ripping off the plaster
Friday 6 June 2008 | 2 cookies in the jar
Dearest Interwebs,
How are you? I miss you and think about you all the time. Not much going on here. Although as of today, I’ve been one week without medication.
I know, I Know, I KNOW. And, I feel fine.
Actually, I feel better.
Honestly?
I feel deeply, deeply well.
Not forever, I’m sure. But for a rare and precious week, anyway.
Now how do I explain this—or perhaps the better question is, why bother dragging you through any of the chemical or psychic details. As Peter Cook’s coal miner said of his coal-mining novel, “It’s not long, but it’s extremely boring.” Yet I feel like I need to type it out for myself, to examine my reasoning and make sure it’s not sketchier than usual. I apologize to those of you who still labor under the delusion that you can rummage around here and find good writing, because this post is proudly going to be duller than ditchwater, and unrepresentative of the rather more complex and colorful thinkings which are cheerfully allotted post titles in my drug-discontinuing brain and then filed away and forgotten.
[Meh, if you are foolhardy enough to visit this website on a regular basis anyway, you already know that I am, per Love and Death, a major loon.]
Et alors. First of all, one can’t switch from Emsam straight to something else anyway—MAOIs demand at least a two-week washout period. Then too, I felt it was long past time to move on to a different med or meds. I now think most of my dysphoria this last school year was exacerbated rather than ameliorated by my cocktail. Gentle reader, I just couldn’t take this particular set of SEs anymore—the twitching, barking, yelping, jerking, lip-biting TD, plus the akathisia, plus the agitation/anxiety/hypomania/general feeling of crawling out of my own skin. My impulsive-compulsive behaviors were merrily proliferating and my mood was swinging like London, Chicago, and Delhi (cf. Anoushka Shankar; of whom, more momentarily; because a wild Friday Refrains is coming down the pipeline; sometime before midnight, j’espère).
So I kicked. First Abilify—which was easy as I don’t think it was doing a damn thing anyway (other than augmenting my insomnia). Then Lunesta—which was merciless. Just brutal. I didn’t sleep for three weeks, overlapping with the great Seroquel experiment. And finally, a week ago, Emsam, once I realized that even with the antipsychotics gone, I was still enjoying hypnic jerks and, per George HW, not enjoying them very much, chronically waking up the Brujo and myself in a fine froth of sleep disturbance (which, as a little aside, don’t do much for your swinging moods if you already have ‘em).
Et voilà: Drug-free for the first time in three years.
And of course, probably not for long, she said with a shred of realism. The summer is golden and hot and wide and right now teaching and deadlines seem a million days away. But days shorten and the first big department meeting is on August 18 and getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Also, I note some things are better and some are the same (but hey, at least none are worse; yet).
Things Which Are Better:
• Sleeping. Oh God. Sleep. Is this what you all have been doing all this time?! It’s brilliant! It’s a miracle! Toward the end of the day I start feeling this sensation—what do you call it in your Earth language? “Tired”? Whereas before I pretty much felt the same at 10 pm as I did at 10 am—jittery and exhausted. Now I lie down in the dark and close my eyes and this soft black stuff overtakes me. I don’t emerge from it until the next day, when light enters my eyes and an insistent furry black feline paw bops me on the nose. I’ve even slept through things: barking dogs, exterminators, the Brujo interviewing a potential housesitter, the postal carrier, the garbage truck.
• Impulsive-compulsive Internet usage disorder. One of my nastiest little not-so-secrets. This winter’s frantic discovery of eBay and various fabric-lust panderers has melted into a desultory daily checking (still more than I would like) which deteriorates into reading a couple of blogs and then getting bored and wandering outside to trim the lawn or over to the sewing machine to work on Oleoptene’s and Mandarin’s quilts (!). Sadly it means I’ve also discontinued middle-of-the-night Scrabulous dialogues with beloved interlocutor Ms. O. and have just generally fallen off many electronic maps, reprehensibly enough. Which brings me to:
• Berating myself aloud. Not dislodged by a long shot but shifted.
One night, late, still insomniac, not many hours/days after discontinuing the flow of selegiline into my nervous system, I sat up in bed in tears, the B. with one hand on my back, listening. Half in addressing-the-moon mode, as if from a slight remove, I heard my voice saying something like this:
You know…I think I’m done. I’m just done. It feels like I’m dying, like I will die at the end of this summer. I can’t imagine trying to do a bunch of stuff now. I could die now and let go of everything and it would be okay. I’m not suicidal; that’s not what I’m saying. Sometimes I’ve wanted to stop being alive because I wasn’t worthy of breathing air, and so I felt guilt and failure. But now I have that sesshin sensation of, I could lie down under a tree and look up at the sky and smile and cease. And just quit. I feel done with striving. I don’t feel any pressure to go on and do anything big or important, or in any way to justify my existence. I’m nearly forty and this whole time I’ve fretted and worried and struggled and tried to improve and do more and be better and bigger and faster and more significant and worthy. And I think I’ve done enough. I’ve paid enough bills and gotten enough grades and given enough grades and cleaned enough houses and written enough pages and impressed enough people and taken enough showers and made enough phone calls and been a decent enough human being. I’ve suffered enough, and been in enough mental and physical and psychic pain; and I’ve dragged myself out of the house enough times and gone to work; and I’ve been fired enough, and broken up with enough; and on and on and on and on. The checkbook is hereby officially balanced. Anything I do from here on out is Extra. I’m through. I’m finished. I did enough. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t ideal but the score is settled, the books are even, the debt is paid. I gave enough and I’m done apologizing for it. I’m done now. It’s over. I have fought the good fight and I can die.
Then I immediately fell hard asleep.
The night before that, there’d been one of those eerie modest experiences of some evanescent spiritual kind. (Here half-a-dozen barely-tolerant-until-now faithless readers shudder and flee.) The Brujo, in a pre-dormant attack of tenderness, had wrapped his skinny drummer’s arms tightly around me and then passed out, blowing serenely but stertorously into my hair. I lay there twitching lightly, trying not to wake him despite the discomfort of having my left tit crushed into my ribcage. My hair tickled my neck and itched but I couldn’t move to smooth it away. At first I planned an elaborate slow-motion rearrangement; then suddenly gave up the idea and focused on accepting my plight and trying to fall asleep. It’s just like zazen, I thought patiently, as I’ve told myself during many sleepless nights. Observe it and wait. If you moved you’d just feel uncomfortable again in a few seconds. There is no escape. —And so forth.
Then there was a movement in my brain. These things are so tricky to describe. There was a word that came with it: gratitude. I thought about this word, but not very hard, and waited, and felt what I was feeling, lapped and caressed and loved, not aroused but calm and utterly serene. All of it seemed, without preamble, completely a gift.
More words were there, as if the first line of a poem:
They have put jewels into my hands.
I understood then, and in the morning when I tried to tell the Brujo and wept with relief and with I don’t know what, that everything had been a gift. It’s still hard to say this in words. But the ugliness and the pain too, the itching as well as the soothing. Endometriosis and depression and growing up with people even crazier than I am, unfinished plans and unfulfilled commitments, angry and judgmental and frustrated and needing-more-from-me friends and employers and exes and students and editors. Fighting with the Brujo as well as eating cereal with him &c. All of it. I don’t know how to say it. Stomach flu, fear of dying, paper cuts, getting mean e-mails, fucking up, fucking, slamming my hands in cabinet doors, being hungry, screaming, laughing until my face hurts, watching treetops blowing in wind.
They have placed their jewels in my hands.
I wondered, as I wriggled out of the B’s tit-crushing embrace, whether the feeling would last, knowing that the wondering itself meant it was already gone. I fell asleep.
There is a peace like a weight down at the bottom of my abdomen. I know it fleetingly from before but there it is.
Emsam discontinuation? Or five years of Zen practice and two of DBT bearing fruit? Finally exhaling after a year of life with the Brujo, realizing on some deep level that he’s not going to slap me, ridicule me, break my dishes, take my money, or vanish?
Or maybe just summertime.
Things Which Are The Same:
• Not writing. I could write an entire burdened paragraph or two on this (ha ha! ha ha! ha.) but can’t be arsed.
• Not tackling The List of Stuff Which Should Have Been Done in 2007, which looks increasingly impenetrable.
• Hermiting. All the more tempting this week since 1) I am calm and happy, and 2) the Brujo has had his first real vacation all year, the week between school and summer school, so we’ve rambled around the house in our underwear being placidly quiet and synchronous together. I think he needs more time off. I wish I could buy it for him. (Instead I bought him $3 worth of soft cotton homespun, so I can try to sew him boxer shorts. They seem simple enough: four rectangles and the truth. On verra.)
This morning I saw Aunt Freud for the last time.
“So how’d she take it?” asked the B., scrambling eggs with queso for lunch. I was at the sink scrubbing an empty can that had held fancy salted nuts—an end-of-year present from the grateful mother of one of his more trying algebra students.
“Um, pretty well. Probably because I, well, I didn’t exactly say, in, uh, in so many words….”
“You were going to fire her!”
“I know. But I just kind of…put her on permanent sabbatical.”
Having returned last week from Hawaii, she now leaves for a big conference/editorial thingummy in Tel Aviv, and won’t be back until July, I explained. “So I’m to call her then and let her know how I’m getting on—which to me means that I’ll hope the insurance company has settled by then, and I can pay off the balance and be done. As far as I’m concerned, I terminated today.”
“Right. But she doesn’t know that.”
“Well, I did tell her that I had a lot of ambivalence about therapy right now. Which she already knew. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…and sometimes missed appointments are just missed appointments. But I’ve ‘forgotten’ like, three so far.”
“Did she freak out about your stopping all your meds?”
Aunt Freud had her head thrown back in her hideous caramel-brown naugahyde chair, eyes squinted as she listened and grey hair in companionable disarray. She’s generally in companionable disarray, wearing untidy floppy gauze skirts and blouses, twinkly eyes but with that barely detectable psychoanalytic edge that’s there if you know to look for it. The floor of her office is tile, partially covered with a Berber carpet that I cannot straighten surreptitiously with my foot no matter how I try. (”I like it for that reason,” she says roundly. “It’s not symmetrical, it’s made out of fifty different non-matching colors of thread, and it won’t lie flat.” Clearly she should not be treating people with OCD symptoms. Or perhaps she should.)
She listens to my confession of noncompliance, and nods. After a while she speaks. “You’ve been on a lot of different medication. And you’ve had a lot of therapy. I can imagine that you would want a break from both.”
To my relief, we go back to talking about volcanoes, quilting, and Orthodox Judaism. She gives me the name and number of her on-call replacement pdoc and I emerge into the roasting Arizona morning. Sunglasses and lip balm. Listening to the Oleoptene mix tape and mentally writing my blog commentary on same, I stop at Whole Foods for an apple and a bar of almond soap.
Then I take myself to the surreal Scottsdale couture fabric shop; vocally admire all the Scalamandre and the Liberty, the taffeta and crepe and four-ply silk; charmingly evade the owner’s suave attempts (seventy, bright blue eyeshadow, master seamstress, former Vogue designer, barking mad) to sell me $300 worth of Dormeuil silk-wool blend (my GOD, the drape! the hand!) for an eyepopping bargain price of $120; escape in my filthy, unregistered, illegal, falling-apart Korean car; and go to Joann where I use my teacher discount and buy boxer-short cotton for the Brujo.
Come home and immediately shed my cream-colored thrift-store August Silk blouse, olive-green silk-linen thrift-store Ann Taylor cropped pants, and highly uncomfortable underwire bra, all donned for the purpose of being admitted to the couture fabric boutique. (It did no good; the owner immediately assessed my shoes and saw through my little hippie soul in a microsecond anyway.) And ate burritos with the Brujo, showing him my sample square of tobacco four-ply silk (a mere $70/yard). He explained many things about cacti and taxonomy to me and we clambered into our cool-sheeted bed with Pyewacket, who despite the heat insisted on falling asleep wedged firmly into my crotch. I drooled on the pillow.
It’s June. It’s 10 pm. He’s making salad in the kitchen and I’m going to join him now without editing this post. And probably won’t finish my Friday Refrains post either.
I hope you are well and happy and that all your stars are out.
Love love love, your Unreliable Narrator
2 cookies in the jar
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Psychotropic cocktails are like PhotoShopping your brain; even so, cold turkey can really crash your hard drive. Please proceed with caution, UnNarr.
Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! Better living through chemistry is K.’s mantra, but we’re agreed there’s limits to what psychoactive substances can do to improve a bad situation. She feels that for me 2 dry martinis (up, with olive) is definitely pushing the limit, especially if topics political are in the offing. Here’s fervently hoping that regular sleep, undirected creative activity, occasional recreational sex, reasonably reliable income, and a permanent jettisoning of the superhero ideal will put the unbelievably admirable Un on the long road to general well-being—insofar as possible in a world gone mad with greed, power, bloodlust and related ephemera & epiphenomena. Remember the task of the slave in the triumphal chariot was to whisper in Caesar’s ear: All glory is fleeting.