Dropped Stitch

Time is running out for the crafting of presents, and somehow I went from 19 stitches to 18 and had to rip out a couple hours work. How the bookmark unravels, I suppose.

As I've mentioned, this week and next are all about the making and baking. I'm not going to divulge all of what I have my hands on and in* because some of the people who are getting that stuff are also reading these words.

I'm really enjoying it, I have to say, though there is some stress involved. Mostly deadline related. I'm not sure I'm going to be ready for Espig Xmas this weekend. It may involve a very late night on Saturday or a very early Sunday morning.

In other news, I concur with Jennifer and cannot wait for my holidays. I've got 10 or 11 days off and it cannot come fast enough.

It's no secret I've had a difficult fall. Problem is, it just seems to be getting worse. I talked to Shelley tonight and she said "Sweetie, you just sound beat down." At least my outside matches my inside, I suppose.

I always think of my ups and downs in terms of light, which is stupidly hokey to write, but feels true. When I'm happy and everything is going well, it feels like I emit streaks of bright light, somewhere on the yellow spectrum. When I'm normal, there's a little glow around me. Right now, I would say that there's a candle in there somewhere, sheltered under a perforated box.

People respond in kind, interestingly. When I'm at my brightest, people smile at me on the street. Probably because I'm smiling at then. When I'm at about where I am now, it's like I'm invisible. People bump into me more, notice me less.

I've read the women's rag self-help blah blah, and know that I should just paste a smile on my face and then my currently fragile ego will be boosted by the goodness that comes back.

But you know, there's not much creepier than a death's head smile backlit by a dull flicker.

Jamine's Blog

When I started yoga nearly a couple of years ago, I didn't expect it to be life-altering. I expected to be able to touch my toes. But I definitely became one of those annoying people newly converted to something and extolling that something's benefits whenever they can.

Jamine was my yoga teacher for a long time and I think she's great. She engages enthusiastically with yoga in all areas of her life, in practical and realistic ways that manage to encompass the spiritual and the humourous at the same time.

She wrote a couple of posts last week that hit me in some kind of right spot. Practice, Practice, Practice struck a particularly loud chord, all notes ringing in the last paragraph:

So don't be attached to your practice but stay committed! There's a difference. Committing will keep you going deeper, allowing you to notice and respect other practices and keep you out of suffering and being attached will, well it may in time lead to misunderstandings and suffering...

I've been muddling through something similar in my head for several weeks now, but couldn't figure out how to phrase it neatly in a digestible form.

As you can probably tell from my blogs lately, I've been in a not-so-happy place. I am finally trying to be just sad - not protective, not defensive - about a sadness I have been carrying with me for many years.

It's fucking hard. I feel breathless and panicked on occasion. It makes me alternate between holding on tight to all the good things I have and wanting to jettison them; both moves poor attempts to stave off loss.

What Jamine expresses up there, the idea of commitment without attachment, is the balance I am looking for, am hopefully passing through mourning towards.

Inside Skin

Things are not so hot here, Chez Butch. I wish I meant inside my apartment.* Sadly, I mean inside my skin.

My mind is a bit off, reverting to old patterns I don't much like. Consciously anyway. It's startling to find that a decade after I really stopped hating myself, those neural pathways are not only still there, but feel entirely comfortable and strangely comforting.

Those pathways snake out into the rest of my body, old patterns like veins. Physical manifestations. That feeling like I want to shake myself loose. Like I have ghost fingers itching to claw myself out through my eyes just to breathe outside air a little while. That tense spinning feeling under my breastbone that gears up after I do anything, that throws off crazy-stupid meteorite sentences like Oh I shouldn't have written that, oh, why did I say that, oh, people are gonna be mad at me. That galaxy of anxiety in my sternum whirling just a little faster and my breathing just a little harder.

It makes me full of tears even though I don't feel sad. It makes me think I don't want to eat even though I know I need to. It makes me bone tired.

Luckily, I know how to distract myself pretty well by now. Luckily, I know the nicest people ever, and my friends and paramour have been saying and doing no end of nice and supportive things to and for me.

Also luckily, a few weeks ago I booked an appointment with my wonder-wonderful therapist. At that time, I was feeling mostly fine, but was starting to notice an aura of needless anxiety around my edges. Consciously, I'm surprised the bad feelings have shot into the centre so fast, but you know, I think my fingers knew when they tapped her numbers into the phone.


*Where I have a brand new giant bat poster to hang up, to make up for my lack of flying mammals this summer. Thank you, mysterious present-giver!

That Night, The Next Morning

My memories of those couple days are, in the main, blurry or non-existent. Only a few images glint their jagged edges out of the murk. When I write them, of course, the details come, but at this point, after the punch drunk feeling of the overdose, after a decade, I’m not sure what is real memory and what my brain has concocted to make a good story.

(1)

Curled up in the corner of the hall, the lines and whorls of the hardwood stretched out down the dark hall and the blurry shape of my ex looming out of the shadow as he yelled. What he was yelling is not part of the memory, his voice worn down over the years into a bloated muted trumpet blare.

(2)

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, the door shut tight and locked, a towel jammed into the crack to keep the rattle of the pills in the room. Another three or four pills spilled into my palm, the small plastic cup of water I had to keep filling gripped in my right hand. Everything in that bathroom was white. The bulb was high wattage.

(3)

The moment I started throwing up. The thick feeling of half-digested pills scraping my esophagus the wrong way. I would continue to puke every half hour for 12 hours. At 12 hours I was dry heaving and knew it wouldn't stop. I took the streetcar down Bathurst St. to Toronto Western Hospital. I took a big white plastic bowl, held carefully in my lap in case I needed to actually throw up. People looked at me very strangely. I had never taken a cab before. I was not thinking clearly.

(4)

My ex sitting on the side of the bed, where I was lying with the lights out a few hours after the puking started. Asking me what I'd been doing in the bathroom. Telling me I needed to go to the hospital. Leaving the room when I said no.

(5)

A look in the mirror. The face of a beaten boxer looking back. My face randomly swollen: eyes nearly closed, cheeks misshapen, lips puffy.

(6)

Over a bedpan at the hospital, on a gurney in emerge, shaking and crying and asking the one kind doctor if it would ever stop. She rubbed my back and told me it would. I kept retching and finally threw something up. We both stopped still, the micro-movements every body makes momentarily arrested. "What is that?" I gesticulated with my head. "My stomach?" She nodded.

(7)

My mother sitting on the chair by the bed, my first night in the hospital. Scared but acting calm. Holding my hand hard.

Low

Eleven years ago today, I tried to kill myself. I swallowed a good portion of a bulk bottle of tylenol and spent 5 days in the hospital. They kept me in to ensure that my liver hadn't been permanently damaged and to keep an eye on me in case I tried again. It was a horrible and pivotal experience that has shaped my life in ways I still don't understand.

The next couple July 4ths were brutal. When I wasn't getting bits of metal shot through my tender bits, I was in bed and/or crying. The piercings, none of which I have any more, were to commemorate the fact I was still alive, a fact that I was celebrating. More or less, depending on the day.

Even after those first couple years, the Anniversary Affective Disorder persisted. I would usually start feeling kind of down and twitchy around mid-June, with some of the old hateful thoughts coming senselessly back and the for-no-reason tears pushing swollen and uncried in my ducts. I'd get totally freaked out and worried that It was happening all over again, which was like fertilizer to the thorn voice twisting panic around my brain. Then I'd catch a look at a calendar and the date would register. The down and twitchy would stay, but the panic would dissipate.

Last year was the first year that I haven't spent at least a few days feeling low. I didn't even think about it till a day or two after. At the time, I thought it was because Hey! After Only One Decade I Am Finally Over It. Looking back, I think the new sad of my breakup was so fresh there was no room for old sad.

A suicide attempt is an odd thing to have gone through. Half of me thinks that it was really no big deal, that lots of people go through much more difficult things, that it was a long time ago and so enough with the moping already. Comes from the same part that thinks I maybe use the experience to make myself feel special in a completely ridiculous and possibly dangerous way.

But then that's the brain of the depressive, right? I mean, what makes me so special that I should be happy? Because obviously I'm not special: not especially interesting or especially nice or especially funny or especially cute or or or or. And who am I to even think that I could be especially any of those things?

I am, however, or at least have been, fucked up. Though not as fucked up as other people, who are much more especial than I am.

And then there I am, right back at the start of the spiral, but a little lower down, a little more tired after each go round. It's exhausting.

Depression is also addictive. It was easier to get over being depressed than it has been to get over seeing "depressive" as such an integral part of my identity I felt the need to hold on to it. Once established, your body feels comfortable bathed in whatever chemical wash takes the place of serotonin and norepinephrin. The neural pathways to sad become well worn and much easier to traverse than those leading to contentment. Happiness is a rocky, impossible trail high above the clouds.

It was incredibly difficult to build those happy pathways as I trudged my way out of the fog. I managed only through the glory of pharmaceuticals and by dint of hard work. Anyone who tells you that anti-depressants are a cure-all is full of bunk.

At the same time that I think it's really no big deal, just a small part of what will hopefully be a long life, it also seems like a really really big deal. I have a hard time talking about it, and with even some of my close friends, it took me years to even mention it. When I do talk about it now, I often say "When I was hospitalized..." because the phrase "When I tried to kill myself..." sounds jarring and too loud outside my head.

So writing this here - for strangers and acquaintances and friends alike to read - it's an odd sensation. I've never shied away from writing about being depressed or the attempt itself, but in poetry or obtuse prose. So I feel a little exposed.

But you know why I feel exposed? Because no one talks much about depression or suicide. Not like it’s real.

There's jokes and odd remarks and the occasional slightly disgusted wonderment. There's the snide "oh, it was just a cry for help" comments. But when you make it real, when you say "Well, yeah, I totally understand what would drive someone to do that," people most often flinch like you've thrown cold water in their faces.

So here I am, talking about it, with more to come tomorrow. Here I am, making it real.