Four Years

Wednesday, February 14th, 2024 will mark four years since the day I was released from hospitalization on the mental health floor. Four years. One quadrennium. The typical length of a high school education or an undergraduate degree. The length of one presidential term. 1,461 days, to be exact.

Since those days in the hospital I have been in treatment to maintain my sometimes tenuous grasp on sanity and calm. I am medicated and regularly go to therapy. The second I start to feel off or anxious, I break out my skills and work through figuring out what the problem is and make a plan to deal with it. When I need help, I ask for it. I figure things out and I get through them, even if it is sometimes by the skin of my teeth.

In short, I am one strong bitch.

I think I say that fairly because I have managed a lot of nonsense all at once, a lot of it stemming from my own gray matter. But at times I also wonder if I am actually a strong person or if the number of things that can take me down makes me weak in reality.

This last year has been a good one. Managing my anxiety is like a sixth sense now. Almost before something triggers it, I know it’s coming. While I know I am taking actions every day to help with the anxiety, I’m not really consciously aware of doing so all the time. Sometimes days will pass without me really having to think about how I’m feeling. Which, I think, is why some events this past year really threw me for a loop. There were moments of high emotion and anxiety, some I prepared for and some that actively have me freaked out for the future.

In March my grandfather passed away. I expected his memorial service to spike my anxiety and it did. My heart rate was elevated for about two days surrounding the service. I made it so that I would be sitting on the outside of the pew during the service in case I needed to make a quick exit. I had emergency pills in my pocket. And while it was hard, I got through it. I felt strong that day.

In May the organization for which I work held the first in person Annual Conference since the pandemic. For innumerable reasons in person Annual Conference causes me great stress. It is a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. Pre-pandemic and pre-hospitalization I barely made it through these events; in the days immediately following Conference I would be physically and mentally exhausted from trying to keep everything together. But in 2023 Annual Conference was quite nearly a breeze. Still a ton of work and a lot of stress, but damn if those selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors don’t do the trick, not to mention the benzos (all legally prescribed, and no I’m not sharing…get your own). That and the tremendous amount of preparation and planning I did to make sure I wasn’t carrying everything on my shoulders. I delegated and trained and empowered the people on my team so that we truly ran the event together as a team. Surviving and somewhat thriving through moments like Conference and Grampy’s memorial service left me feeling strong and capable.

But then there were other moments that really make me question my ability to function as a normal human.

In December on the way back east after visiting Iowa for Christmas, I got a flat tire on route 80 just outside of Chicago. I ran over something that punctured my tire, rendering it immediately flat and useless. I was able to move the car safely to the shoulder, put on my hazard lights, and started the process of calling Triple A. There was a little confusion about which territory I was in and I had no idea what town I was in, so it took them a little while to find me. In the twenty or so minutes of uncertainty, I worked myself up into such a near panic that I had to get out of the car and pace along the shoulder between my car and the barrier on the side of the road. On the interstate. In the cold. At dusk. Nothing about that was safe, but it was the only thing that kept me from feeling like I was going to explode out of own body. After the tire was changed and I was once again physically safe, it took me hours to calm down enough to be able to sleep. I had to employ just about every coping mechanism in the book to get through that. And honestly, flat tires happen. It wasn’t that big of a deal, yet still from the way my body responded you would have thought I was under attack by an army of vomiting Nazis armed with atomic weapons (pretty much the worst thing I can imagine).

This past year I think I subconsciously assumed that I was past the point of allowing stress to really get ahold of me. There are so many things I do to take care of myself that while I still feel stress, I didn’t expect the stress to be able to take over. Oh how wrong I was. After a lovely but fairly stressful holiday season (see above re: flat tire), I returned to work and expected to hit the ground running with all the projects that sort of fizzled out while everyone was taking time off for the holidays. I did indeed hit the ground running and so did everybody else. The amount of work that piled up and the amount of responsibility I had was beyond overwhelming. There was about a week and a half in January where I seriously thought I was regressing all the way back to the beginning of this whole mental health crusade. I was so stressed that my head ached constantly. I would get dizzy standing at the sink washing the dishes. I kept forgetting to breath and then wondered why I felt so weird. There was even one afternoon where I seriously considered going to the ER because I just felt so terrible. But deep down I knew stress to be the culprit of all those lovely symptoms, so I just pushed through. I was not happy to feel it as intensely as I did.

Moments like these make me feel weak. Not because I didn’t handle these events, but because they happened to me in the first place. It cannot be normal to be in a state of panic for hours because of a flat tire, or so I tell myself. It cannot be normal to feel the physical symptoms of stress and then immediately pile on with three intrusive thoughts about how I’m obviously dying and the cat is going to eat my face and no one will notice anything is wrong until it is way to late to get help. The fact that these thoughts and feelings happen to me truly make me wonder if I am built to handle the life of a typical adult human.

Not my artwork…

My biological clock, which has been silent, presumed dead, for many a year suddenly started ticking again about a month ago. For this I blame my adorable goddaughter, her brother, and my nieces and nephews. I blame the pleasure of witnessing families interact with each other, witnessing the bonds that exist from raising children together and being raised up in a family unit. So, as with any other wild occurrence in my life, I brought it to my therapist. Given that I have PCOS, am pathologically afraid of barfing and therefore morning sickness, and that I am already 37 years old, we talked about my options for producing a child. Long story short, with any of the biological options available to me I would have to go off at least one of my medicines, which is not impossible, but scary. And my mental health history makes me more susceptible to postpartum depression which my therapist has seen last for THREE TO FIVE YEARS! And that is before we even address the absolute mountain range of responsibility that is being a parent. Just having a cat stresses me out, people. I cannot say that I feel capable of having or raising a child and yet tick, tick, tick goes that blasted clock.

Therapy used to be mostly about managing my anxiety at the surface, but for a long time now we have been delving deeper and are slowly working on chipping away at my OCD. It is one of the hardest disorders to work on, sayeth my therapist, and it is not likely that I will ever be completely rid of it. I’m fine with that and am grateful for the small amounts of progress that I have made over the last several months. Then just this past Friday an email arrived from NOCD, a mental health service based out of Chicago that specifically works with people to treat OCD. First of all, the email gave me no clue as to how they got my information. I recognize now that it was probably through my health insurance which is also Illinois based, but in the moment I was like, “okay, technology has officially crossed all privacy boundaries and nowhere is safe.” Slight panic at that.

Then I actually read the email which featured this precious gem of information: “…people with OCD are over 10x more likely to die by suicide than the general population.” THANK YOU for putting that into my brain on a Friday morning! Just what I needed! Because on top of being afraid of barfing, flying, car accidents, heights, deep water, and crabs, I am now also afraid that my OCD will suddenly manifest into suicidal ideation. Which isn’t that wild a thought because, just like many other mental health issues, suicidal ideation can seemingly come out of nowhere. (988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline - available 24/7. Learn it! Knowing that number is just as important as knowing 911.)

When I really sit with it and reflect on where I was and where I am now - it doesn’t compare. My quality of life has improved in innumerable ways. Yes, I am scared of a lot of stuff and yes, sometimes that holds me back. Part of that fear and anxiety actually comes from the fact that I’ve been in treatment for four years; I consider things from way more angles than the average bear, hence being more hesitant and careful. But in the long run when I really want something, I figure out how to get it and what I need to make sure I’m still okay if/when I get it. And when something does totally knock me down, I’m never down for long.

I celebrate this anniversary openly not only to remind myself of how far I’ve come, but to remind others on similar paths that it is not linear. It is not easy. It doesn’t even always make sense. Some days are amazing and some days are horrible. But every bit of it is worthwhile.

Maybe I’m not strong in the traditional sense of the word, but I know this to be true: I am resilient as fuck.