So I rally should be working on my finals, but I can’t help but feel the need to document what’s been happening to me (mostly for writing and posterities sake).
Things have been stressful to say the least. Which is always true, but lately it’s been 20 time worse what it normally is.
Most of you who know me know that I have nightmares off and on and always have. As i’ve gotten older I don’t mind the classic nightmares so much, they even occasionally lead to good story ideas.
But the past month I’ve had two separate cases of Sleep Paralysis.
Apparently during REM sleep your brain sends out a message to your body to keep it from moving so that you don’t injure yourself. Sleep paralysis occurs when you wake from REM suddenly but your body is still in full paralysis.
Often times your brain is still dreaming, but your also somehow awake and unable to move.
- you may feel a weight on your chest
- you may hear other people in the room that aren’t there
- it may feel like hours like this
- you may hallucinate
- you can’t open your eyes
Seep paralysis is the basis for a lot of ghost, alien, and demon beliefs. Once you’ve gone through it you can understand why. The first time I thought I was dying, literally. I had Mike Doughty’s “Grey Ghost” stuck in my head, which is about Jeff Buckley’s overdose on heroin, and I thought there was someone sitting on the edge of my bed as I died of an overdose. I struggled to scream and I couldn’t.
The second time was just sheer terror at the fact it was happening again. I was so scared for no reason. I could hear people outside my room and I kept trying to roll myself off the bed and crawl out to beg for help. The closest I got was being able to twitch my hand and when I did I could tell that the cat was there, which would calm me down because she wasn’t part of the hallucination so I’d realize I was dreaming and be okay for a few minutes. Sure enough though I would drift back into the hallucination and it would start all over again until I could feel the soft fur of the sleeping cat by my side.
I’m actually having a minor anxiety attack typing this. It’s made sleeping so much more difficult, because I have this added level of anxiety about it happening again.
Sleep paralysis is remarkably common, over the course of a lifetime more people than not will experience it once. It can be due to stress, bipolar phase shifts, excessive drinking, sleeping on your back, etc.
What’s amazing is while I’m totally terrified of having it happen again, I also completely want to capture that feeling in a way in my writing.
Hands down it was the scariest thing that have ever happened to me. Scarier than any nightmare or breaking into a haunted house.
So while 90% of me is terrified it’ll happen again, 10 % is terrified it won’t because being in that in between was like being in the space after you finish an intense round of yoga or meditation. It was like doing too many opiates. It was like touching something that you aren’t supposed to touch and knowing that that space is what all mystics and madmen spend their lives searching for.
I feel like if I could find it again and not be scared, it might be different . . .
Pabst created the 6-pack because they judged it was the weight most easily carried home by a housewife from the store. I consider this fact and smile as I grab a half case of PBR from the back fridge of the 7-11 and head up to the counter. It’s only four blocks home and I won’t even need to switch hands. The Indian man behind the counter eyes me lecherously, but not unpleasantly, with a smile as I deposit the change back in my bra and head on my way at 4am.
The air is finally cool, Hurricane Earl heading his way up the coast, and I’m happy to have the walk. The neighborhood, which is new to me, smells of trash and heat escaping pavement.
I walk past empty Corona bottles and burnt offerings to the god of summer dwindling. My head is filled with my bartending shift and the fact that I’ve been in New York a year.
In that year I’ve refocused my personality. I’m not necessarily different, but New York is a scalpel to Philadelphia’s baseball bat when it comes to matters of growth. I’m more comfortable in my skin and expect less for twice the amount of work. To some that might sound like a bad thing, I think to people who make it here, it just sounds right.
I pass by the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from my place and the smell of sugar and dough rises in the breeze. I’ve never wished more for a deck overlooking a body of water to sit out on and watch the sun shift slowly into Saturday. I sigh and think for the fortieth time this week that I’m so glad to be here.
My neighborhood is either South Slope or Gowanus depending on who you ask. It’s a balanced mix of hispanics and auto-body repair shops with a growing percentage of people like me who moved here for the great bars and the safe streets.
Every person has their own New York. No really. There are no two New Yorks, and there is no right or wrong. I found mine on a deserted one way street with only four or five ramshackle houses and a large number of warehouses. Sometimes it smells like exhaust, sometimes donuts. The tacos are cheap and plentiful, and the nights are quieter than anything in my head. If I’m capable of happiness by any standards, I’m happy here.
I climb the flight of stairs to my apartment and plant myself on my kitchen floor. I have a bourbon and a can of beer to alternate drinking from. I sit by the window so I can smoke without moving. I think about my day, how my back hurts, why I’m dissatisfied with graduate school and my job, and why I love and hate the place where night slides wordlessly into morning.
Did I mention I’m in grad school? I’m 9 credits and a thesis away from a master’s in nothing useful. If you are considering going to grad school because you think think it’ll improve your life, I’d like to offer some advice: don’t. No really, an M.A. is a bill of goods, and you’d be better off putting that money into a time share in Reno than on most graduate programs in the humanities. If however you are like me and love learning without reward and have no idea what else to do, by all means, please sign up and enjoy the most expensive soul searching a person can undergo.
My program funds the more high level M.F.A. students, so they can go on to teach composition poorly at state run universities and prisons. All of the great things I’ve learned have been accidental and in that regards depressing. Still, I love reading and learning and thinking, so I persist.
There’s a one sentence email waiting for me when I get home. I’m ecstatic to read it:
Are you still looking for a bartending job?
It’s from a resume I sent out a week earlier to a place I was really interested in. I know it will likely lead to nothing, but I smile still the same. You learn here that the little victories are enough. The reply on one resume out of ten is amazing and boosts my spirit enough to redouble my efforts.
Oh, why am I looking for work? I have a full time bartending job already. Except it’s kind of like bartending in prison. It’s the sort of place where people give you $2 on a $40 check and look at you like your an ass if you don’t proceed to wash their feet with your hair. Believe it or not, that wasn’t even what did me in there. I can live with cheap morons.I can even deal with the bar fights and the occasional human feces found on the floor. But I recently got a new bar manager who’s idea of managing me is to talk to me like I’m an absolute moron. I can handle it from the customers, but I can’t take it from my boss. It’s time to go. It might take me a while to get out, but I’m fine with working hard. The rewards are sweeter that way anyhow.
On my dirty kitchen floor I try to write. This has been the albatross of New York. No lack of ideas, but a lack of cogent sentences. My form has gone all wavy and my verbs have gone all limp. I have the writing equivalent of whiskey dick, so desperate to do the deed, so incapable of satisfying myself or anyone else.
I’m working out the whys and the hows. It’s a process because even though writer’s block is a bit of a myth, writer’s tennis elbow is a very real thing. I want to write and I do write, but I’ve lost the narrative, the signal, the drive. It’s somewhere in the pathways, but it isn’t here. Still I fight for it.
I’m out of touch most days. It isn’t anything about New York per se. So much of this life is wrapped up in talking, being, and doing, that when I get five minutes to myself I often just need to sit and stare. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I became great at working in restaurants. And while I love that, it takes up 100% of my personality in 35 hours a week. Then I try to find another 20% to give to my school life, and another 50% to give to the man I love, and another 30% to give to friends, and the next thing I know I’m flat on my back in my kitchen with a beer and some bourbon and wondering why I’m so drained. I dont’ regret a single percent, but I am always two steps behind and totally brain dead.
The man in my life? Yeah, I know, it’s crazy. But he and I have been together over a year and we’re still as gross as we were the day we met. I don’t talk about him much because I’m terrified of jinxing things. Still, he is the best part of every day.
The sky is not lightening yet, and I leave burnt effigies of late summer in the form of cigarettes as I pour myself a second round.
My thoughts turn to the prophecies of Zevon and the small kindness here in New York. Both weigh heavily in my brain lately.
They are the alternatives to the early morning meanderings of things long lost. Though I suppose Warren would understand those too.
There is an aspect of forgetfulness that New York promises. With each new dawn, the chance to start over. I put on something bittersweet on iTunes and decide it’s time to turn to poetry that will never see the light of day. The time for narrative is lightening into the time for Ginsberg’s golden rule, no ideas but in things.
I no longer care if my story is sympathetic. I no longer need to be the hero of this life. Tomorrow is occurring and I will wake lather, rinse, repeat and try only to do it better.
I know I usually do my year round up on the 8th, but each year it becomes less and less of a focal point of my year. I forgot it was the 8th until I dated my taxes this year.
So a belated Happy Birthday to James Dean.
Don’t get me wrong, February is still an awful fucking month. But nowadays it’s more about the cold and the dark and the snow then about my past.
So I use this annual blog post to sort of assess the past year and I guess this year what I want to talk about is the bipolar disorder.
And this really goes back more than a year, but all things are built upon what came before them.
So a recap –
I was diagnosed at 16 years old with bipolar disorder II (rapid cycling). At the time I also had very severe PTSD and what was unknown at the time, a very common, but still problematic hormone imbalance.
It’s been a decade since that diagnosis and I’ve tried a plethora of meds, a shit-ton of drugs, yoga, witchcraft, raw foods, atheism, alcohol, meditation, and therapy. Of all of those things the only real progress I can measure has come from consistent therapy for the past 3-4 years. It wasn’t a quick fix, but of all of those things, the only improvement I can measure (and I’d like to think that my friends can measure too) is from having a few great therapists.
Still you don’t get to leave your diagnosis behind…or do you (menacing music)?
I gave up on meds this fall because of two things:
1) insurance
2) I disagree with the premise that I will always be bipolar. At least in such a way that is debilitating to my life. I disagree with therapists and psychiatrists telling me that it doesn’t get better, and that I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life on meds which side effects are often time more debilitating than the swings themselves.
Well I’ve finally met a therapist who sees eye to eye with me. We’re spending a lot of time disputing the diagnosis itself in sessions. We talk openly about the criteria and the definitions and what it means for me.
Look it might not seem like a big deal. It is just two words after all. But if you’ve never had a legion of people tell you you can’t be trusted to make decisions about your own brain, then you don’t understand.
As it stands now, I’ll always be diagnosed bipolar if I’m honest. The way the criteria is set up, I’m diagnosed on certain incidents which may have happened anywhere from three to twelve years ago. I’m effectively always being held accountable for my past.
Textbooks don’t take into account the extreme circumstances of my teenage years, or the abuse I put myself through into my twenties. They only look at incidents and durations.
Well I feel like that’s not enough. And so I’ve really been pushing my therapist with my constant questioning and debating of the diagnosis. I’m stuck on the psychiatrists’ ideas that: – it doesn’t get better – it doesn’t go away – and even though we don’t know why it happens or why something works, I’m supposed to trust them blindly.
So, all things being synchonistic – my therapist has a colleague who is on the cutting edge of neuroscience. She asked him point blank if he thought bipolar disorder could be cured.
He said yes.
He said he’d seen it first hand.
There is apparently a new school of thought emerging that runs closer to parallel with my own. I’m still learning about it and researching things, but basically the way I look at this new information is as follows:
For the first time since my diagnosis I have something to work towards. I have a goal. I’m not fully cured yet, but I’m already so far from where I’ve come. There are people out there who think and feel the same way that I do, and there is hope of one day not being fully taken over by the monster in my head.
I’m not looking for a magic wand this year. I’m looking for a life that I can lead without giant mental setbacks.
A lot of my damage is emotional. That will still need to be processed through therapy if I ever want to stop hating myself (which, oh my god, I do) and if I want to break the patterns that I am stuck in.
But I’m looking forward and I feel hopeful that there are people who want to help me.
This might mean going back on meds at some point, but I’m fine with that as long as there is a reason and I’m working towards a finished product.
I guess the point of the February 8th blog (often delayed) is to always say this – for any survivor who might be out there:
I Am Not the Girl I was 12 years ago.
I Am Not Broken.
I Have a Voice.
The earth moves steadily around the sun, and that is the best that we can hope for.
That and to die old and in our sleep.
It kills me more that it take so long to get home.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever put this on the blog before but I had a brilliant professor who said that he thought that Homer’s Odyssey should be read as a metaphor for PTSD. No matter who wins the war, it takes ten years to get home again.
It took me ten years to get home.
The last two have been spent figuring out how to live here.
The past is so far gone that the incident itself it a memory of no-memory. But the wreckage I recall, and the wreckage is what I deal with putting right again.
I used to say when I was a teenager and invincible that if a tornado decimates your town, at some point the tornado itself doesn’t matter, because no matter what happened you’ve got to rebuild.
Well this tornado led to a lot of wreckage. It can verily easily be blamed for the bipolar diagnosis and a lot of self destruction. I’ll never be done talking about it. I’ll never put it fully away (or for that matter, take it fully out and look at it). But the wreckage I came home to a few years back is really where my attention is needed.
I wish a happy february to all. It is a month of crap and cold darkness. But we all have our februaries to get through and we all have our februaries to see to.
Okay, I just poured a cocktail, donned my smoking vest and lit a cigarette. Let’s chat. In my drunken blogs I haven’t mentioned how this christmas went or anything about New Years. So I’ll do start there.
For those long time reader (I’m talking LJ and whatnot), you’ll recall that the holidays normally Suck. Well the biggest surprise of 2009 was liking Christmas. I spent it with my friend Kirk who came up from NC, and my Charles and we went with some other misfits to see Sherlock Holmes (which I thought was awesome). Also I got awesome gifts. No really, awesome freaking gifts.
I got this beautiful graphic novel called Bayou, which if you are at all into Southern culture and magical realism, and things that are sad and creepy and beautiful, it’s a must read. The art floored me. I’ll also be updating goodreads when school starts, so if you’re following me there, you’ll see it.
It was the year of good books because I also received Absolute Death, which Neil Gaiman was nice enough to sign and sketch an ugly, 45 year old, lesbian werewolf in the front of. He’s a very kind guy.
I’m leaving out a ton of great other gifts, but that’s mostly to brag about the books.
Charles had been listening to me talk about Joe Hill’s new book Horns since I found out it is coming out in February. i even suggested he steal his boss’s advanced reader copy of it. Well he did one better, and found me an advanced reader’s copy. I freaked out. Many kisses were given.
The book itself was brilliant where it was brilliant and heavy-handed in other parts of it. I will say overall I loved it, and the characters and stories and metaphors have stayed with me since I read it. The obvious metaphor of the book (which is about a guy who wakes up with a hangover to discover he has grown horns) is not really the overarching metaphor of the book. I think the real meaning is especially poignant if you love someone intensely, and it is a beautiful – if unlikely love story. I highly recommend it for a quick read, though I’m not making any claims that it will one day be cannon. Also please note that regardless of marketing, it is not a horror book. Really. There is nothing in it that is meant to be horror, but fucking publishers and marketing teams don’t know how to copy with magical realism.
Kirk stayed in the ass-end of Brooklyn with me for 8 days, and dealt with the odd smell of chicken wings without so much as a complaint. There was an absinthe night which is hands down the best night on absinthe I’ve ever had. It made me wish I was in a safer neighborhood, because i would have loved to go walking.
Then New Years Eve came around and I was -surprise surprise – wingslinging. I made it home in time to ring in the New Year on my couch reading. I was soon joined by my love, and I cal it an Epic win. Shit has been kind of downhill since then, but that’s really the job.
there has been some cell phone fuckery, some writing, a lot of cursing, some tears, and even more wingslinging. (I am the wingslinger. Feel the heat from my blazin’ buffalo sauce).
I miss my philly friends like crazy, but Sara was nice enough to drive up here on a sunday, deliver me a bicycle and a freaking wawa hoagie (classic italian. god damn I love wawa). We sat in my living room and did that parakeet thing we do for five hours and then she drove home. Awesome.
I should be seeing Sparky and Matt 1 (only remaining Matt really) on Saturday for lunch.
School starts in a couple weeks. I know it’s a late start, but we go till June, so no hard feelings. I’ve got a great course load this semester, which I’ll go into on another post, and should be TAing an English Comp 1 course as well. This is of course on top of the waitressing and hopefully still putting work together on this novel. The truth of it is, that I think I can make it all work for a few months, and then find something better by the summer, when my funding disappears and I have to pay my rent off of what I make (right now my rent is paid through march).
I also want to bog at some point about the still no meds situation and the acceptance of the bipolar, without the acceptance of the psychiatrist’s words that I’m not a functional member of society.
Also I’d like to address the appearance of rampant drinking:
This is post-shift restaurant drinking. If you’ve never worked in a restaurant, you don’t know, but trust me it’s a job requirement. Also nights I don’t drink I tend not to blog, because I opt for a movie alone, or bed. Now I get that drunk emailing, tweeting, and blogging are bad things, but it also seems like the best time to talk to people who aren’t talking back. So it’s going to seem worse than it is, but I hope you don’t cart me off to a 12 step program just yet.
Okay I think that’s it for now, but I’ll be back.
This is the part of the day where I start to cry for no reason.
Just wait, it’ll pass.
It happens a lot these days. Well basically ever since moving to New York.
Sometimes it’s because of something good (like being loved). Sometimes it’s because the world is so much sadness that I can’t stand to think of it.
It doesn’t really matter. It’ll pass.
Crying is to my eyes what vomiting is to my stomach. I can’t seem to control it, so I just wait it out.
I’ll just sit here alone and wait it out.
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