do I deserve to bear this intense guilt?

I try to leave my personal drama involving my love life out of this blog, but it's been on my mind.  I move forward so rapidly, I fall so hard, my wellness is always five leaps forward, five falls back, one hesitant move in the right direction.  My love for him makes things so complicated, confused.

I need to dance, to bead more, to finish the bracelet orders I have to do by Christmas.  I need to remember one day I'll be happy.

In the Moment: Cuts and Carves

(This is probably triggering for cutters.)

I bought Hello Kitty and Disney Princess Band-Aids to dress up my cuts in pretty pictures.

This was back in June, when I started my downswing, and had too much negative energy which can only be leaked out through reckless skating, or gashing my skin again and again with scissors, in short bursts, tens of lines lined up against each other on my arms, my thighs, my stomach.  Shallow enough they won't scar, enough that is hurtshurtshurts, and when I'm done going horizontal I cross them off in vertical zig-zags and it feels good-bad.  Later that week I would say I had a sewing machine accident when asked about my bandaged left arm.  Cat scratches on my thigh.  My then-boyfriend eventually figured it out, but instead of giving me a one-way ticket to the looney bin (which probably would have saved our relationship, had he tossed me in the mental ward so I could have gotten my diagnosis before I ruin it all four months later.  Or he ruins it all.  We were both pretty insane, and running toward disaster, but I got but in the mental ward, and he got to not care about the girl he dumped) he told me not to do it.  I kept doing anyway until my first day at my new job.  They don't like it when tiny little teacher's aides carve up their arms.  They don't want people like that around kids.

I'm still on my medication, a little bit of antidepressants, but I'm sitting here with Helly Kitty Band-Aids and my pair of freshly-sharpened sewing scissors (the blue pair I use for paper and self-injury, not my good singer pair for when I actually sew).  I am anxious and angry and I know what I want.  I know where.  My left hip bone is screaming, so are the tops of my arms.  I don't know why there, I just know that that's where the negative energy is and it needs to gogogo.

I shouldn't have postponed my intake appointment.  I was sick, but I shouldn't have.  Can't keep one more week without carving lines in my skin and covering them in happy pink bandages meant to dress the skinned knees of four-year-old girls.

I guess I'm in trouble.  I guess I should write this in my actual journal, but it sounds so good.  I can write dynamically right now, and this is the first time since I was put on these drugs and I just want to let it out.

A Procclaimation of Disbelief.

I've been very sick for the past few days, which is why I haven't posted anything.

I've been feeling very lost lately, confused about where I fit in.  I've been meaning to use this blog as a chronicle of my spirituality, as well as my mental illness, so today I'll address that, I suppose.  I know this is a highly awkward way to start a blog post: "well this is what I'm going to tell you", it's the sort of thing English teachers hate, but I'm in a very awkward state right now.

Since high school I had been a practicing Asatruar (Norse Reconstructivism), but after things got legitimately bad I become an "atheist for three weeks", until shortly after my hospitalization.  Since I've been going through a spiritual reawakening, although lately it seems to hurt more than help.  It's a form of frustration--wanting to feel something more but not knowing what I believe in.

I still fall toward the more pagan spectrum, although God or Gods I don't know how I feel about.  I know I feel an intense connection to nature, but what comes from that I do not know.  Mostly, I have a deep yearning to feel more connected to the world, but it seems as though my disorders prevent me from doing that.  My depression and BPD have destroyed relationships, torn down integral parts of my world, and left me confused.  Some days I don't feel connected to myself, so I have to ask: how am I supposed to feel connected to others?

I wish so much I could have that sense of certainty in my faith.  I wish it would click and I would know, that I could carry strength from it like I used to.  But I lost the gods I used to follow, my sense of belief, and the things that used to define me.

More and more I realize, as I discuss and try to define my belief system with others, I am trying to shape myself too.

What I Learned From Roller Skating

Roller skating, I have come to realize, is not like riding a bike.  After I stopped I could not pull on my pair of skates and magically become a derby star.  When I fell back into my depression I could not magically get better the same way I had got better before.

In order to learn to skate, you cannot be afraid to fall.  And you're going to fall, probably a lot.  You'll get bruised and sometimes bloody, your back will ache from all the times you land on your ass.  But you'll learn, if you keep at it.

Coping with depression is a lot like this for me.  I cannot get better by hiding inside and not trying.  Not trying, isolating, trying to "wait it out" landed me in the psych ward.  I needed to learn to try, and to take the falls.  I needed to not be afraid of the bruises and to embrace the scars the struggle leaves me, because at least I'm fighting.  I could have given up.  I could have rolled over and died.  I almost did, much like I almost gave up on roller skating, but just because something is hard does not mean it's not worth the struggle.

The struggle to roller skate gave me a love of speed, the ability to feel the wind and sun embrace me as I skate down roads and bike paths, the connection I feel as a roller rink with other like-minded people.  The struggle to beat depression gave me purpose, let me see the sun again, gave me a reason to get out of bed and see friends.  It allowed me to learn who my real friends are (even through the pain of losing a boyfriend, and those who could not understand my disorder), who my family was, and that while blood is thicker than water, the family one makes for themselves offers a far greater bond than blood.  It allowed me to rediscover myself, to get a second chance at life.

The struggle is hard, but it's worth every step.

The Wanting Comes in Waves

Last night was the first night I cried since I was released from the hospital three weeks ago.  I won't get into detail why, but it was a very difficult time.  I felt betrayed, and even more, I felt frustrated: Someone had the power to hurt me, and I was not strong enough to move forward.  My insomnia came back full force, my chest got tight, I was pushing a "9" on the scale of anxiety, and I took a sleeping pill for a first time in days.

The book I'm reading, which is about Borderline Personality Disorder, not Major Depressive Disorder, describes BPD at one point as being like in a forest.  That's an image to which I can relate.  I following the pathways, but sometimes they disappear and I get deeply and thoroughly lost, and the moment I notice I'm lost I have a very hard time coping.

This morning I slept in, for the first time in two or so weeks.  I didn't get out of my pajamas or even brush my hair.  It took me five hours to switch on my laptop to even consider writing this post.  It's frustrating to feel the depression after I had been doing so good.  It's hard think of the future when the present hurts.

One of the things I have come to realize is I am getting better and better at coping, however.  The problems I had prior to my hospitalization where I could not get my anxiety to pass are lessening, though.  I do my beading, I color, I play some sudoku, it's all very relaxing, and even in my pajama'd state I am being more productive and confident.  I might be lost in the woods, but at least I have a compass now.

00. The Fool

I have always been fascinated with tarot.  I bought my first set of cards at twelve and since have collected an array of decks.  Unlike many, I never associated myself with the Fool of tarot.  A sufferer of Major Depressive Disorder, and possibly Borderline Personality Disorder, seeing the sheer amount of potential in myself was impossible.  I was not part of a journey, but simply in a series of moments, some intense, some in which I felt nothing.  Things happened to me, I did not make things happen.

Less than a month ago my disorders caught up with me, and I attempted suicide.  I have since been in a psychiatric ward as well as intense therapy; newly discharged, and in a much better place for the first time since I was a child, I am just now realizing the unbridled potential in this world, and in myself.  Like the tarot card Fool, I am experiencing a new beginning and starting on a journey, one that is mental, physical, and spiritual.  This blog is my attempt at recording my journey of discovery and sharing it with anyone who might be interested, as well as showcasing my creative endeavors.

For many years I have hidden myself from the light, and now I see the light inside myself.  So, like the Fool, I  begin to take first steps out of the darkness.