The oddities of mental illness
I think in my "recovery" process, the thing I am having the hardest time coming to grips with is not breaking up with David (hardly miss him) or moving back in with my mother temporarily (things have settled down considerably) or having to leave school because of failing grades (I'll be able to apply for readmission when I get up to speed), or the crushing fatigue (the Wellbutrin has helped a lot, I think, although it had been a serious problem before).
No, I think the hardest thing to deal with is that sometimes things just don't make any goddamn sense. And by that I don't mean that the world is unfair or that there's no reason to continue living or anything like that. I mean there is some shit in this world which you just can't make heads or tails of, and you feel like you need to, while at the same time you wonder if maybe it's best not to try. Except of course that it intrudes everywhere, everyday, in the day-to-day.
The first time I went to see a therapist in August, I had just started taking Wellbutrin two days before. While I was sitting in the waiting room, I remember suddenly shaking uncontrollably and being overcome by anxiety, for reasons I couldn't totally identity, but at the time I thought maybe I was nervous because I would have to talk to the therapist about the incident that landed me in the psych ward in May. When I walked into the therapist's office, she of course focused immediately on the hospitalization, even though I felt that the lead up to the incident was just as important if not more so. I was jittery, and getting rather upset as we spoke. I told her the basics of what happened.
The therapist thought that I was in denial of having been raped and I was suffering from trauma. I think the therapist has a limited imagination, but that's neither here nor there. I left her office thinking that maybe that was part of the picture but the truth is, as I later thought, that that was probably not what happened, and that didn't really get to the heart of the issue anyways. What happened was, in my mind at least, a whole other magnitude of terror, if you can imagine that. Terrifying enough that even the third day I was in the hospital I was still in a state of panic. The nurses would take everyone's vital signs a few times a day, and my heart rate was constantly over 100 beats per minute, even though it's usually closer to 70. The nearest description I can give is that I was literally scared out of my mind. Terrified, and with a few other confusing emotions mixed in there for which there don't exist words in the English language as far as I know.
After I left the hospital, there were nights for weeks afterwards when I would wake up trembling. I had developed a tick of sorts: whenever in the course of my usual thoughts I would run up against a memory of my ordeal, specifically of my thought process at that time, my head would suddenly jerk to the side, as if attempting to shake it. Since I started taking the Wellbutrin, the tick has mostly gone away.
There's kind of a perverse upside to my depression, in that the memory problem I had before I stopped taking birth control pills has returned. Everything prior to last month sort of slips away into this vast forgetting. If I try really hard I can access it, much in the way that one who is in a valley can scale a mountain slowly and, glimpsing more and more of the landscape, come to the point where they can identify a landmark some distance off. But the top of the mountain now eludes me completely; I simply can't hold a complete picture of the past firmly in mind, with any kind of wholeness, whereas before I could--which was generally deeply satisfying but sometimes deeply disturbing, as I mentioned. With that part of my brain asleep, I'm generally undisturbed by memories of the past, but with it seems to go my ability to think about philosophy for any length of time. And since this is requisite for writing philosophy papers, I haven't made any progress at all on that front.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: eventually my working memory will return (I hope), eventually I'll have a flood of thoughts again, and I'll be able to get on with my work. But I wonder if with that--and before I can deal with schoolwork--the terror of that initial ordeal will come flooding back as well, and I'll have to process it all over again. Hopefully more successfully that time, meaning with greater clarity and more closure. But I think this is why I've resisted writing a more complete symptom history, why I feel like I don't get much done in therapy--because I just don't want to think or talk about it, except in a distant and non-specific way. It's not automatic, so I don't want to put forth the effort to find it. And I think it will only come to me one piece at a time and I won't be able to comprehend the whole and resolve it into some kind of coherent narrative in my mind. It will just haunt me like a ghost, materializing to frighten me and disappearing as soon as it appears. Which is why I haven't really gone into it in any detail here (sorry to leave you in suspense). Perhaps I'll relate that another time.
No, I think the hardest thing to deal with is that sometimes things just don't make any goddamn sense. And by that I don't mean that the world is unfair or that there's no reason to continue living or anything like that. I mean there is some shit in this world which you just can't make heads or tails of, and you feel like you need to, while at the same time you wonder if maybe it's best not to try. Except of course that it intrudes everywhere, everyday, in the day-to-day.
The first time I went to see a therapist in August, I had just started taking Wellbutrin two days before. While I was sitting in the waiting room, I remember suddenly shaking uncontrollably and being overcome by anxiety, for reasons I couldn't totally identity, but at the time I thought maybe I was nervous because I would have to talk to the therapist about the incident that landed me in the psych ward in May. When I walked into the therapist's office, she of course focused immediately on the hospitalization, even though I felt that the lead up to the incident was just as important if not more so. I was jittery, and getting rather upset as we spoke. I told her the basics of what happened.
The therapist thought that I was in denial of having been raped and I was suffering from trauma. I think the therapist has a limited imagination, but that's neither here nor there. I left her office thinking that maybe that was part of the picture but the truth is, as I later thought, that that was probably not what happened, and that didn't really get to the heart of the issue anyways. What happened was, in my mind at least, a whole other magnitude of terror, if you can imagine that. Terrifying enough that even the third day I was in the hospital I was still in a state of panic. The nurses would take everyone's vital signs a few times a day, and my heart rate was constantly over 100 beats per minute, even though it's usually closer to 70. The nearest description I can give is that I was literally scared out of my mind. Terrified, and with a few other confusing emotions mixed in there for which there don't exist words in the English language as far as I know.
After I left the hospital, there were nights for weeks afterwards when I would wake up trembling. I had developed a tick of sorts: whenever in the course of my usual thoughts I would run up against a memory of my ordeal, specifically of my thought process at that time, my head would suddenly jerk to the side, as if attempting to shake it. Since I started taking the Wellbutrin, the tick has mostly gone away.
There's kind of a perverse upside to my depression, in that the memory problem I had before I stopped taking birth control pills has returned. Everything prior to last month sort of slips away into this vast forgetting. If I try really hard I can access it, much in the way that one who is in a valley can scale a mountain slowly and, glimpsing more and more of the landscape, come to the point where they can identify a landmark some distance off. But the top of the mountain now eludes me completely; I simply can't hold a complete picture of the past firmly in mind, with any kind of wholeness, whereas before I could--which was generally deeply satisfying but sometimes deeply disturbing, as I mentioned. With that part of my brain asleep, I'm generally undisturbed by memories of the past, but with it seems to go my ability to think about philosophy for any length of time. And since this is requisite for writing philosophy papers, I haven't made any progress at all on that front.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: eventually my working memory will return (I hope), eventually I'll have a flood of thoughts again, and I'll be able to get on with my work. But I wonder if with that--and before I can deal with schoolwork--the terror of that initial ordeal will come flooding back as well, and I'll have to process it all over again. Hopefully more successfully that time, meaning with greater clarity and more closure. But I think this is why I've resisted writing a more complete symptom history, why I feel like I don't get much done in therapy--because I just don't want to think or talk about it, except in a distant and non-specific way. It's not automatic, so I don't want to put forth the effort to find it. And I think it will only come to me one piece at a time and I won't be able to comprehend the whole and resolve it into some kind of coherent narrative in my mind. It will just haunt me like a ghost, materializing to frighten me and disappearing as soon as it appears. Which is why I haven't really gone into it in any detail here (sorry to leave you in suspense). Perhaps I'll relate that another time.