Is this what getting better mean?

Posted on 2013/05/06 by SummerSolsticeGirl

Anxiety.

I am having frequent anxiety attacks.

An entirely new thing to me. I even blogged about it last year. Or maybe it was a comment on someone else’s blog? I don’t remember. But the sentiment was one of gratitude for never having experienced those crippling moments.

My therapist says it actually means I’m improving. Go figure. That instead of dissociating and withdrawing, like I used to do, now I’m staying in the real world. And staying in the real world means dealing with the problem at hand. By going into anxiety episodes.

Makes sense.

But I am at a loss here. I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t have the coping mechanisms. I know them. In theory. Somewhat in practice too, I guess, since my daughter had severe anxiety episodes while growing up. I helped her and she learned how to cope. She doesn’t even need medication anymore.

Bottom line, I never had to apply them to me!

I will learn how, of course. Eventually I will, I have no doubt. I will get a handle on this.

But right now, it’s hard.

The end result is the same. Stuff doesn’t get done.

But instead of being blissfully oblivious of it like I used to, I now get this pain in my stomach like someone is punching me. There’s sweating and more generalized pain as well. Tremors too. Nausea. You know what I’m talking about.

We’ll see how it goes. I hope I don’t have to add yet another medication but I’ll do what it takes because I certainly don’t like the way I feel.

In the mean time, feel free to offer advice. I’d be interested in knowing what has worked for you. maybe it will work for me as well. It’s worth a try, right?

So far, having the cats around is good. Hearing them purr, stroking their soft fur and feeling their warmth helps a lot. Talking to my best friend too, of course. I am incredibly lucky I have that.

© Summer Solstice Girl and A Canvas Of The Minds 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Summer Solstice Girl and A Canvas Of The Minds with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The tragedy of Mental Illness

Posted on 2013/04/01 by SummerSolsticeGirl

I lead a good life.

I have all my needs covered. I have a roof over my head. I have food. I have clothes.

I have the perfect job for me. One that has allowed me to avoid the hell that is fighting the disability board.

It allows me to work from home -on my PJs, mostly playing on social networks. If I’m too tired (not your normal tired but the chronic fatigue kind of tired), I can take a two hour nap in the middle of the day to recharge.

And when I do have to leave my place, I get to wear pretty vintage-inspired dresses to go teach people how to dance. I also get to play vintage Jazz music at many dances in my city and other cities as well. Sharing my music with others dancers and hear them say how much they enjoy my sets is always nice.

By teaching swing dancing and by deejaying at swing dances, I get to put smiles on a lot of people faces. You should see them, how happy they are when they are dancing.

And that makes me happy too.

I have two wonderful children. They are beautiful (aren’t all children beautiful in their parents’ eyes?), smart, talented and very accomplished. They have good hearts and are honest, hard-working young adults. They give back to the community and dream of leaving the world a better place than they were given.

I have dear friends. The ones that last a life-time. My only complain is that none of them are here with me. But their friendship isn’t any more real or strong because of that. Their love carry me through life.

I have a loving family too. Truly. The kind I couldn’t wait for it to be Sunday so I could go see. Or Christmas, or Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. Or that cousin’s birthday. Even though we’re now a continent away, their love surrounds me every day.

I have two beautiful cats that bring continuous joy to my life. I live in the country of my dreams.

I’m smart, fit and fairly good looking.

I’m reasonably healthy too – chronic pain/chronic fatigue aside. By which I mean, yes, I am in pain all the time but I am not attached to an oxygen tank and I am not bed-ridden. I can walk, I can sing, I can see, I can hear (with some difficulty), I can dance.

I’m able to find joy in the little things. A bird singing. A chipmunk running around, looking for food. A pretty flower. Rain fall. A good meal. A conversation over Facebook with a long distance friend.

All those things make me smile.

Furthermore, I never stop being grateful for the things I have.

So, why is it then that sometimes I walk in such darkness? I feel such emptiness? I lose all hope? And the nightmares that won’t stop making this otherwise nice little world of mine, a very scary place at night, only make matters worse.

Yes, I lead a good life. Yes, I have everything I need.

And yet, I can’t help but hate this life.

That – my friends, of mental illness, the tragedy is.

Intelligence and Mental Illness: A beautiful Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Posted on 2013/03/04 by SummerSolsticeGirl

Scumbag Genetics meme

It has been said that a beautiful mind is a terrible thing to waste. And yet, it would seem like every day I live is just one step closer to wasting this mind of mine.

Born with a gifted brain, I once was marked for success, like so many other gifted kids around the world. One would think that a better brain could only make its owner’s life easier. But it is the most counter-intuitive thing in the world.

Gifted children have a lot of problems adapting to a world where they stand out by simply existing. School for them is infinitely boring. Classmates are boring. Teachers are boring. It’s hard to relate to a teacher when it is so obvious for you- at age 7, that you are way smarter than them. Take my word for it.

Gifted children more often that not, quickly become outcasts. Either they go inward, like me, ignoring everybody and living a very quiet, introverted life or they become arrogant, confrontational or even destructive.

And then, mental illness kicks in.

I have often told my therapist that I consider being this intelligent a curse. For many reasons. Being gifted also means being painfully aware of everything. On the other hand, being on the other side of the intelligence spectrum also means being blissfully unaware.

Once, the following construct was a great source of grief for me : If I am so smart, why can’t I fix myself? And the fact that I have an MD degree didn’t help at all. That’s how I lived my 20′s and 30′s. It tortured me. But when one is genetically marked for mental illness, little can be done without the help of pharmacotherapy. It is the only way to correct damaged or faulty pathways. For now, anyway. I have high hopes on gene therapy. I hoped to one day work in that field but alas, that will never happen.

However, there’s no solid data for the high intelligence-mental illness association. The following quote says it all:

Anecdotal and biographical reports have long suggested that bipolar disorder is more common in people with exceptional cognitive or creative ability. Epidemiological evidence for such a link is sparse.

The former is the first paragraph of the abstract of an article published this month* in Molecular Psychiatry: Is bipolar disorder more common in highly intelligent people? A cohort study of a million men. But the quote may as well be applied to Clinical Depression and other disorders.

Yet another recent article on the relationship between depression and high intellectual potential in children, concludes that:

based on these different levels of analysis, it appears that heterogeneity of mental functioning in children with high intellectual potential is at the centre of the creative process and it has related psychological vulnerability.

Gotta love scientific jargon!

In other words, it looks like there is some correlation but nobody really knows why or how. In the mean time, a lot of gifted people – my son and I included, struggle with mental illness. And it would seem that history is backing me up on this one.

It does seem to me that goes like this: Crap, we gave her too much of this so we better add some bad things or else it will be unfair.

But I’ve long known that I pretty much got the worse from that scumbag genetics. How is one supposed to not waste a beautiful mind when one is in so much constant pain, both of the physical and psychological kind?

I seem to have lost the battle. This beautiful mind has been wasted.

I have failed the test. I will diminish, and go into the Darkness, and remain a lost little girl.

The Sad Socrates Effect (thecrimson.com)
The Eloquent Madness (pensaleas.wordpress.com)
5 mental illnesses share common DNA roots (vitals.nbcnews.com)

Footnotes

* By the time this post is published, it will actually be last month, on February, 2013

The desert of my soul

Posted on 2013/02/25 by SummerSolsticeGirl

Stripped of all flesh and bare to the bone.

- alone in the tundra,

gelid winds cut like a sharpened stone.

Oh, the unbearable pain of the exposed, tortured soul.

Forever split between that and this world

harsh is the path

of the one that is torn.

The wanderer wonders, deprived of all hope

is it even possible

to bring forth new growth?

The problem with reaching out

Posted on 2012/12/31 by SummerSolsticeGirl

We all know how important it is to reach out when we feel we might be starting to spiral down into an episode.

We all also know that reaching out is not easy.

For starters, we don’t always realize we need to reach out. And even if we do realize it, we don’t always know how to reach out. Or even worse, the very nature of the illness prevents us from doing so.

And as if this weren’t difficult enough, some of us face a whole different level of difficultness when it comes to reaching out: Cultural differences.

As an immigrant, cultural differences often make my life trying at its best and down right miserable at its worse.

I come from a culture where you don’t have to apologize for opening up. Where you don’t have to feel bad for telling your friends -and I use the term friend loosely here to include non-close ones or even acquaintances*, over coffee that your boyfriend just broke up with you. Where your friends don’t feel uncomfortable if you cry in their presence. When your friends don’t hesitate to hug you if they sense you need a hug. Moreover, where your friends don’t hesitate to ask if there’s something wrong when they see that… well, something is not quite right with you.

Here it’s very different.

I’ve had a lot of people apologize for “dumping” their problems on me. To me, it was only a friend telling me of a particular difficult situation they were dealing with at the moment and yet they felt they had to apologize like they had done something wrong. In Colombia it would be considered just a normal conversation between friends.

Here, people often don’t feel comfortable asking other people if they’re OK because they are afraid that it might be taken as an intrusion.

Moreover, I’ve heard a lot of people complain about other people “dumping” their problems on them. How dare them! I’ve heard people say, when the had someone talk about a problem in their lives.

For those reasons, I’ve learned to be very careful who I mention my problems to.

For those reasons, I’ve learned to apologize too, if I ever forget and end up talking about something personal. I think it’s wrong to have to do that but if those are the cultural rules of this society, I have to comply.

For those reasons, I find myself between a rock and a hard place.

Say, I know that I need to reach out if feel I’m about to fall down the rabbit hole. But how do I do so, when I know that most people here won’t be comfortable with me doing so? That even some of them are going to think I’m unjustly dumping my problems on them?

Now imagine that for some reason, I’m slipping and I don’t realize I need to reach out. I have been told by close friends that they won’t intervene unless they are asked to do so. But how am I supposed to ask for help if I am not able to? If my Colombian friends were here, they wouldn’t think twice to intervene if they see something is not quite right.

And by intervening, I don’t necessarily mean rushing me to the hospital. I mean, talking to me over a cup of coffee. I mean asking how I’m doing and not expect a polite “not too bad, thanks” but truly asking for an honest answer.

It is quite the conundrum, methinks.

How does one reach out? I honestly don’t know how. Not here in Canada, anyway.

Footnotes:

* I am sure that is also the case here for close friends

© Summer Solstice Girl and A Canvas Of The Minds 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Summer Solstice Girl and A Canvas Of The Minds with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.