Climbing Out of Brain Hell
Imaginary Living Room
Imagine a living room. There's a couch and a TV on the wall. On the coffee table is whatever book(s) I've been reading recently. There's whatever cold or hot beverage you want on a coaster on the table because in this imaginary living room we use coasters. It's good to see you, friend.
Hey friends,
It’s been a while since I wrote something up here. Truthfully, I wasn’t really feeling the personal essay bug for a while. I have been watching a lot of movies and writing a lot of reviews and thoughts on Letterboxd and that was about the extent of my creative energy for writing.
Honestly I think I have probably been depressed for the last few months. I’m not very good at self-awareness about these things despite the fact that I got a bipolar diagnosis quite a while ago. Things just sorta happen to me and I kind of ride the wave of emotions and assume this is just how it’s supposed to be. I have a bad instinct for my own emotional self-preservation, which sucks when laundry is piling up and floors haven’t been vacuumed and there’s 5 rolls of film waiting to be developed that have been sitting around for almost 6 months.
Then, last week, I had a very bad depressive spiral, on par with many of my absolute lowest points in my 20s. I was taking voice training lessons for voice feminization and I abruptly cancelled those. I tried to break up with my therapist and said some very fucked up things to him. I lashed out at my girlfriend. I completely lost my grip on reality for a few days and felt a kind of delirium that I think they dramatize into movies with high-pitched ringing noises and heavy camera shake and lots of screaming. But instead, it was just me, rolling around in my bed like a pathetic worm, texting the most self-destructive stuff to a handful of people that I knew I could hurt the most.
It ended up very badly, and like all of my depressive episodes, it did eventually pass. At some point, I woke up, and I was fine. Manic, even. Right after this episode ended after over 4 days, I was suddenly losing sleep and obsessively reading about COVID rapid antigen test efficacy.
It has been a crazy couple of weeks for me and it’s gotten to the point that I have to find a new psychiatrist to get back on some kind of medication to help me balance my mood and my energy levels. And I’m checking myself into an intensive therapy program that will force me to be part-time at work for the next couple of months.
It is honestly beyond comprehension how fast things fall apart in your life. Whether it’s mental illness, other health things, money things, life things, sometimes it really feels like you are just teetering on the edge of the abyss and you’re spending all your time looking up to the sky so that you don’t waste every waking moment worrying about how hard the next fall is going to be…and then you slip or something pushes you and the next thing you know you are at rock bottom.
I’m not writing this to worry you. Honestly, I’m terrified of this intensive outpatient program thing I’m starting next week and mostly I fear that after 8 weeks of therapy I will still be the same fragile and unstable person I am today. The idea of wasting this time, of getting all this paperwork together and taking all this time away from work, just to end up in the same place, is really paralyzing to me. But I’m not writing this to worry you. It’s just that I didn’t know what to write about for a few months until this happened. I want to have good news to write about, but besides watching a lot of movies I have been doing a whole lot of nothing. I would have written some exciting piece about my voice training, except that I got so self-conscious and felt so ugly while doing it that I launched myself into space and left this planet so that I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself in front of my voice teacher any more (I blame the childhood piano lessons, my ability to just learn in private instructional settings is absolutely fucked now).
That’s basically the whole update I’ve got. Not a fun one. People always ask what they can do to help, but the problem is that I actually can’t believe that people want to help me in the moment when I think I am lower than the trash you kick away from your shoes on the sidewalk. I tell myself all these insidious lies, like that everyone is secretly resentful of me and hates when I show up to things, or that if I reach out I will cross the line and finally become too annoying and bothersome to be worth spending time with. If you offer to help me all I will be able to tell you is, I don’t know how to accept. Maybe that is something I will learn in my big therapy program thing, how to accept help and reach out for it when I know I need it but feel like I don’t deserve it. Maybe the problem is that I myself am too closed off out of fear, too judgemental towards others, and assume that they must be the same back to me. I don’t know. I struggle with maintaining friendships and connections because I am really good at masking my real feelings. So often I am showing up disingenuously to things, I am secretly depressed or self-conscious and so I put on an air of grandiose humor and confidence. Then when I get home, I look in the mirror and tell myself, “you are trash. Nobody likes you. You’re ugly and you’re sick. If people knew what you really felt they would string you up like a dead animal” (I’m really good at over-the-top supervillain type shit but only when referring to myself).
This is also why I hate being late to stuff and making mistakes around friends. If I have ever brought something to a potluck, just know that I agonized over making it as good as I possibly could for hours. Just know that if there was even one thing I screwed up about it, I spent the next 24-48 hours replaying my mistake in my head over and over again so that I could convince myself I deserved to be abandoned and ostracized. If I’ve ever shown up late to a thing that we were supposed to meet at, just know that the entire drive there I was sweating bullets and on the verge of tears because certainly this would be the reason you would finally hate me the way I deserve. Is this getting dark yet?
So, I'm trying to get some more help so that I can get more help, you know what I mean? This isn’t a tenable way to live. I have so many things I still want to do with my life and at every opportunity I get in my own way. I’m so obsessed with self-flagellation, self-punishment. Once, I went to a frisbee golf outing with some friends and got mad at myself for not doing a good job. At frisbee golf. That’s the sign of a true madwoman. I would like to have a neutral relationship to myself. I don’t even need to like myself, I just wish I could accept myself instead of thinking my wants are a sign of arrogance and my mistakes are a sign of irredeemable failure. I don’t even know how much this overlaps with my bipolar disorder but I will say it certainly doesn’t make that any easier to live with.
I am glad to be here, in the end. The last time I really, really went to personal brain hell, I made a plan to kill myself on my 30th birthday. I’m 31 now, so that was a lie. But could someone please just turn the gain knob down on my own brain? Please?
Hoping you are having an easier time than me right now.
Love,
June