Good weeks and bad weeks
So, this was a bad week.
So I went to put this post together, and then I thought, well crap. I have followers now. People who read this journal who I don't really know, haven't had complicated emotional conversations with, don't even necessarily have friended back. It's weird. There are things I want to vent and explain, and the idea of *hugs* and sympathy from a bunch of people who might get everything or nothing...it's weird.
So. Let's do this thing.
My Aunt Marilyn makes this jell-o mold for every family party I've ever been to on that side of the family. It's not even molded, really; it's just layers, one flavor on top of another, and when you get a piece you can peel them apart one by one, and leave the other layers entirely untouched. For years, it was one of the most interesting parts of our annual holiday parties. (Yes, this is more of a comment on my interest in parties than my interest in jell-o.)
People? Are not, and I know this will come as a shock to all of you, all that much like jell-o molds.
"Humans have layers", they say, but you know? We're not like onions. We're not English trifle or quadruple-decker sandwiches or parfaits. People are what happens when you build your jell-o mold, layer by layer, and then let it alone for a while, and then some of the layers figure out how to grow roots. And pretty soon the lemon layer is sending a hundred tendrils down through the strawberry layer almost all the way to the top, and the lime layer has released spores and started colonizing the grape layer in little polka dots, and over there the raspberry layer and the blue layer are slowly melding into one entity. And bits of it stay soft and other bits harden into concrete.
And later you come back and look at it and say, "wait, no, not that layer there. That layer there makes you think about killing yourself every once in a while and not able to get out of bed and sometimes you sleep five hours a night and bounce around like you're on speed until you crash out and cry for a while night. That is a bad layer. Let's get that out of there."
That's not you, they say. It's what's keeping you from really being you.
You must understand that this is a lie.
It is a good lie, a necessary one, an important thing to say, but you must know, this depression, this bipolar disorder, this chemical imbalance--it did not come from outside of you. It looks like a thick, sick grease slick floating on top and suffocating the rest of everything else, but it has roots all the way through you. No virus made you feel this way. It is your neurotransmitters, your brain, your very self that feels like this.
It's natural. It's organic. And so is malaria, and smallpox, and death in childbirth, and huddling together at night in the dark in fear as the lion, the tiger, the wolf hunts in the distance. The part of me that gets a label 'disorder' is part of me--but I am no more obligated to accept the part of myself that gives me a 35% chance of dying by my own hand, than I am to live in a cave and die under the wolf.
So this is where we come in with our pickaxes, our jackhammers made out of anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers, SSRI's and antidepressants that won't trigger a massive manic upswing. We try and chip away at the concretion of ourselves, try to pretend that we can take out just-that-one-layer. And that's not how it works.
I can chisel down my peaks and brick up my valleys but there is no surgery that can excise just one part of me and leave the mythical 'rest'. It's me. It's all me. If I decided that all the parts on the inside of my head that I don't like are not-me and went after them all to weed them out one by one, I'd end up ripped to tatters with nothing left at all, because the layers all blur together and there is no line where the part of me that's really good at experimental cooking lies separate from the part of me that gets too much glee out of dissecting frogs, or the part of me that hides in the bathroom with her cell phone at parties, for half an hour at a time.
I am not obligated to chisel away at who I am so I fit some perfect mold of person-in-society, and nor am I obligated to keep everything that I was born with when it will drive me off a cliff. It's a give and take. How much do you leave, how much do you take? And in the end, it's not the bipolar or the ADD or anything else with a the and a DSM-IV code--it's all just the pieces of my head, doing what they do.
So you chisel away with your meds and your therapy, and there are still good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. For me, a bad week is not a week where things go more wrong than normal; it's a week where the little things that will always go wrong seem worse. My good moods are sharper, higher, giddier (I spent last Wednesday skipping and grinning and talking to myself) and disappear faster, and my bad moods last longer (I've been so sad about things this week, for no reason at all). I get too excited--and that's the definition of being a geek, that we get too excited about things, so maybe we don't call it bad brain chemistry, maybe we call it something else all together. I get too upset--and aren't we supposed to allow ourselves to feel sad sometimes, maybe we call it 'being sensitive', 'being empathetic', 'being a girl'. There's lots of names. Some of them are better than others.
I've been so tired this week, for no particular reason, except perhaps for too many family parties and too little something I can't quite name. And some weeks are like that. Some weeks, you just get tired.
(And it makes you screw things up, important things, and that only makes it worse, but you have to keep going, you have to fix it. You have to trust that maybe tomorrow, you won't still be so damn tired you can't quite fix it yet.)
There's this thing going around tumblr, about the bullshit around the idea of "strong female characters," and how maybe a badass who can fight and kick ass and always come out on top maybe isn't the kind of character we want to see at all. That maybe we want to see somebody who looks a little more like us. A little weak.
Here's what I know: the definition of being strong is being able to get through the day. Sometimes being brave just means doing something even though you think it will make you cry in public. I know that I spent six hours at my cousin's wedding today and I didn't hide by myself in a bathroom stall for more than five minutes at a time, and my mascara stayed on the whole night, and it doesn't matter how many people I did or didn't talk to, or how many cups of decaf coffee I gulped down, I win.
I know that maybe Pottermore wasn't so off-base as all that, because I think all the things, at all the times, but it's only to keep from having all the feelings, all of them, too much and too many and far, far too strong, and oh, that's about as Gryffindor as it gets, isn't it.
I know I'd rather live inside this whole diagnosably crazy, smushed-together layer cake of my brain, than inside somebody else's, because none of the good parts come without the bad ones, and half the time it's the exact same part just looked at the other way. And this week it looks the bad way. And next week will be better.
BTW, for those of you who are pretty much just hanging out here for Dragons updates (which is totally cool! you do not need to read under the cut! it's kind of incoherent anyway): it might be a little while, because Reasons, but I will get right on finishing up the next chapter as soon as I'm not too tired to feel guilty about being late with it. I think it will be a happy chapter. So that will be nice for all of us.
So I went to put this post together, and then I thought, well crap. I have followers now. People who read this journal who I don't really know, haven't had complicated emotional conversations with, don't even necessarily have friended back. It's weird. There are things I want to vent and explain, and the idea of *hugs* and sympathy from a bunch of people who might get everything or nothing...it's weird.
So. Let's do this thing.
My Aunt Marilyn makes this jell-o mold for every family party I've ever been to on that side of the family. It's not even molded, really; it's just layers, one flavor on top of another, and when you get a piece you can peel them apart one by one, and leave the other layers entirely untouched. For years, it was one of the most interesting parts of our annual holiday parties. (Yes, this is more of a comment on my interest in parties than my interest in jell-o.)
People? Are not, and I know this will come as a shock to all of you, all that much like jell-o molds.
"Humans have layers", they say, but you know? We're not like onions. We're not English trifle or quadruple-decker sandwiches or parfaits. People are what happens when you build your jell-o mold, layer by layer, and then let it alone for a while, and then some of the layers figure out how to grow roots. And pretty soon the lemon layer is sending a hundred tendrils down through the strawberry layer almost all the way to the top, and the lime layer has released spores and started colonizing the grape layer in little polka dots, and over there the raspberry layer and the blue layer are slowly melding into one entity. And bits of it stay soft and other bits harden into concrete.
And later you come back and look at it and say, "wait, no, not that layer there. That layer there makes you think about killing yourself every once in a while and not able to get out of bed and sometimes you sleep five hours a night and bounce around like you're on speed until you crash out and cry for a while night. That is a bad layer. Let's get that out of there."
That's not you, they say. It's what's keeping you from really being you.
You must understand that this is a lie.
It is a good lie, a necessary one, an important thing to say, but you must know, this depression, this bipolar disorder, this chemical imbalance--it did not come from outside of you. It looks like a thick, sick grease slick floating on top and suffocating the rest of everything else, but it has roots all the way through you. No virus made you feel this way. It is your neurotransmitters, your brain, your very self that feels like this.
It's natural. It's organic. And so is malaria, and smallpox, and death in childbirth, and huddling together at night in the dark in fear as the lion, the tiger, the wolf hunts in the distance. The part of me that gets a label 'disorder' is part of me--but I am no more obligated to accept the part of myself that gives me a 35% chance of dying by my own hand, than I am to live in a cave and die under the wolf.
So this is where we come in with our pickaxes, our jackhammers made out of anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers, SSRI's and antidepressants that won't trigger a massive manic upswing. We try and chip away at the concretion of ourselves, try to pretend that we can take out just-that-one-layer. And that's not how it works.
I can chisel down my peaks and brick up my valleys but there is no surgery that can excise just one part of me and leave the mythical 'rest'. It's me. It's all me. If I decided that all the parts on the inside of my head that I don't like are not-me and went after them all to weed them out one by one, I'd end up ripped to tatters with nothing left at all, because the layers all blur together and there is no line where the part of me that's really good at experimental cooking lies separate from the part of me that gets too much glee out of dissecting frogs, or the part of me that hides in the bathroom with her cell phone at parties, for half an hour at a time.
I am not obligated to chisel away at who I am so I fit some perfect mold of person-in-society, and nor am I obligated to keep everything that I was born with when it will drive me off a cliff. It's a give and take. How much do you leave, how much do you take? And in the end, it's not the bipolar or the ADD or anything else with a the and a DSM-IV code--it's all just the pieces of my head, doing what they do.
So you chisel away with your meds and your therapy, and there are still good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. For me, a bad week is not a week where things go more wrong than normal; it's a week where the little things that will always go wrong seem worse. My good moods are sharper, higher, giddier (I spent last Wednesday skipping and grinning and talking to myself) and disappear faster, and my bad moods last longer (I've been so sad about things this week, for no reason at all). I get too excited--and that's the definition of being a geek, that we get too excited about things, so maybe we don't call it bad brain chemistry, maybe we call it something else all together. I get too upset--and aren't we supposed to allow ourselves to feel sad sometimes, maybe we call it 'being sensitive', 'being empathetic', 'being a girl'. There's lots of names. Some of them are better than others.
I've been so tired this week, for no particular reason, except perhaps for too many family parties and too little something I can't quite name. And some weeks are like that. Some weeks, you just get tired.
(And it makes you screw things up, important things, and that only makes it worse, but you have to keep going, you have to fix it. You have to trust that maybe tomorrow, you won't still be so damn tired you can't quite fix it yet.)
There's this thing going around tumblr, about the bullshit around the idea of "strong female characters," and how maybe a badass who can fight and kick ass and always come out on top maybe isn't the kind of character we want to see at all. That maybe we want to see somebody who looks a little more like us. A little weak.
Here's what I know: the definition of being strong is being able to get through the day. Sometimes being brave just means doing something even though you think it will make you cry in public. I know that I spent six hours at my cousin's wedding today and I didn't hide by myself in a bathroom stall for more than five minutes at a time, and my mascara stayed on the whole night, and it doesn't matter how many people I did or didn't talk to, or how many cups of decaf coffee I gulped down, I win.
I know that maybe Pottermore wasn't so off-base as all that, because I think all the things, at all the times, but it's only to keep from having all the feelings, all of them, too much and too many and far, far too strong, and oh, that's about as Gryffindor as it gets, isn't it.
I know I'd rather live inside this whole diagnosably crazy, smushed-together layer cake of my brain, than inside somebody else's, because none of the good parts come without the bad ones, and half the time it's the exact same part just looked at the other way. And this week it looks the bad way. And next week will be better.
BTW, for those of you who are pretty much just hanging out here for Dragons updates (which is totally cool! you do not need to read under the cut! it's kind of incoherent anyway): it might be a little while, because Reasons, but I will get right on finishing up the next chapter as soon as I'm not too tired to feel guilty about being late with it. I think it will be a happy chapter. So that will be nice for all of us.