Where I'm at.

[moonbyrd]

I am so tired of feeling stressed all the time.

Okay, folks. Here's the deal, why you haven't heard anything substantial from me for a while and why I'll probably continue to be a bit distant.

After my grandfather passed away at the end of August, I went home to attend the funeral. The next several days were a flurry of family activities. Remember, I have a large and loud and tight-knit family. I was immensely grateful for the hugs and kisses and casual touches that are so commonplace in my family, the closeness really helped ground me while the genetic approach of "humor in every situation" helped me work through the grieving process. The unfortunate side effect of all that time together was a consensus of "if I see another family again within a month, I'm going to scream."

I returned to Boston the Sunday after the funeral, driven back to the new apartment by my parents. We kicked some boxes around, we took HM!S out to dinner, they deposited me with a big aeromattress and my old bike and headed home. I spent the next couple of days in a mixture of grieving, unpacking, applying to jobs, hanging out with my friends, and worrying about paying bills. HM!S left Friday to spend the weekend with family in Cape Cod.

That Saturday, September 12, I frittered away the morning with a few job applications and reading a book. In the afternoon, I got up to go to the bathroom and as I walked down the hall the thought popped into my head, "For someone as miserable as I've been the past several weeks, wouldn't it be normal to think about suicide?"

That thought, unbidden and innocuous as it may appear, drew me up short. I want to make something very clear, and that is this: I am not and never have been the sort of person to think about suicide in any capacity. I have had friends who have been suicidal and friends who harmed themselves as an outlet for emotions. I have given a great deal of thought to those phenomena and have simply never understood it, although I have done my best to act as a grounding and supportive presence for those people I know who have experienced those feelings.

I instantly realized that thinking about suicide as a normal thought process was different from my usual patterns. Oh my god, I then thought, I just thought about suicide. Suicidal thoughts are one of the major risks of Prozac. I am suicidal.

Then came the panic attack. Oh dear gods in heaven, I have such a wonderful imagination. I could see myself going downstairs and getting a knife and stabbing myself with it. I could see myself using that knife to slit my wrists. I could see myself bleeding to death in the kitchen, on the bathroom floor, alone in my bedroom. I was hysterical, in tears, I could not breathe, I could not focus, I could barely move. Wave after wave of ice cold terror washed over me. I felt as though I were trapped inside my body, without conscious control of my muscles. Oh god, I could hurt myself. What if I kill myself in a moment of passion? What if I lose control of my body and do something horrible to myself?

I shook against the bathroom wall until caught my breath enough to stumble back to my room and pick up my phone. I called my father. I was in terrible shape. I told him what had happened, that my thought was about thinking of suicide, that I was not coping well. He spoke with me calmly and rationally and told me that if the problem persisted I could go to an emergency room, that I was doing well to call, that it might help if I gave myself a task to focus on. I calmed down considerably, decided to do laundry, and ended the call.

I gathered up my laundry and took it down to the basement to wash. Got back upstairs and started trembling and crying again. My mother called at that moment. "I'm sitting in my car right now," she said. "I will come out there in a heartbeat if you want me to." She was in tears, too. "Mom, I...could you?" I needed, so badly, to have the supportive family around me that I'd just left.

We got off the phone and I stared at the wall. Shook and cried. I called E, the other girl in my close circle of nearby friends. "I...am having a difficult day," I told her. "I could really use some company." I started to cry and she told me she was still at work but could come over when her shift ended. We ended the call and I calmed enough to go downstairs to switch my laundry into the drier, only to discover that it was broken. I busied myself with bringing the wet things upstairs and spreading them out to dry, borrowing a rack from one of my new housemates.

It occurred to me that my mother, who hates driving long distances, who frequently mentions how uncomfortable she is driving in the dark because it throws off her depth perception, was on her way to Boston at six in the evening. I began to feel guilty and worried about her. I called my dad again, asked his advice, then called Mom and basically said to her, "I have a friend coming over. Please don't drive all the way. Stop somewhere so that I don't have worry about you as well as my own panic." She informed me that I was not under any circumstances to feel guilty and that, yes, she would stop if she got tired. Feeling better, I returned to spreading out my laundry and waited for a call from E.

E and I agreed that we both wanted showers, and I was doing noticeably better with the promise of company and knowing that my mother wouldn't put herself in undue danger and discomfort. I sat in my room in a haze of emotional exhaustion until E and B came to pick me up. We drove to C and T's apartment, where A showed up as well. We piled up on the floor and watched "The Incredibles". Whenever I felt fear or worry begin to well, I shifted to lean against C or B. They are chronic head-petters and work wonders for my state of being.

I was dropped off at my apartment again at something approaching 3:30 in the morning. I felt exhausted and distanced enough from the panic that I could sleep, so I got ready for bed and curled up. And then I started shaking. I felt no noticeable shift in anxiety levels, so I assumed that I was cold. I got up and changed into my warmest sleepwear and my ratty old Boston University hoodie. I put on thick socks. I pulled the fleece and wool blankets both onto my bed. Still I shook. About 4:30, I think, I finally dropped into a doze.

I was awake around 9 the next morning when my father called to check in on me. He wanted to assess my condition as well as possible over the phone and to let me know that my mother had already left her motel and was expecting to reach Boston before noon.

I have no idea where the next two hours went. I don't really remember doing anything. I may have just stared at the wall all morning. I think I got dressed but I can't even attest to that. I did call my therapist’s office and leave a message about having “an interesting episode” and would she please call me as soon as she could.

When my phone rang at 11:30 and my mother told me she was downstairs, I was shocked. I went down to let her in, led her up to my room, sat her in my desk chair, looked at her. The next thing I knew, I was kneeling by the chair with my head in her lap, sobbing. "I've never been that afraid of myself."

She held me and let me cry for a few minutes. When I took a deep breath, she pulled me up, hugged me, and set me about a task: claiming my room from the chaos and mess that was all I had managed after unpacking all of my boxes the week before. I calmed considerably with that chore to focus on and we cleared up a lot of floor space, hung my curtains, and found places for my storage boxes. I packed a bag quickly and we went out to lunch.

When we reached the diner, I realized that for the entire week prior to my breakdown, I had barely eaten a thing. A bagel for "breakfast" each day, sometime between nine and three in the afternoon, and some bread with olive oil and Balsamic vinegar for dinner sometime after that. A cup of yogurt once or twice during the week.

Well, Jesus. No wonder I was shaking and unsteady. So we stuffed me with a salad and crabmeat for protein. Then we got in the car and drove out of town, for a nice drive in the countryside under the trees that have always been so comforting and calming to me. We had a lot of fun. We took turns at random, we ended up in New Hampshire, we couldn't find our way out of Manchester, we drove some dead end neighborhoods in the hopes of finding charming little bed and breakfasts. We laughed and joked and chatted and rambled.

By about seven in the evening, we were back in Massachusetts, several towns west of Boston. And I positively crashed. I warned Mom that my mood was dropping. Tears began rolling down my face, I started shaking. I couldn't string two words together. I started thinking about scenes from books and movies where characters attempted suicide, kept thinking of phrases like, “Thank goodness he didn’t know the proper way to slit his wrists.” I couldn't tell her what I needed or wanted. I didn't even know, myself.

We went to Woburn, north of the city, and got a room in a hotel that she's used before. I was calmed down enough by heading to a destination that she went in alone to check in. I decided to call my father. I pick up the phone and dialed and as it rang I started thinking about hearing his voice. I was crying before he even answered. I let him know where we were and that my plans for the evening consisted of getting into the hotel room and crying until I choked. In that magical way he has, he calmed me enough just by talking that I felt up to the task of marching through the lobby of the hotel and making it to the room.

Once inside the hotel, Mom and I ordered Chinese for delivery and sat around for a bit. I was expecting to collapse the moment I crossed the threshold, but I had reached the next quiet plateau in my emotional roller coaster. We ate, we talked a little bit, we poked around on our respective computers.

It was about an hour and a half after our arrival that I put my computer down and went to curl up next to Mom on her bed. I put my forehead against her side, felt her stroke my hair, and cried. I cried, and cried, and cried. I mumbled things about Grampa, about Dad, about fear, about money, about jobs, about her. I told her a lot of things I’d already said, I told her some new things she didn’t know. I cried until she rubbed my back and told me that I was doing myself no good making myself hysterical, that I should focus on the things that were bothering me instead of just give myself over to extreme emotion. She was right.

I spent the next stretch of time forcing into words some of the scattered thoughts I was having. I did my best to make sure she understood, finally, my reactions to things she says and does. I did my best to ensure that I could communicate with her whenever something came to mind. I was functionally calm, although I still dribbled tears once in a while. I exhausted myself so thoroughly that I put on my pajamas and crawled into my bed and slept for eleven hours.

Monday morning started with a trip to the standard mediocrity of the hotel’s breakfast. Bad coffee, watery juice, greasy muffins. We ate and watched the news on the television in the corner. We went back to the room in time for me to field a call from my therapist’s office. She was out of town, but one of her partners had heard the message when she checked the machine and wanted to check in on me as soon as possible.

I told that therapist a brief version of what had happened, what my rollercoaster had been like. She listened and evaluated and asked, “In with all of these other parts, right now, where is there a part that has compassion for everything you’re going through right now?” I sat, tears pouring down my face, while she told me that I had done the right thing in calling my family, in contacting my friends and letting them know I needed support, in not being alone. She told me that my rational mind was still in control, even in that moment of greatest panic, and that the fact that I hadn’t done any of those horrible things I could picture myself doing was a good indicator that I wouldn’t. She promised to contact Jo and have her call me as soon as possible.

Mom and I spent that Monday quietly. We drove back to my apartment and took care of the rest of my clean clothes. We made my bed. We sat for a while. When it was time for lunch, we headed back toward the hotel and turned off into a different town. We got another salad into me and then, despite my “Do NOT let me go in there,” we went across the street to a used book store where we promptly charged $75 to her credit card. It was an “oops” but it was fun. We went back to the hotel and read, played around online, talked a bit.

I slept another eleven hours that night. We ate breakfast the next morning, talked about going back to my apartment to get more things. Instead I just looked at her and said, “I don’t even want to go back. Let’s just go home.” And off we went. Jo had called while we were at breakfast and I called her back during her break for the day, early in the afternoon. She reiterated everything that her partner had said. It hurt to hear her say I had done well, it felt so good. So there I was in the car, crying again.

When we got home late that afternoon, I hugged my father with tears in my eyes. I cuddled with the dog and terrorized the cat and was just absolutely exhausted, drained emotionally, physically, and mentally.
I spent the rest of that week at home, a complete gibbering mess. I couldn’t be alone in a room in the house for more than five minutes without feeling panicky. I developed a really fantastic separation anxiety that acted up whenever someone wandered away for a few moments. If I weren’t alive, I wouldn’t be here to experience this, I wouldn’t be sharing time with my mother and father, I’d think, and then promptly burst into tears again because it wasn’t a warm and comforting thought but a mournful one.

I devoted a lot of time to thinking and trying to face things. I made myself stare at a razor and prove that I had no desire to use it on my wrists. I reminisced about my grandfather. I ran through the coping mechanisms Jo and I have been setting up over the last year: breathing, visualization, muscle relaxation. I helped in the kitchen and monitored myself for any stray thoughts about alternative uses for knives.

Being home, with the warmth and support of my parents, was wonderful. For the first few days, anyway. I started feeling anxious because I wasn’t in Boston. I felt like I was running away and not facing my problems and not trying to effect change. Additionally, as the days progressed I realized I was dealing with a lot more than fear of suicidal thoughts.

One day I went into Target with my mother to browse through little things for my new apartment and lasted a grand total of 15 minutes before I could feel myself paling and flushing and sweating and starting to shake, with so many people around and so much merchandise. I don’t have any money, I can’t possibly afford this, I shouldn’t be in here, I have so many bills to pay, I have no income, I can’t even think about spending money, even this price is out of my reach.

One day my mother and aunt and I went to pick apples and stopped for lunch at a restaurant we’re familiar with. There was a fan running somewhere in the depths of the kitchen that thrummed with a deep reverberation that pressed against my ears. I was seated in a booth between my mother and a wall. For the first time in my life, I experienced claustrophobia. Then we went to the orchard and the money concerns returned - how much is this going to cost, please don’t ask me to go into the store, stop picking apples they’re charged by weight, this is too much money, we can’t possibly afford this.

The entire week was a sliding scale of anxiety. I was so tense my muscles protested every time I wiggled. My heart would race and my breathing would shallow at random, frequently without a recognizable trigger.
Even the small fluffy dog wasn’t the comfort I expected him to be. I laid on the sofa and he came up to curl up with me and nap and be petted and I absolutely freaked out because his weight on my stomach, a whopping nine pounds, restricted my breathing. After that experience I couldn’t lie on my stomach, either, I was so upset by the constriction.

I found comfort in a single distraction. I couldn’t focus enough to read, I couldn’t listen to anything attentively, I couldn’t watch television or movies because I cried every time something even remotely emotional happened. What I COULD do, and do obsessively, was study online flashcards and Japanese language tools. Friday, I spent five hours studying Japanese. It was the only period of calm I had felt in a week. It was the only calm I would feel for more than a month.

After a week of being home, my father and I convinced my mother to take me back to Boston. I had gotten to a point where I could be alone for an hour or so without panicking. There were the inevitable personality clashes between me and my mother. There were the added mental pressures of unhappy memories from my younger years, which were all I could think about in the absence of the friends who helped me get through grade school with my sanity intact. I wanted and needed to be back on my own turf, with plenty of good friends close by, a stone’s throw from my therapist.

Against her wishes, Mom drove me the six hours back to Boston that Sunday. She deposited me in my room in my new apartment and trundled unhappily off to claim a motel room; I’d made my need for personal space very clear. My perspective was thus: I have always been self-reliant and worked through my problems on my own. I need to be able to face…this…alone. It wasn’t the brightest of ideas to try to strike out alone quickly but it was necessary for me to have some space and room to think.

In any case, Luck or Fate or Irony was watching out for me, because the next day our power was shut off. For the next three days, I flipped back and forth between my mother’s hotel room and the apartment C and T were in the process of moving into. Being forced to spend time with other people was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do, but I was glad at the same time that I wasn’t facing long hours of solitude.

I had several measurable panic attacks each day. I would spend hours writing cover letters and sending out resumés, to give my nervous energy a focus, but my muscles were so tight that I ached every time I moved. It was a toss-up what would freak me out at any given time: the fear of putting myself out on the Internet in search of employment, close proximity to my mother’s intense concern, feeling like a trespasser in friends’ empty apartments, the thought of paying rent or buying food, or sheer physical pain. I spent a great deal of time hiding in bathrooms, making myself breathe deeply, forcing my hands to unclench, and in general present a façade of ability to cope to the world. I met with my therapist and barely had time in our hour together to spill out the events in my life, let alone touch upon the feelings I’d been experiencing.

When the power came back on in our apartment, three days later, I nearly cried with relief. Away from close quarters with Mom, out of the foreign space of other people’s new homes. I was almost giddy with the concept of something going right, finally. Unfortunately it meant that I had to go through the entire rollercoaster of need-space-don’t-want-to-be-alone-need-to-get-away-want-to-hole-up-and-hide again. It took another day to prove to my mother that I wasn’t about to go stark raving mad and leap out my third-floor window and that she could go home. It took much longer to prove it to myself.

I thank every higher power, every deity, every good thought anyone has ever had since time began, for my friends. I honestly don’t know what would have happened if I had been alone over the next few months, without people to call, spend time with, sit with, think about, cling to, and distract myself with.

I was an absolute mess. I found that I couldn’t be alone in the house for more than two hours. I was incapable of clearing my mind and focusing on one task or pursuit. Every minute, I wondered anew if this was the day, the hour, the minute I would lose my mind and do something horrible to myself. I saw my hands at the keyboard of my computer and noticed how fragile my wrists were, how thin the skin over the veins was. I sat up in bed and eyed the minute distance to the window. I stood on the balcony and realized that it would be no task at all to hop up onto, over, the railing. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water and there were long, sharp knives out in the open where anyone could get at them. I reached for painkillers and thought about how many there were in the bottle. I approached the stairs and measured up the distance to the landing, the corner, the floor.

My heart raced in my chest every moment of the day. I was incapable of breathing deeply. My stomach was eternally tight and fluttery with nervousness. Whenever I thought of death, dying, suicide, I trembled and grew nauseous. I sobbed intermittently, out of the blue, only realizing afterward as I curled myself into tight huddled positions that I’d had a fleeting thought of my grandfather’s incredibly blue eyes or the time he told me he was proud of me. I thought of how sad he’d be to see me struggling and felt I’d let him down.

My only escape was to seek out public spaces. “Public” is a powerful word in my vocabulary. If there’s anything I’ve inherited from my mother, it is her delineation between “public” and “private”. If you are in front of someone you do not share blood with and did not live with for at least ten years, you are in public. Even if you are in your own home, you must behave properly in public.

Leaving the house allowed me to step into a character: instead of terrified, grieving, overwhelmed Meg, I was simply quiet, sad, unemployed-but-looking Meg. In public, I had to maintain decorum. I had goals, which were to get some sort of work done and to demonstrate to anyone who might possibly be glancing around that I was capable of functioning as a normal human being. I considered each job search, each word typed into a thesis document, each second I spent in the nebulous “public eye” a small victory. Then I would come home, think about the five dollars I had just spent on coffee or a sandwich or something, and promptly dissolve into hysterics because I should not be spending money.

Just wandering around for the sake of merely being out of the house was little comfort. I constantly saw the possibility of cars hopping the curb and running me over. I pictured myself leaving the bus stop and walking into the middle of the road. I crossed bridges and wondered what it would feel like to throw myself over, to trip and fall down the embankment, to be pushed over the railing by someone rushing past and drown in that cold dark water.

Everything was dark. For weeks on end, I moved through a world tinged with stark shadow. I remember feeling my eyes squint and water against the autumn sun while I walked back from a café, but cannot recall seeing the light falling on trees and houses. I didn’t feel anything for longer than a moment; I could tell the breeze was in my hair but didn’t feel the chill, I could feel coffee burn my tongue but tasted nothing. I sat on benches, wandered nearby parks, took pictures of trees and foliage and water and clouds and remember almost none of it. Everything was filtered through hazy blackness and empty numbness.

To compound it all, I stopped taking my antidepressants completely. Every time I looked at the bottle, I thought, “These make people suicidal. These made me suicidal.” I shook at the mere thought of putting Prozac into my system. I called the woman who had prescribed it to me but couldn’t meet with her because I was no longer covered by the student health insurance. I tried, at her urging, to continue on a lower dosage but after a week the anxiety associated with swallowing those pills had me nauseous and unable to eat.

I started taking “things to do” with me when I went to hang out with my friends, just in case. They were watching a lot of television while hanging out, chatting, and having a couple of drinks. I was intensely grateful that everyone was spending so much time together, because it meant that I could curl up tight against someone and soak up the comfort and strength of their physical presence and affection, but I avoided the alcohol and could not handle the television. I recall T watching the first episode of Dexter on Netflix one night, while we were waiting for others to arrive. I recall thinking that it would be a miracle if I made it through the hour without dissolving into screaming tremors, there was so much blood and death and mental illness in that show. I managed to make it through the episode by reminding myself that I was in public and by trying to remember the Latin verb conjugations I hadn’t thought of in six years. And by driving my fingernails into the palm of my hand, at first involuntarily and then to give myself something, anything, else to think about.

That nails-in-palm experience opened up a new angle of horror. Just as I’d never understood the phenomenon of suicide, I’d never really understood the concept of self-harm. I’d had friends explain it to me, talk about their feelings and outlets and needs and actions, but I’d never been able to comprehend the urge. As soon as I crossed that barrier, I was fixated. I scratched at my itches, bit my lips, picked at pimples, and every step of the way I thought about how it might feel to dig deep and draw blood. How good it might feel. How badly it might hurt. How it would heal. How it could scar. How I might accidentally cut too deep and open a vein and bleed to death.

I never did it. I have to confess that more than once I wanted to, deeply and desperately. I wanted to make that choice and draw those lines and pull out the poison that was sitting in my heart. I wanted to externalize the pain and frustration and anguish and fear, to make the pain physical. Somehow I thought it would be easier to deal with, there on the surface. I never did it. I never knew what kept me from acting on those urges, fear of making a mistake and dying, fear of what would happen if others found out what I was doing, strength of character to face the urge and say no, strength of conviction that I was capable of dealing with my pain without being self-destructive. The reasons, the excuses, the triumphs, varied, but every morning I would wake up and be glad I was still whole.

September passed. October crept along. One day I made a calendar. There were good things coming in my life, things to look forward to. I wrote the dates in large letters. CHRISTMAS. UTADA HIKARU CONCERT. SISTER’S BRIDAL SHOWER. SISTER’S WEDDING. But then…what then? What happened after I hit the last milestone? I refused to think about it. These events were all months away.

I went out to eat with my friends. I applied to jobs. I did scholarly things. I had panic attacks over money, over unemployment, over impending loans, over health insurance, over Prozac, over my grandfather’s death, over songs that came up on iTunes that blithely mentioned death or depression or fear. When I couldn’t justify going out and spending more money of coffee or pestering someone yet again to babysit me, which was somewhat often, I clung to the people I knew online, seeing comfort and companionship with the friends I managed to cross paths with on Twitter or instant messenger, but I found I could only do obsessive or mindless things: apply to jobs until I hyperventilated, played flash games until I was cross-eyed, or study kanji and Japanese vocabulary until I could feel my brain leaking out through my ears. I couldn’t make myself relax enough to enjoy the things that had brought me together with most of my Internet friends, though, and I found myself unable to open conversations with them, to reply to journal entries, to comment on stories or join in discussions. I felt incapable of making worthwhile contributions, like I would be wasting people’s time with my ramblings. At the same time, I cherished every sentence, every joke, every picture, that was shared online. They were all tangible evidence that life continued, that things were going on, that there were interesting things happening that someday I might be able to enjoy for my own sake, again.

Small reprieves and tragedies came and went. I qualified for state health insurance. Loans went into repayment. Deferment applications cleared. I never heard back from places I interviewed. I started fighting against my very nature in order to let my friends know what I was dealing with and how I was on any given day. I signed up for a physical because I needed to be registered with a primary care physician in order to see a psychopharmacologist. I went to therapy, I started taking a new antidepressant, I was approved for leave from grad school, I went home for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was important. I needed to see my family’s dynamic. I had actually spent a morning kneeling on the floor in a pile of laundry that wasn’t getting folded, sharing a breakthrough with my father over the phone: my entire life, my concept of family identity has stemmed from my family being old. Not that we can trace our roots to the Black Prince’s court, which we can, but that we’re long lived. One both sides of my family, people either died before 60 or lived to be ancient. I had three paternal great-grandparents living during my youth, the last of whom passed away when I was a sophomore in college. My maternal grandmother was in her 80s when she passed, which was a little young for my mom’s family, but my dad’s family either drops dead at 56 or toddles on into triple digits.

My grandfather was the last. The last of these ageless, permanent fixtures in my childhood. Regardless of his failing health, his frailty, his wrinkles and age spots and stiffness, I thought he’d be around for another 20 years. He had been the patriarch of my family for longer than I’d been alive and I simply couldn’t fathom how the family would function without him. The week of the funeral, there had been so many fights and so much blame interwoven with the love and support and togetherness, that my concept of the cohesive family had been shaken far deeper than I’d realized.

Thanksgiving marked the first big step in improvement. As stressful as it was for me to cram into a room with my insanely large, insanely loud, insane family, it was a relief and pleasure to see that my family hadn’t fallen apart and were still zany and warm and opinionated and full of mirth and humor. It also made me realize something strange and frightening and very important to my understanding of my own issues: whenever I had spells of thinking of death or self-harm, I never gave a thought to my family or friends, it was always entirely about me. My concept of self-harm went from “how could someone do that to their loved ones” to “me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” Complete 180°, and suddenly I had a signpost by which I could measure my thoughts and assert, “These thoughts of hurting myself are not me!”

Just as important as seeing my family was seeing someone who is part of the family I’ve chosen for myself. Em-chan offered the passenger seat of her car to me for the trip home, if I could get myself on the commuter train to meet up with her. The drive home was cathartic and comfortable and the best thing that could have happened to me at that point. Em and I have known each other in some form literally our entire lives; we’ve known each fairly well for almost twenty years and she’s been one of my dearest friends for more than half of that time. Having our history and our connections made talking with her during that ride more impactful than anything my family, other friends, and even therapist had said to me.

Things improved throughout December. Slowly, oh so slowly, but a steady incline. My constant feelings of panic abated bit by agonizing bit. A staffing agency I’d rostered with in October afforded me two weeks of proctoring exams, which was something I never thought I’d be so happy to do, and the tiny bit of income from that helped ease the anguish I'd been feeling over living completely off of my parents, something I hadn’t done since my sophomore year of high school. I started this post, trying to face my breakdown and come to terms with the general hysteria that I’d been experiencing.

Thanks to my pre-Thanksgiving conversation with Em-chan, it finally began to sink in that I have been a victim of poor timing and economic circumstance, and that my unemployment did not reflect failure or inability. After six months of searching for a job, I finally started to not hate myself for not having one. And then there were the setbacks: new loans came due, loans that had been sold and transferred so many times I’d lost track of the deferments, and I received a letter saying that I hadn’t sent in a form and would lose my health insurance.

Christmas was hard. For the first time ever, my sister did not come home for the holidays. She stayed in California with her fiancée and his family and although the video chats were frequent and the phone calls almost constant, it was incredibly strange and very lonely to be the only one sitting on the floor by the tree. It was weird to sit around the tree at the big family event and not hear my grandfather churning out bawdy R-rate versions of carols. It was hard to tell everyone that I was still unemployed, hard to face people who may or may not have known about what I’d been going through, or how severe it had been.

I was still having trouble with the concept of death and particularly suicide. “I was so embarrassed, I just wanted to die,” someone would say. Another would comment, “Someone, shoot me now.” Each and every time, my breath caught in my chest and my heart began to pound. The nice thing about large families is that there’s so much going on at any one time that you can almost always slip away before anyone even realizes you’re gone.

I was able to meet up with Maui and her sister. We talked and talked and talked and they asked about what I’d been going through and we got caught up on each others’ lives and we laughed and debated and empathized and it was proven to me again how much stronger I am with good, long-time friends around me. Maui and Sid are goodness embodied and spending a few scant hours with them did more for my spirits than any number of hours in therapy.

The brightest moment of the season, though, came when Em-chan and TW and I met for tea the next evening. I hadn’t seen TW in six years. Six long, impossible years. TW was the first person I ever knew of who struggled with emotions and problems similar to my own. Seeing her after so long was like coming home in a way I didn’t know I’d been missing.

Of all of my friends, Em-chan, TW and Maui are the sisters I have chosen for myself, the ones with whom I’ve shared the most and who mean the most to me, although we haven’t seen each other much or even emailed frequently over the years. Finally getting to see all of them eased a deep part of psyche that had been lonely, starved for the history and memories and clarity we've all shared over the years. Just as with Em during Thanksgiving, what Maui and TW had to say struck me far more deeply and truly than anything from other sources.

Christmas also racked me with guilt, though. I couldn’t afford gifts for anyone. Gift giving is one of my greatest pleasures in life and it tore at me to be empty-handed. It was a horrible feeling, receiving so many things from people and not being able to return the gesture. Frankly, it sucked. It poked at that sense of failure and worthlessness that had been so slowly receding.

I fled from home as soon as I could. I needed to escape my mother’s smothering combination of concern for me and loneliness for my sister. As much as I wanted to spend more time with my old friends, I’d bought the earliest train ticket I could - New Year’s Eve - and was desperate to get back to the city. I needed my chosen ground, my group of boisterous friends, my distance from my mother’s concern and hovering.

January brought an increased dosage of medication. With it came a spate of almost manic activity. I cooked, I pulled out fabric and worked at a quilt, I cleaned, I organized, I pretty much climbed the walls. It felt so good to be able to do things again, to be able to turn my energies to a focus on a whim. I was making real, measurable emotional progress! Most relieving, from my personal perspective, was the sudden realization that I hadn’t thought of scratching myself, of drawing my own blood, in weeks.

Then one day, as I stood before the bathroom mirror holding my toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, I thought, “What would people think of me if I committed suicide? What would they say? Would I be one of those tragic figures everyone mourns as a waste of talent or one of those shocking I-never-saw-it-coming-she-wasn’t-the-type suicides?” And then I thought, “Oh my god, I’m romanticizing suicide!”

I took myself firmly in hand, gave myself a mental shake, pointed out to myself that “romanticizing” was not really what I had been doing, and reminded myself of what my psychopharmacologist and therapist had been telling me for weeks: my obsessive compulsive tendencies had transferred themselves to the concept of death and suicide and those thoughts were not my desires and true feelings. I took a deep breath, pulled my shit together, and thought about the things on my calendar to look forward to. “If I can make it to the concert, it’ll all be okay. I just have to get through to my sister’s bachelorette party. Once my sister’s wedding is over, it’ll all be okay.”

SPOILER ALERT…Well, shit, son. Way to set yourself up for failure.

I went to my temp work project, I had the occasional meal with my friends. I had a bland routine and never strayed from it. Before I knew it UTADA was days away. Riha went to a show in Chicago and I read about the show and was glad she got to go. I made a playlist of UTADA’s songs and listened on repeat. The morning of the show came and I took my ticket from its place on my bedroom wall and went to work. I chatted, I joked, I smiled and conversed and worked determinedly and went home and switched off my public!persona and slumped in my desk chair. I felt no more excitement, no more emotion, than I would have if I were a robot. No excitement, no anticipation.

The concert itself was amazing. Going through work, getting dinner, standing in line, waiting in the crowded club, I felt nothing. But the music started and swept me up and Hikki sang her songs to a rock band, not a pop synth track, and I loved every minute of it and I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun listening to music and let it take me from myself. I sang along, I punched the air, I even made it through that damned “I’m a bear” song without punching myself in the face. I loved that concert.

Then the show was over and it was the next day and I was telling myself, “I just have to live through next week, I just have to get to California, I just have to make it a few more days.” No excitement, no anticipation. Enthusiasm would rear its head when someone asked me about the concert, but the topic of conversation would fade and I’d go back to “Just have to make it a few more days, just a few more days, the next event is in a few more days.” No excitement, no anticipation.

Once again I shuddered away from any thoughts, songs, conversations, and what-have-yous that mentioned death, dying, suicide. I decided to do some light reading, some flippant and meaningless and rollicking. I grabbed HM!S’s copy of Jim Butcher’s Turn Coat, since the Dresden Files have been so entertaining to me over the years and so much fun to read. I nestled into my papasan chair, read half a chapter, and could read no more. I couldn’t even read for fun! The stark circumstances of Butcher’s hero, the darkness of the enemies he was once again facing, the fear and pain and anguish his characters were already feeling just a few pages in, were far more than I could handle.

The day before I was to fly to San Francisco, I picked up my calendar. I flipped to the end of April. I looked at the date for my sister’s wedding. I turned the page, turned a few more, flipped through until I found my birthday. I looked at it blankly. I’d made a note in bright, cheerful red, “The big quarter century!” I looked at it some more. The words meant nothing.

And then I all but convulsed. My concept of time ended after April 24th. For months, I’d been living my life for the sake of these far-off engagements, things that were ages away and surely my life would be in order by the time they arrived. Here I was in the midst of these huge events and I still had no job and I was still a mess and I was just moving mechanically from one to another and there were only a handful of Big Important Dates To Remember. After the last milestone, what would I have to live for?

All the conversations I had had with people over the previous few months, all the progress I’d made, all my problems, all my issues, contracted and imploded and left me exploding in an hysterical eruption of grief, panic, disappointment, and the crushing sense that I had lost my concept of myself.

I’ve often told people that, if they wish to know about me, they should read the Tao Te Ching. Since my first nervous breakdown, in middle school, the Tao has been what formed my method of viewing and dealing with the world. Suddenly, here I was, more than a decade later, and all of a sudden I was discovering that over the course of several months I had not only forgotten my worldview but in fact turned around and started absorbing life in a fashion absolutely opposite my guiding philosophy.

That little revelation was two steps forward, three steps back. I had identified a problem and could begin to rectify it and it was very manageable. But it heralded in an extremely difficult weekend, days spent in tight quarters with my Type-A personality sister and her Type-A personality friends who are all cheerful, driven, energetic, wonderful people. I spent the days feeling awkward, fat, childish, unsuccessful, overcrowded, nervous, irresponsible, and exhausted. I was so far out of my comfort zone that I made more than one trip to the bathroom just to lean against the wall and gasp for air and try to calm myself from the edge of tears.

Through it all, there was my sister with her huge smile and her laugh and her obvious joy at the occasion and her happiness at seeing us all together again, in spite of her obvious distress at the state of her apartment and her frustrations with the scheduling and the inevitable stresses of being around our mother. She went above and beyond the call of sisterhood, doing her best to make sure I was okay and comfortable and letting me know how glad she was that I had come and she made all the anxiety and the stress bearable. And then I promptly felt like a gigantic heel, a kill-joy jerk, for being such a grumpy guss during her weekend.

Seconds after I finally returned to Boston, I discovered that I’d been pms-ing in addition to my persistent emotional baggage, so that was fun. I got to add “stupid” to the list of things I was feeling about myself, because really, who doesn’t recognize at twenty-four the signs of their cyclic imbalances starting up? I’d even been tracking the days and knew it should be coming soon.
Moving on, we come to now.

It is now April. I have calmed considerably, having spent long hours trembling and crying as I tried to face these memories and write down my experiences in a manner that was both candid and not melodramatic. I don’t ever want to forget how this has felt, this entire horrible, horrifying, terrifying rollercoaster, because I don’t ever want to feel so afraid of my own psyche. I am still struggling with severe depression, even through my antidepressants, and I’m planning on calling my psychopharm soon and seeking her opinion on another dosage increase. I’ve continued meeting with my therapist at periodic intervals, as schedules and money have permitted, striving to believe her when she points out how well I’m doing facing these things and that my very fear that I’m becoming actually crazy is evidence that I am, in fact, not.

I have glossed over a lot of details, a huge number of short-lived events that had me convinced the world was about to end for one reason or another. I’ve left out most of the little details that have made me so thankful for all of my friends online, without whom I’m fairly certain I would have either done something drastic - like move back home just to be Not Alone - or died of sheer boredom when I could no longer stand staring at my walls and hoping for a dribble of insight.

Two people in particular have been there for me every day, no matter what time I went crazy or what topic I’d picked to lose my mind over. My father put up with more phone calls than I care to admit to and poor Ciara was constantly running interception on my bursts of anxiety and tears whenever I was my computer. My dad still reassures me that I am crazy but just not in bad ways and Ciara has put up with even more whining than he has and still hasn’t blocked my gchat account, which in and of itself qualifies that girl for sainthood.

As things stand right now, I’m still unemployed and working in temporary contracting positions. I haven’t touched my thesis or research since the end of October. Every once in a while I have a day when I can listen to sad music without freaking out, a day when I suddenly can’t handle some trigger my brain picks at random and lashes out violently at, a day when all I want to do is lie in bed and hide, or a day when going for a long walk in the sunshine and just hearing the birds and the traffic is the most fulfilling experience I’ve ever had. I’m highly prone to being fine while at work, having a focus and goal and feeling like my energy means something, then coming home and crumpling into a slouch of gloomy, listless, baleful negativity.

Keeping an eye on Twitter and scanning people’s journals is still largely the extent of my contact with people online and my friends here in Boston have mostly quieted down to weekly dinner dates, but I’m finally started to feel less like I need to hide in my shell. The months of fighting against my years of self-imposed training about not letting people know how I feel are paying off, as evidenced by the fact that I’m going to post this entire beastly diatribe on my blog, out in the wilds, of teh intarwbzorz, even though I couldn’t bring myself to post anything for the majority of the past seven months.

I’m still prone to crying when I think of my grandfather but I’m no longer afraid that my family will fall apart, I still have the occasional wave of icy cold fear when my thoughts brush against death-related thoughts - I had one earlier today when I found myself pondering what people would say if I weren’t here - and my room is once more in its semi-perpetual state of what-bomb-went-off-and-holy-crap-how-can-a-human-being-live-like-this. In a shocking turn from the last several years, I haven’t cleaned the bathroom more than a handful of times since moving into this apartment and HM!S has been very tolerant of my moodiness. I’m still sixty-some thousand dollars in debt, my health insurance is still likely to change without notice, and I’m still not sure what I’ll find to do with my time after my sister’s wedding and once my current temp project reaches the end of its run.

And my skipping ahead to the present has made me rambling and wordy and I’ve lost my train of thought several times.

The holy-fuck-this-is-long;didn't-read of it is: I had a severe nervous breakdown in September and have been withdrawn and...jittery, for lack of a better word, about absolutely everything. I have a level of trauma associated with variants on the words "death" and "suicide" and at the same time I have developed an obsession with those concepts because my brain is a fun place.

I'm working at it.

I'm sorry to anyone to whom I've been distant (which, honestly, is pretty much the entire world) and I promise I'm working at that, too.