Who We Are

Because of the nature of this blog - and in fact much of what I've written on the topic of mental illness over the years - I sometimes start to sound like a combination of broken-record and one-dimensionality. The truth is that I am so much more than this illness. I am not just depression. I am not just trauma survivor. I am not just chronic illness. These things have shaped the person I am today. These are things I have sometimes desperately concealed and sometimes spoken about in detail and at length. I think this is an important topic to open up about and, for me personally, a conversation that I need to have with myself and with others. But depression is not the sum of who I am, even when I am sunk so far in its depths that I can't move and can't breathe and can't feel anything else.

We are not just schizophrenics, or borderlines, or bipolars, or anoretics. We are not just antisocials, or anxious, or autistic, or alcoholics. We are people. People with hopes, and quirks, and struggles, and passions. We are people who love, who hate, and who are indifferent. We are teachers, and mechanics, and assembly line workers, and doctors. We are artists, and appreciators of art.

There are a number of art installations on the grounds of the Douglas, placed there for employees, patients, and visitors to enjoy. Here are some of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

My Pink Tree Is Pink

This will be my last year with my pink tree since I'm moving this summer, and I'm really going to miss it. Please enjoy these pictures!!

All Around Me: Travelling To and From the Douglas

One of the things that's true about living in a suburb on the North Shore of Montreal is that I'm really, really far away from pretty much everything I want to get to. This is especially true of my daily journey to the Douglas hospital, because it's in Verdun and itself pretty far away from everything else.

Luckily, the Douglas and its surrounding area are unbelievably beautiful.

The hospital faces some sort of body of water and the view is absolutely spectacular. This comes in handy if I've decided to walk either to or from the hospital. It's calming to look at the water while I wait for a bus, especially when the wait is a long one.

The Douglas grounds themselves are expansive and park-like. I can wander around, have a picnic, practice yoga in the shade. I love the smell and feel of the grass, the openness, the quiet, the chance to disconnect from a hectic, crowded, and noisy urban world.

I'm so grateful to have this space and this time, especially since treatment leaves me feeling incredibly drained and exhausted. I love looking at the beautiful trees and discovering the world around me. I feel like, in the middle of my days dedicated to my disease and its management, I have found a space just for being.

There is so much more to health than just the minimization or absence of illness. 

I get to the hospital much in advance of my daily treatments (because public transit is a fickle beast, sometimes), and it gives me an opportunity to be with the world around me. Over and over, I find myself thinking how lucky I am, which isn't something I've felt much of in the past years. It's amazing what impact being surrounded by natural beauty can have.

I'm not saying you should have all your future family picnics out on the grounds of the Douglas, but if you'd like to join me in sitting on the grass during my last week of treatment, you'd be more than welcome to share this time and space with me.

Hansel and Gretel: They Ate that House

One day, a little boy and a little girl found themselves lost in the woods due to some negligent parenting and a couple of hungry birds. Their names were Hansel and Gretel: it doesn't really matter which one was which. In the course of their increasingly desperate wanderings, they stumbled upon a house made entirely out of candy and gingerbread and sprinkles and all sorts of deliciousness. Having been inadvertently raised by the media to blindly accept things as they are (rather than wondering 'why is there a house made out of candy?', or, 'why did our parents leave us alone in these dreadful woods, anyway?'), they immediately began to eat the house. They kept eating the house until the entire house was gone. They weren't thinking that now they'd have no shelter against a dark and stormy night. They weren't thinking of pacing themselves and saving the windowsills for morning. They weren't thinking that maybe someone lived in the house and would be perturbed at finding it, suddenly, reduced to crumbs.

After a while, they weren't even hungry. But eating the house was comforting somehow, probably because it was so sweet. So they ate the entire house, fondant foundation and all. And then they had horrible tummy-aches, ran around the forest until they crashed and burned, and felt absolutely wretched. They also, more than anything else, craved even more house.

Which is sort of similar to what happened to me after I had my Birthday followed by Easter and ate all the chocolate in the universe. ALL THE CHOCOLATE!!! I started small, with an egg or two, and eventually went into a tailspin where no confection within a 12-mile radius was safe. It was ugly.

Now, I'm not a complete moron: I've done my research, or at least I have done, in the past, when I wasn't so lazy and slow-witted as I am today. I know that eating a healthful diet high in fruits, vegetables, and lean protein and good fats, while being low in refined sugar and over-processed carbohydrates, is relevant to staving off recurring episodes of depression. I know that it makes me better able to weather the lows, though not the extreme ones. I especially know that even though eating much less sugar than I'm used to does sweet-fuck-all to cure my depression, it certainly makes me less cranky, less exhausted, and overall less gross-feeling.

I started my tailspin this fall, when I stopped being hungry and tried to stave off extreme weight loss by consuming sweet sweet Starbucks frappucinos. I continued my tailspin when I started taking a medication that leaves me feeling pretty much constantly hungry no matter how much food I eat. I could eat an entire box of cereal and still keep going strong. I've always been one of those people who understands that psychiatric medications can cause weight gain, and who in theory thinks it's more important to have your illness under control than it is to be thin.

But God-dammit, I've gained more than 10% of my body weight!!

So, anyway, I decided when I got out of the hospital that I should go back on my holistic health kick of yore, and stop eating so much gosh-darned crap. And, you know, I had less meltdowns. But, one thing led to another. Maybe I was working too much, maybe it's because my sleep started to get worse again, but my depression -- easier to deal with when that was the only thing I had to do all day -- started to deteriorate once I moved from working 3 days a week to 4. I needed more energy, and I just didn't have it. I needed to be awake, and I just wasn't waking up. I needed to have at least one moment every day where, however briefly, I didn't feel like I was about to break into a thousand sharp little pieces and have a spectacular meltdown, because everything was just too much.

So I started to make exceptions in my diet. And then more exceptions. And then a few more...because making mistakes in the past means that I will never be able to do anything right, and I am a colossal fuck-up, and why bother trying at all? The strategy turned into something like 'keep making bad choices and then have horrible moments of revelation when you realize that you are fat, and hideous looking, and you can't even stick to your own health-care plan even though you're the person who designed it in the first place, because you are worthless, and you will never, ever get better, so you should just kill yourself now.'

Wednesday morning, I ate a giant bowl of Easter chocolate and then polished off an economy-sized bag of M&M's. I immediately felt miraculously revived and awake, like my body had just been given a drug it was craving. It was before 9 AM. I realized that maybe, just maybe, I had a serious problem going on here.

Anyways, the lesson of the story in Hansel and Gretel, which I'm sure I have retold in the classic format we all know and love, is that I have to give up adding all this extra chocolate and candy and ass-tons of sugar to my diet, because I am stuck in an unhealthy, vicious cycle. And I have to do it now, and not 'later, after this one last cereal bowl full of Cadbury creme eggs.'

Today is day two, and I have a wicked headache, and also a surprising amount of I'm-about-to-have-a-panic-attack anxiety. I'm not sure how much is because of sugar withdrawal, and how much is from general stress, and how much is because my mother bought me special ice-cream today after I told her I had to stop eating sugar if I ever wanted a chance to get out of this tail-spin. But hey, I'm still going strong, though admittedly without much of a track record.

When you come across a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest, just walk away.