The Men in the White Coats

TRIGGER WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS DETAILS ABOUT A MENTAL BREAKDOWN. IF THIS WILL UPSET YOU, PLEASE DON'T READ IT.

They really did come to take me away. (Ha ha, hee hee, to the Funny Farm......)



It might have been the pressure I put on myself from Hubby being gone, the rough transition of him being back for just one week and gone again coupled with that strangely changing power dynamic. It could be that the hypo-manic episode I had in early October swung the other way and led me into a vast crash, not suicidal but not in any way competent. Maybe there is just something about this time of year that sends my brain into emotional overload and I take a nose dive. Maybe the Lexapro destabilized me just enough to see the upswing in October and the downturn in December. Oh hell! maybe a butterfly flapped its wings in Central Park and someone around the globe wished they hadn't forgotten their umbrella.

Whatever the cause, the result was the crash. The cutting intensified - the pull of the urges so strong that even the desire to not have the urges faded away into a foggy background. The song Fake It by Seether became my mantra, my theme song. I felt like I had this grand elaborate mask on, trying desperately to fool everyone around me (including myself) into thinking I was doing just fine. And I wasn't. I don't know how much others realized I was sinking because I got so much encouragement and praise - that could have been in hopes keeping me going or out of ignorance that it wasn't true. But I sold my soul to fool the world and lost my self-esteem along the way.

Then Hubby came back for a week. Things were strange in a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff kind of way. I wanted things to go back to how they were before he left. I wanted him to become the me I had become while he was gone. I wanted him to fall in line with the changes we had made without him. I wanted to make it easy on him. I wanted him to make it easy on me. It was a very confusing set of emotions and contradictions packed into one short week.

And then he left. Again. And this time I knew how it would feel to know that my heart was only beating half-way because its other half had been ripped out and shipped off via airplane to Atlanta, Georgia. And I knew the kids were going to feel that too. I knew the whole schedule had fallen back onto my shoulders. I knew then that there would be no going back or staying the same: everything was changing and we didn't have an adapt or die choice, we simply had an adapt option.

I blamed myself for him being irritable and out of sorts while he was home. I blamed him for it then blamed myself for blaming him. The world seemed to speed up around me while I trudged through the mud trying to catch my bearings, my breath. I didn't see how we were going to make the rest of our lives work if we couldn't even make one week work, forgetting that the water is coldest in the first moments after you take the plunge.

I let myself slip away inside myself more and more, sleeping as often as I could, sleepwalking when I couldn't sleep, dissociating when I couldn't do either. Predictably the headaches came on in full-blown glory, along with the shots of Happy-Juice. Instead of taking one xanax, I'd take 5 or 6 or forget I'd taken a couple and take a few more. That Wednesday, the 3rd, I snapped. And everything else is like a memory of someone telling me about a movie they once saw when they were drunk.

The straw that brought the men in the white coats actually ended up a bipolar rage - mine. Well, Kid-1 started it. (I sound like a kindergartner! LOL) He went into a rage and in my basically incoherent state, I responded likewise. We tussled, physically, and the exertion gave me an asthma attack bad enough to call in the EMTs for me and the cops to calm Kid-1 down. In the process of getting me breathing again, the EMTs saw my arm. The latest gash is deep and long and wide and was bleeding quite grotesquely. For some strange and incomprehensible reason, they were not impressed.

The men in the white coats restored oxygen to my body, bandaged up my arm and called The Shrink to find out if I was bloody nuts or harmlessly crazy. The Shrink was literally in the process of telling them that if I promised I wouldn't do anything that I could be held to my word... when I pulled out the IV and stripped the bandage from my arm, got dressed and tried to leave. Thus came the court ordered 72 hold.

When informed of the hold that had been placed against me, I was less than pleased at the prospect. In fact, I tried repeatedly to leave the hospital, thwarted by a HUGE guy who, if his name wasn't Bubba, it ought to have been. When they told me I had no choice and brought out the HANDCUFFS(!!!!!!) I began to shriek. And shriek. And shriek. And shriek.

The running joke amongst my friends is to use a patronizing tone of voice to tell someone: "Don't worry. The men in the white coats are your friends. They will bring you a coat that lets you hug yourself. And the big shiny needle only stings for a minute."

Wow. How true it is, only substitute the huggy-coat for handcuffs and there you have it. The sedated me for transport - twice. When I came out of my stupor, I grew more and more coherent. I quickly realized where I was and that this was NOT a good thing. But the fog was also clearing and I began retrieving control over my mind. Within 24 hours, I (me, not someone in my body that wasn't me) was back. I was released from my 72 hour hold after little less than 48 hours. (This caused them some paperwork issues but I don't care - that's their problem.)

Now I am back from the funny farm where life is beautiful all of the time and I am trying to pick up the pieces I dropped over the past few weeks. I didn't OD or attempt suicide this time so I didn't break too many people's trust in me. I went to the hospital via ambulance because of an asthma attack and that is the story that the vast majority of people heard so I am not getting lecture upon lecture upon lecture. I am feeling better, a definitive upswing (that has me worried but that's for another time) and not sleeping all the time. Hubby will be back TOMORROW!!!! And I have gained some new insights into some issues here at home.

I guess all's well that ends well but the next time we use the men in the white coats joke or sing that silly They're coming to take me away haha song... I guarantee I will think of this. Maybe it will take the edge off the joke and dull the humor; maybe it will increase it exponentially like the "Are you psychotic?" snafu did. Time will tell.

Echoes Past and Present

The Shrink hit me where it hurts today. I started it. I said it first. We were discussing Hubby still being irritated and frustrated and snappish. He asked what Hubby needs to feel loved and I said things like being listened to and supported and things like that and I remarked, almost offhand, that he would probably like more intimacy and me to start it too, but oh well. The conversation migrated and all I ended up hearing was blah blah blah If you want Hubby to be be happy to have to prove you want to be intimate with him blah blah blah.

And that is so much the message I feel I got from the worst of sources: You owe me this. If you want me to like you, be nice to you, stand up for you, loveyou, then you need to show me you want this (and if you don't, you'd better be very good at pretending). It felt like my past had come full circle and every horrid thing I had been trained to believe and started to question had turned out to be accurate after all.

I lost it. To be honest, I don't remember hardly anything else he said. I remember him laughing at me then trying to apologize for treating the subject so cavalierly. I remember him trying to call me back to the room a couple times. I remember him not wanting me to leave because he wasn't sure I was safe. I don't remember much else.

Actually, I think that gave me the final push over the edge into a breakdown. More on that that later. I am writing this now, on the 12th of December, what was started late on the evening of the 3rd of December and occurred early on that morning because everything else in between was like driving at high speed through dense fog. Hopefully I am through the worst of the messy emotional storms and back to a safer pace of life.

Self-Destruction Inside and Out

NOTE: THIS POST CONTAINS POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING DESCRIPTIONS OF SELF-HARM. IF YOU ARE FEELING SUICIDAL OR THE NEED TO CAUSE HARM TO YOURSELF OR OTHERS, PLEASE CALL 911, CONTACT YOUR DOCTOR, OR A FRIEND WHO CAN TALK TO YOU, OR SEEK HELP FROM SOME SOURCE. THIS IS NOT!NOT!NOT! MEANT AS AN ENCOURAGEMENT OR TO CONDONE SELF-HARM OR SUICIDE IN ANY FORM.

I cut at my arms. I refuse to eat. I sleep as often as I can get away with it. I take too many pills or not enough or the wrong kinds. I walk around barefoot in the snow and don't really notice or care. I take showers hot enough to raise welts. I am generally a self-destructive person. I mostly do it in ways that don't affect others, except when they find out by accident or when I slip and overdo one. I hide this well enough that my kids don't even realize it happens, Hubby and The Shrink don't know about it unless they ask me directly in such a way that I can't dodge it.

But by far my physical self-destruction is much less than what I do to myself mentally and emotionally. If anyone said most anything that I say to and about myself to my children, they would get such an earful as to leave them deaf for a long time to come. I have worked very hard and with a specific intensity and purpose to keep my children from feeling and thinking the things that fill my head and heart most every moment of every day. I would not wish me on my worst enemies. The things I say and feel about myself cause me far more pain than anything I do to my physical body.

I love my kids with an intensity that overcomes nearly everything. They are my sole purpose for living. All I want is to be gone from this world, this life, this self. I despise myself more than an ugly stepsister and feel the harshest of punishments, whatever they may be, are well-deserved and insufficient. If it were not for these lovely, wonderful little children, I would be gone in a heartbeat. And though I will not do that, because of the trauma it would cause them (despite their lives becoming far better for not having to deal with me), I won't leave them.

Resolving not to leave them until they are grown and flown the nest and able to cope a little better does not ease my self-loathing. It does not keep me from wanting to rip myself from limb to limb in any way available. A few weeks ago, I made quite a mess of my arm. Baby-Mommy saw a small part of it (the only one who ever notices, thank goodness) and gave me a minor tongue-lashing but ultimately decided she can't control me and what I do is my problem. (Again - thank goodness.) I stopped the destruction because I was afraid Hubby would see it when he was home this past week. Though the scabs were gone by the time he got here, the scars are a bit obvious if you see the arm (long sleeves are my friends!) yet mercifully, he didn't notice.

I found this encouraging. Cutting, as horrible as this sounds, is reassuring and almost self-comforting. Some of my cuts and things have been highly symbolic - the crosses, the Ms, the horizontal slashes that count the days he has been gone - whereas some are just anger and loathing rising, literally, to the surface. I choose whether or not it hurts, which The Shrink says is not normal but whatever. I feel the bite and sting as it happens and watch the blood rise to the surface and all the hate and rage and disgust at myself gets poured into that. All the pain that I feel inside that I don't feel I can express to anyone becomes a physical thing - a legitimate reason to feel the pain that I otherwise do not feel entitled to. As I move my arm under my sleeves as it heals, I feel the pull and ache of the wounds and it reminds me that I have a "real" reason for hurting that isn't just in my head. It also serves as a release of some of that self-hatred that whispers (or shouts) at me to just die and be done with it.

If the pain becomes a problem for whatever situation I am in, I push it away and I don't feel it any more. I know it is there, like I would know it is cold outside by looking at a thermometer without actually feeling cold. The only pain I can't disengage from is pain in or around my head. Migraines, toothaches, sinus infections - they get to me. Everything else will generally go away on command.

The Shrink says one problem with self-harm is the tendency to escalate. Apparently it is a release for "cutters". They want to "feel something, anything, even if it is pain" and seeing the blood or injury "makes them feel alive, that if [they] can bleed, they must be real and living". I don't understand that. I don't have issues with escalation. Apparently, for these people, once the blood stops and the cut begins to heal, it is no longer enough. The same degree of injury doesn't suffice to bring about the same feelings so more, deeper, harder, longer, whatever, becomes necessary (in their minds) to generate the same release. I don't feel that way.

Another problem is supposedly the tendency to accidentally cause too much harm and create an "accidental" suicide. How on earth someone manages to "accidentally" cut their body enough to lose enough blood to die is beyond me. I have caused problems by overdosing before but those were not self-harm attempts; they were something completely different altogether. And though I have occasionally wondered what it would feel like to cut deep enough to need stitches, fear of being caught has always held me back from causing even that degree of injury.

The other thing that is apparently common for cutters is motive. This is what keeps me from getting caught more than anything except the threat of being separated from my children. It seems many cutters do it for attention. They want to cause harm to others by making them feel responsible for the harm they do themselves. Some even simply want attention. These are classic Borderline Personality Symptoms. I am many things but I fit very few of the diagnostic criteria for BPS. I get very angry when I do get caught and people automatically lump me into that category. I know and love many people who are BPS, but I find that assumption (that because I SI, I am BPS) to raise my blood pressure with just the thought. If I "simply" wanted attention, I can think of far better ways to do it than to upset everyone who finds out, cause them to revoke all trust in me and treat me like an errant child, and risk being separated from my kids. And I DO NOT cut (etc) "because" of someone else. I do it for me, not just to me.

All that said, I honestly don't understand why this is being made such a big deal of. I am not in physical danger of irreparable harm (save for some minor scarring that doesn't affect anyone else). I'm not hurting anyone else. I'm not trying to emotionally hurt anyone else. And I makes me feel better, not counting the vast guilt and shame that getting caught brings about. So why can't they leave me alone??? At least I'm not attempting suicide.