Why I have been away

In the throes of a crippling episode, I write this.

First of all: why?

Because I have to. Because this is what I know how to do. I can write. I can ramble. I can somehow see this make sense to someone else.

Second: What is personal should be private, right?

To this I say: NO. This is a blog. Not only is it a blog, it is my blog. And I have nothing to hide. But you don’t need to know everything. So you won’t. You’ll get what I decide to put up here.

Again, why?

I don’t care. And I need to do this. I must do this, for me and me alone.
If something isn’t such a terrible secret and isn’t treated as a terrible secret, some terrible blemish or something that doesn’t need to be discussed in “public” as it were, then it will keep having the stigma attached to it as it does now. Don’t make me repeat this. Don’t ask me to take it down. I am me, and this is my blog. If you don’t like it – don’t effing read it.

Third: Wtf are you going on about, K?

Too long I have been taught to keep it in, don’t tell others, it is my business. In effect, being made to feel that if I don’t keep it in, that it will be used against me. If that is the case, then that will be the case. What is this but one of millions of blogs on the internet? I am not, not in the slightest, afraid, of what some flamer or lamer or utter and complete twat might say. Besides, ALL comments are moderated before they even show up here, and ALL IP addresses are logged and kept in a secure place, if needed in the future. Yes, the all-blogseeing K is watching you right back. To put it simply, I hold the supreme editing power of this site. If I don’t like it, what you say will probably not show up on here.

Case in point: I will move forward from here.

—

I have been unable to move, speak, think, write coherently. Do not take that in a literal sense, please. I am, afterall, writing this.

I have been torn to shreds again and again, year after year, episode after episode, by some nameless disease. I have been patched up, but like that old story about the Dutch dike, when you put your finger in the hole to stop the water, it only ends up spurting out another hole. It doesn’t fix it. I have not been fixed. I am not fixable.

I have dealt with it for over a decade now. Yes, a decade. I am twenty-seven. You can do the simple math.

To put it in terms you might understand, when someone breaks a leg, you wouldn’t tell them to get up and walk right away, would you? No, you take them to the hospital, they get x-rays, the break gets set, a cast is put upon the break, and then you wait it out while it heals. No one can possibly expect to run a marathon a day after breaking a leg, right?
Such is mental illness. A brain injury. Like a diabetic who takes insulin, I may have to be on meds for the rest of my life. I am not on meds now. We’ll discuss that later.
[The broken leg analogy I borrowed from a guy named Jerad Poore at http://www.crazymeds.us/]

This is not a medical blog, I am not a doctor, I don’t pretend to be a doctor, I do not dispense medical advice, I do not have a degree in psychiatry, psychology, pharmacology or anything even remotely medical. I will not dispense medical advice, I will not tell you what you should do with your life, I will not diagnose you. If you are in need of help, go get it. Call someone, call 911 if you feel you are in danger of hurting yourself or someone/something else. Don’t look to me to be your savior. I am not and will not be it. There is my disclaimer. If you can’t respect it or any of the previously stated, then leave this blog immediately.

Okay, here goes.

The newest, tentative diagnoses are as follows:
-bipolar disorder (possibly rapid-cycling)
-dissociative disorder without altered personalities
-panic disorder without agoraphobia
-ad/hd, combined
-along with borderline traits.

If you are so inclined as to look up what each of those means, I would suggest, for the medical version, to go to the Mental Health Center at Mayo Clinic. Go educate yourself, then, when you’re convinced I’m not insane or making those things up, come back.
—–

What is it like? A bad day perhaps? It has been mostly a depressive episode lately. Some days I can’t make myself get out of bed, until the very last minute before I must, in order to get my zombie self to put clothes on, have a few sips of coffee and drive myself to work. I may be a terrible mess, but we have bills to pay. Ah, so I’m not that bad you think? I can get up and go to work and hold a job down so I must be pretty okay, I must be managing just fine, there mustn’t be something too terribly wrong with me, I must be exaggerating, right? Bullshit. (That means, if you were thinking that, you are wrong.)
If you’re a woman, and a woman who gets PMS and knows how that throws you off for several days at least before your lady week begins, then you have a slight inkling of what this is like for me. Except it’s worse. About a trillion times worse. Like PMS times a trillion, day in and day out. A ping pong ball is the simplest way I can put it. Up, down, all around. Falling off the table, spinning in circles, being batted about without any sense of what will happen next.
The crying really bothers me. I’ve never been much of a crier. And, even being a woman and being able to cry with the best, I’ve never done a lot of it. But this crying for seemingly insignificant reasons such as being one box short of mac & cheese for a meal, is really killer.
If you’re a man who has a lady who gets PMS, and you know how you have to tiptoe around her lest you spark a brilliant flash of lightning in her eyes, or worse yet, her fists, then you have a slight inkling of what is going on here.
But, ladies & gents, this is not PMS. And this isn’t all of it, this just a slight piece of it. I get exhausted easily. I will not tell you about the manic parts, they are parts that rank on the lesser scale of proud. Not that pride has anything to do with it.

Anyway, this is why I have been away. This has come round again and hit me in the head like a sack of bricks. Again. And some days, I just can’t. I have no more energy to spend on typing into a seemingly insignificant blog. And some days I am what I call baseline. Not too terribly down, not having panic attacks that make me feel like I’m dying, but not particularly up or too terribly happy, as it were. I’m pretty okay. But always on that fine line, treading along that edge where it could go either way. Last Sunday I was bouncing around, in a pleasant way. I wasn’t letting my hands drop off the steering wheel of a car going 70 mph. I wasn’t stricken frozen by anguish or screaming at anyone.

Today I am mostly okay, and so I’m writing this. And this is the tip of the iceberg. If we are on Titanic, maybe it will sink again, but at least I know how to get myself onto a lifeboat. I really do. Promise. I’m still here afterall, aren’t I?