Montreal Walks for Mental Health

This year was Montreal Walks for Mental Health's sixth year in existence, and my second year participating. I'd seen a segment about it on the news three years ago, and immediately began following the event on social media so I could join the next one. I sincerely hope I'm able to participate every year, and not just because they give walkers these truly awesome hats!

This year, I was able to double the number of people I convinced to walk with me. Double! On the surface, this sounds impressive and speaks wonders of my charisma and persuasive skill. This would all be true, except for the fact that the number of people who came out to walk with me was two.

Two.

I posted extensively on social media about the event, and about other mental health topics in the weeks leading up to the walk. I posted mass invites on facebook, and personally asked a couple of people I feel really close to if they would come with me. The posts where I told everyone I was going and invited them to come with me got only 8 'likes.' None of the people I singled out came -- some because they couldn't, others because they didn't want to. While I did have an encouraging number of private responses, most of those who were trying to make it ran into personal conflicts and ultimately weren't able to attend.

I have 402 friends on facebook, all of whom have seen my re-posts about mental health over the years. Of those 402 people, 1 person said the walk wasn't worth going to because we wouldn't be spending any time alone, 3 planned to come and couldn't make it, 1 wished she could come so much that she shared my invitation with all of her friends (with my permission!), and 2 actually came. 

Two.

The point of the walk is to stand up together against the stigma surrounding mental illness. We all know the tangible effects that stigma and discrimination can have: unemployment and underemployment, lack of adequate housing, fragile and non-existent social networks, loss of opportunity, loss of friends and family, food insecurity, looks of disdain, refusal of service...the list goes on. As for me, I am fortunate to have never experienced life-shattering stigma, to have never run up against that wall. While I've had my fair share of people tell me they don't believe in medication (including my mother who habitually refers to it as 'a crutch' and a graduate thesis supervisor who approved my leave of absence specifically so I could stop taking pills), or who believe that I will get better if I just try harder, the way that stigma has hurt me the most is actually in its silence.

I feel stigma in the silence of other people surrounding my illness. Over the years, my depression has been dismissed by family members as 'not that bad,' even though we've never spoken about what it's like for me. In the decade since I first became acutely ill, my mother has not read any literature on depression, suicide, or trauma. Depression, and its ongoing effects in my life, is never discussed, except in the weekly complaints that I kept a prescription light box on the family's kitchen table so I could use it every morning. 

I feel stigma in the way that people avoid talking about mental illness. The informational posts I share are the kind of thing people seem to skip over in their newsfeeds. Perhaps, like me, they worry that if they display too much of an interest people will begin, on that basis, to assume they must be mentally ill.

I feel stigma in the way that inappropriate language and misinformation about mental illness is silently accepted. Over the past few years, I've occasionally scattered my speech with ridiculous mental-health terms, hoping that someone will call me on it. A thing can be 'psychotic,' 'schizophrenic,' 'bipolar,' 'crazy,' or 'retarded.' I have never, not even once, had anyone tell me off for using offensive and discriminatory language (though I've certainly done it to others!). When I complain that news media have reported a story in a misleading and discriminatory way, people respond by changing the topic, with non-committal sounds, or by defending the newscaster. We have come to accept the misuse of words and misinformation as part of our social fabric, in the face of which we, as a society, are largely silent.

I feel stigma the most in my own personal silence. Although I was quite outspoken about my struggle with trauma and depression years ago, and was able to use those experiences to help other people, over time I've become hesitant to share these details about myself. When I began a new university degree, I decided to tell as few people as possible about my history of mental illness. Part of that was wanting to make a new start after having tried to kill myself again. Part of that was related to taking on new roles in church leadership and preparing for a more public ministry within my Christian life. Part of it was shame that, after years of helping other people with their illnesses, I could no longer convincingly tell a story of my own recovery.

In terms of employment, my manager does not know I have depression. My absence was coordinated with disability and HR, so none of the people I actually report to are aware of the circumstances of my medical leave. While negotiating flexible hours to accommodate group therapy (which should be starting soon!), I implied to my manager that the group is about my chronic headaches. I write this blog, all about my experiences living with depression, but the link is not posted anywhere on my social media because I'm afraid it might get back to the office inadvertently through friend-colleagues.

I feel like a hypocrite because, while I talk about ending mental-health discrimination, I keep my own illness wrapped in a carefully guarded silence. I do it because I'm afraid to ruin my career in a competitive, target-based work environment where failure to succeed is not tolerated. I do it because I am afraid I'll be seen as a liability in an office where taking your full 10 sick days in a year is tacitly considered unacceptable, unprofessional, and detrimental to the team. I do it because, on my very first day of employment, I asked about using sick days for mental health reasons and was told that for mental health days we have to use our vacation. And I do it because, as someone who longs to dedicate her life to working with other people as part of her church ministry, I understand all too painfully that disclosing my mental illness makes it unlikely that I will ever be entrusted with authority; depression makes me 'unstable,' and my honesty has meant that I am not considered a good candidate for ministry.

So yes, I do feel the stigma. I wonder to myself if people skip over my profile posts about mental health because we are more comfortable not talking about it. I wonder if I would have gotten more likes or more participation if I had asked people to join me for Light the Night. And I feel the stigma in the relationship of my own speech about mental health awareness to my silence about my own illness.

I went to Montreal Walks for Mental Health and I was proud to stand with people who are fighting stigma by speaking out, hopeful that one day I, too, will no longer feel the need to protect myself with silence. 

Oh, Hello Failure: On Sucking at your Job

To be fair, I am excellent at half of my job. The half that involves me typing things into a computer all day, classifying documents at light speed, and verifying that the numbers the computer has lifted are, in fact, the correct ones. (In unrelated news, the computer could not spell the name 'Robert' if its life depended on it. Seriously, sometimes it thinks there are j's in there! But I digress.) I think I got good at this job by going to graduate school and learning to read things quickly without really reading them: looking at forms and documents all day is really not that different from skimming 17 articles on short-term spatial memory in order to figure out which ones will be helpful for the experiment you're designing.

It's the other half that I suck at. Part of my job involves removing claims from their envelopes, flattening and un-stapling all the papers, deciding whether or not anything needs to be taped back together again or shouldn't even be in our office, and then putting it all on a roller conveyor belt so that it can be 'scanned' into image files by this big-ass machine. The images are then dropped into our proprietary computer programs so we can manipulate them, which is what I do the rest of the time.

The machine jams. It hates cash receipts. Sometimes it randomly rips things in half as it's depositing scanned items on one of its trays. It gets dirty and scrawls ink lines all over documents. God forbid you have to change the imprinting cartridge and planned on having ink-free hands that day. Machines will sometimes stop working for no apparent reason, or refuse to start at all. If you're me, you'll drop the back door of the machine on your own hand while trying to pull a stuck document out. Occasionally they'll make annoying or horrifying noises that refuse to go away. People swear smoke was coming out of the back of one once! 

Sometimes people fold their mail up as tiny as possible, while others staple every document in triplicate. Setting up the documents to be scanned is the longest part of the job. Unfold, un-staple, stuff into machine, repeat.

I've gotten a little better at controlling my frustration when the machine is acting up. I do all the right things: I take the oldest mail first, I share the gigantic envelopes so one person doesn't get stuck with them all, and I move as fast as I possibly can. This is a production environment, so every task we do is based on numbers and speed. I work my hardest all day, and leave the office exhausted and aching from making the same motions over and over. But the numbers don't lie: I just don't measure up.

On Thursday, I put 5,772 pieces of paper through my machine. 5,721 count as scanned: the difference comes from documents I had to scan more than once either because a processing error occurred, the document got jammed in the machine, or I put it in badly and it looked horrible. My average jamsort time was 2 seconds, which means when something went wrong between the machine and a document, that's how long it took me to fix it. This doesn't take into account envelopes I opened that turned out to be in the wrong department, the entirely wrong company, or contained 3-D objects or x-rays.

On the face of it, that doesn't seem too bad. But we measure our production by envelopes, or what we call 'transactions.' An envelope with three documents stapled once is one transaction. An envelope with 50 documents stapled a million times with coffee spilled on them is one transaction. I scanned 846 transactions. The daily target for each person on scan is 1,000. A thousand! I've never made the target, not even once!

I can't tell you how bad it feels to be hopeful all day about how well you're doing, going your fastest, trying to make every image look its best while staying a step ahead of yourself, swallowing painkillers during your break to try and decrease the upper-back-ache that goes along with scanning, massaging the stabbing heat in your un-stapling wrist, and then pulling up your stats at the end of the shift and seeing how you failed.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't inherently believe I'm good. Either that I'm a good person in general, or that I'm good at specific things. I need that feedback. I can't seem to generate it on my own. The part of me that pats myself on the back has gone on vacation and gotten lost.

I am always so hopeful that today will be the day I scan a thousand transactions. Today will be that day. But then I get my numbers, and it never quite happens. It doesn't matter how good the mail was, how much of a rhythm I felt I got into, or how little I had to take breaks to go pee: I just can't seem to make it. Every day, I get the feedback that I am not good at my job, that I am failing. And the next day, when I'm back at the computer where I have a chance, I'll get my error messages informing me of how many mistakes I made the day before. A document might have been folded. It might have gone in crooked so information got cut off. It might not have supposed to have been scanned at all. The error target is 4 per month. I can do that, and more!, in a bad day.

I'm not used to constantly failing because I tend to quit things that consistently make me feel bad -- yes, I am a quitter! I've quit relationships, hobbies, and sports because they made me unhappy, and a lot of the time that unhappiness came from just not being suited to the tasks. But I can't quit my job, even if I suck at it. 

I'm not sure why I'm so bad at it, but I hate the feeling of wanting to not care, of wanting to quit trying my best, of failing to succeed when so many people have assured me I can do it. At the start of another day, there's nothing left to do but take a deep breath, turn on the machine, and try my best knowing that it won't be good enough.

And it makes me sad.  

I Can Has Internet!!!! (Or, rejoining the land of the living)

Well, I finally moved out of my parents’ house into my own place, which was a milestone for me not only because at the age of 31 I’ve never had the opportunity to live on my own and be truly independent, but because I’ve never moved in my life. Ever. Yes, that’s right, lived in the same room in the same house, always.

I meant to blog about this whole process, but in the upheaval and overwhelmingness of all that was going on, I totally forgot that the internet can’t be magically and instantly delivered to your dwelling. A shame, really.

It was a long, drawn-out process because I hired movers for the first day I could take off work – July 11^th – but really wanted to move in before. So I had all my Ikea furniture, including a bed that was a nightmare to put together (apparently), delivered the Saturday before, and my family helped me build it. Well, my family built it while I washed dishes and then lay helplessly on the floor, curled into a fetal position when faced with the enormity of what I’d done. I mean, I made my family build a crap-ton of Ikea furniture together: it was a nightmare.

I’m the kind of person who hates change. My life is carefully structured into tiny and large routines that govern my days, everything from what coffee cup I use any given morning of the week to how I do my makeup, what I eat, what time I get up in the morning, to how and when I pay my bills, the kinds of jobs I apply for, and the rhythm of my days. I like routine, and structure. Sure, I make allowances for when things inevitably don’t go as planned, but when I’m facing huge adjustments I’m an absolute nightmare to be around. I run the gamut from sobbing hysterically, to withdrawing and shutting down, to hiding under the kitchen table only to be bribed out with jars of peanut butter.

When I was about to start kindergarten, my stress drove my brother so batty he moved out of our shared room and into his own space in the basement.

Anyways, this whole moving-into-my-own-apartment thing was a really, really big change. I spent every night the first week crying. The first day was particularly distressing because, even though I had a bed, I didn’t have a table or chairs, so I ate dinner sitting on the hardwood floor balancing my plate on a stepping-stool. I admit, the thought ‘what in God’s name have I done?’ crossed my mind a few times.

I had a difficult moment in my first week, when the Douglas hospital called me to say I was eligible for maintenance treatment one week a month, every day, for six months, the thought being that I would benefit by seeing an increased duration to the effect of treatment and a possible delay of recurrence. Unfortunately, none of this was included in any of my return-to-work medical papers, so I had to turn it down because I can’t afford the two-week exclusion period that comes with a new claim.

To be honest, I’m lucky my health insurance is so good that I don’t have to choose between food and medication. Please remind me not to lose my job!

I struggled in the middle of the first week when I unpacked a bottle of Remeron that I’m not taking anymore (but, of course, I hoard medication I’ve stopped taking). When I cried at my desk at work Wednesday morning, I reflexively dumped them all on the desk and counted whether or not I had enough to kill myself with if I needed to.

I know that having my own space, my own independence, control over my own life, is a stepping-stone in the direction of changes in myself that I need desperately. But, for today, I’m still battling to live with my dragons.

Clipping My Face On: Getting Back to Work

Every day when I leave for work, I'm secretly afraid that I've forgotten my ID at home. Not so much because I wouldn't be able to get into the office - I'm sure someone would let me in eventually - but because all the women's bathrooms in the building are pass-key enabled to make us more secure. I just can't hold it that long.

But I digress. 

Now that I'm finished rTMS treatment, I've started back at work full-time, though admittedly without the ability to control all metal objects in my vicinity with magnetic superpowers like I was promised. 

I was thinking about it on the way to the train Monday morning, and I realized this would be my first five-day work week since I went into hospital in January. I was nervous, to be sure, but also excited. Not disabled any more!!!  I felt like shouting! Of course, that would entail that people in my office knew why I'd been out...presumably they've been thinking I was kidnapped by aliens? 

The week seemed especially long and insurmountable from the perspective of Monday because I knew I'd be working late on Friday, every week, to make up the time I miss on Tuesday to go to my psychologist appointments. I discussed taking the time unpaid, but my manager made it subtly clear that it was either the opportunity to give the time back every week or using up vacation time. Given that I've spent, like, twelve weeks on sick leave this year (holy crap!!), this seemed fair.

I was all set to make this a post about look how awesome I am, I'm completely better, I went back to work full-time and it was great! There are ways that this is true: I was tired, but it was a normal tired. I'm moving at a normal speed. I'm making good production statistics in my data handling jobs, and I didn't do too badly my first day back on the industrial scanning machine. I was all like I am a success story!! Haha psychiatrists who thought I was pinning too much hope on neuromodulation! I was still having mood fluctuations, but I was so, so much better.

This is true.

But there are ways that this is not true. 

Today was my second day using the scanner this week, and my day started out poorly. I had an insurmountable system error at the first machine I tried to work at, and I couldn't manage to fix it using the process notes. In the end, I had to change machines and ended up beginning to scan late. As I tried over and over to fix my machine, I felt like putting my head down on the desk and weeping, or walking out the door and never coming back. The machine I moved to is not built for someone as small as I am, so I couldn't reach anything. The stacker door slammed on my hand as I was retrieving a document that got lodged in the gears of the machine. Everything was slowing me down, and I knew I'd never make my production target for the day. I was near hysterical tears. I was all like, everything was going so well, and I'm messing it all up, with my moods and my failures. I was thinking, thank goodness I have those xacto knives in my bag, I can go slice up my arms during lunch, or maybe I'll wait until I get home where all my bandaids are, because I shouldn't get blood on people's documents. 

And I was thinking, why aren't I better?

I've always been...something of an extreme person when it comes to myself. I'm very forgiving and flexible with other people, compassionate even, but I just can't tolerate my own failures and weakness. Maybe because I just have so darn many of them. I need to be the fastest, the smartest, the best. And, for a lot of my life, I have been. I expect nothing less than perfection. And isn't my recovery just one more thing to be perfect about, all in one swift go? I want a gold star on my exam, goddamit!

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not all one thing or another, but a shading and blending of both. I am a lot better. The right treatment has broken depression's crushing grip and I feel like I can breathe again. I am better. But I'm still fragile. My emotions are out of kilter. Sometimes things are too bright, and I feel that edge that comes on when everything is going too fast, when I'm thinking too fast, and moving too fast, and I feel like any moment it's going to spin out of my grasp in a million different directions, and all I want is to stand still. 

I've been sick for at least twelve years. I've accumulated ways of thinking and behaviors that are fundamentally maladapted to living a healthy life. I'm not sure I know how to live a healthy life. There are things I need to learn, and things I need to unlearn, and it's going to be a lot of work, and take a lot of patience, and demand a self-compassion that I still need to discover. I am finally in a place where I am well enough to start doing that work, instead of just treading water or trying to dig myself out of crisis. 

Just because I almost burst out crying at my work station doesn't mean I am not better. It doesn't mean I should give up on moving toward wellness. In the end, no one else could fix the machine either, and my manager had me switch stations with somebody taller so I wouldn't hurt myself. My day got better, and so did my mood. I left the office exhausted and hopeful. 

I am frightened by how much I'm affected when things go wrong. By how fragile my mood is, by how weak and vulnerable I feel. And that's okay. It doesn't mean I'm hopelessly sick. It means I'm human.

And there is so much more that I can grow.