But I Get Up Again: Being Willing to Start Over (and over, and over, and over...)

In the face of disaster I tend to be pretty resilient: I stay calm, I do what needs to be done, and I get through it. Car accident? Okay: give a report, talk to the firemen, call the people who need to be called. Lose your job? Alright: get your paperwork together, visit the relevant government agencies, fill out all the forms, take advantage of every available service, and work out a job-seeking strategy. These things aren't disasters in the sense that a volcano or genocide are, but they did derail my life in some significant way. I somehow managed to cope with them, mostly because I knew I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other and couldn't afford to let myself go to pieces.

Having said that, I have a remarkable capacity to catastrophize my failures, setbacks, and lapses as if they spell the end of the universe. Felt really down and ate too many muffins? I am going to be fat and disgusting forever. Sliced your arm up with a box-cutter? I will never be able to stop hurting myself and I don't deserve to live. Perform poorly on your monthly production report? I am terrible at my job and am going to get fired because I always fail at everything.

This is a truly spectacular skill because I know in my logical mind that these are not insurmountable obstacles. Bad stats this month? Lots of people get bad stats and so far no one has actually been fired. Eat all the muffins? Being fat isn't the worst thing in the world, and maybe right now you need the distraction more than being thin. My failures are also not necessarily as real as I think they are: actually, you only missed one of your targets, and although you've gained weight you're not really obese yet. 

And yet...THIS IS THE END OF THE UNIVERSE AND I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO COME BACK FROM IT.

My emotional mind is completely haywire with feelings of inadequacy, of worthlessness, of despair, disappointment, and the nagging conviction that I am bad. I feel like this is the end of the world because these are things that have gone wrong because of me, because of what I've done and haven't done, and I know I'm at fault. I know I'm failing myself and my own values. And I tell my history to myself in a narrative that flows from one personal failure to the next, weaving a story of falling, and falling, and falling again. Is it any wonder that I take every mistake as a sign of the inevitable apocalypse when I carry around an autobiography of my own ruin that I reference at every wrong turn?

Somewhere in between emotion and logic lies the mystical country of the wise mind where the two come together and create a space of integrity, self-awareness, and personal growth. 

All the muffins in the universe ended up in your stomach? Okay, so you did something you aren't proud of because you were trying to make yourself forget how bad you feel. Maybe you chose this particular thing because you watched your mother do it all your life. And yes, you're feeling like you've given up on your values because you behaved in a way that doesn't belong to you, that doesn't fit with who you are, and that is really just a new way of hurting yourself, of punishing yourself for having needs, vulnerabilities, and desires. 

Tomorrow, you can act differently.

You didn't get the greatest results in your production this month? Okay, so you're disappointed because you didn't perform as well as you have in the past. But you've been doing a different job more often and aren't getting as much practice as you used to. Most of your results are still above target, and you haven't suddenly become a slacker. You always do your best. Just because you grew up being told that only excellence is good enough doesn't mean this is actually true. Maybe you feel uncomfortable because your standards are unrealistic and prevent you from having to acknowledge that you're actually doing well.

Tomorrow, you can learn to value yourself based on something other than the worth which authority figures convey on you.

The truth is that everyone makes mistakes, and everyone messes up, and everyone behaves in ways that make them wish they could have a do-over (or some sort of time-travelling car). But not everyone thinks their slip-ups are the end of the world. And not everyone falls down and thinks to themselves there is no point in getting up off the floor because I will never, ever be able to do better than this. Not everyone says to themselves that they might as well keep going the way they're going or doing what they're doing because they're obviously trapped by it and can't get out. I do. But maybe I don't have to. 

I think there might be steps involved with this. Also, I just like using the bullet list button in my blog text box :)

• Acknowledge that you're having feelings about what went sideways (I am feeling disappointed because I got blood all over the floor again)
• Look at what happened and put it into a realistic perspective (I did cut myself. But that doesn't make me a failure, and that doesn't make me irredeemable, and that doesn't mean I don't deserve to live. It means I am in pain, and I made a mistake)
• Don't use your mistake as an excuse to make more mistakes (I soaked through a bunch of paper towels with my blood, but that doesn't mean I can keep going until the whole roll is gone. Just because I chose this one minute ago doesn't mean that I have to choose it again now)
• Have realistic expectations about your behavior (I started doing this a long time ago, and that means it will be a difficult habit to break. There will be setbacks. But that doesn't change my goals or my values or the fact that I am moving forward)
• Understand that the powerful dialectic between what you feel and what you know is offering you a precious opportunity to discover what you value (I really, really want to tear myself apart with my bare hands because I hate myself so much that I want my insides to be on my outsides so the pain will finally stop. But this isn't how people should be treated, and I am a person. I want to learn to love myself and take care of myself, so I can live a life worth living. The discomfort I feel as I'm trying creates a space where I can find a new way, and opens the path to change, and growth, and newness of life)
• Accept that the way you want to live may never be easy for you. It may never come naturally to you. It may never be automatic for me not to fantasize about knives when I'm hurting so badly that I can't find the words to express how much I feel like I'm dying inside. And yes, that sucks. And yes, that might be something I have to deal with for the rest of my life. It might not be fair. But it is the reality. 

It might never be easy. But that doesn't mean it's not worth choosing to get back up and start again, every day, even the days after I've messed up. It is still, always, no matter what has come before or what might come after, worth choosing.

A Slow Awakening: An Early Spring Photoessay

You might know that I've been having something of a difficult time. Part of that is probably due to my brain settling into an old, familiar groove as the rTMS treatment I received moves further into the past. Part of it is undoubtedly due to therapy -- engaging with trauma, or any difficult issue, often results in feeling worse over the short term.

Obviously, what we're most concerned with is the long term: will I survive this illness? If so, for how long, and with what quality of life? But the short term matters immensely, too. After all, I live in the here-and-now, not in the future. And anyway, what with the Morlocks and the Eloi, it isn't as if the future looks like that awesome of a place to hang out.

One of the first things I noticed during rTMS is that the color green was brighter.

Spring was the ideal time for me to receive this treatment, as it turns out. My senses were awakening at the same time as the world burst into riotous growth around me. From a landscape laden with dead, bare branches and hard, barren earth sprung up buds, and new plants, and the beginnings of life. 

I felt like things I had all but forgotten were growing within me: humor, and lightness, and hope. Like a seed dormant in the ground, I had not lost those things whose absence I felt so keenly and with overwhelming pain. They were only sleeping. I couldn't feel them, or remember them, or reach out and touch them. I felt like I would never feel happy again, that nothing would ever change, and that there was no point to struggling on in the midst of lifelessness. But, when I believed I couldn't take it anymore, not even for one more day, the world around me burst into life and reminded me that feeling like I could live was hidden, but not dead.

Under a layer of dead leaves slumbered a field of flowers. And under the darkness of my despair crouched a hidden sunlight. I began to have hope -- hope that I could get better, hope that I could feel differently. Hope that, one day, I might even recover. I looked at the world around me with hungry eyes and an open heart, amazed at the way my own mind could take me by surprise. I had been afraid that I couldn't get better, that it wasn't possible, that this was going to be my life. In the onslaught of vibrant color, I was caught unawares by the possibility of change residing even in me.

I felt an openness, an expansiveness, like a body of water in the breeze. I began to see that life could be beautiful. Life could be beautiful emerging from death, and going into death. Maybe life is beautiful too when it lies in stillness, dormancy, a dreamless sleep. If I can remember this, hold onto it, when I feel like I'm dead and wish to be dead, maybe I can hold the beauty and the suffering in my two hands at once, cradling and cherishing both. Both can be tended to, and both frame the boundaries of my experience.

 Spring is not all beauty and new growth and sun reflected off water. Spring unearths muddy ground, trees that have not survived the winter, stagnant water overflowing with the detritus of decay. Plants that greedily take more than their share of water come back to life, dominating the fragile seedlings around them. It isn't all easy, it isn't all pretty, it isn't all what you're hoping to find in your foray into new beginnings. But it is there -- an undeniable part of what it means for life to come charging back in.

In its own way it is beautiful, because it is true. As I started to feel better, I began noticing painful truths about myself that had been buried under the agony of suicidal, backbreaking depression. I had opened the door to hurting myself again, and the longing plagued me. I have difficult relationships that take up a large place of my life, that have contributed to my illness and that I don't know how to manage. I have enduring trauma and recurring memories that flow through my mind. I hate myself, and wish I didn't. I live with a lot of shame. I am somewhat obsessive. I have difficulty understanding my own emotions.

These things were hidden under the blanket of winter. But now I see them again, reappearing, taking up time and space in my life. There is a layer of decay that fomented under the snow, and it needs to be reabsorbed into the life around it; changed into life, it can once again bring forth goodness and color and meaning and strength. It's good for a tree to fall in the forest and be reclaimed. But it isn't easy when you first see it lying there, tumbled across your path.

It will be hard. It will be painful. And it may cause me, sometimes, to forget about the springtime. But I have to look hard at myself if I want to reclaim the parts of me that have been damaged by depression -- the parts of me that have fallen under the unbearable weight of ice and snow -- and integrate them into a healthy life.

As I struggle, it is too easy to focus on the bark of a decaying tree rather than on the seedlings springing up in its midst, drawing their nourishment from it. I'm writing this post to remind me of how I felt when I saw vibrant green and new flowers. And to remind me that spring is a coming into being that enfolds both the remains of winter and the beginnings of new life.

Observing Your Thoughts With Curiosity: It Turns Out I am a Total Bitch

One of the key components in practicing mindfulness is non-judgmental observance, or learning to pay attention to your thoughts as they arise. As my psychologist put it, my homework for this week is to approach noticing my thoughts with an attitude of open curiosity. Oh, isn't that interesting! And then letting them go. The mind, after all, is a fascinating place if you just pay a little attention to it. We're so used to thinking thoughts all the time that they become a kind of static we don't hear any more.

But they're there, influencing us. And if we don't know what they are, how can we begin to unravel the complex ways that our mind behaves during periods of depression to reinforce our mood, to dig us deeper into it, to make us think that the things we're saying about ourselves to ourselves are so automatic that they must be true?

I saw my therapist on Tuesday, so it's only been a few days, but already I've noticed a disturbing pattern in the way I talk to myself. I call myself an idiot an awful lot of the time. Like, a lot. I insult myself, say I should have known better. I am very sarcastic: when I do something wrong, like pushing the elevator button for the wrong floor, I say 'good job' in an obviously demeaning way.

These are things I'd never say to anyone else, certainly not in this way. These are things that are unacceptable. If I was my own wife, I would call myself verbally abusive and tell us to get into couples' counselling right away!!

The hardest part of the assignment is not to judge myself -- or the thoughts! I can't help but feel disappointed in myself when I notice the way I self-talk. I can't help but feel like an idiot for calling myself an idiot. So I notice these patterns, too, this tendency to spiral off into a cycle of self-abuse that leaves me feeling worse and worse.

And then I put it aside.

If I saw a beautiful flower, I wouldn't say to myself, 'You are a wonderful person for noticing it there, its soft petals and its delicate fragrance.' I didn't put the flower there on purpose, or create it, and it isn't mine, though I did choose to notice it. It was fascinating. If I saw a hideous flower, I wouldn't say to myself, 'You are a terrible person for noticing it, its ugly color and sickly scent.' I didn't put the flower there on purpose, or create it, and it isn't mine, though I did choose to notice it. It was fascinating. These things tell me that I am the kind of person who chooses to notice things, as they are, and tries to let them be an experience without judging it, as best as I am able.

It's fascinating to choose to pay attention to your own thoughts. I knew I hated myself. I was aware that I didn't like myself, that I don't think well of myself, and that this would be surfacing in my thoughts. But I had no idea the extent to which I was doing it. I am going through my days surrounded by this great cloud of words. It's...fascinating! I was like, wow, I had no idea it was like this inside my head all the time!

I don't know what to do with all of this yet. But it's interesting. After 31 years, I keep being surprised by my own brain: how cool is that?!

Sometimes Your Brain Thinks Thoughts

The brain is a truly complex and amazing organ. It does some pretty unbelievable things that we never have to think about, like regulating the pace of our breathing, our heartbeat, some reflexes, vasomotor activity, plus the obvious stuff like generating our emotions and thoughts. The brain, in conjunction with the nervous systems, reaches out to tell our organs what to do, and to make our bodies move around. Our brain allows us to see, to hear, and to feel. Our brain is so sophisticated that it does what no other parallel processing computing device has ever been able to replicate: it allows us to have consciousness.

Kinda makes it sad that the machines are wasting our potential by using us as batteries, right?

I joke, of course. This isn't the Matrix. Whatever you do, don't take the red pill.

Sometimes, our brains think thoughts. If you think about it, we're thinking thoughts all the time, possibly as an outcome of linguistic capability (it might also be the other way around but, really, who cares). It seems obvious that we think thoughts when we're trying to solve a problem, or planning, or listening, or having a conversation, or learning. We think little thoughts all the time as we ask ourselves questions like, I wonder if I'm hungry? What should I have for dinner? We think little thoughts as we keep up a running commentary on things going on around us. Our brain thinks little thoughts to remind us of things, sometimes by interrupting something else that we're doing to tell us something completely different, like if we're doing the dishes and our brain tells us that we have to go to the drugstore tomorrow and buy more cottonballs.

We think thoughts so often that most of the time we don't even notice them; they're part of the background noise of being human. We take them for granted. In retrospect, part of what I find most terrifying about severe acute depression is the moments where the pain gives way to a nothingness where there are no thoughts. People tell me later that it's like I've frozen staring off into space. Subjectively it feels like time has stopped and then picked back up again, except that it turns out there was a gap with nothing in it. I'm lucky that this tends to last only moments at a time. But the idea that it might be possible for my brain to stop thinking thoughts, even temporarily, is chilling.

But I digress.

Sometimes I have thoughts that I don't feel like I'm in control of. Sometimes these thoughts follow moods, but sometimes they just float into my mind like a passing breeze with no obvious genesis.

I wish I was dead.

I should jump in front of that metro.

I want to stick a carving knife into my wrist and pull it up to my elbow.

Do the thoughts bother me? Yes. Partly because anything I don't control bothers me, and I hate not being in control of my own mind. Partly because the thoughts are scary and bad, and I'm afraid that if they start to hound me I'll end up being powerless against them. Partly because it divides my attention away from other things, like data entry, or looking at pictures of cats, or obsessively replaying my rapes in my mind.

I talked a little bit about the hurting-myself thoughts with my first psychologist, whom I will henceforth refer to as Dr. Radio, because he had the best voice I've ever heard in my life. I could listen to him for hours, even if he were just reading copyright information, because the sound of his voice was so relaxing. Anyways.

When I started to get more depressed in the Fall, one of the things that happened is these thoughts about suicide and self-harm reappeared. I was terrified: I hadn't had these thoughts for years. I wasn't suicidal at all since 2006. I hadn't harmed myself at all since 2009, and not seriously since 2006. When these thoughts came back, I felt scared. I also felt like I'd failed. I felt like I was failing God, Who had given me the miracle of healing me from these ideas. I felt like I was failing myself. I fought against the thoughts for months, by the winter for most of the day, constantly. Both the feelings and the thoughts were painful and overwhelming. I was scared I'd have the thoughts forever, and I was scared because I both did and didn't want to do what they were telling me. I knew that at one point I wouldn't be able to stand the thoughts any more and would give in just to get a moment's peace.

When I was released from the hospital in March, I'd had weeks to think about it, and I knew something would have to change in the way I was dealing with the thoughts, especially since my mood was still pretty low. In a way I was also better off than before I went in, thought-wise, because trying to kill myself did work in the sense that it released a lot of the pressure. It was like taking a cork off a bottle of champagne: Ahhhhhh. Suddenly not so crammed-in and tight-feeling, crushed, unable to breathe. I think that's what they call catharsis.

Over the years, I'd taken steps to try and mitigate the potential impact of the thoughts. I don't keep Tylenol in the house because acetaminophen is shockingly hepatotoxic (that shit will destroy your liver). I don't have a gun, and wouldn't have a gun, because shooting yourself in the head is very bad. I keep stainless-steel blades specifically for self-harm because I can sterilize them with alcohol and, at the very least, avoid cutting myself with anything stupid like a rusty nail or a broken bottle I found in the street. At times, I've had my prescription medication locked up so it was inaccessible and gotten it dispensed weekly.

Obviously, these are attempts to control my environment rather than attempts to regulate the thoughts. Leaving St. Mary's, I knew it wouldn't be good enough because it manifestly hadn't been good enough.

The main thing I decided I would do is that I wouldn't chase the thoughts. It's natural, when you have a thought, to have the corresponding emotions. When a thought is powerful, either in the force of its suggestion or the tenor of its emotional implication, it's easy to get trapped in a cycle of thoughts. One thought follows another in an endless train, pulling along emotions that fuel the thoughts running on and on, a conflagration running like wildfire through the kindling of your mind.

You chase the thoughts, following them, fueling them and, ultimately, allowing them to burn uncontrolled. If you ever do stumble across a wildfire - which I sincerely hope you don't - the way to put it out is really to have it run into barren ground where there's nothing to burn. Chasing a difficult thought around is like throwing barns at a fire while you run away, hoping that it will eat the barns instead of you, all the while making it bigger and angrier and more uncontrollable.

Stop. Take a breath. Acknowledge that you're having a thought. I am having a thought. Okay.

Then let it go. You don't have to hold onto it. You don't have to dwell on it, or try to puzzle out what it means, or let it fill you up. It's just a thing that's happening, and it passes.

Talking about the thoughts with Dr. Radio, we discussed the ways that I felt badly about myself for having the thoughts. I felt like I was a sick person, a weak person, like I wasn't ever going to get better. I felt abnormal. These thoughts, these are illness. But he pointed out that, in reality, people with psychopathology and people without psychopathology both have random thoughts like, I wonder what would happen if I stabbed that person, or, I wonder what would happen if I jumped in front of that train. The research supports the fact that everyone is having these stray thoughts. The difference is what people with mental illness say to themselves about themselves because of the thoughts.

I have a thought about killing myself, and I tell myself that I am sick, that I am a bad person, that I am not capable of getting better, and that I am afraid I won't be able to resist the thoughts. So what I have to learn is not to judge or label myself because of the thoughts. Essentially, this involves noticing that a single thought is actually triggering an entire thought-sequence about yourself that really has nothing to do with the original thought and everything to do with your self-conception. So when my thought-train starts up, I take notice, stop, take a step back, and remind myself that the thought doesn't mean any of the things I'm saying to myself about myself, because the thought is just a thought. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of work, to interrupt thought patterns, but I'm sticking it out.

Recently, after rTMS, I've been feeling a lot better and doing the thought-work is easier, but I'm still having the thoughts sometimes, out of nowhere. It doesn't bother me as much as it used to. I do feel disappointed sometimes that they're not completely and miraculously gone, but then I remind myself that it takes a long time to undo thought patterns. Thoughts, like flowing water, carve grooves in the mind so that future thoughts more easily follow the same path. It's not easy to change the course of a river, and it's not easy to change thoughts, either. You definitely end up with two competing thoughts at once where you're telling yourself, gently, that you're wrong. So, at least while you're relearning, what you're having is not so much different thoughts as more thoughts, as you pile new thoughts on top of the old ones to divert them. I had to decide to be patient with myself.

Talking about my thoughts with my new psychologist, she mentioned that I didn't seem very distressed by the fact that I was having them, so I told her what Dr. Radio had told me and how I was trying to learn not to judge myself. She suggested that I take it one step further and, instead of saying to myself, 'I am having thoughts,' to say, 'My brain is having a thought.' This makes sense on multiple levels: it creates more distance between you and the thought by decoupling it from a sense of personal agency; it creates a gap between the thought and the emotional reaction by framing the experience in the most objective way possible; and it interrupts the thought-pattern by adding a new thought about the thought, namely that you are not the same as your thoughts. This last idea is actually pretty radical - the suggestion that you and your thoughts are not identical, or that you, as a person with personal worth and value, are not made out of your thoughts.

So, if you're looking to change the way your thoughts are running around in your head, I hope you find my tips helpful:

Don't chase the thoughts.

Don't judge yourself for the thoughts.

Be patient with yourself as you learn a new way.

Remember that the thoughts are not you, and don't define you, and will never define you. The thoughts are something that is happening, and that you are living with, and that are giving you an opportunity to change. 

If all else fails, just turn yourself over and look for the little button that you can poke with a pen to force a system reset.