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Mar. 9th, 2006 12:46 pmSome of the mental state persists, but I am out the door. I can always go home early if it's a problem. I clearly need sleep.
Making the brain sane...
Mar. 8th, 2006 06:43 amSo far as be being stable was concerned, February well and truly bit. I managed to get out of it reasonably sane and definitely alive, though, so I'm feeling pretty good about being me. Skipping back just under three years, to June 2003 -- definite difference in the sanity. (I did find the 36" strap-on entry, which is what I was looking for.)
If anyone ever suggests that I co-parent with marxdarx again, I will look around for something appropriate to use as a blunt object. Of all the influences for the worse on my general sanity, my high school friendship with Shawn has to have been the worst, co-parenting with Marx the second worst, and any number of things including my previous encounter with the current workplace and my relationship with BJ tying for third place. (That's for steady grind-down. The three worst shocks are probably Terrible Tuesday in 1996, the Awful Realization of early 2005, and leaving CTY in 1995 without proper closure.)
St. John's Wort seems to be doing the trick of stabilizing me at something approaching human. I'm lucky in that it works as well as it does. I'm on 900mg/day at the moment, and I've been there for about a week; I'm going to try 600mg starting at the end of this next week, probably stay there for about a month, and then get back to 300mg/day where I've been doing well except when I go off it entirely.
I know it's been working, because I did this past Saturday at work on less than two hours of sleep. I'm lucky that I can walk to work. I was acting entirely too giddy and punchy at the end of the shift, and Comic Pirate Super was wondering if the contents of my water bottle would catch on fire if offered flame, but I was there and I was functional. Homie G Super didn't see any cracks in my professionalism at the beginning of the shift, even though I told him how much sleep I'd gotten and that I was exhausted. I evidently exude professionalism there.
If anyone ever suggests that I co-parent with marxdarx again, I will look around for something appropriate to use as a blunt object. Of all the influences for the worse on my general sanity, my high school friendship with Shawn has to have been the worst, co-parenting with Marx the second worst, and any number of things including my previous encounter with the current workplace and my relationship with BJ tying for third place. (That's for steady grind-down. The three worst shocks are probably Terrible Tuesday in 1996, the Awful Realization of early 2005, and leaving CTY in 1995 without proper closure.)
St. John's Wort seems to be doing the trick of stabilizing me at something approaching human. I'm lucky in that it works as well as it does. I'm on 900mg/day at the moment, and I've been there for about a week; I'm going to try 600mg starting at the end of this next week, probably stay there for about a month, and then get back to 300mg/day where I've been doing well except when I go off it entirely.
I know it's been working, because I did this past Saturday at work on less than two hours of sleep. I'm lucky that I can walk to work. I was acting entirely too giddy and punchy at the end of the shift, and Comic Pirate Super was wondering if the contents of my water bottle would catch on fire if offered flame, but I was there and I was functional. Homie G Super didn't see any cracks in my professionalism at the beginning of the shift, even though I told him how much sleep I'd gotten and that I was exhausted. I evidently exude professionalism there.
Four Faces
Jul. 29th, 2005 04:52 amI'm Eve made a distinct impression on me. I was already well on my way to fragmentation, with the two separate lives of home and school, plus all the teenage personality experimentation selves I created while trying to decide what "me" I was supposed to become...
The book put a name on what I was experiencing the edges of. There were other people out there like that. Chris Costner Sizemore had an extreme case. I decided that what had happened to her was too scary, and proceeded to make sure that there was harmony throughout the Collective, once it formed. The beginning stages had already been set for serious fragmentation -- I was Joan at school, Joanie at home. Two different cultures. Two different names. Eventually, two different girls. (One boyfriend tried calling me "Joanie-Joan". I abhorred the nickname. It felt wrong. In retrospect, it may have been self-preservation, to keep my selves separate, to keep the strategy working.)
After reading the book, the outlook on the world changed in a slight but significant way. Circumstances were no longer forcing us to keep creating new selves by default, and collapsing them into one or the other of us -- we could choose to create one of us to face something, and we could keep conflicting stuff that needed to be kept isolated separate from the rest of our day-to-day operating personalities. We could choose. We could control it. We could sit and talk to ourselves, and no one else, no one outside the Collective, ever had to know.
This proved invaluable when the depression first started hitting. I would later learn that I have a family background of depression, and that Dad did not get diagnosed or treated until after I left the house. The major opinion of home on mental health professionals was that they were more nuts than the people who went to see them, they would discover problems that you didn't actually have, make any already-existing issues worse, and that if one had problems, one would do well to keep them politely to oneself. And so the little poisonous thoughts, the ones that said, "You suck. Life sucks. Why not just die?" did not get aired to my major confidante, my mother, and remained rankling inside. (My riposte to Dad's homily about "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", which would have been, "Depression is a permanent problem," was fortunately never brought up in family discussion.)
Without Mama to turn to, and it being one of the things that Wasn't Discussed In The Family, not my sister either, who did I have left? My high school buddies? Ha. I learned within the first week that some things were safe and some things were not, and something that deep and vulnerable would not have been safe to talk about. That left ... me. Myself. I. Her. Them. Us. We.
It started out as writing in a notebook to myself, stream-of-consciousness. I wrote what was on the mind, and then the words started coming out weird -- not like an alien, but like a note passed back and forth in class. Two different streams of thought intersecting, in two different handwritings. It was a delight, having a friend I could tell anything to, someone who loved me unconditionally, someone I could trust absolutely. I was fourteen.
Gradually, two handwritings became three, and more. There was a babble on the pages, writing swapping from tiny to loopy to angular to smooth and everywhere in between. There were names, self-images, a whole cast of characters, all engaged in the somewhat scary struggle to get "me" (the main front personality) through high school intact -- and most importantly, alive.
The book put a name on what I was experiencing the edges of. There were other people out there like that. Chris Costner Sizemore had an extreme case. I decided that what had happened to her was too scary, and proceeded to make sure that there was harmony throughout the Collective, once it formed. The beginning stages had already been set for serious fragmentation -- I was Joan at school, Joanie at home. Two different cultures. Two different names. Eventually, two different girls. (One boyfriend tried calling me "Joanie-Joan". I abhorred the nickname. It felt wrong. In retrospect, it may have been self-preservation, to keep my selves separate, to keep the strategy working.)
After reading the book, the outlook on the world changed in a slight but significant way. Circumstances were no longer forcing us to keep creating new selves by default, and collapsing them into one or the other of us -- we could choose to create one of us to face something, and we could keep conflicting stuff that needed to be kept isolated separate from the rest of our day-to-day operating personalities. We could choose. We could control it. We could sit and talk to ourselves, and no one else, no one outside the Collective, ever had to know.
This proved invaluable when the depression first started hitting. I would later learn that I have a family background of depression, and that Dad did not get diagnosed or treated until after I left the house. The major opinion of home on mental health professionals was that they were more nuts than the people who went to see them, they would discover problems that you didn't actually have, make any already-existing issues worse, and that if one had problems, one would do well to keep them politely to oneself. And so the little poisonous thoughts, the ones that said, "You suck. Life sucks. Why not just die?" did not get aired to my major confidante, my mother, and remained rankling inside. (My riposte to Dad's homily about "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", which would have been, "Depression is a permanent problem," was fortunately never brought up in family discussion.)
Without Mama to turn to, and it being one of the things that Wasn't Discussed In The Family, not my sister either, who did I have left? My high school buddies? Ha. I learned within the first week that some things were safe and some things were not, and something that deep and vulnerable would not have been safe to talk about. That left ... me. Myself. I. Her. Them. Us. We.
It started out as writing in a notebook to myself, stream-of-consciousness. I wrote what was on the mind, and then the words started coming out weird -- not like an alien, but like a note passed back and forth in class. Two different streams of thought intersecting, in two different handwritings. It was a delight, having a friend I could tell anything to, someone who loved me unconditionally, someone I could trust absolutely. I was fourteen.
Gradually, two handwritings became three, and more. There was a babble on the pages, writing swapping from tiny to loopy to angular to smooth and everywhere in between. There were names, self-images, a whole cast of characters, all engaged in the somewhat scary struggle to get "me" (the main front personality) through high school intact -- and most importantly, alive.
More with the mind/bomb analogy
Jul. 26th, 2003 02:02 pm...From time to time it's necessary to excavate those old buried bombs in the mind.
Shawn crawled around with a lit match looking for the fuse. I don't know whether he planned to defuse them, or just light them off for fun, but doing it that way was really stupid. And he did it on his timetable, too.
Darkside packs along a flashlight; my dear Boy Scout. And it's a great big bonky flashlight (Just for you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shywickedpixie...) and I can actually see things with it. And he holds it where I need light, and points out stuff I may have missed, and hands me the shovel so I can excavate, following the fuse to the bomb itself. In case I've forgotten, he hands me my body armor, and he's already wearing his.
Sometimes we can defuse it without detonating it. But, if we have to detonate it, he's brought the full bomb kit, including sandbags and fire extinguisher. And in the ear-ringing aftermath, he helps me to my feet and we dust each other off and make sure no one did really get too hurt, and then we patch up all the scrapes. Sometimes he has to clean and stitch a gash, and I feel really lousy about not having ducked fast enough, and really bad about having had the bomb there in the first place.
Figures that a good analogy for my mind is a minefield. But he helps me flag the ones we haven't taken care of yet.
Shawn crawled around with a lit match looking for the fuse. I don't know whether he planned to defuse them, or just light them off for fun, but doing it that way was really stupid. And he did it on his timetable, too.
Darkside packs along a flashlight; my dear Boy Scout. And it's a great big bonky flashlight (Just for you,
shywickedpixie...) and I can actually see things with it. And he holds it where I need light, and points out stuff I may have missed, and hands me the shovel so I can excavate, following the fuse to the bomb itself. In case I've forgotten, he hands me my body armor, and he's already wearing his. Sometimes we can defuse it without detonating it. But, if we have to detonate it, he's brought the full bomb kit, including sandbags and fire extinguisher. And in the ear-ringing aftermath, he helps me to my feet and we dust each other off and make sure no one did really get too hurt, and then we patch up all the scrapes. Sometimes he has to clean and stitch a gash, and I feel really lousy about not having ducked fast enough, and really bad about having had the bomb there in the first place.
Figures that a good analogy for my mind is a minefield. But he helps me flag the ones we haven't taken care of yet.
Defining...
Feb. 14th, 2003 07:45 pmInsane: Those who just don't have it all together.
Outsane: Those who know they just don't have it all together and outsource their sanity.
Outsane: Those who know they just don't have it all together and outsource their sanity.
