This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time blah blah blah

I’m glad to be meeting with my therapist again, but in doing so, I’m also having to confront a lot of hard work. Well, hard but simple work, really. I need to organize my life, take more responsibility. FUNCTION, basically.

I laughed a bit during my last session and said, “After all I’ve been through, just living a normal life is the hardest, scariest thing to me. That doesn’t even seem logical.”

In order to fully explain why I’m having such a problem with this, I need to divulge a bit into a backstory. Although before I do, I need to make some things clear. It’s not my intention to drag members of my family through the mud here. Some of them read this blog and overall they’ve mostly been supportive of it. I love my family and I’m not here to slam anyone or reveal every tiny detail about my relationship with all of them. But my relationship with my mother is a topic that I cannot avoid for long when speaking about my mental health issues. Although, be that as it may, I only wish to mention that which is appropriate to reveal in regards to my current issues. I have no interest in bringing out every skeleton in the closet and putting them all on public display. For all her faults, my mother is still my mother, and she still supports me in a lot of ways, even if our relationship is usually fairly turbulent.

Now, disclaimer aside, I can begin.

My parents divorced when I was five years old, and my mom retained custody of my brother and I. At some point, she decided that we were having a hard time dealing with the divorce (keep in mind, I was five and my brother was three), so she put us through therapy. Her reasoning wasn’t because we were showing any signs of distress in response to the situation, but rather that we weren’t; she thought our indifference and happiness was a sign of hidden pain and sorrow. Essentially, she was projecting her own emotions onto us.

My brother somehow eventually weaseled his way out of continuing therapy (and meds) years before I did. I continued on with it all until I was about seventeen. I grew up thinking that everyone lived this way, at least the going to therapy bit. I realized pretty early on that not everyone took medication. Some meds I had to take throughout the day, and when friends would ask what they were for, I’d lie and say I was sick. I didn’t really know what to say besides that because I didn’t actually know why I was taking them myself.

The explanation I’ve found to explain a lot of my mother’s behavior is this: everyone probably knows of Münchausen syndrome (faking illness for attention) and the “by proxy” type (inducing sickness in someone else to receive attention), but both of those tend to conjure up images of physical sickness only. Well, while it’s probably rare, there is a side to this disorder that deals with garnering attention through mental illness as well.

My mom always liked to talk about my supposed mental health issues to everyone in order to show off what a great job she was doing coping with it all, and also to receive loads of sympathy from people. Over the years, I was diagnosed with severe depression, anxiety, and then back and forth with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. In all actuality, I felt there was nothing wrong with me, but during my early years, I figured I must be wrong, since I had so many adults saying otherwise, especially my own parent. Then, around age twelve, I hit a brick wall, and all the symptoms I’d been told forever that I had but really didn’t started to actually become a reality. I became depressed and it all sort of spiraled downward more and more all throughout my teens. By the time I received the diagnosis of bipolar disorder when I was in my mid teens, I believed it.

Anyway, the point of revealing all of that was to illustrate why so called “normal” living is still pretty foreign to me. I grew up being told by professionals (and my mom) that I was totally nuts. There was never really any sort of structure for me growing up. I went to school and all that, but never felt I really belonged there. I felt it was all just a giant façade and I was just killing time until I’d inevitably be locked up in a mental institution for the rest of my life. I never truly planned my life because I didn’t think I’d ever get one. I expected to be dead before I was sixteen.

Possibly due to that belief, things really started going to shit when I was around that age. I put myself in the hospital for the first time then, and it inadvertently started a trend of “escape responsibility by having a breakdown.” I’ve mentioned before that my mom tends to do a lot of things for me. That, coupled with my belief that on some level I was crazy as fuck, led to a thought process that I couldn’t do anything right no matter what, so why even bother trying anymore? I’d also been groomed practically from birth to believe that the only way to get any REAL attention was through some kind of crisis.

Essentially, for the past twelve years, I’ve accomplished very little due to the fact that I give up on everything constantly. Almost everything I’ve done during that time frame ends with “and then I had a breakdown.” I seem to be able to function all right for a few months at the most, and then I inevitably crumble and go into hiding for X amount of time until I start a new cycle of the same shit.

The funny part (in a depressing way) is that I felt I was finally overcoming all of this during the job I had prior to my breakdown last January. Then, of course, that also ended with “and then I had a breakdown.” Although that breakdown was completely different than my usual anxiety driven, self-mutilating, too-depressed-to-do-anything types of the past. For the first time in my life, I was totally blindsided by my mental problems. I literally woke up one day and lost my mind. There wasn’t much of a precursor to it.

Anyway, because of my constant pattern, the thought of actually functioning well for a long period of time is pretty terrifying to me because, well, I’ve never really done it. On top of that, I now have the constant fear in the back of my mind that I won’t be able to handle things again and I’ll wake up on a new day and go through another prolonged psychotic episode. I try to rationalize it all by reminding myself that I seem to be able to function without problem while on my meds, and therapy helps in some way as well, so I really should be just fine. But the only real way to calm my fears is to just get back out there and DO IT. And I’m damn well going to–even though part of me would really rather not, and just now even the thought of it is making me want to throw up–because I know I’m capable of overcoming my problems; I know I’m capable of not being defined by my illness. I know I have practically my whole life of feeling that the only way I could get attention was through being fucked up working against me, but my outlook has already changed dramatically in the past five years or so, and I know I really can only keep going forward, even if it happens at a pace that’s slower than I’d like. There is no quick fix for anything in life; it’s all up to how much hard work you put into it.

It’s amusing that the way most people stumble upon this blog is through searching the Nine Inch Nails’ lyric I believe I can see the future / cos I repeat the same routine. That may have been the truth for me in the past, but I don’t want it to be the truth for me forever.

“Sort your fucking life out, mate!”

I’m scared.

There, I said wrote it.

There’s that saying that the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one. I’m told that frequently. I suppose it’s true, but what people fail to mention is that huge gap between admitting something’s wrong and actually taking steps to fix it.

I want to get my life back together. I want to function properly. I want independence.

Yet I keep stalling.

Ever since my therapy session this past weekend, I’ve just felt guilty. I’ve realized that I live my life more through other people than I do for myself. It’s difficult for me to find my own motivation unless I’m working with another person. I manage my time better if I feel someone else is expecting something of me than I do when I’m the only person I have to answer to. I procrastinate like a motherfucker. Even if it’s doing something that will only serve to improve my life, I can still find an excuse why it would be better to put it off until tomorrow.

To go with the Freudian cliché, I think most of these feelings stem from my relationship with my mother. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, she babies me constantly. I had a pretty violent relationship with her as a kid, and while it’s now not the same as it was then (thank God), she still seems to exert this desire to control everything, especially anything to do with me. She’ll tell me that I need to learn responsibility, yet she takes all responsibility away from me. If I’m ever doing anything in front of her (setting up the coffee machine, washing dishes, etc.) she’ll inevitably find something I’m doing “wrong” and point it out to me. She tends to tell me to take care of my own stuff, but then she’ll do things like pick up dirty plates and cups and wash all the dishes anyway. She used to clean my room if I were out of the house somewhere for a few hours, and she still sometimes does. If I ever tell her to cut it out and leave my things for me to handle, she’ll say that I never do anything I say I’ll do and then … usually does it for me again before I have a chance to do it myself.

She denies ever acting like this if the subject is brought up among other people, therapists especially. She’s been told that by doing what she does, she’s ill-equipping me of skills I need to function as an adult, and constantly giving me the message that nothing I ever do myself is good enough.

I’m not saying this is all her fault. She’s definitely a reason for my anxiety, but I’m entirely able to make my own choices in my life. Right now, it’s me who needs to fix things. My mom’s never going to change. But I can change.

So why is it so goddamn motherfucking hard to do?!

I told my therapist that I would get my shit together this week. I’m supposed to start going back to the gym, finish up the paperwork needed to do volunteer work there, and generally doing stuff instead of hiding from the world all the time. And this is all stuff I want to do! But over the past few days, I’ve realized that on some level, I’m petrified of responsibility.

For the past ten years, I haven’t had a very good record of finishing anything, mostly due to issues with my mental health and/or my self-esteem in general. Most of it had to do with bouts of depression when I’d give up whatever I’d been working on and just quit. I dropped out of high school at the advice of a therapist after my first hospitalization. I’ve been working on college off and on for quite a while. Basically, I have nothing I feel that I’ve really accomplished, and it builds up over time and makes the whole “giving up” thing seem like it’s the only option I have for everything. Pile on top of that my fear of going crazy again and you’ve got yourself  a party.

What a bunch of bullshit.

I’ve become more determined than ever to prove my own worth to myself ever since I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder last year. To myself and those around me, it felt like the real underlying problem through the years had FINALLY been found out and could be treated so that I could function well again and pick up the pieces of my life. It’s just that the whole “bouncing back” thing is taking longer than I, and possibly others, expected. I guess if you look back at my pattern of giving up, though, a decade compared to a year is pretty off-balance.  I don’t want to use that as an excuse for why I can’t get my shit together though because it’s pathetic.

I really just have to suck it up and get to work. I know that if I take that first step in the right direction, everything will fall into place and become easy. I just need to stop being afraid of success … and I wish I knew how to do that. I know I’m capable of setting goals for myself and doing things on my own without anyone else’s support, because I used that formula many times in order to be self-destructive. I just have to re-wire that thought process to work towards something good instead. I need to somehow push the negative voices (sometimes “real” voices [to me], sometimes an inner voice like everyone has) away and learn to ignore them the way I ignore the rest of my symptoms that interfere with daily life.

The way this is being written makes me sound much more optimistic than how I actually feel or what’s going on in my head right now. I keep making excuses the more I write here and listing reasons why I’m a bad, crazy person who’s never going to sort her life out. This fucking blows.

Supplemental blog

Here is my other public blog that I mentioned in my post earlier: http://richey.dreamwidth.org/

I created a livejournal feed as well.

This pretty much goes without saying, but still: you absolutely do not need to read the dreamwidth journal if you don’t want to.

They took your life apart and called your failures art

I changed the layout here last night because the other one was too dark. I don’t want to give off the impression of doom and gloom all the time, especially since that’s not how I feel or view life. This layout isn’t 100% how I’d like it to look, either, but oh well.

I don’t know who will care or not (feedback would be greatly appreciated!), but I’ve started planning on keeping another public blog alongside this one. The difference between the two is that the other blog will be about life in general, not just mental illness. I thought it would help give anyone interested a better idea of who I am beyond just this one subject. I’d thought of just keeping everything in this one journal, but I decided that doing that would sort of defeat the purpose of why I created this blog in the first place. I’d like people to know more than one side of me, but I also want emphasis placed on my disorder (and mental illness in general) to bring greater insight and understanding to it all.

Anyway, I’ll give a link once I’ve got that journal more set up.

I’ve also decided to re-join Twitter and see how that goes. My page is here if anyone wishes to follow me.

Getting down to business now, I guess. I had a session with my therapist this weekend. I hadn’t seen her in months due to money issues and all the drama with my brother’s health. It was nice to finally talk to her again, although it also reminded me of how much work I have to do still. I basically have no sense of myself when it comes to certain things, especially anything involving food. She asked me what I thought would make a healthy dinner, and I honestly couldn’t answer.

In order for this to make sense to anyone, I should explain that my mom babies the hell out of me. Not in a good way though, really. What I mean is that she tends to do everything for me before I get a chance to do it myself, thus rendering me pretty useless when it comes to learning skills for myself (like cooking).  No matter how many times I try to get her to stop and allow me to do things on my own, she never listens. It’s pretty infuriating.

Anyway, because of all that, it’s difficult for me to grasp certain aspects of being an independent adult, and my therapist is working with me in order to overcome these obstacles. Things like understanding the various aspects of money, bills, cooking. Basic stuff. She’d like it if I could be sent shopping for groceries and start preparing meals on my own. She also wants me to have a healthier understanding of food in general. I understand what’s healthy or not healthy, but my judgment of portions and how to mix things together is really skewed. Like, I function either on the level of “eat whatever whenever I feel like it” or  the “eat barely anything / obsess over every calorie” level. There’s really no in between area for me. It seems really ridiculous, even to me, but when asked what I thought a healthy meal would be, I couldn’t think of a damn thing. Well, that’s a bit of a lie. I could think of things like an apple or yogurt, but when it came to mixing things together to create an actual meal, I went blank.

I’m supposed to cut out pictures of “healthy” food and bring them to my next session this coming weekend. I’m not gonna lie, it is pretty embarrassing, but if activities like this will help me better understand this type of stuff then I’ll do whatever it takes. I mean, it’s embarrassing to not understand this stuff in the first place!

I am actually really hungry right now, and writing this isn’t making it any better, haha. I think I’ve covered everything I wanted to mention here today, so I’m going to stop here and go find something to eat.