Learning to say no

Dear Friends and Fellow Bloggers – I hope that you are as well as you can be. Thank you to those who read my blog and a few new followers. It inspires me to write. It has been a difficult time for me and my writing voice felt blocked. I’ve recently become a proud grandmother but have found complications that come with mental illlness with this little blessing. This includes a granny who battles with sleep, not being able to sit still and wanting to buy groceries and nappies ceiling high to protect us from impending doom that I neither have the funds or storage for. The doom probably isn’t real, but it feels and frigthens my body and being like it really is, often waking me up at night.

As someone with Bipolar Type 2, I experience hypo-mania whether I like it or not. I often explain it as being akin to being eyeore on red bull. It’s tearfully terrific and turns the volume up on the impending doom track I already hate listening to. To quiet it and increasing anxiety, I cook for three days, I plan menus and busy myself with putting a preventative plaster on any area of my life I can at great personal cost. I’m always busy, I’m always catching up and apologizing for my very existence. I know very little rest, although I consistently adhere to my meds and pray for a quiet and peace that mental illness has never allowed me to know.

That’s a lot and all it makes me feel like doing is sighing even more. Instead, I need to learn a small way of addressing how I feel. From experience, blood, sweat, and tears, I have learned that you have to find and fight to chart a way of looking after yourself no matter how many times you fail in trying. Perhaps it could be in learning to say no which isn’t as easy as it sounds. To find ways to say no to the impending doom, the cleaning each room or the cooking of the contents of the fridge. Learn to say no I can’t to things and areas of your life as loudly as you can that it’s too much I tell myself. Perhaps you could try to. I’m trying to succesfully learn how..

Lemon Drops, Love and Laughter

So today I baked.  I brewed.  I made lunch and made sure my chickens had an awesome Sunday, even though I felt very little sunshine.  I did however “salt” their biscuits with a tear or two, but I’m sure they don’t mind.  Everything gets written off in the name of love (and I’m not going to tell them).  Love covers a multitude of sins. Well, at least that’s what I learnt and am learning from them.  They don’t need me to be happy.  They don’t need me to be anything.  They just need me to be me.  They understand the quirks.  They understand the laughter.  The bake the whole cupboard vibe.  And then the not get out of bed for weeks on end vibe.  The tears are erupting out of my stomach and I don’t know how to stop them vibe.

And I don’t want them to experience that.  I’d like them to be in search of sunshine all the time.  To experience the realness of life without being afraid of venturing out into the world, lest emotional attacks be levelled at you, lest your anxiety take over at times that are honestly just not convenient.  And then being anxious in case this happens, cause well you never know, and because usually, anxious moments leave me feeling like the idiot.  Or me doing the wrong thing.  Idiot is common though.  Or so I thought.  My chickens have convinced me otherwise.  They say Mom we love you the way you are.  Mom it’s ok to cry.  Mom if you NEED to go to hospital go.  We understand.  And that’s hard.  I don’t want them to.  I don’t want them to look after me.  Until they said – um, we want to.  And we’ll tell you how much we can take.  And what we can’t take. But we want to be there for you like you are there for us when you can be.

So you know what?  Although it’s the precise opposite of what I want to do – I am fighting for them.  I am fighting to wade through the murkiness of mental illness, because if such amazing awesome human beings want to be there for me.   Want to and are prepared to love me just the way I am.  Why on earth would I think that I’m not good enough?  I’m throwing my homemade lemon drops at loneliness and telling the depression where to get off.  Because my chickens, me, are always, always worth fighting for.  Be part of those who support us as opposed to those who don’t.  I am 4 M’s Bipolar Mom.

 

 

Career Crater Climber

So true to form in my Murphy’s law life, this Bipolar Gal had a day of meetings ahead of her today.  I had carefully thought through the approach to each of the meetings,  the client clinking laugh, the understand your needs so well consultant smile, the outfit to wear, matching lipstick and earrings.    With matching earrings and lipstick, meds and my coffee, I was ready to rock the proverbial professional day.  Readers of my blog will know that I’ve only recently climbed out of a crater in my couch, where I was buried under sweet and crisp wrappers, Food Network focused for far too long.  So today was important.  I needed to let go of my crater creature vibes, strut my stuff and win some work.  For both emotional and financial reasons – so yes, it was important.  And then my life happened.

I do not drive so I am dependent on others to take me where I need to go.  When I have money, I use Uber so this isn’t a problem.  But since my professional activity over the last few months has been close to zero, Uber wasn’t about to arrive.  They don’t get the free payment mechanism I propose.  So my mother, and teenage son set out with me to the meeting I needed to get to.  I had, since the night before, been worrying about the meeting so slept badly, but got up, donned my planned gear and make-up and was ready to rock.  Because I pre-plan each step of the day or the way things should ideally go, I am AGHAST when they do not.  At 12.15, my meeting being at 13.00, my mother suggested we drop teenage son at a. location FAR from where my meeting was.  Teenage son was meeting teenage friend which I thought a tad less important than a meeting with a potential fee paying client and no matter how I tried to persuade my mother, she proceeded with her plan.   And I began to melt.

There was no way I could get to my meeting on time, and rapidly melting internally, my plan being disrupted, my emotional plan being disrupted, molten anxiety lava boiling, I was about to explode.  And I wondered whether anyone that understood how unnerving, how heartbreaking (yes literally), how anxiety inducing not following a simple plan would hurt me would actually do it.  It was more than missing the client meeting.  It was more than being late which I hate.  It was more than the minutes ticking by on the clock in the car that literally felt like they burnt my heart and being.  It was the overwhelming feeling that I was right and that I should never have left my crater.  It was safe there.  It was delicious in there.  It was perfect baking perfection on repeat on Food Network.  It was safe.  There were no minutes, no changes of plan, no anxiety lava.  And I regretted going out.

I tried to salvage the meeting – phoned and noted that traffic had been difficult.  And the client said he would call me – but perhaps that I should not call him.  And I crater climbed, though backwards, faster than you would know.  I’m officially back in my crater, with a laptop sticking out to type this piece.  Fortunately, tomorrow is therapy, and perhaps an opportunity to understand the reasons why I’m in the crater, and how to get out in small, but hopefully sustainable steps.  Until then, pass the chocolate, my meds and heap of feeling sorry for me please.  My therapist will not be that kind – he will chart strident steps with me to become crater free, but til then.  I’m “happy” as can be in the crater of me.    Be part of those who support us as opposed to those who don’t.  I am 4M’s Bipolar Mom.

 

How not to become disabled

On the day my psychiatrist offered the D word – diagnosis – I was pretty nonchalant.  I am the kind of person who you have to spell things out for, be clear, and descriptive.  For example, if she had said something along the lines of: “life-changing, mood altering, people will discriminate and stigmatise, anxiety wrenching something that is helped by medication and therapy but not really something you can be cured from for the rest of your life” I would perhaps have understood.  Instead, in my head, she said: “you have the flu, and if you take flu meds sometimes, you will be ok”.  And that’s perhaps why things go a bit pear-shaped with me, why I am still learning how to live with Bipolar, ten years into the “game”.

Some people mark the day they were diagnosed, mark the day their life “changed”.  And mine did too, but not in the way “learning about your diagnosis through online reading etc.” brings about.  Instead I learnt how and why I am mentally ill from others.   I learnt more about my diagnosis about the way I was treated, looked at and spoken about (sometimes in my presence) in a not so nice way from others.  For example, I was taught that your eyes leaking at inopportune times is not awesome, and generally instills fear / favour from the tear recipient.  Also, if you don’t get up, the whole day or potentially weeks, (and don’t want to, and your limbs feel like they’re cemented to the bed), you might be experiencing a little bit of depression.

Essentially what has happened is that I’ve been educated in the language of disability, with a vocabulary that did not have my – or any other person with mental illnesses’ – best interests at heart.  I have been versed in discrimination, described with poorly prose, and left out, when I so desperately wanted to be included, even though I’d cry too much, even though I’d be curled up in anxiety, even though I’d be too depressed at times where I really shouldn’t have been – all of which I thought and imagined was the reality of living with lifelong brain flu.  And no matter how I tried to take “antihistamines”, how I tried to hide my flu like symptoms away, it would always catch up with me. Creep out, and unfortunately catch up to my family.

The funny thing is that all those who choose to effect a discrimination dialect – I have very important news for you:  There is NO way you could make me suffer more than  already have, no way you could describe the depths of depression more than I have sunk and swum through, no way you could face a day, sometimes day after day, with stomach wrenching anxiety with actual physical pain more than I have.  I didn’t reject these things.  Did not reject my experiences.  Instead I have lived as best I could (sometimes less pretty than others), and did as best I could, even when they decided that I was broken.  That I was disabled.  And that being Bipolar definitely, was a synonym for both those things.

What I decide instead is that I am not disabled.  I am not broken.  I am not a prognosis, I am not a condition, I am not too many tears, I am not too extreme, I am a first and foremost a person.  A colourful, effusive, does require medication, and doesn’t mix well with alcohol person. I am a person who has to live in this world, and confront this dialect on a day to day basis, sometimes with my emotional arms tied behind my back.  And if you’re someone like me, someone who has to live in an unfriendly place and still smile – I think we are MORE abled.  Because I have learnt something the hard way that the d-dialect people did not describe:  I am a survivor and I have just the right ability to always try again, even with the odds stacked up against me.  Be part of those who support us as opposed to those who don’t.  I am 4M’s Bipolar Mom.

 

 

Packing my suitcase

This morning brings the dawn of time to go home.  Time to journey from my seaside home and family to my chickens, my husband, my mother.  My home.  In packing the necessary, I”m finding that there are a few lessons I need to pack that will help me deal with home.  That will help me deal with getting up before 15h00 to start the day life.

Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me: I have spoken a lot about the bone crushing stigma and discrimination that I experienced over the recent past.  And it threw me.  It didn’t take much for me to think and believe that there is something wrong with me.  Because I do come face to face with that wrongness on occasion.  And I need to try my utmost not to be even further thrown from that.  Instead, the house head at my seaside holiday has literally been preparing me for the world of stigma and discrimination by regularly insulting me, on literally everything I do.  She does not bite her tongue, but rather explicitly tells me how I could have done things this way or that, could have listened to her better.  I know this comes from a loving place, so its like water off a duck’s back.   Well not completely. I absorb the positive guidance I can use in my life.  And therein is a valuable lesson.  Don’t let it get to you.  So sticking my tongue out, I chant playground style:  sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.

Don’t sweat the small stuff:  Now this lesson is particularly difficult.  I am a well trained professional in the art of anxiety.  I make lists of the stuff I have stressed about, will stress about, and have a spare page for the things I may have forgotten.  I reasonably believe that waking up in the middle of the night to jot down a few thoughts that may have occurred mid sleep.   No point forgetting what I need to stress about.  Things my stomach needs to churn about.  Seeing the waves lick the shore during this brief sojourn to prepare myself for the real world reminded me that I’m actually quite insignificant.  No, not that I don’t matter but rather that relatively speaking, the challenges I have, think I have are actually minor, and probably solve-able.  And perhaps the best approach is to believe in the cycle of life, taking strength from something as simple but important as the sun rising and setting when its supposed to.  That perhaps my lists could wait for the next morning, and perhaps just perhaps, that I needed to put them to rest, so I rest.

You reap what you sow:  During this trip, I have been working everyday cultivating different clients for my work from home business almost every day.  I have worked hard and averaged 8 hour days, or positive outcomes during my work time.  And I’ve enjoyed it.  Yesterday one of these clients confirmed that they would like me to work for them and asked for a costing proposal.  Fuelled by unbridled excitement I Bipolar-ed the costing proposal.  I did.  I detailed the detail.  This does make me anxious.  But taking heed of the listen above, I determine that THAT is exactly what makes me an awesome fundraising professional.  I am thorough.  I know what I’m doing.  So check out that detail.  Check out that thought process.  I fully intend to reap what I sow.

Someone is listening, no matter where you pray:  Many years ago when my eldest chicken and I were alone, I was making the tea for the prayer meeting my mother was holding.  He ran between me and the prayers and looked at me quizzingly.  I believed that I could not pray with my mother and her fellow church-goers as I have different spiritual beliefs, and so unknowingly believed that we would be dialling different numbers to the Heaven hotline.    My eldest chicken came to me and said:  Mummy, Jesus can hear you no matter where you pray.  By telling me this, he made me digest two major things: that there is one God, and since “Heaven” is the whole sky, you have pretty good God coverage, no matter where you try and hide.

I am sad happy as I fold these life lessons into my heart, mind and being.  I will miss my family here.  Miss the regularity of the routine I’ve come to know.  But armed with my new and remembered lessons, I conclude with one of my favorite quotes:  “Ships are safe in harbour, but that’s not what they’re made for”.  Be part of those who support us as opposed to those who don’t.  I am 4 M’s Bipolar Mom.

Mommy and Me: Children and Moms with Mental Illness

For the past few days I have been working from home.  “Working from home” is an interesting concept for most mothers.    Add into this mix: “sick” children, the need to clean up / have things ordered in order to be able to work (excludes self, I am currently sitting in my bathrobe), punish some children and forget the punishment so you prepare them lunch.  And THEN YOU discover said children may be largely undiagnosed or skilled emotional beings, not sure yet, trying to get some work done cycle this mother, with notable mental illness, is going through.

The day started off with a bang – as a very noisy someone in thought, word and deed, the SILENCE in our home woke me up.  There was no sound, and my brain bit that never goes to sleep roused me quickly and said something must be horribly wrong, or “we” are officially dead.    Woke up and quickly ran through the critical to function mental checklist:  – where are chickens: school (whew),  – where is husband (ok, disposable, but still check): at work (questionable feeling), – why am I not at work: fighting labour battle, they openly discriminate, and it’s safer at home: (no whew), it’s affecting me and I’ve focussed on this alot.  So much so that I just stop ticking at this point.  And indulge in much ugh feeling.   And my fav recurring thought comes back: you are not enough,  and they are saying so a lot so it must be true.   So I shuffled sorrowfully to the kitchen to make coffee, and felt the walls of my mental prison close in.

Quite prepared to delve into darkness for the day on my own, I was called to collect my youngest chick from school, known for her nervous stomach.  When I got to the reception, I asked in my out of breath concerned mother voice where she was and what was wrong.  Apparently she had been throwing up at school, and was in the sick room.  That was 9.30 in the morning, which in our country, is shortly after school’s started.  The receptionist dutifully went to collect ailing chick, and she walked in, dramatically gesticulating across her stomach.  I immediately hugged her, and we went off home.   Now if I’m honest, the prospect of just loving her for the day instead of feeling sorry for myself appealed, but that’s what’s good for me not her, so I decided to undertake mom doctor analysis instead.

Did you have breakfast? Were you upset? Was someone mean?  Now I MIGHT have used what my family would deem mental-illnessy words like “anxiety / anxious / attack”, and my chick nodded vigorously.   She even had the voices and actions to go with the how did that make you feel descriptions of each.    After having issued some buscopan for the cramps, and dry toast and tea (which my mother swears by), I decided that my daughter had a different problem.  So I basically asked her to draw a mini bullet journal page “why do we feel like this” = and there were a few interesting findings.  1) Sunshine / my child are allergic to each other 2) Other people and my child are allergic to each other 3) there is a “gem” hurting her and she doesn’t know what it is (read germ) and basically: 3) My child is allergic to leaving the house.  Now I did see a similarity to a certain someone I know, but I quietened my inner me-ness to uncover more.

Turns out she had a bestie just leave her out of the blue and she cannot fathom why,  she and said bestie had braved a range of bullies for a year which had made their bond particularly strong, and she thought everyone at home was too busy to listen to her.  To really hear, feel and understand her she said.  Because it’s hard being on your own she said.  Especially when you have feelings that you don’t understand.  She said her dad watched TV, I blogged (shocked face) and her siblings were busy being teenagers (not in so many words).  And she said that this multiplicity of feelings made her nauseous, that it turned her stomach, and that she found it difficult to breathe and cope.  And I felt the similarity again, and I remember being waved off as a child, called naughty or The Neverending Storyteller, and the light switched on.

My eldest son lives with a diagnosis, my eldest daughter has ALL the symptoms of EACH possible psychiatric illness in the DSM, my third youngest son has regular attacks where he recently rocks himself on the floor (read twice, never did this before EVER) and my youngest is well, without saying so herself, having symptoms of anxiety.  And there are a couple of outcomes I come to:  either I have “trained” my kids to be, act and live as though they are mentally ill, as though everyone needs to work / school a four day week (I do believe this), and that it’s ok to take a bow from real life to well, take a much-needed mental health break.  Straight face.   When I do this, it’s usually because I am A LOT overwhelmed.  But aren’t they too?   Are their feelings and emotions not real too?  I HATE people that stigmatise because they believe mental illness is made up – when it is very tangibly not.

Instead of pushing my daughter off to the nearest psych facility, I drew further bullet journal pages with her, and ended up with “the mother / child partnership to happiness page” where we could both learn to practice our happy skills, together.  Our calming skills together.  We decided on and she illustrated: going to the park, spending family time together, and then a “mommy and me” blog.  Wait, what? Yes.  And she has already written up fifteen topics we can post about, including: “how not to hide from yourself”, “trying to be ourselves”, and “how not to get annoyed”.  This without any help or input.  I will have to leave her to write the how not to get annoyed post:  I have no clue.  And I realised, that perhaps she wasn’t mentally ill.  Perhaps they are all different beings, that I am increasingly teaching to be open and honest about who, where and what they are.  And no-one did that for me, and if they did, I would need to break less, cause I’d have coping skills more. I’d have I can deal with this more.  Said sick child is currently blogging our first instalment, getting ready for school again tomorrow and trying again.  Yes I will watch them, yes I will take them for help if they need it, but until then, emotionally intelligent beings who take care of their mental health?  Beings that learn to express and UNDERSTAND themselves early on? I think we can do with many, many more of those.  Be part of those as opposed to those who don’t.  I am 4M’s Bipolar Mom.

 

Bipolar as a Blessing

Recently I was told that having Bipolar / a mental illness is a blessing.  Wait, what? Yes, that’s right, I was told that having Bipolar is a blessing and that I should consider it as a gift.  Shocked face.  If you are like me, you’d probably be high tailing that gift right back to the place you got if from and asking for a full and final refund.  But if I pause for a moment, that isn’t completely true for me.  Having Bipolar is an ongoing beautiful nightmare that affects all aspects of your life.  But my friend’s statement got me thinking – for the first time in a long time – about depression, mental illness, emotion in a very different way. About my experience with Bipolar in a very different way.  And this new perspective has shone a light on something I have struggled with for a while.

To contextualise my realisation, I need to explain what I do when trying to mental illnessplain  to the others.  Because I’m dramatic, I usually begin gesticulating wildly.  This is not recommended.  Gesticulate / mental illness / dramatic – a bad combination when you’re trying to underline the good points. Moving on.  I usually describe Bipolar as an experience of emotions, experiences (this list is endless) etc that are hugely amplified.   What I’m unable to fully express and articulate is the enormity of the amplification.    I don’t just feel, I freaking F-E-E-L.  I don’t just cry, I SOB.   I love endlessly, hate angrily, have shades of sadness, depths of depression and a rays of happy feelings.  And then there’s my personal ‘favourite’ – a mix of these emotions simultaneously, on repeat for the whole day.  What’s the point?   Because of my Bipolar brain and heart’s “amplifiers” I have even greater empathy, I have even greater compassion, and I am intimately acquainted with being vulnerable and feeling.

Also because of this, I have the ability to have a conversation with a complete stranger, to make them smile, and sometimes, they even spontaneously tell me their stories.    Sometimes it’s sparked off by me crying when I’m not supposed to (my eyes aren’t very well behaved), or smiling at them if I can tell they need to talk.  People with mental illness know that I need to talk feeling and the accompanying face.  Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t listen, and like my brain and heart are too full to accommodate anymore.  But I’ve rarely hushed anyone, I’ve always empathized if necessary, cried with them if I needed to, felt for them, responded genuinely.  Someone like me can’t ‘lie’ emotions even if we wanted to.  I’m angry when I need to be, I’m sad when I need to be, I’m happy when I can be, and sometimes I can’t control it.  And there-in lies the nub.

My amplifiers make me who I am.  I have survived, lived and enjoyed my life because my amplifiers have been there.  Yes emotions, life and experiences on steriods is not easy to navigate.  But the light that has gone on is that it is my very amplifiers – my illness – my Bipolar – is both a source of vulnerability and strength.  And if you don’t support me when I can’t support myself, you don’t deserve me when I can.  I have blogged and spoken about extensively the pain I’ve experienced, about the tragedies that have befallen me, about how I have been a victim.  I’ve never really spoken (or felt) about how strong I am.  And that’s what this gift realisation thingy is – that I’m beautiful not because I’m broken, but because I choose to see the good before the bad, because I wish to shout and lift up the voices of people who are vulnerable, because I can write, and I can share their stories in an amplified manner.  Because I can cry with someone, and know when I need to cry and then do so with passion.  My realisation is that I am strong.  And I know just when I don’t have to be.  And that makes me a better me.   I am 4 M’s Bipolar Mom.

 

 

Rising from the Ashes

Dear fellow bloggers and readers – hello and a very happy new year to you and yours.  I haven’t been able to blog lately – my heart, mind and soul are broken – and I didn’t want my blog to be THAT blog about heart ache, bad things and depression. ALL. THE. TIME.   Don’t get me wrong.  I encourage everyone to speak about their experiences and hopefully by doing so – they will shine a light out of the darkness and give hope to someone else.  And Lord knows, when you’re really depressed, you need a hand up, an arm up – anything to escape the desolation.  My husband has always been mine.  Even when he didn’t really want to or was too tired to, he held me, he was my quiet place, that place where my emotions would finally be quiet and could rest. Could stop tormenting me.  He picked me up, he carried me wherever I needed to be, reminded me to take medication and even put me to bed.  These are hugely important things for people who are mentally ill.  I suppose they’re important for most people anyways sans medication.

Unfortunately – my husband has left.  And boy he left with a capital L. To be precise, he left close to two weeks ago.  I know this because since his departure I stopped breathing the same, I have not been able to sleep, eat, gees even digest in the same way.  He left the day after Christmas.  So my festive season was pretty much like a teenager having sex for the first time – it started out well, got better for a few seconds and then died down miserably.  The word on the wire is that we will get D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D.  Don’t say it all at once.  It’s like the Harry Potter version of Voldemort in my house – we know it’s there but we don’t say it lest its evil demons and monsters be unleashed in my house and I could not bear that.  What I am doing now is trying the “eat an elephant in small bites approach” – I only take bite size chunks out of the body excavating pain that I’ve come to know everyday.

At the moment I move from breathless anxiety that clinches my heart my body to surges of rage and anger and increasingly, quiet moments where I take a breath.  Consider that this is the person I have been married to for half of my living life.  Who leaves the person that they’ve been married to for over a decade?  Through child birth, through hospitalisations, through different medications.  He had been with me for all of my diagnosis.  He knows my pharmacist, psychiatrist and regularly talked to me about conversations with the only other man I pay to be intimate with me – my psychologist. Winks.   Seriously though, the only peace I know from the pain is being asleep and spending time with my children.   The asleep part doesn’t work so well.  My insomnia is worse than it ever has been.  Through my medication, I wake up and remain awake, and am thrusted back into the oh-so-painful-gnawing-pain, alone at night while everyone else is sleeping. And that’s dangerous. But my children are my joy.  And they remind me of what’s important – and that though I am burnt, scarred and pained – as I have done for more time than I have been married, been with any man, or a mother – that I am a Phoenix and that I will rise from the ashes again.  But I am in the ash part, hell the coals are still burning for now and probably will be for a while. Be part of those who support as opposed to those who don’t.  I am soon to be 4 M’s Bipolar d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d Mom.