Treasure

Today, my son taught me an important lesson on value and how we place it.

My son is a really special little guy. He has Pervasive Development Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified on the Autism Spectrum.  So, a lot of little things that would be be considered typical in other children are really significant for him.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a parent tell their four year old to shut up because the chatter became overbearingly annoying.  I always feel that twinge of sadness, fearing that my son may never speak enough for me to become aggravated at all.  Those moments are significant for me, too.

But, then there are those moments that are significant in an enlightening way.

I was sitting at the dining room table this morning with my wallet and what we call “The petty cash box”.  I was mindlessly dumping change into it when my son approached me.  When he speaks, I listen with all of my might to make out what he is saying.  It might be the only thing I ever put my full attention into.  He said, “Mommy, money!”  I was thrilled that he took an interest in what I was doing, and I allowed him to put the money in the box while supervised.

He happily put the money in, and presented me with a quarter saying, “Mommy, want quarter?”  I was delighted that he could identify it.  Suddenly, he grabbed the box and started to walk away.  I was about to chase him down just when he put it on the end table. He turned to me excitedly and shouted, “Look, Mommy! Treasure!”

He started to prattle on about being a pirate when my heart just melted. It was a brilliant observation. The little box kind of resembled a treasure chest, brimming with different colored coins. And that’s when it hit me. It wasn’t just about the likeness. It was about the whole interaction. And the whole thing had taken on an entirely different value.

I started to think about the things that I value. What do I cherish?

The realization hit me. Lately, I’ve been dwelling on the things that I want, but don’t have. My focus had been shifted onto the seemingly hopeless pursuit of these things. And I realized that those things are intangible idealizations that may never even have the possibility of becoming a reality. Those things had gained all of the value over the things I truly cherished and clouded my mind.

What do I value then?

Little, daily victories for my son. A few engaged words here and snippets of hopeful conversation there. His new discoveries and interests. And each beautiful little smile and giggle. All of those shining moments that give me hope for his development through Autism Spectrum Disorder.

But even more for him, I value him. Him, as he is. My 4 foot tall, 55lb, brown haired, green eyed little Beast.

I value my husband’s caresses. This morning, he unexpectedly turned over and actually spooned me. It was more than welcome. It was soothing, comforting, and all spontaneous. It was one of those rare, intuitive moments he had. I cherish those.

But, I value even more than those fleeting moments. It is bigger than that. I see what I have missed all along. Every action is an intuitive, invested action. Whether I know it or not, he’s taking care of my needs that I don’t even think about anymore. I was overlooking what was right there in front of me because I was too involved with what I considered to be neglected needs.

Finally, my eyes started to open up.

When I really thought about it, I found value in myself today. I have been so fixated on what I am not, and the things I thought I had lost, I lost sight of who I am and all of the things I have gained. I am a mother. I am a wife. I have been those things for longer than I have been anything else. I am those things above all else. And I don’t know how I came to value anything else.

I lack certain qualities, but that does not make me devoid of myself. There is plenty of me. I am not stable, but I am spirited. I am not entirely well right now, but I cannot expect to be well all of the time. I have Bipolar Disorder. I am not Bipolar. I am more than my illness and more than my symptoms.

Today, I connected with my husband without trying or wanting. I connected with a son I thought I was losing to Autism Spectrum Disorder. But more so, he connected with me. He reached out and connected me with the world again. And that was what made all of the difference.

A new dawn, a new day.

Everything is (not) Wonderful Now

“I just don’t understand how you can smile with all those tears in your eyes and tell me everything is wonderful now.” – Everclear – Wonderful

I feel as if I have been robbed of something.  Most of the time, I’m blank with these vague floating emotions.  Sometimes, I can tap into them, but it is more akin to breaking open the Pandora’s box.  These emotions suddenly intensify and flood over me, consuming me like a tsunami.  A thief crept in the window to my mind and stole my translator for emotion to cognition.

I am inclined to speculate as to whether this is just a side effect of losing those internal monologues / dialogues.  On occasion, I catch myself attempting to recreate them, especially in the moments of severe, agonizing distress.  However, there seems to have been some kind of role reversal.  Instead of my dominant persona being confused by multiple personas in my head, those lesser personas being the ones who generated the intrusive thoughts and discord in the chambers of my mind, there remains one persona.  This persona is new.  She’s the therapist.  What do people call it?  Maybe the voice of reason?

Blank slate.  I am seemingly an empty canvas.  I never cared much for empty things, because they require filling.  There are always these second thoughts and doubts; Am I doing it right?  What if I mess up?  It highlights the cracks.  I float around in my life without immediate purpose, without the constant noise that colored my life.

One would think the riddance of such garbage background noise and a wide spectrum of ever fluctuating emotions would be a positive improvement.  There remains this empty container where thoughts and emotion would overflow out of, the tap of which being always open.  The source has dried up, and it seems an IOU is tightly fastened to the bottom without a named perpetrator.

One would suspect that another would be at peace without such distressful experiences such as psychosis.  Instead, I find that I cannot seem to associate myself with this state.  I don’t belong here.  This doesn’t feel right. Something is wrong.  It’s all wrong.

One would think that all of this freedom would be so wonderful.

Everything is not wonderful now.  The tears of mourning still come to my eyes as if I were somehow missing a piece.  Colors seem to be dimmer and the whole world feels washed out.  It is distressing in itself.  The absence of myself.  The crazy, emotional, outrageous, always interesting, talkative woman has become muted, grasping at straws for conversation and content.

Is this what it feels like to be normal?

Leep-Into-Cin – Part III

Part three and recent parts of my fight with cervical cancer

As the Pendulum Swings

Warning: The following content can be considered graphical in nature.  It may contain material that may not be appropriate for certain audiences.  Children under the age of 18, those of the male gender, and others faint of heart may want to take extra care while viewing this.  Use your own discretion.

Bringing in the Big Guns

After the experience where I was left stranded on an operating table, I had grown animosity toward that doctor that performed my surgery.  I refused to see her, and I refused to go through any more procedures.  It didn’t matter.  I had lost my insurance again and there was nothing I could possibly do.  The only other option was to return to the clinic so that they could slowly kill me with their negligence.

I did break down and go to the clinic, but only for a required Pap to receive birth control.  I…

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Leep-Into-Cin II – Part II

Part two of my journey with HPV and Cancer

As the Pendulum Swings

Warning: The following content can be considered graphical in nature.  It may contain material that may not be appropriate for certain audiences.  Children under the age of 18, those of the male gender, and others faint of heart may want to take extra care while viewing this.  Use your own discretion.

July 19, 2007

C.S. and I walked through the neighborhood in the early morning hours.  The air was thick and heavy like wet cotton, but a chilled wind passed every few moments, carrying with it the scent of midsummer rain.  Our discourse was just as thick, but much more warm.  It was like other evenings, but with an electric charge of an impending thunderstorm in the air.  We walked the desolate backstreets with a course for a local convenience store.  Everything was quiet, with the exception of our conversation and the light patter of rain beginning to fall.

Mid-sentence…

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Leep-Into-Cin II – Part I

Finding out about HPV and cervical cancer

As the Pendulum Swings

Warning: The following content can be considered graphical in nature.  It may contain material that may not be appropriate for certain audiences.  Children under the age of 18, those of the male gender, and others faint of heart may want to take extra care while viewing this.  Use your own discretion.

One Bad Apple . . .
Twelve years ago, almost to the day, the relationship with my first love started.  We had gone circles for over six months.  He eyed me, and I fancied him.  We spoke almost daily and we had become great friends.  There were many late night conversations, spilling out our hopes, dreams, fears…  But, he was forbidden fruit, the tastiest of them all.  He was my best friend’s boyfriend.  After over a month of clandestine meetings, secret phone conversations, secrets, and lies, I came clean.  And within six months after that, we were no longer…

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The Seeds of Doubt

Amnesiac.

That might be a painfully accurate depiction of a large part of me. My memories prior to eleven are largely fragmented, save for a few vague impressions, recurring themes, and a traumatic experience that has recently resurfaced to rear it’s ugly head at me. Regardless of how often I attempted recalls, those calls went unanswered. A flicker, like a spark, would come alive, but leave existence as quickly as it came.

I often find myself in a unfocused world of disjointed memories and alternate realities. The vast fields of fog are sewn with seeds of doubt, spouting fears and obsessions. In those fields and shadows, monsters have plentiful cover to prowl for their prey – me.

They often say that when a lie is repeated so many times, it starts to embed itself as a portion of factual memory. Basically, if a person believes in something strongly enough, it becomes real. It becomes enough to rewrite someone’s entire history. The lines between reality and fantasy start to blur in a place where fiction and fact can coexist, even potentially peacefully.

Unfortunately, I have not once before been a person who can successfully smudge the details of my own personal past. Not to myself, anyway. I can report being guilty of deception by omission. But, something distressful stirs and blinks with any instance I even remotely consider telling a blatant lie.

This is not say I am immune to deception and coercion into accepting an outright lie. My psyche is malleable in the way where I am susceptible to manipulation. Why? Because it’s been the very basis of which I have been raised.  My father once told me, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”  Then, was it his intent to distort my world in such a way that I will one day have difficulty trusting myself?

There are so many clinical words for this.  Dissociation.  Depersonalization.  Derealization.  Psychosis.  Delusion.  Hallucination.  Dissociative Fugue.  Splitting.  Repression.  Coping.  So many clinical terms that overlap in their definitions, and yet, not one quite captures the true essence of being within it’s grip.

For me, my repression has a proximity sensor.  Clinically, it’s called Dissociative Amnesia or Dissociative Fugue.  In the past, I have always called it throwing a block or throwing up a wall.  I am figuratively walking along in my own mind, through wild, overgrown fields and forests of my own memories to suddenly smash into a concrete wall.  Suddenly, the whole landscape shifts, and I am boxed in this nondescript, blank white room.  White walls, white floors, no windows.  It is me and a dining room chair.  This is my mental waiting room, where I am being isolated until the memory of the memory passes.

I call it, “The Eraser”.  When it’s all said and done, I come back to consciousness in my own familiar surroundings, in my own waking life.  But, is it?

This is the direct result of the seeds of doubt being sewn into a person so carelessly in the impressionable youthful brain.  The concept of an active consciousness is disturbed, and the development is stunted and contorted.  It must be so easy to manipulate someone with such a frail sense of reality, a blank canvas of self, and stunted emotional maturity.  And that’s why abusers do it.

I slip in and out of streams of consciousness, alternate, yet simultaneous realities, and find skips and pauses that disarrange an incomplete chronology of life.  I start to get the belief that I am, in fact, a time traveler, as my external self as my own ship, however I have no use of my own controls.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, I have been damaged.  It mimics human ailments.

But I know none of that is true.  I am just as human as the next person, with cognitive dysfunctions resulting from mental illness and latent trauma.

Or faulty wiring.

I doubt everything.  My experiences often seem surreal.  My memories, unless attached to a particularly powerful moment, are vague.  My short term memory is shot, so it becomes unreliable.  I doubt everything I feel, all of the conclusions that I come to, and some of what is right in front of my face.  I doubt right down to self.  Is this me?  Am I me?  Am I here?
How did I get to such a place where I have to question everything?

 

Antipsychosis

I find that I’m sifting through every corner and combing every shelf.  Typically, this is how the search for my marbles goes.  I have a bulging pouch, a testament to my . . . (I cannot find the word.  This is aphasia at it’s finest.)  To my bounty of sanity that I contain.  No, instead, I am frantically . . . hunting for my inspiration.

Is this dry spell the direct result of my lack of “a certain something”?  Certainly.  Am I what I would consider sane and stable?  Certainly not.  I am muted and docile.  No gusto.  No fire.

No original thoughts of my own, apparently.

There is a certain amount of pressure mounting the a point of bursting.  Unfortunately, I cannot seem to even see my own hand in front of my face.  That is how lacking in vision and perspective I am.  I am unaware if this . . . tension is a dam walling the roaring waters of content.  Silently, I pray it is.

Instead, I feel this tightness in my psyche so strongly it becomes somatic.  What lies beneath, within?  What could possibly be of such importance that it has created a friction that produces no heat?  In all honesty, what could I possibly say about anything?  There is a complete absence of thought.  It has all become a runny stew, too brothy to hold the meat and potatoes intact.

Brain Goop Soup.

. . .

And more nothingness.  Annoyingly silent, echos of almost, faintly mocking me in nondescript whispers.

. . .

I suppose that sometimes, a disconnect develops.  This disconnect . . . well, it is just as indescribable and inexplicable as the nonsense prior.  I find the disjointed nature of these thoughts to be the severing of one underdeveloped conscious thought to the next.  Reality has become too real, and I have become evicted from my own headspace.  Expelled into the real world, where time is near frozen.  Days are detached entities, and moments have no . . . a lack of continuity.

I have found that this is the polar opposite of psychosis.  This is the state of antipsychosis, where reality is overly dominant, and abstract thought . . . is a concept in which I have to make a concerted effort.  Never before in my life have I been so uninspired, so dried up.  My home was in my head, a comfy nest in which I resided.  Where do I make a home in reality?

My bullshit radar is going off.

I find the discovery that instead of tapping into something original, I am going through the motions.

I am needy.

Extroversion has become a monster that requires feeding.  I cannot find the willpower to stop myself from desperately searching outside myself for intellectual stimulation, self-affirmation, and creativity.  I do so with the intent to stir my own soup, but I instead crumple that little page of notebook in my mind and immediately discard.  Irrelevant, my brain determines.  It does not sustain my basic needs.  It is superfluous.

Just pet me and tell me that I’m wonderful.

Not because I need the validation.  I have enough evidence to convince myself of that truth.  (Mania, maybe?)  It just feels nice to be acknowledged in the real world.  Because in the real world, I feel as if I am a wandering, translucent ghost.  Are you listening?  Can you see me?  Do my words count for anything?

Is there something wrong?

Is the theory of antipsychosis actually a manifestation of psychosis?  Are my ideas of eviction from my brain, but an absence of presence in reality a problem?  It is not distressing.  Okay, I find a tiny drop of distress, only at the idea that I may never have another unique idea again.  That this blankness, this . . . blockage will be my doomed fate.

Is my intense desire to be thought of actually neediness?  It is a tad distressing.  It is watered down.  I can live with it.  I find extreme boredom in everything.  Worse, I find myself to be the most boring of all.  I have not once before experience such severe boredom.

How do I reach out and make a connection when I have nothing funny, witty, inspiring, or provocative to say?

 

Blog for Mental Health 2012 : Official Blogroll Summons

Hey mental health bloggers!

So, I figured out how to put a blogroll together, finally.  I’m about to put the Blog for Mental Health 2012 Official Blogroll together, and I need to know who has pledged so far.  I know there are a number of people.  Some of you may not be aware of Blog for Mental Health 2012, because maybe you’re newer.  Click the link, or peep the badge on Pendulum’s site.

Don’t be fooled by this badge:

That one doesn’t belong to us.  In fact, as you can see by the date, this badge came well after our New Years pledge to blog for mental health for the entire year, instead of just one day.

No, our badge is different and shows a commitment to blog for mental health awareness throughout an entire year, faithfully.

This is the badge that belongs to us.  If you want to participate, I’m officially sponsoring you right now.  Click the image to go to the blog page for Blog for Mental Health 2012’s rules and terms of use.  I’m more than happy to spread mental health awareness by lending my support to other bloggers and inspiring others to come forward.

I am proud of all of the bloggers that have already taken the pledge, and am more than happy to invite others to take it as well.  It’s still 2012; you can still join!

So, if you want on the blogroll, leave me a comment below, something to the effect of, “I have the badge” and “I made the post” or “I want in”.  Whatever, just something to know that you’re in on it.

Thanks!

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