On bipolar and intrusive thoughts (plus cats)

I had a really hard day yesterday. I'm very proud of myself lately because I have become exceedingly emotionally resilient. Almost emotional elasticity, and it's something that serves me well. It was a difficult thing to develop and it really did need cultivating, like a garden would. So I wanted to talk about intrusive thoughts and bipolar today.

When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I spent some time in Dominion Hospital. My doctor had tried to put me on Cymbalta for my migraines - but women with bipolar disorder and antidepressants don't mix. I started hearing voices, and then I started having visual hallucinations. I was on Cymbalta for two weeks and at the end of that time, I had no choice but to admit myself into Dominion Hospital because I knew my brain was short-circuiting. I am exceedingly grateful I was able to cry for help, even though that cry was more of the sort of strangled mewling that you'd expect from a weak kitten, mixed with the roar of a tyrannosaurus rex.

Things fell together for my doctor. I actually saw one of the pediatric doctors, even at almost 30 years old, and he was amazing. He said the fact that I had horrible post partum depression should have been a dead giveaway. He said that normal people don't think it's fine to sleep 3 - 4 hours and then live your life, day after day. I honestly had no idea - I'd always been a short sleeper. He gave me a term for things that had bothered me since I was a very young girl - and that name is INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS.

Have you ever been at home and your husband is 10 minutes later in coming back than you expected and you thought that he was dead?

Have you ever been convinced someone was going to kidnap your child to the point where you wanted to photograph her every morning so you would have record of what clothes she was wearing that morning?

Have you ever been SURE someone was in your basement, and when you had to go downstairs to do the laundry, you raced upstairs after, your heart pounding and tasting bile in the back of your throat?

Have you ever thought that someone was talking about you, and kept thinking about it, over and over, and what you should've said, and were you a chicken not to confront them? And why would they think that about you anyway? And what about that character on that TV show, why did they do that? Do you think you should do that? What if you did? What if they did? What if you did? What if they did? What if you did? What if they did?

What about something more subversive - have you ever looked in the mirror every morning and thought about the size of your ass and the limpness of your hair, and then you couldn't stop thinking about it? Or have you ever thought that if you were only taller, or thinner, or blonder, or whatever - then everything would be okay? What if you're losing your hair? What if you forget your homework? What if you forget your homework and everyone else didn't? What if you fail that test what if you forget your homework what if you fail what if there are no more tests what if everything in your head just fades to black and you don't wake up why would that happen just because you failed a test? Because I forgot my homework I will fail this test and I will have no future and I will become a junkie and live on the streets and life will be hell and everyone I know and love will shun me and I will die because I can't because I fail because because what if? What if?

Here's the reality of intrusive thoughts. They suck, and they are NOT rational.

The difference between the occasional fleeting thought like this and intrusive thoughts is that you cannot banish intrusive thoughts easily. People may say to you, "You're doing it to yourself," or "Just stop thinking about it!" or "You're working yourself up over nothing?"

Sound familiar?

These people have no idea what it's like to be you. These people have a brain that doesn't short circuit and play an annoying four measures on repeat over and over. People with bipolar disorder cannot stand repetition. A ticking clock makes me want to scream, if I am at all stressed. Even my fingers clicking on the keyboard can be a horrible sound if I'm really, REALLY stressed. Repetition is one of the things that I have classified as Enemy, and I've had to develop coping mechanisms to work around.

Because coping mechanisms can diffuse intrusive thoughts.

Let's take a typical intrusive thought. My wnderful husband has forgotten his cell phone and he is out. I cannot get a hold of him, therefore he must be dead. (no I'm not kidding, this happens sometimes.)

Coping mechanism #1: I have a housemate who I love, Tara. I will go to Tara. "Aaron has forgotten his phone. Do you think he's okay?"

Tara loves me too and she knows how I operate. She says, "He's fine Jen. He forgot his phone. He's out at the store and he will be back. Remember, this happened a month ago."

"But when should I worry?"

"Let's think about it again in 30 minutes."

For 30 minutes now, I can pause that thought. It comes back if Aaron's not back and I REALITY CHECK with a trusted friend again. My friend does not say, "It's all in your head." My friend does not say, "You're making a big deal out of nothing." My friend simply states reality - this has happened before, remember what happened last time? And we repeat if necessary. When Aaron gets home, I gently remind him to keep his cell phone with him, or laugh it off with a "you were dead!" joke - like the cats feel we're dead when we're gone for a day.

Coping mechanism #2: Tara isn't home. George is. George is my big fluffy orange cat. I have trained myself to have George's voice too. I say to George, "George, is dad dead?"

George replies, "No. Rub my tummy."

"But what if he is?"

"He's not - this happened before. Now rub my tummy."

I have distracted myself with George. This will have to happen a bit longer, but I have taught myself to have a cat, who can't ACTUALLY talk, talk back to me and tell me things are okay, pet me because I destress you. Pets are an amazing coping mechanism.

Coping mechanism #3: I have this thought at work. I can't get a hold of Aaron while I'm at work, and I can't talk to Tara or George. I will write down my intrusive thought and I will set an alarm on my phone. This alarm is typically 20 minutes. "In 20 minutes, re-evaluate." I also will turn on Pandora and listen to music, or put in ear buds. This fixes the problem. Music, for me, removes the intrusive thought because I sing along.

For me, I have needed several strategies to cope with intrusive thoughts. It's gotten to the point where I don't have them more than once every couple of months, and that's a pretty amazing feat. And when I do, I have coping strategies in place. I need cats. Cats help me SO much when I am stressed and people are not around. I need people - and the people I need have to know that you can't say "You don't make sense." You can't say that to someone with intrusive thoughts - it makes things worse and not better, because on top of your intrusive thought you now feel hopeless that you're not normal. It's okay. I got news for my bipolar friends out there - we're never going to BE NORMAL thinkers, but we absolutely can achieve our own NORMALCY and our own way of coping. If you are trying to fit your other-wired brain into a perfect brain-box, you will achieve nothing but frustration and unhappiness and self-loathing for not being able to do it.

So don't. Find what is normal for you. Experiment. For me, it's cats and coaching. I coach my close friends on how to respond to me when I am having an irrational episode. I also have music as a back-up. And as another one, I do zen tangles and I zone out and do art - this occupies the music sphere and the hand-eye sphere, and will block pretty much anything. But I had to find what works for me, because my brain's not a perfect brain-box. It's perfectly beautiful, and it's mine, but it's really more shaped something like an enzephalaoid.

Don't bother looking it up. It's one of a kind, baby.

On trauma and why I don't have an established "writing practice"

Lately I have been working up many of my poems for publication. I joined a Facebook group or two specifically for poets in the publication process. These ladies are my idols, they're dedicated, fun people who work hard at getting their art out there.

For me, for a long time, writing was processing escapism. As a child I was abused by neighbors for a long time. I never told anyone, until I was much older, and I was saved when my family moved across the state. This left me a bit less than whole. No... that's not quite right. Instead of less than whole, I was too whole. I was too full of things that a young girl shouldn't be full of - fear, self-loathing, hatred. I missed a childhood but the negative things that got crammed in where the hole of my childhood was were seething and they grew too fast for my young mind. And I took to writing. Writing was my solace, writing was a way in which I could write myself bigger, able to handle all the things that were in me. I could write myself smaller, or invisible, or not in the picture at all and envision a world without people, with only things. I could write anything, and in writing, I discovered immortality.

Then I grew. And I went to college. Originally I wanted to become a genetic engineer. I was extremely excited about ideas I had regarding the capabilities of retroviruses to be released as anti-retroviruses. I had plans. And I chickened out. I was too afraid to be too far from my parents, so I didn't cash in those scholarships to MIT and Yale. I thought of going for music, but I chickened out. I was too afraid to be too far from all the things I'd always known, so I didn't cash in the scholarship to the Lawrence Conservatory of Music. I had a full scholarship to any state school in Wisconsin or Minnesota as well, and I decided to go that route.

While there, I studied drama and poetry. I had in my mind that it didn't matter what I studied in college - I wouldn't be getting a job in what I got a degree in anyway, so why not do something I loved? And I did love it. Poets were something wild, something that didn't seem afraid. The poetry teacher I identified with was crazy, and just lived his life the way he wanted. I admired that somehow, and emulated it. But writing was about lifestyle and escaping, still.

I quit school, again, you will recall that I said this is bullshit. I took a job in Minneapolis, and my best friend and I moved. It was great. I do not lament any of these life experiences, nor would I have done them differently. Everything I do has led to who I am and I love myself, I love my children, my job and my life. And my friends. Renee and I, with our friends Trish and Katie, had a good time in Minneapolis. And I stopped writing.

I quit that job and moved to Washington DC to be with my ex-husband and to take a job which changed my life. Both things did. I got married, and in my job, I discovered I could bring creativity to the workplace and I loved that job. I had a mentor, Maxine, who I adored and looked up to. She'd been in the Peace Corps. She had children already, and a career, and a sense of humor, and an eye for what could be in the long run. This was critical for me at that time, and would come back to me later, but for the moment, I simply enjoyed my work and meeting people and hosting exciting meetings and having a good life.

Then I had Anna and I realized I couldn't bear to leave her at home. I quit my job to be a stay at home mother, and this left me alone most of the time. Post partum depression hit me, hard, and I started reliving my childhood. I went back to school to finish my bachelors in creative writing, so I could have adult company in the evenings and better job prospects after my kids grew a little. And I started writing again. This time, I wrote my lonely heart companions. I wrote poems that expressed all the things I wasn't ready to face. Julia came, and she came early, and the hormonal whirlwind of post partum depression just got worse and worse. I wrote daily, I wrote six, seven, ten poems a day. I decided to start my MFA in poetry because I loved it so fiercely, so much of me went into writing.

And then a medication that my neruologist tried for migraines changed my life forever, when it caused a psychotic break and I wound up in a hospital for ten days, detoxing and learning that all my energetic life with its high happy and its post partum abyss was actually bipolar disorder. I continued my MFA for a year, but I stopped writing. I was afraid. When I looked at my demons, at my past, and I wrote, I was afraid I would lose control. I took medication and I altered my life to pay careful attention to what I ate, when I slept, making sure I minimized my stress. I nurtured my body and my mind by hugging them and giving them permission to heal - and I did heal. And I became happy for the first time, really, since I was 9. Really, truly at peace, through therapy and time and writing and process and escapsim and I felt I have to be done with escapism. I have to LIVE now.

But the bipolar had taken its toll on my marriage and it dissolved, for the better. My ex-husband is a great dad, and when I grew up, I was not compatible with him. We had far too different world views, and this story is complex and not something for telling now, but we separated and moved on and remarried and life was continuing to be more and more awesome but my writing nagged at me. It was like an itch that I was refusing to acknowledge. But in some small way, I blamed my writing for my instability earlier. I thought that allowing myself to delve into the abyss in my mind was weakening me, and it was making me crazy. I talked to my husband about it. I talked to poet friends.

I have a confession. In the time since I treated my bipolar, I stopped reading new books. The only books I would read were books I HAD read, and many times. And I read the same books over, and over. Now, I have read thousands of books so this isn't quite as crazy as it sounds, but I was afraid of reading too.

I started with reading. I read new things. Journals, blogs, books - poems. And I started experimenting with liturgical voice and writing poems about religion and Judaism. I started writing poems about parenting. I wrote no poems about childhood trauma, because I didn't feel the need to. I destroyed the old poems which hurt and had no element of art in them. I healed my relationship with writing.

But it took time. And now, it's hard for me to get into good writing habits. Sometimes I write at night, or in the morning. I write outside on the deck, I write at the table, I write at work, I write in the car. I write at odd hours. I keep my sleep schedule, don't worry, and I'm no longer medicated because I've worked so hard to regulate myself, and I do regulate myself beautifully, but I have no real writing process. Now I write simply because words love me and I love them and we bring each other great happiness. I write in the way I love my husband, my children, my family - without abandon and freely and with no expectations. It's freeing, and I'm still sometimes scared. If I write too many things in too short a time I check myself - am I just escaping?

Sometimes I wonder if that fear will always be there.

Sometimes I'm sure it will not be.

On homelessness and how I chose my job

I always knew that it was more important to me to feel good about the work I did than it was to get paid a lot of money for the work I did. I took some career assessments which confirmed this, when I was 35 years old. It said I was motivated by purpose, motivated by helping others, and that money was my least important concern. This is a position of extreme privilege and I am aware of it. I am very lucky to have a husband as a partner who supports me working a job that is extremely fulfilling. I had a good job with a government contracting firm that paid me incredibly well to do work that was incredibly draining. It wasn't difficult - it was the opposite. Not challenging. Over-thought and under-stimulating. But the pay was hard to walk away from. I took a job making 1/3 of the salary after working there only 7 months. There were a number of contributing factors to this - primarily being the hours kept me out of the house doing mind-numbing work for 11 hours a day and my body did not like being vertical that long, due to fibromyalgia. I was working part time and that didn't work for my company, so I decided to find part time work that would make my heart sing.

I took a job at a family homelessness shelter. My job is to coach people and help them find jobs. Many homeless people are already employed, especially here in the DC metro area. The cost of living is so high that under-employment is a massive contributing factor to homelessness. This job can be difficult and I encounter so many kinds of people. I work with people who are refugees, with women who are victims of domestic violence, with single mothers who have children and are having trouble maintaining work because when their children get sick, they lose their jobs. I work with people with disabilities, with mental illness, and every person has a different story.

I'm a storyteller. I want to tell people's stories and I want to help them see how their stories impact their lives, and how they can turn a tragic story into a story of triumph. I like working with people who want to tell their stories and who want to change. But there are times when I encounter clients who have grown complacent, who are happy with their status quo, and that's the hardest thing for me. It's really hard for me to see people who have stopped struggling and started passively being cared for. In my state, the social services provided do not provide a posh living. Many members of the Republican Party would have me believe people do extremely well on government assistance but it's just not the case. What they can do is subsist - maybe. Sometimes. With the help of charity groups and with the help of community organizations and faith-based initiatives that will help them stand, they may be able to subsist.

That's not the vast majority of people I work with - in fact, I've met only two people like that in almost a year of working in this job. The vast majority of people I work with try and try hard. They focus, but they just don't know where to go for help and they just don't know how to talk about their stories in a way that lets an employer know that yes, you can take a chance on me. Yes, I will come to work and yes, I want to work and do well. The vast majority do not want to live in a shelter, and they don't want long-term government assistance. The vast majority would love to be self-sufficient, but it's hard.

And then I look at the fact that I was able to make a choice to take this job. I was able to choose to drop out of college after 2 years, the first time I went, because I thought it was bullshit. I was able to go back to college several years later when my oldest daughter was an infant. I was able to finish my degree, and almost finish my masters, and then able to stop that because it did not align with my long term goals (not because it was bullshit!  I did grow up, some.) And I realize why a lot of people think that the homeless must be choosing to be homeless, must be pissing away their money and making bad decisions.

It's because they were lucky. They, like me, were able to make choices.

Let me tell you, when you are without a place to live and you don't speak English well and you have to take odd jobs which don't let you attend ESOL classes, which are expensive, and if they're free, they're not at a time of day which lets you work - you take a job.You take any job. You put up with abuse, you put up with hatred, you put up with being ridiculed and being called leeches and suckers and you put up with people looking down on you because you're an hourly worker, you're uneducated, you're not white... and none of this is your fault. But you begin to believe it. You begin to believe you're a leech. You begin to believe you suck and that you're worthless because others have assigned your worth based on the money you make, the car you drive - and you know, chances are you don't even have a car because that in itself is a huge luxury.

You become invisible.

Invisible people don't feel.

Invisible people don't have options. They don't have rights. Sure, we say they have rights - but they can't "just get a better job." To do that, they have to have time off to interview. They have to have connections which enable them to find jobs. They have to be able to understand that they have rights. When someone's been beaten down by poverty, they do not always understand that they have rights. The idea that a full time job might come with benefits is crazy talk to them. Many of my clients say, "What are benefits?" and we need to talk about things I hope for when they get a job.

I ask, "What do you want out of a job?"

They say, "The ability to buy my child a birthday present."

I don't believe that anyone who says that the poor do not deserve social services have ever had to want to work to be able to buy their children birthday presents. Social services provide the absolute bare minimum. An FDA food box for a family of 3 contains a few cans of soup, some rice, some beans, some tinned meat. Possibly some ramen noodles and a jar of spaghetti sauce. They are allowed one box a month. Food stamps for the same family are just under $200 a month, in a location where my monthly grocery bill is over $800. Granted, I eat primarily produce. If I ate boxed foods, I could bring that down to $600. I have a family of 4. 

I don't believe that anyone who says they're in it for a free ride has ever had someone ask them if they know a place where they can help their child buy allergy medicine, because she hasn't been able to get more than a few hours of sleep for three months because the mold in the apartment is making her unable to lay down. And it does not occur to them, no, to ask the landlord to clean up the mold. They wouldn't want to put their housing in jeopardy.

Nobody wants to be on a waitlist for a spot at a shelter. It's not like everyone who is homeless can be at a shelter. There's just not room.

I am writing this because things I have heard people say hurt me, but my hurt is nothing. The people I work with, my clients, hurt too - but their hurt is sometimes of a kind that they don't even realize they are hurting until they catch a glimpse of things getting better. They hold your hand and cry when you bring a box fan, because the temperature in their house is over 100 degrees. They wish to buy their child a birthday present.

So I am writing this to process some of the things I've heard people say. I will do much in the way of processing, and do. Things I encounter at work often leave me sad for a while, wishing I could change the world. I can't change the world. But I can be an instrument of change on a small scale, for several families at a time, and that's reward enough for me.

That's how I chose my job.