Hi there. You can basically thank Mike Doughty and his new album for this blog. It’s amazing and it is making me want to reach out, state that I’m still alive, and ramble to everyone and no one all at once. We might get to more about the album later. For now I guess I should account my current existence.
I realize it might of been a dick mood to mention going off meds and then not blogging for a while. Sorry about that. So what has happened with going off meds:
Basically that was vetoed by my current therapist and her supervisor. Yeah, I know what you are thinking, how can other people veto one of your life decisions? Easy. When you are bipolar, you are treated like a five-year old when it comes to decisions about treatment. They directed me to apply for state run health insurance, so I’m waiting on that, and then I will resume lithium. They made it pretty clear that without making this commitment to meds there was a good chance the counseling department couldn’t take the risk to see me if I’m not medicated or trying to get medicated. They assure me that in a couple years I can revisit the idea of going off meds completely. I assure you that this is a carrot on a stick, but am not ready to go without therapy.
This is why bipolars get pissy about meds. Imagine going to your primary doctor and finding out your have high cholesterol, and your doctor telling you that if you don’t take the medication they won’t see you again. Sure high cholesterol can kill you. Sure you should take the meds for it. There are holistic options like soy, exercise, etc., but they aren’t a guarantee that your cholesterol will improve. So instead of leaving you to decide the risks vs. the rewards and make a decision, your doctor gives you an ultimatum. You’d be pissy too.
Don’t get me wrong. I get where they are coming from. 25% of bipolars who are unmedicated/under-medicated commit suicide. I get that that scares them. It used to scare me. But I don’t think they are helping me as much as they think they are by undervaluing my progress and self-stability.
They minimize my strength, and say it isn’t my fault that I can’t handle reality. It’s my disease. I say I think I’ll be fine. They politely disagree. And the worst part is their opinion is the only one that matters in this situation. That is unless I’m willing to forgo additional assistance, like therapy. Oh well, so that’s where we are at.
So why haven’t I been blogging? It’s not really about the meds, though I’ve been down about being treated like a child. But my life has been split into two separate lives.
On the weekends I have this amazing guy I spend my time with. I’ve basically gone completely head-over heels for him. And I would blog about that, but that’s exceptionally boring if you aren’t in the relationship. Plus at least 75% of it is so completely inappropriate to share I’d be left blogging about our dinner selections, which are very good. So just know that I am very happy with that part of my life.
The other part of my life is this very grey existence of grad school and wandering the streets and subways of new york alone. While there is a beauty to that, it is almost designed for the microblogging of twitter. It’s so stark and unsatisfying that it’s hard to write a full update about classes. I constantly feel like I’m playing catch up and doing a smoke and mirrors act trying to convince my teachers that I’m smart enough to be in a master’s program.
So how did Mike Doughty’s new album change this today? Well it was a usual grey morning in my brain when I bought Sad Man Happy Man, and it was like someone reached into my chest and restarted my heart. I felt engaged in the world.
It’s probably, it is just a new album, but since it is a Mike Doughty album it means that there is a puzzle for me to unravel. I’m sure I will be unbearable for the next month listening to nothing but this album, obsessing on each lyric and the progression of tracks.
If you aren’t sure if you want to buy it, or you just want to get an idea of why I’m obsessed, check out Lorna Zauberberg and (I Want to) Burn You [Down]. Now if he would just put out a new book of poetry, I would be ridiculously ecstatic.
Okay ridiculous fan girl moments achieved.
Side note, my friend Ange will be on Jeopardy. I will tweet more information. I expect everyone to watch and cheer even though I’m almost positive it isn’t live.
…saw you in the shipwreck disco…
It’s a rare thing to find me bored. But reading is giving me a headache, and I’m on a bus so there you have it
Oh, wait…typing is way worse.
Aborting blog.
- I want the next president to be at least half as good we all hope he’ll be.
- I want to become Southern.
- I want someone to explain to me the economy in a way that doesn’t make me curl up in the fetal position and start licking toads.
- I want more time.
- I want my family to stop fighting or, assuming the impracticalities of that, at least leave me the fuck out of it.
- I want to either lose twenty pounds or write 5,000 words a week consistently. I don’t care which.
- I want everyone I love to be happy, or at least for me to learn that I can make other people happy.
- I want a pet pig and a pick up truck, and an awesome hat.
- I want to go somewhere new, at least for a weekend.
- I want to get back on meds in a permanent way.
- I want to discover two new people from my home planet, explain to them the mission statement, and send them out recruiting others.
- I want Mike Doughty to be my wacky neighbor, who is always there to give advice when I’m blue or confused.
- I want to accept everything and move forward with it.
- I still want to speak Russian, but now in part because I want to have coffee with Putin.
- And again, I want you to have a wonderful New Year. I will be thinking of most of you at 12:01.
Good music is gospel, not the genre, but the idea of gospel. gospel of the human condition.
i don’t pray, but i do repeat song lyrics over and over in my head — mantras to aid or comfort.
today a song lyric popping into my head caused me to cry for the first time in therapy (first time with this therapist at least).
i got out and played every version of the song three times, waiting for a day when the repitition of the line is more than a prayer. the day where i believe it.
most times we build walls to keep out others, but sometimes we build them to keep ourselves out. pulling down the bricks, you assume you’ll find the outside world, but 1 in every 72 times your sense of direction is wrong and you find yourself looking in.
it had been years since i even looked in. i forgot how strong those emotions are. contained like a supernova in small, but well fortified, box. i’m still reeling from the renewed knowledge of how much anger, guilt, sadness, violence, and shame are spiraling at the center.
the lyric?
“i forgive the world right now.”
Maybe this will help me sleep.
Here’s the post I was writing in Chicago that I couldn’t poach wi-fi to send.
{terminal K-8}
Ugh. traveling with a hangover is simply punishment for the drinking itself.
yay chicago.
Would have blogged yesterday, but yesterday was the classic me traveling day where weird things happen. Hence I think I pulled my liver and I’m completely brain-dead in O’Hare.
You didn’t miss much, if I posted yesterday it would have been another one of those tragically long posts about how much I detest myself. I was sitting in my hotel at one point and wondering for the millionth time what it would be like not to hate myself when it occurred to me that I might as well speculate on what it’s like to wake up one day and be a beaver. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it is so far out of my frame of reference I can no more hypothesis what self-acceptance even would feel like then I can to imagine what a Beaver thinks when it wakes up in pajamas. Even in my daydreams I hate myself. It’s like being left-handed, always with me, always irritating me at the most unexpected times.
So yesterday’s blog largely would have been about that.
Today’s is not really about anything.
Saw interesting thing on the news yesterday about American Airlines having unfiltered wi-fi, and the implications of that. I’m not sure if this is currently in effect, but we’re about five minutes from boarding so I guess we’ll find out soon enough. The argument was basically one sided to the right on the channel I was watching, (some podunk local 24 hours news channel I think) about how without filtering people will be able to surf for porn on the internet and that it will be up to the flight attendant to police the skies. Okay wait. Really? As long as no one pulls it out and starts going to town or makes another passenger watch a video they are uncomfortable with I don’t rightly see the problem with watching porn on your laptop. In Japan business men read porn on the subway (can someone check this out? I’m wondering if it is an urban legend). Why can’t people just keep their eyes on their own screens? I’m not saying the guy watching Anal Annie and Friends is who I have in mind when I think about free speech, but he’s as protected to watch that as the asshole on the other side of you is to watch clips from Rush Limabughs greatest hits DVD. One persons porn is another persons political pundit…..maybe not.
Also why is the internet so much more tempting for watching porn in public? These freaks and weirdos who apparently can’t go for a whole flight without seeing some nipples, how have they been managing thus far? Why don’t they just bring in a DVD of it?
{on flight, seat 25 A}
So wi-fi is just a rumor. Damn.
Will post when I get in.
I love that flying is still set up as an entertainment in it’s own right. Train travel is a transportation, and no one wants to be on a bus, but there is something the supposed to be magical about flying. The pilot is like some b list celebrity, with his charming facts about the plane and the destination. Sometime sI think they take extra hard left turns for no other reason then reminding you that you are suspended in air.
flying over lake erie right now I’m simultaneously horrified and hypnotized. I think I killed just enough brain cells to be utterly childlike for a night.
***
Then I got home, realized sometime last week I moved back home with my mother into my childhood bedroom in a town that I despise.
Then I remembered that today I had my first day class in 6 years and it was a fiction workshop.
Then I only slept 4 hours because of the tossing and turning. Which by the way, is cute when it’s the first day of high school, but when it’s the first day of your senior year of night school and you have to put in 8 full hours of work before going over it becomes remarkably less cute.
Then pumpkin spice latter came back to Starbucks and I thought I might live through the day.
Then I got to work and found out that I had 60+ different message explaining how the there were EPIC FUCK UPS but professionally and personally in my absence.
And don’t get me wrong I make after city wage taxes less than a poop scooper at a Russian circus, it’s still my little ship and when things fail it’s my problem, even if only in my eyes.
But those are the eyes that I measure everything with, so in the end that’s who I’m aiming to please. And I am not fucking pleased right now.
So then I go to my new fiction workshop to discover that it is almost entirely 20 year old day school girls who I guarantee will write fiction about the fight they had with their boyfriend Chad the night before.
Bought half my books.
Discovered I need $1,300 by Monday for school.
Go to dinner. Come home to childhood home, still here.
Put away laundry, sit down, have a beer to relax. And then can’t fucking sleep. I have to be up in less than 5 hours and I could run a marathon right now because all that’s running through my head are the long ass emails I have to write at 7 am tomorrow triaging a fuckup that’s already happened, where the blame is endless and the only thing I want to do is hide under my desk and practice braiding the fuses for an explosive devise that I will strap to my chest and the next person who laughingly tells me that shit falls apart when I’m not there is going to push that fucking button so the world blows away.
Then Mike Doughty posts a blog that he is looking for a new manager. I think I said last year after leaving a show with my sister that I wanted to quit my job and go work for him.
And all I wish in all the world is that I could send out my little PR resume, bullshit my way into the job and set a match to all this shit here.
***
And basically before I came back I was going to write a quick note at the bottom of my travel blog that I’m going through a lot emotionally right now. I’m off my meds and trying to make a little sense of my life. Therapy is just starting to get tough, and i feel like I don’t really have anyone on my team or anyone that I can rely on now.
I’m just saying if the post aren’t happy or they don’t make a ton of sense or come as often I’m sorry. But it’s in the fucking title. I’m here trying to survive myself. So even without all this added bullshit, some days it takes all my energy.
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