Good Days, Hard Days

My kid has had five good days in a row. This is a massive breakthrough, and I find myself feeling as if the ground is shifting under me, or maybe the sky is shifting over me - a sense of vertigo with this new upbeat person in our home. People talk about medical conditions all the time. Particularly in children, we tend to romanticize illness, as if the sick child is somehow endowed with unique powers of resiliency, or good-heartedness, or a range of solid character traits that he or she supposedly gained from the experience of having managed the obstacle of the medical condition, or disability, or whatever you care to call it.

This is not the case with the depressed and anxious child. Primarily, her illness may be a secret from our friends and neighbors. For the most part, it is, for me, something shared with the very few. When she is in the hospital, we are especially isolated. People do not bring food and send flowers. Indeed, only those few people know about it. We want to preserve her privacy and protect ourselves from peoples' reactions. Often, folks are as compassionate as they can be; at other times, people do not understand the distinction between major depression and the regular depressed feelings everyone has at times. I am not interested in educating. And honestly, it is painful to share. There are too many implications, and the blunt reality that my child is thinking that hurting herself is a good option because her life is that painful; she is pale and quiet; she cries and cuddles up to me like a small child, which she is not.

It is ironic that my relief with these good days is followed by my own anxiety - a delayed reaction, perhaps to all of the worry that I hold in and that I held in with my first child. It's not that I keep a veneer of calm - hardly - but I am the confidant, and the main caretaker in these matters, and I must hold myself together to take care of my dear daughter. When she feels bad, I feel bad, but I have little time for that because she needs me to listen, to reflect, to remind her that she does have good days, that it always passes, and that she is slowly following a pattern of getting better. Now that she is so much better than she was even a short time ago, I need reminders for myself: she is okay. I need to wind back to when my son was ill, too, and tell myself the same thing: he is doing well now, and he is a fine young man. But honestly, where does it leave me? Feeling a vague sense of what might be desperation, anticipating the inevitable moment of the next bad day.

Side Effects, Symptoms and Psychiatry

It's been over three years since I have posted here and in that time things have not been particularly peachy. But rather than launching into the whole story of the woes of me, I'd prefer to discuss one piece: side effects. Yes, side effects. They are the quirks that arise when you have a problematic symptom and the solution is in a pill and you take the pill and lo, another problem crops up. Sometimes there is a pill to help with the new problem so you take a pill so that you can take a pill. Do you follow me? I will be more specific. A coupla years ago I was having issues which I would rather not detail at this time but since the point of the blog is to actually "Say Something," I guess I had better do some of  that.  I was so anxious that I could not eat.

When you are so anxious that you cannot eat, it is detrimental because your body needs food to survive. This is a basic tenet of human biology but it bears repeating here because of the great amount that I could not eat: the nausea, the difficulty swallowing, the cramping, the diarrhea was all extensive. As the song says, "there's a pill for that," and indeed, there was. The first pill was to help me swallow and after months of difficulty it truly helped. However, the side effect of that pill was diarrhea. Oh, joy. It was around this time that the doctor thought maybe I had celiac disease. Ha! But I was desperate, so I eliminated all gluten from my diet. It changed nothing except that now my food was limited, which I really did not need because I continued to lose weight. Food caused nausea, anxiety caused nausea, nausea caused a disdain for all things food-ish.

Now you may be reading this and wondering about the anxiety part of it. That is mysterious because at first I had only gastro-intestinal symptoms and stress at my now-former job. I did not notice any anxiety. Over the course of time the anxiety seemed to increase but I did not realize it. It was like the time when a doctor prescribed Percoset for my herniated disc and I asked why the strong medicine? "You're in a lot of pain," she told me, at which point I realized that limping around for months unable to sit in a chair was perhaps not the 'new normal.' So Denial, yes, capital D, not just a river in Egypt, etc etc. The symptoms of anxiety hit me before I realized I was feeling anxious. Plus my doctor was saying to me "you need treatment." I could not really hear her; or rather, I heard it, but it made no sense to me. When you do not eat, your brain does not work well (see aforementioned denial) and a lot of things do not make sense to you.

I kept saying "I hafta go to work" in response to the distant voice of psychiatry saying "you are sick."  I woke up in the mornings at 3 a.m. wondering what I would do, how I would manage the humiliating crap that was my job, which is another story called "The Humiliating Crap that was My Job." But back to side effects! Once I started the treatment that, yes, I did end up needing to start, they gave me a pill to gain weight and help me sleep. Great stuff. It turns out that eating and sleeping are both recommended activities. They actually gave me two pills because I was way too thin and sleep-deprived. Side effect: they worked. That would be a happy ending to the story if I no longer needed them and/or if any of my clothes actually fit me now. Who cares about my clothes fitting if I recovered from the awful anxiety and nausea, right?

It felt that way at first because I got back to my normal weight. You are thinking oh no I read all this just so she could complain about her weight? Well, kind of, yeah. When your clothes don't fit and you become an entirely other shape it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It is not like when you are going to have a baby and something exciting is happening. It is confusing, as in: what do I wear and how would I feel if I tried to come offa these pills?  And you learn that a "muffin top" is the sag of your belly over the low waist of the now-tight jeans. Last spring I tried to come off of one of the muffin top pills and that was not wise. A couple of months ago I reduced another by half so that is getting somewhere.

I am able to eat now and of course that is good and I no longer have any of those fairly repellent symptoms I had before. But the side effect, which was initially a desirable one, is that I am perpetually hungry. I know what you are thinking: there's a pill for that. I know! But I am not going to take yet another pill. My Inner Guide tells me to love myself the way I am, and to embrace my muffin top. My pants ask me if I have the dough to go buy new ones. So if I "go with my gut," at least I have something to really grab onto - with both hands.

Rhoda and Opie: A Coupla Freaks

Here's the story, or the query, or the mystery, and if any one out there is able to decipher exactly what happened, or is willing to give advice, surely you are going to heaven, or whatever your version of it might be: a really good concert, a delicious dinner, or an amazing sexual experience?

How does one decipher the difference when you are in a bad situation with someone and they are a freak and you are a freak? You both behave badly, but your own perspective is shot. Do you blame the other person, especially since you have concrete evidence that he or she is thin-skinned, naive, and, well, young? After you know he's fudged a few stories at work to cover himself? Do you continue to trust someone after he's complained about you to an authority at work? In another context, that question would seem absurd to me, like "he punched me in the face - should I try to forgive him"? What if you know the other person has at least as much anxiety as you? What if you feel you are introducing the whole story with a clear bias, so that the reader is already won over to your side, without even realizing that lapses in judgment occurred? (Notice the cute illustration, to feign compensation for above-mentioned bias. ) Did I ever claim to be Jewish saint? (Maybe I did, but that's a rhetorical question.)



Don't get all hot and bothered over there - I made it sound worse than it is, and this is not someone I am currently talking with more than a professional hello. I don't know why I care, and I don't know if it's genuine caring, but I know I am beseiged with questions and hopes. Hope that I haven't messed with my job too much; hopes that something can be salvaged. How embarrassing. The connection between us was chipping off anyway, due to circumstances described below, and when I asked a colleague to check on said person, said person became enraged that I would "gossip" about him. So maybe that means he has not demeaned me to every human at work? Why am I not more angry? Anger is a huge part of my identity, with a specialty in self-righteous anger.


Let's take a more serious look. Say Rhoda - not Mary, of course! - is at her job. She's a beading teacher, creating beads to stroll through for all sorts of folks. And say Rhoda is having a hard time, like Joe's been kind of a jerk lately because he wants to leave the show, and even though Rhoda knows it's better that way - a happily married Rhoda was an oxymoron, really, and signaled the demise of something pure - and so Rhoda goes to work and everything seems good at work, despite personal woes. (Oh I know Rhoda had a spin-off, but that's besdie the point.) She is beading with a young, inexperienced guy - we'll call him Opie, although that's not exactly right - and he seems nervous a lot, but then they realize that they both love, well, beads, and the same hippie music, and he is almost as funny as she is. No, definitely as sensitive, and sort of funny. They yak about all sortsa stuff, including their respective assessments of their beading students, movies, books, 'the works.'

She neglects to notice as more than a nagging whisper that he is wildly disorganized, and she doesn't quite know what to do about joint projects that he doesn't seem to care about. When they actually have to teach something to a group of prospective beaders, it's great, and they are even using Bob Dylan-style beading. (Isn't it weird that Bob Dylan's name is Bob? Bob is such a mundane and fun name. He seems more like Caleb.)

Oh, anyway. So Rhoda's all like so middle-agey-bogged-down and she's having a lotta fun with this guy at work - he should be Ritchie, actually - and people at work are like, hmmm, big-personality Rhoda is maybe going overboard. Rhoda doesn't notice. Often, they leave at the same time because the mini-guy has signed on for extra duties that he hates, but he is unable to tell The Boss that he hates them , and Rhoda is stuck with extra work. She doesn't really mind, and she helps him some. They talk about it, but Rhoda tells him beaders help each other out, and Richie is new: after his first year, it will be easier. One night, The Big boss moves a deadline up, and they take all of their papers out to eat, and correct them together, alternating between serious work, serious chat, and very not-serious chat.


I am really truly getting to the point, but this is hard difficult painful and I need to not glass over either Rhoda's or Ritchie's freakiness.

One day Big Boss, not an unfair person, but idiosynchratic, at least, and not so far off from Lou Grant, or Ed Asner (there really wasn't a difference: he played himself, like Peter Falk aka Columbo), sits Rhoda down. So Lou says "Rhoda, I had to learn this. You hafta learn this. People are talking." Oops, I left out a part.

Flashback! (If you were hoping for logical sequence you wouldn't be reading this, anyway.) Big Boss, a week earlier, tells Rhoda that she - Rhoda - is going to specialize in a certain type of bead design, as many of the inner-city students are way below bead-level - and that she and Opie will not be together any more. Rhoda is taken aback, she cries even, later. Lou is tactless, telling her in the hallway, while beading students gossiped and compared styles all around her. What is going on? How did this happen so quickly? Why had Lou spoken to Ritchie that morning - to ask his opinion - yet not to Rhoda? It is all quite disturbing, yet still, Rhoda proceeds, in her quirky, nervous-energy way, to do her work.

Lou says - back to the hallway - he went to a conference yesterday, and after all, the two jobs were originally meant to be separate (that's true). Rhoda has to move her things out of the joint office, and she tells Opie - he reverts back at some point - that she has been evicted. Opie had honestly talked about wanting to work on his own because he needed to do well without an experienced beader always there, but he was torn. Rhoda told him to do what was best for him. He had informed Lou one morning that either would be fine; he told Lou later in the day that he wanted things to remain the same. Lou interrupted - "I'm splitting you up!" Maybe Opie had realized how much Rhoda is working on (cynical view). Maybe he remembered how well they had worked together (who knows). They had received a lot of praise about their work together. (Notice that was all past-tense/pre-split, and that it quickly became a moot point.)

Rhoda spends a week trying to connect with Opie - he is stand-offish. He has the flu or something and whenever she sees him he is blowing his nose. He teaches a creative lesson that she had planned without thanking her or mentioning it. The beaders all love the lesson. Rhoda is wildly jealous, working on what seems like far less interesting stuff. She pesters him for her things. Remember how Rhoda had asked a colleague how Opie was doing? by now the tension between them is clear. Rhoda googles "apology," although she is already pretty good at it, and manages a strong apology on a Friday morning. Unbeknownst to Rhoda, Opie had ratted her out the night before. Wow, you can really tell how obsessed I am with this whole issue, huh? It's starting to seem a little funny to me at this point.

Oh God, back to the story. Lou says, "Look, Rhoda. People are talking. You and Opie had an argument and you sent him a text message asking him to talk to you. You mentioned drinking. You gotta stay away from him." Rhoda is mortified, horrified, embarrassed, angry, and fearing for her job. She is a married woman, devoted to her kids and family. Somehow all sorts of feelings had leaked out. She had been out with a bunch of colleagues and invited Opie. He had shared the email out-of-context. He was so wrong, and such a freak, and such an asshole to 'tell on her,' without ever talking to her. He was the classic, fearful, afraid of-conflict guy. For Rhoda, the anniversary of something painful had just passed, and despite knowing how righteous she was, Rhoda sorta knew she'd been acting crazy, hounding Opie about little remnants of connections, like supplies she needed back, books, and information beaders share.

She and Opie had confided in each other. They were both wounded souls. They hung out in the same places. He gave her one of his CDs. But there was an undercurrent of something, and instead of letting it be, it just sort of flared up.

So the question is not what should Rhoda do, because she already did exactly what Lou prescribed, and he told her at the end of the week that she had done well at the new-fangled beading assignment. He had said to stay out of staff meetings while things cooled off. He had said beaders gossip. He had said that he had been in a similar situation once, and that he would teach Rhoda how to avoid it again. He told Rhoda not to speak to a soul about it; he told Rhoda that he knows everything that 'goes on' at the beading establishment. Yikes! Could that possibly be true?

She is working on trusting herself again. She is still obsessing, but not as much. Eating? Not really. Sleeping? A bit better. Watching movies, listening to loud music, writing, looking through papers, thinking about beading. Joe is suddenly very supportive. Maybe the show will stay on the air, after all. Or maybe she's a bit more of a Phyllis (Chloris Leachman - off the fucking wall, and almost as over-sexed as SueAnn Niven)?

But why would Rhoda still care about Opie, who basically betrayed her, and actually complained to Lou? Is she obsessed or compassionate? The original sentiment was some maternal-type concern about his lack of professional care-taking re beading requirements. She became a pseudo-stalker and it was all wrapped up in confusion and - as the DSM IV manual says - a loss of awareness that her behavior was out of the ordinary. Rhoda still wants to contact Opie! Why? Partly because she doesn't like to leave things unresolved - she hates it - but also because she misses the sudden, intense companionship, she misses another lost friend from a while back, Edward, and she misses her little brother, although Rhoda refuses to over-do this point.

I wrote a poem once called "I love too much." Omigod that's like that pop-psychology book. but it's not that I stay with people who are bad for me, it's that I see the details in people, I feel for them, and I love them as whole personalities.

Obviously Rhoda was so mortified that she didn't quite tell anyone, even here, the whole entire exact story. She tried to tell her great and excellent friend Gotcha, an older and wiser confidante. She told enough. There was nothing physical that went on between them, there was no lying to Joe; there was just so much intricacy to the friendship that it is still impossible to 'pin down.' Other folks validated the fact that Opie was something of a freak, but what am I, if not a freak?

Opie still has some of Rhoda's books and beads and other things, but she is leaving them in the old office until a light moment comes up. Rhoda fears that she will be removed from the team completely, and she is prepared to switch from the idea of a hiatus to a division. Rhoda adores the people on the rest of the team, all of whom are professional and kind adults. Rhoda is always going to have to manage mental health issues. She really, really wants to go back in time, in a lot of ways. Not like Aunt Bea, or anything, but definitely before the bad things happened, and before the really bad thing happened.

I've always thought it was absurd when people detailed their shit at work, because who really cares about other people's work shit? Nevertheless, I needed to air this one, and I need some sanity. The former may be happening already; the latter is going to take awhile. After all, Rhoda settled for what she could get, and I eat life up like I'm starving, despite the consequences.