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Tears of disappointment were streaming down my face.  Not just because I am stuck here, but because I realized I really couldn’t rely on anyone.  I’ve been told over the years of therapy that just because I take such good care of people that I shouldn’t expect the same in return because of almost certain disappointment.  It took me years to figure out that I was being almost too reliable.  I did so much for everyone else, regardless as to how it affected me and especially my mental health.

The word hanging in the air is guilt.  Guilt has been pounded in my head since I was a child.  It was my mother’s favorite way to teach us.  And, of course, it’s not only her that can play to my weakness.  I’ve been used and tossed aside by all types of people.  I feel guilty for not helping other people when they need something.  It can be the tiniest thing, such as opening a door for them, or so much that it takes everything I have, like helping an ex-boyfriend adjust to being single.  I feel guilty for being sick because it puts a burden on others.  Guilt is the prison I have been living in and I have started to saw through the bars.  I’ve cut people from my life that drain every part of me.  Hell, I’ve cut people that I just can’t stand to be around and take care of anymore.  I’m working on trying not to hold myself to the unbelievably impossible standard that no one can achieve.

I have to start realizing that the world will not fall apart if I don’t hold it up with my own two arms.  Therapy would be good, but alas, for now at least, this is my therapy.  This, and talking to the social worker about just about anything.  I even feel guilty for taking up his time.  It’s nice to have someone who is willing to listen, even if I have to pay them to do it.  I know it’s his job, but it’s kind of stretching the limits of his job description to talk to me about things that don’t pertain to my care.

While I cannot have children, my brother has managed to knock up some girl.  She hasn’t even been his girlfriend; she’s just some girl that spent a few nights with him.  I am going to be an aunt around October.  She’s only eight weeks along and with Kayla’s miscarriage I hesitant to get excited.  I have told my case manager that I would like to stay around the city my brother lives in to make sure I get to be near my new niece or nephew.

Feeling good for so long is something I haven’t felt in years.  I still have traces of my illness here and there, but for the most part I feel healthy.  I just need to get out of this place.  My dad says I always say that when I’m in placement.  My response is that I don’t belong in places like this.  While doing an assessment with the social worker yesterday I realized that I only have conversation of real length with staff.  It made me take a step back and look at how I perceived myself.  I like to think that I don’t consider myself superior to the other people here, just different.  My inability to enjoy most of the people here could possibly be just my yearning to spend time with people with higher intelligence or with insight.  Perhaps I am just as guilty as society by expecting them to function and act like “normal” people.  I have to remind myself that they have mental illnesses just to get through most days.

Being in my own room has added a lot to my pseudo-contentment.  Not being able to block out auditory stimuli especially makes it hard for me to handle the noise of another person in my bedroom.  Not to mention the control issue.  I want things a certain way and become easily annoyed when things differ from that set of parameters. 

Being in this environment is doing numbers on my mind and body.  Being sex deprived is not something that I’m very comfortable with.  My dreams seem to have a sexual subtext regardless of the theme.  I know that many people face low or no libido with their antidepressants and antipsychotics but unfortunately for me, being in this situation, I do not have that luxury.  It’s true that I do have a lower sex drive than when I’m not taking my medication but to my dismay it only puts me at the level of normal people (from what I can tell).  Doctors and staff in hospitals and in placement seem to put any idea of a patient having a right to a sex life to the back of their mind.  It doesn’t seem to register with them that we are people just like everyone else.  And I hate to use the overused “I have needs” statement but what else is there to say?  It seems to be the same with the mentally ill and the elderly, people don’t want to think about them having sex so they just simply pretend it’s not an issue.  Trust me, it is an issue, especially in coed RCFs where people are, for a lack of a better word, stuck for a long period of time.  Administrators and other staff will have to deal with this issue eventually.  Perhaps if there were more high functioning mentally ill patients fighting for rights in this area they would have to deal with it more sooner than later.

It has been a terribly long day.  The weekends are usually long around here, but with a change in med times and the situation at lunch today, the day just seemed to drag on.  There was a baby here during lunch today, the lunch lady’s grandson.  He is a beautiful five months old.  I could hear the cooing and laughter from outside the kitchen door before we even went in and I knew what was going to happen.  I had a hard time keeping my eyes off the baby while I kept my physical distance.  Did I mention he was beautiful?

I ate as quickly as possible so that I could come to the safeness of my room to cry.  It’s wasn’t like the other tears I’d shed in here, from loneliness or disappointment, but deep aching tears of grief.  Not being able to have children still makes me feel like I’ve lost a million best friends.  They say it gets easier with time, that the grieving process just has to take its course.  I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get to the acceptance stage. 

While I was holding in my sobs today I remembered that one of my favorite nurses is due soon with her first baby.  I remember being on the ward and staring at her belly from across the room, wonder how it felt to hold your child inside you, know that you are nurturing it every minute of every day.  And of course with every hospitalization and doctors visit, even this placement, brings up the questions:  “A tubal ligation?  But you’re so young!”, “How many children do you have?”, and the ever popular “Don’t you want kids?”.  I will admit that I have come a long way from when I made the decision to have the surgery.  I was sobbing so loudly in my room that several patients stopped to ask if I was ok and then a nurse came and shut the door.  She said I was scaring other patients. 

As always, today I tried to soothe myself with my logical, ethical reasons for not having children.  Believe it or not it’s never really helpful.  It mostly makes me feel guilty for feeling so sorry for myself.  I’m not sure how that makes sense, but while I like to think that all my thoughts and feelings are rational reactions, I’m not that naïve.

As I have many times in the past I recently started to doubt my diagnosis.  As I looked back over the ups and downs of my life I began to wonder if I was simply bipolar with symptoms of psychosis.  I usually begin questioning or re-evaluating the validity of my illness when I feel healthy for any period of time.  It shouldn’t be surprising when I add that many people in the past have questioned whether I was truly having psychotic symptoms.  It is things like this that lead many people to stop taking their medication.  Luckily (and somewhat unluckily) , even though I sometimes question my illness, I have distinct memories of hallucinations when I was not having mood problems.

What reaffirms my belief in my diagnosis is the thought disorders that I have that are classic of schizophrenia, many of which I always thought were normal.  The one that comes to mind the most is thought withdrawal.  Thought withdrawal is pretty much how it sounds, you lose your thought.  It’s not like you forgot what you were talking about, but it’s as if suddenly you never knew at all. 

Another thought disorder, that I don’t know the name for, that I suffer from especially when they are adjusting my medications is losing the meaning of words.  It’s not that thing where you say a word so many times it doesn’t have a meaning anymore.  It’s like as the words come out of your mouth your mind loses meaning and suddenly you’re not sure what you said, or if it made sense to anyone else.

The most obvious time I can think of is when I suffered from thought withdrawal was when I was in the hospital (when am I not, right?) and we were playing one of my favorite games, Rummikub.  It is a game with tiles that is similar to the card game Rummy.  The different between Rummikub and Rummy is you can move the tiles around to make new groups or runs.  I had been playing well, making complex moves along with simple ones.  Then suddenly, as I began my turn and had moved several tiles, my mind went blank.  Not only did I forget my elegant plan, I couldn’t understand how to play any of my tiles.  This lasted so long they had to move on to the next person with none of my tiles being played.  I wanted to cry, I was so unbelievably embarrassed.  My brain had failed me, and when it’s your brain that you can’t trust, what can you?  I still have instances where I lose a word and have to use its definition instead, which is also frustrating.  These things make me feel like a babbling fool.