In one of my more memorable and irresponsible (but completely awesome) decisions, I cashed in a small life insurance policy my dad gave me as a graduation present from college.  I took the cash and my boyfriend at the time, along with his sputtering environmentally unfriendly Plymouth Sundance and headed out across the country.  We left from the cultural mecca of the United States: Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Imagine going cross country in this thing.  No A/C, either. 

It was, and remains, one of the most vivid and important memories of my life.  It wasn’t so much who I was with, because the boyfriend was kind of a whiny turd most of the time and our relationship was already unraveling.  I was a high-strung girl freaked out by no longer having a full-time college student job title, and was faced with finding a real job title.  The boyfriend had another year of school (he was on the 11 year plan, I think), and I’d already committed to living with him in what could now be considered a housing project near the Big House.  So near, in fact, you could feel the building shake during football games.  It wasn’t reassuring. 

So we were still in love, or what we thought was love, and it enabled us to spend days on end in his smelly car.  We budgeted the small amount of money we had well, and mostly camped on the way to California.  I remember we talked some, but by then we already knew each other inside and out, and the bloom was definitely off that rose.  Sometimes he’d reach for my hand when he was driving, but mostly I had what was then a state-of-the-art video camera perched on my shoulder.  All 20 pounds of it.  I took obsessive amounts of video, and there is probably still a VHS tape in a box in the attic with the trip on it.  At that time, I was more interested in memorializing my trip than actually living it. 

In fact, I still tend to do that. 

We headed to my sister’s house, and got into lots of fun things on the way.  The Painted Desert, Route 66, Grand Canyon, Tijuana, random truck stops and the scariest motel room I’ve ever seen. On the way back east, we did more national parks.  Some of my most colorful memories are from Arches National Park in Utah. 

By this point in the trip, we were into week 3.  We were tired, dirty, and over the whole non-air conditioned car in June, in the desert.  The beer had long since been consumed and the last thing either of us wanted was to listen to his Simple Minds cassette tape one more freaking time. 

At Arches, we wandered around.  He walked in front of me, and I slowed my pace.  Although I’ve never felt necessarily attached to the desert, something about that place struck a chord in me.  It was so red, so dusty - so desolate.  I watched my boyfriend and suddenly knew, looking out over the most bizarre rock formations, carved by thousands of years of wind and rain and baked dry by the sun, that we were a finite equation.  Already I felt the desperation of not knowing, of not being able to plan.  My friends were already starting to get engaged and move places with each other.  Back then, the white dress still held an element of awe and reverance.  It wasn’t so much about who was next to you in the dress as much as it was about the dress itself.  The dress said, “I’m so done worrying about the future.  Thank god I found someone and the rest of you fools can keep sticking it out at The Brown Jug.”

In a few months, the boyfriend and I would attend a friend’s wedding in Grosse Pointe.  I would cry on the way back to Ann Arbor and our slumlorded, drafty apartment.  He would yell at me and said he was done going to weddings with me because I was SUCH a pain in the ASS.  And frankly, I was.  I just wanted to know the direction of my life. I was tired of wondering about it.  I wanted answers. 

But back in Arches, I already knew the answer.  By the time I got back to Ann Arbor I’d forgotten it or just pushed it under layers of denial.  I distinctly recall looking at the back of his beautiful head and thinking, “He’s going to leave.”

Turns out I left, but only after having diminished my usefulness to him, which was primarily providing a stable income.  When my tenuous job laid me off due to a pesky thing called bankruptcy, he decided stepping up to take care of me for a change was too much.  Could we just be roommates and could I still pay 75% of the rent?

You can imagine the answer, and that’s how I ended up living in the Southeast, where I have remained ever since that U-Haul took me, Delilah, and lots of random furniture south.  The cloud of dust we kicked up leaving Whitmore Lake covered all of my history there.  I missed the dog I’d left behind more than the boyfriend and wished him lots of luck making ends meet while working at Kinko’s.

The point of all of this is: 

I’m still trying to figure stuff out, plan it out, nail it down, be “done” with limbo.  20 years later, I’m still videotaping my life in case it will help me figure things out.  I’m still trying to control everything outside of myself so I don’t have to feel so unhinged and victimized by randomness and rain.  Sometimes I have a repeat moment of the drive leaving Arches, staring out the window and all the red dirt, knowing I hadn’t a clue where the car was going to end up or how I was going to make ends meet on $16,800 a year and a high maintenance boyfriend. 

The stakes are higher now, and the monetary figures are more staggering.  There’s more to lose, but in other ways, it’s much simpler for me to accept that I know nothing and will probably never know anything.  My current situation was driving me mad.  After a few months of that, it has slowly turned into a weird kind of apathy where I expect nothing good to happen.  On my best days, my expectation is that NOTHING will happen, that I will always be hanging in this inbetween.  Perhaps the inbetween is actually just the reality, and there is nothing before it or after it and I’m wasting my life waiting for my life to happen.

That may be the most obtuse sentence I’ve ever written, but damn is it true. 

I think back to that road trip, how incredibly fortunate I was.  I was free for 3 weeks, and all we did was explore and go wherever the car took us.  Gas was around $1.00/gallon (and that is not a typo).  I spent most of that trip waiting for it to end so I could see what would happen.  Coming back into Ann Arbor, dealing with starting my new job, unpacking in the expensive squalor of A2 apartments - it was only then that I wished I had been more present in those hours and miles.  Perhaps Arches stands out to me so clearly because I was present then, feeling every breeze, smelling the dirt and clay, watching the boyfriend’s artfully careless hair whip around his horn rimmed glasses.  We were young, smart, broke, and intellectual, but for once I wasn’t focused on those things.  I knew where things were going and oddly, I didn’t care. 

I need a little more “I don’t care” in my life, and a lot more moments where I’m just sniffing the breeze. 

May 4, 1993.  I know this because it snowed in the Grand Canyon on my birthday that year, and this is the morning after. 

I was talking to someone at work today who’s had a serious streak of bad luck/karma/ickiness lately. I jokingly asked her if she’d clubbed a baby seal in a past life or something.  Today I’m feeling sorry for myself, like I’ve had my own baby seal mass clubbing genocidal rampage in my previous life.

It’s such a cliché to say that life isn’t fair.  You can be a very bad person, make very bad decisions, hurt people, leave wreckage behind for someone else to clean up and yet, you still may come out ahead.

It isn’t fair that you can work your ass off and have someone take your hard-earned results just because they can.

It isn’t fair that you can be the cause of so much pain and turmoil, and still expect the person you hurt to continue to give to you.

It isn’t fair that children are stuck in the middle, desperate for some stability and sanity with the adults in their lives.

And it certainly isn’t fair that greed and poor moral fiber and a general sense of entitlement affects the lives of those who never wanted to be involved with you in the first place.

Never have I felt so completely beaten down and frustrated with a situation over which I have no control.  It seems to drag on endlessly.  Most unfortunate, there is no good outcome for anyone involved.

Sometimes I kick myself for decisions I made a while back.  Based on the information I had at the time, they seemed sound enough.  I wonder if all the hell and frustration I’m feeling now is my own personal penance, my punishment, for my own transgressions in my actions against other people.  Maybe watching the suffering of my friend is appropriate and just desserts for the pain I have put others through.  Maybe it’s just life and there is no reason why things happen or don’t happen.

I keep thinking about my parents, and all the years they owned a business.  It never seemed to matter what the situation was – whenever the law was involved, they always ended up on the losing side.  Try to run a business honestly, you pay.  Try to reward your employees, you pay.  Work hard, be a good father, a good husband – you’re going to pay too.

The dark, niggling fear that consumes me late at night:  am I witnessing my significant other’s hell up close and personal because I did the very same thing to my ex?

Then I become rational, reasonable, and begin to list out the ways in which my situation was so different, from the reasons why I got married in the first place, to having children, to our finances, to the way we ended things, to the way we communicate now.

No matter how I seem to look at it, though, turning it this way and that in my head, I feel almost as though I personally deserve this, and that this form of limbo is closer to the Catholic concept of hell than it is to being stuck in the middle, between good and bad.

I had a really crappy day today.  My patience is shot, and I am not patient to begin with.  The day was so crappy I don’t even want to write about it, because then maybe it will have just been my imagination. 

Work wasn’t good.  It was a vivid reminder that I am not firing on all cylinders (if I were a car, I’d be a Gremlin, with two cylinders), in any part of my life.  My personal life feels like someone is alternately standing on the brakes, so to speak, or spinning me in a vortex.  I’ve been in varying degrees of chaos since 2009, and this woman wants off the rollercoaster.  I have never felt so powerless in my life.  The changes that need to happen are mostly outside of myself, and up to other people.  I can only sit by, biting my nails, waiting for it to end.  I feel like I’m under-performing as a mother, a coworker, a friend and sometimes, a girlfriend. 

You can imagine my delight when, after today, I came home finally at 7.30 at night.  I left the house at 7 am.  Thora decided to pull a bottle of sesame seed oil off my pantry shelf.  She ate it.  In the middle of the living room.  Again.  My house now smells like a dirty Chinese restaurant, and two treatments with the steam cleaner has now made it smell like a febreezed Chinese restaurant.  Glorious. 

Patience.  I want it so badly, but instead, I’ll settle for this picture instead. 

**This is a long post.  I apologize but after editing it and editing it, this is as concise as I can be**

I used to work with a guy who was prone to fits of rage.  If he’d been around 3-4 years old, we would have called them temper tantrums.  He’d get so mad at a client, he’d scream obscenities and slam his door so hard the ceiling tiles would fly out of place. 

I found out a few months into that job that he suffered from diabetes, and didn’t do a very good job managing his condition.  When his blood sugar would drop, he’d become irritable to an extreme.  Unfortunately, some of his clients got the brunt of it and equally unfortunate that his coworkers got more than their fair share. 

Many of us excused his behavior because oh, he had diabetes.  And he did.  When he managed his condition properly, he was a normal human being. 

So I wonder how different mental illness is from his diabetes. 

I myself have tired of hearing professionals and those of us who suffer from various forms of it say, “_____(insert condition here) is the same as diabetes or hypothyroidism or any other kind of medical problem.  It needs to be treated, and no one looks down on someone taking medication for a heart problem.” 

This is true, but the words sound hollow to me because let’s face it, telling someone I suffer from high cholesterol and take meds to manage it is very different than telling someone I’m bipolar II (always important to stress the ‘II’ part!  Because that means I’m half as crazy! It’s SOFT bipolar, dammit!) and “need” medication to “be normal”. 

The fact is, for many years I was misdiagnosed with simple depression.  No one, and there were plenty of people who knew, connected my eating disorder with my true issue.  An even bigger fact:  most people who knew me would have never known I was sick or suffering. I became a master at keeping my crazy all to myself.  It helped that back then, I was a “writer” and I was “artsy” because hell, all of us creative types were prone to moodiness and tears.  My eating disorder was also an excellent form of medication to keep the true symptoms buried deep. Some people compulsively shop, gamble, or engage in very unhealthy behaviors.  These are the regular types of self-medication. Mine worked very well for many years. 

It is not an understatement to express how grateful I am that I came undone at the end of my marriage.  It took me being able to realize how bizarre my internal thoughts were to also make me realize that something much bigger was going on.  Although I would rather poke hot needles into my nail beds than go through those things again, I am truly the healthiest I have been because of them. 

I’ve said all of this before. Why say it again? 

Because when I first decided to come forward publicly with my story, I spent a lot of time analyzing the pros and cons of it.  I knew that someday someone might try to use my words against me, call me crazy, fling insults, and just simply feel superior to me.  More than that, I worried my kids would somehow suffer from other people knowing about it.  At the end of my deliberations, I decided to write as openly as I could about it while still maintaining some semblance of privacy and hopefully, dignity.  All the others before me who had written honestly about their own journey had helped me so much on my own.  I felt I owed it to the people in my life and, in a weird way, people that didn’t know me, an insider’s guide to living with mental illness.  I still don’t regret that decision.

Honestly, my fears about coming out with it have come true on a number of occasions.  I’ve had to accept the fact that I can’t explain myself to those unwilling to listen.  I can’t control how others view me.  I just have to be okay with myself and the steps I’ve taken (and there have been many!) to be the person I am today. 

I think what’s frustrated me the most is that it’s so much more taboo to discuss mental illness and own it than it is to just live with depression or other things silently, all the while pretending you’re okay.  Because I’ve had years of therapy, a great psychiatrist and done tons of personally agonizing and difficult work on myself, I’m somehow “less than” a person who just chooses to ignore their poor life decisions, erratic behavior, self-destructive personality, etc. 

WARNING to FAMILY MEMBERS who FREAK OUT THAT I POSTED ABOUT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE:  You MIGHT want to STOP READING because OMG SOMETHING POTENTIALLY NEGATIVE HAS HAPPENED!  SOMEONE HAS JUDGED ME!  WARNING!!!!

(I do get the fact that those in my family who were concerned about me acknowledging what happened just can’t stand the thought of others judging me or potentially penalizing me)

It happened recently that someone found out about my (gasp) illness and was questioning Running Boy about it.  Did he know?  Was he aware? Was I on medication?  In a way, I was amused.  Did he know?  Come on, seriously? I may not wear a t-shirt that says “Kiss me, I’m Soft Bipolar”, but everyone close to me knows the truth and also knows how hard I work to be the best person I can. 

Actually, maybe I DO wear a t-shirt that says this!

I was okay with that part, but the niggling fear under my conversation with RB was, “Is this going to be used against me? Or him?  Is my presence in his life going to cause him more trouble than he deserves?”  The answer is yes, we could go through some crap.  However, I have people lined up to talk about who I am today – including the aforementioned therapy/psych people – and at the end of the day, I’d venture to say I’m more self-aware and stable than the majority of people at the grocery store in any given day. 

What’s truly sad is that you’d think from what I’ve said that I was some raving lunatic in my previous life.  I wasn’t.  Unfortunately, by being so “normal”, I went undiagnosed for years and years and years – which meant that by outsider’s standards, I was fine – but internally I suffered in various ways. 

I have a medical condition.  I am on two medications, at low doses, to manage it.  I spent many years looking at my internal thought processes and my various crutches that enabled me to live with it.  As I hiked Sunday with a good friend, she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this happy.”  I’m not sure I’d call it happiness as I don’t trust that word.  I would say I feel the strongest and most calm I’ve ever felt in my life, and this feeling has been with me for the last two years.  I still have good days and bad days like the rest of the population, and I still have to really manage my sleep patterns and make sure the people in my life are healthy people themselves.  But honestly?  Judging me because I’ve taken major steps to be a better mother, a better person?  That thought process makes me tired. 

I’m curious.  Delurk, even if anonymously.  Tell me how many people in your life have suffered from mental illness. Share what you can.  Have I helped you?  Hurt you?  What do you think the best way to combat this stigma is? 

People always comment on how different my two girls look.  One is fair, blonde, blue eyed - the other is olive skinned, dark hair, brown eyes.  Their personalities are often as different as their hair color.  Lily tends to be more easy-going and has a sweet nature about her.  She’s also prone to over-sensitivity and the need to always be right (even when she’s wrong).  Arden is hilarious and energetic; she’s the life of the party and is also prone to wild mood swings and difficulty adjusting to even the smallest obstacles (imagined or real). 

Way back when Mike and I were splitting up, both girls went to counseling.  It was a great experience for the both of them.  Lily’s counselor was fine, but I really loved Arden’s.  She had just enough of an edge to her that Arden knew she couldn’t get away with anything, but tempered her edge with a nurturing and kind side.  In a way, I got more out of Arden’s counseling than she did.  I tried to emulate her therapists finely-honed skills - being both the disciplinarian and the person you’d most like to hug you.  She showed me the two didn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The biggest thing I learned from her was that I needed to stop holding onto my emotions.  Children can be ungodly frustrating, and Arden definitely knows how to push my buttons.  There are so many times she’d whip me into a frenzy, and the more I lost control, the more she reacted and pushed.  Sometimes I almost felt like she was trying to push me over an edge, just to see if I’d really come back every time.  Honestly, there were times I didn’t want to come back.  I felt like I didn’t deserve what was being dished out.  It was too much with everything else.  Her therapist spent a lot of time with me explaining that I got the brunt of it because Arden felt the most comfortable with me - she could let it out and know that I still loved her.

While that was great to hear, I still had to learn to deal with her tempests.  The problem was, when Arden would throw a fit or defy me, I’d get angry.  I could pretend I wasn’t, but she saw right through it.  Not only did I get angry, I’d hold onto it for an hour or two.  I just didn’t feel like she deserved forgiveness so quickly.  But her therapist demonstrated, over and over again, that you could allow your child to get out “the uglies” without getting personally involved with it.  Making noise in a restaurant or being awful during a playdate?  Calmly remove her from the situation and let her kick and scream somewhere away from others.  Wait it out, even if it takes a while.  When it’s over, enforce whatever is enforceable and LET GO of the emotions. 

I practiced, a lot.  I tried to ignore people who told me I was letting her “get away” with whatever “it” was.  Slowly, her tantrums slipped away and I felt closer to her than I had in a year or more. 

We’ve been back sliding a bit lately. I don’t know why, but maybe it’s because I’ve stopped being consistent.  Maybe it’s because I’m tired when I get home at night and I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in being patient with her bad mood as she transitions from after-school care to my care.  I forget that she too is adjusting to me being at work all day, and that this may be her way of letting me know she misses me too.  I’d much prefer a hug and a sentence like “I miss you, Mommy,” but this is how she expresses it right now.

Today was kind of awful.  After half hour of being her normal cheerful self, she slipped into one of her dark moods.  She was rude, belligerent, and when Windsor came over for lunch, Arden refused to eat and speak to anyone.  I stayed calm, had her food packed up, and took both girls home.  I sent Arden to her room to recover from whatever she was mad about (because she won’t use words to tell me when she’s in that kind of mood).  I stuck her food in the refrigerator and hung out with Lily.  After about 20 minutes, I went into Arden’s room. 

She was playing on her bed, but as soon as she saw me she frowned and turned away.  I knew better than to think she’d talk to me, but I told her that her behavior was unacceptable and rude and that Windsor’s feelings had been hurt (probably not - Windsor gets Arden like no one else in the universe, but it was nice being able to point out that a non-superhero like Windsor might have had hurt feelings).  I hugged her and told her I loved her and she could come out and join the rest of the human race when she felt better.

About 20 minutes later, a paper airplane flew into my room:

I heard Arden giggling, so I opened it up:

She had finally admitted she was hungry, and drawn me a picture to illustrate she was ready to eat. 

As I got up to reheat her lunch, I got hit in the back of the head with another airplane:

(to translate:  she wanted to cuddle like I had been with Lily)

On the back of the airplane, she’d drawn this:

We sat together while she ate her very-delayed lunch and she smiled at me.  I realized that I hadn’t held onto my emotions, and when she made the effort to draw me a picture - and say sorry in her strange little way, I was in a place where I could hear it and move on.  She still received her punishment from lunch (no ds for the afternoon) but she was good-natured about it.  Tomorrow she says she’s going to call Windsor and apologize.  For me, those paper airplanes were a big step in the right direction.