Tag Archives: mental-health

Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day

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Yesterday, the day after the day where you were most afraid the worst could happen, was Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day. On Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day you wake up, and your body feels like cardboard that will not bend or yield. Somehow, you find a dress and some sandals. And look at that! You even found a cardigan. Hold on a minute … must shower, and so you do, for the bare minimum amount of time to be considered clean. Now you can pull on the dress, fall into the sandals, and pull on the cardigan with a double check to make sure it is not on inside-out. Oh, yes, don’t forget to twist your hair up into a a hair clip.

Mercifully, your day at work is a half day. You get through it, actually it’s a strange godsend to go to work. You love the feeling of semi-normality as you discuss the performance evaluation of an employee with a supervisor. Inside you are internally incredulous. “How is it that I can do this? I look and sound normal, and even get the job done well, but the deepest inside of me is in dissociative hell.”

A few more emails to answer at your desk, and you then head out for the day. You head to a coffee shop to take a final exam online. Done. But then you realize that you have to go home, and you feel yourself start to slip away again. You call your friend, David, and he invites you to come over to his place. He reminds you that you need to eat something, so you stop at the bakery to get half priced baked goods since it’s closing time for them. You get a quiche for yourself, a cinnamon roll for him, and vanilla pound cake just to have on hand.

He saved a George Lopez HBO comedy special for you on his DVR months ago for an occasion just like this. You watch it in that sleepy, drifty mode of yours that feels almost like drunken sleep. In that sleepy state you hear “órale! órale!” from the television screen. It’s George’s forever rallying cry. But, you don’t quite drift off because David has it in his head to show you this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, which thrills you because, not having HBO, you’ve not had opportunity to ever see it. You drift off as one of your personal heroes, Simone Campbell, of Nuns on the Bus, is on the show. Such sweet serendipity.

You wind up falling asleep there for the night. Somehow the sofa bed is rolled out, and you wake up with sheets and a blanket on you.

The ick of a nasty nonsensical nightmare with a kidnapping, a helmet, and a roaring train wakes you up with a start. David hears you wake up from his bedroom. He comes out to cut up the vanilla pound cake for your breakfast. He serves you seltzer that is at least two years old because he cannot waste anything.

After all these years, you never really paid any attention to his sound system. He starts to explain to you the intricacies of 5.1 surround sound. You ask to listen to some classical music to try out the sound system, and you find a Weber symphony by the London Classical Players. And it sounds pristine. You would have paid admission for that lovely sound. Later on, he further shows off the surround sound by showing you the sound quality with a game of quidditch from the first Harry Potter movie. He tries to convince you that Star Wars is best for the sound system, but Star Wars always bored you.

But when he’s done he is done, and you get the idea that it is time to leave. After all, you did spend the night. You are still in the same clothes from yesterday. You find a hair band, and you put your hair up. You can tell that you are sweaty, and could use a shower, but you are afraid to go home and lose time. Home is such a black hole of lost time for you. You drive to the tea shop, and order a Matcha Green Tea Latte with Coconut Milk, and the paradox of sitting there with that fancy drink in day old sweaty clothes, and a greasy face is a tiny scrap of humor in the eternal struggle to not drift away. Looking out the open window of the tea shop with a slight breeze, you then realize that it’s the next day of Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day.

The Floats

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The Floats are plaguing me again, that state where my feet feel leaded down walking/trudging through clouds. Today I was at my favorite tea shop, and I made myself sit right in the middle of the shop where the owners could see me because I could feel myself start to disappear, float away. I thought if I put myself in front of people I would, hopefully, be less likely to space out like a zombie with a thousand yard stare. But, still, there I was, floating away, and I would say to myself, “Stay. Stay here. Don’t go.” Sometimes it would work. Other times I just let myself space out.

Earlier in the week, I had an upsetting interaction with someone. I can’t write about the interaction as I’m afraid to get triggered again. But it catapulted me into another time and place with my mother. I was frightened and my entire body shook violently. My head felt like it had been kicked in, and my chest had the sensation that it was closing in on me. I hate that I have moments like this. I look like a freak, and feel like a freak when moments like this happen.

Is this how it will always be for me? Is the idea of recovery just that … an idea, a concept, a fantasy?

Sometimes I feel so strong, and able, and with it. Times like that, I am actually proud of myself. Then there are times like this, where I wonder what the hell I am trying to do with my life. I wonder why I keep trying in the face of all the difficulties.

I have no real answers to those questions, except perhaps I don’t want to miss out if there is a chance to recover.

I’m sitting in that tea shop spaced out, and this elderly woman with a reddish brown cardigan asks me why I’m not sitting in my usual spot. I almost don’t hear her because I’m spaced out. I’m annoyed at first that she is talking to me. She tells me that some people are in her usual spot, the blue chairs (she loves the blue chairs), and she does not like having to sit elsewhere. Somehow I find my voice, and say, “Oh, yes, I’m a creature of habit too. But I decided to mix it up today and sit out here.” And then we start talking about movies, and the fact that we both love the independent theatre in town. She also reads movie reviews before viewing to make sure the movie is not too upsetting or violent. The movie, Blue Jasmine, made us both teary. She asks me to google author Lynda La Plante for her on my phone. We both love police procedurals on tv. And then the place closes down for the night. I pay for my stuff, and leave. I hear her tell the owners, “I sure liked talking to that girl.” I felt the same way talking to her. And that’s why I keep trying, for those small moments that would otherwise not be possible if I gave up. I wish I could have thanked her for helping me fend off The Floats.

An Al-Anon Meeting

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At the beginning of the week I consulted the Al-Anon meeting calendar, and honed in on the Friday 7:30 p.m. meeting. For years I’ve struggled with the concept of attending Al-Anon because I felt I did not belong there. After all, I have not spoken to my alcohol dependent father for 5 years, and before that it had been 3 years, and before that it had been at least 20 years. I had read a cursory amount of Al-Anon material years ago that led me to the assessment that because I was not an “enabler,” and since I was now “detached” I did not need Al-Anon. I believed Al-Anon was for those still entangled with the alcoholic, still trying to get them to stop drinking, and lost in the vortex of covering up for the loved one. Al-Anon was for everyone else but me.

The other part of the puzzle that kept me from entering those Al-Anon doors was my own problem with alcohol. The thought of sitting with people who suffered because of a loved one’s battle with alcohol made me feel like an interloper hiding their true identity as an alcoholic.

Lately, I’ve been ruminating about my father, missing him as if he left yesterday. It’s as if mourning his loss many years ago had been arrested, and now, after all this time, the loss was finally being felt.

I pulled up to the church, and waited in the car until the last minute. I encountered a woman in a lovely dark green wrap dress wearing cross trainers who whispered, “Welcome” as she held the door open for me. I asked her, “Is this the Al-Anon meeting?” She nodded and showed me to a seat. There was a long rectangular desk in the middle of the room with 13 of us gathered around it. The group ranged in ages across the spectrum, easily from twenties to seventies. I immediately felt comfortable with the orderly fashion in which the meeting was being run. It felt like a well-oiled machine, yet one that could take new and broken parts like me.

They went through the typical motions of reading the 12 steps, and there was a preamble that was read (of which I cannot recall much of the contents because I was anxious at the mere fact of being in attendance). They asked if this was anyone’s first Al-Anon meeting, and I raised my hand and introduced myself. I was immediately given a Newcomer packet of pamphlets with a local meeting schedule. And then people shared, and it was so different from AA in that there was accepted silence between shares. If no one wanted to share, or if there was a large pause before the next person shared, the pause just hung there like the damp air after rain. There was no cajoling, or putting people on the spot to share. I immediately relaxed when I saw this was the group format. I’ve always appreciated people who are comfortable with silence, and feel no need to just “fill the gap.”

During one of the silences I found myself thinking about some of the AA and Al-Anon differences. During the introduction that was read the reader mentioned that a person should try Al-Anon for 6-8 meetings in order to see if the program works for them. I also recall hearing the reader say that people could attend regularly or infrequently. She also said something to the effect of “take what works, and leave the rest.” I was aghast at hearing this because it’s so different from the way AA is presented in “How It Works,” a chapter from The Big Book, which is typically read in an abbreviated form at the start of most AA meetings.

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our directions. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. They are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a way of life which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.”

I finally have a window into beginning to understand my issues with AA. It starts with that first sentence, “Rarely have we seen a person fail …” That sentence conveys an immediate arrogance that has always set me on edge, though I was never conscious of it until I found myself comparing the differences between the two groups. That first paragraph in “How It Works” conveys to the listener/reader that AA is the only program that works for sobriety. And if you do not recover it is because you did not fully give yourself over to AA. I’ve always felt that the second sentence of “How It Works” is overly simplistic and presumptuous. Here’s the response I’ve always wanted to write to the first paragraph of “How It Works”:

“I have not followed all of your directions. I tried, but some of them asked me to check my brain at the door, and I could not do that. I could not completely give myself over to this program. However, I am in long-term recovery, and I plan on staying that way for the rest of my life. If you were a fly on the wall of my life you would see that I demand rigorous honesty of myself. I may be mistaken about a number of issues in my life, but it’s because I’m still working through deep-seated issues. I may be afraid of my past, but I will face it, and do whatever it takes to get out of this ditch. But I cannot give in to the AA group think. Perhaps my chances are less than average. That’s okay. I’m familiar with being an underdog. Tell me something new, we all know I suffer from “grave emotional and mental disorders.” Who the hell doesn’t? But I will continue to recover because I don’t give up.”

Since I did not feel the pressure to share I felt comfortable sharing. In AA I’ve been known to go for long stretches of meetings before I share because of the feeling of expectation. I’ve never liked feeling like I’m expected to do something. I can be as stubborn as a rat terrier going after his prey. But remove the expectation, and I’m likely to get there on my own. I talked about my missing my father, and feeling like I did not belong in the meeting since I was no longer entangled with him. I started crying at the mention of missing the good parts of him. I wrapped up my share quickly for fear of turning into a spectacle. Then an older gentleman got up and brought me a box of tissues.

I’ll keep coming back.