wish i were a polar bear

found here

It’s a cold gray Sunday, and although everything is technically right with my world, I have this insane urge to hibernate. I want to put my white bear skin on, snuggle up in a deep cave, and only wake up when I can cope again. I struggle with this fragility which engulfs me if things have been too busy, too intense, for too long. And they have been. Two weeks of extra stress is enough to tip my fine balance over. 

It used to be that stress affected me far more physically. It was the headache or migraine, the bowel trouble, the dizziness. That was simple. I could hibernate in a wish-i-were-a-bear kind of way and say, “I’m not well” to the world. Then I would cuddle up with my quilt until the pain had subsided, and emerge in a day or two when I had improved. 

But when you’re physically about the same as usual, and it’s an emotionally overwhelmed pain you feel, it seems different. Physical pain seems more legitimate than mental, in this world where mind pain is taboo. I didn’t want to write and say that I was ‘unwell’ to the person I was supposed to see today; because I was worried it was a lie. 

Was it a lie? 

In my state of no-confidence, I felt unsure and sick inside. Maybe it was a lie and I was a cop out? But the little intact part of me said no, it wasn’t a lie.

It absolutely was the truth. The mind is part of the whole body, and the mind can be unwell just as the body. ‘Unwell’ is still the term for it. And to be honest, it was exhaustion and dizziness and sore throat mixed in with emotional fatigue. If stress used to give me a migraine, and now it gives me a teary fragility, I still need it to let myself recover. I still need to let myself continue to travel along this road of getting better, and sometimes it means I have to disappoint someone. Sometimes, a mental health day is just what the doctor ordered.

Ben has empathy supplies beyond anything I’ve ever known. When I want to hibernate, he wants to be ten times bigger so that he can wrap me all up in his arms and keep me safe. I imagine that I’m a tiny Polly Pocket doll, and I just get to curl up and nuzzle in. When I couldn’t fall asleep the other night, he began to hum an old hymn which I grew up singing as a girl. 

It’s the most beautiful song of security, and hope.

It was penned by a rich lawyer in 1873, just after he got a telegram from his wife saying that their children had all been killed when the ship they were traveling on collided with another. He is rooted in the peace of knowing his God.

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

punching bags and therapy

I haven’t seen my psychiatrist for a month.

Please understand that this is a really really long time. I miss the lump-in-the-throat rants about things great and small with my unshockable, poker faced shrink. He is a wise old owl. “What’s been on your mind?” he unfailingly asks every week, and I begin to blabber on about anything from carpet stains to the uncomfortably intimate, all in his full confidence. He doesn’t laugh at anything I say, he never blinks an eyelid.

But not only have I been counselling free since just before I left Melbourne, I have also been mood-altering medication free. Right now, I am living life as raw, unrestrained Danielle Skye. I’m sure you can appreciate the difficulties. 

This equation of no medication + no counselling + new city + guests (curious? read this one too) = I needed to hit something by the end of the week. Really hard.  Repeatedly. 

As I’ve said before, when I get anxious, I nearly explode. Implode. Whichever. It’s a peculiar feeling. I tell my husband that I need to punch something. To which he always replies, “You can punch me.” To which I always say, “ No, I don’t want to hurt you.” (And then he privately thinks, “you couldn’t even if you tried.”) On particularly desperate occasions when I have declined his kind offers, the dining room table has suffered, from a rather irrational woman.

picture source

 It would be ideal if I could just run to my psychiatrist every time I was losing it, for he has the most rationalising effect on me. Calmly, firmly, he reminds me that yes, I can say no to people, that yes, I can set boundaries to let myself cope, to recover my health, to foster the stability of my home.

He is now five hours away. Alas. 

I have discovered the most effective solution to this no shrink + no drugs + people issue.

 Bodycombat.

I would advertise this class as just as effective as anti depressants and excellent for sufferers of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). We need to get it into the DSM manual.

I was nervous before class. These classically trained arms of mine are on the slender side of things and people have bluntly told me that when I am punching something, I don’t look like I’m punching at all. I regret not tuning into the boxing on telly a little more. Shall I admit that my greatest fear was punching myself in the head? It has happened before, in a class. Once I start hurling my twiggy arms around pretty much anything could happen.

Well, I had a ball. I had a wild, ugly, monster kind of a good time. The brutality of the class had me in unstoppable giggles. It was utterly vulgar and rough, and the contrast to my years of ballet training was deliciously stark. Sometimes we were punching men; I assume they were potential assaulters of the opposite sex? “C’MON, make the blood trickle”, yelled out our ‘inspiring’ instructor. I sometimes made Mr. Foe my Trichotillomania or GAD. I put my disorders in a lot of pain. My favourite move, apart from the high ninja kicks, was one where we walked along like beasts, wielding a club from above our heads to the monster we were sleighing on the ground. We were staggering along in a line, swinging wildly, like massive hairy Vikings on a bloody hunt.

 It was violent and uncivilized and I was delighted. Next we ran into a circle and apparently captured some other fiend. There was nothing pretty or polite about this class of middle class girls in designer gym gear. We screamed “YEAH” as we kicked our air opponents you-know-where. I let it all out, all those perfectionist, people-pleasing horrors, which make it so tough for me to care for my body. I served them an almighty blow, and goodness I felt good at the end of class.

A great deal of mental stability came about without me hurting my table, punching my husband, seeing my psych, popping a pill or having a sob. 

Will I be back? 

Yes, for sure.

Oops I mean, HELL YEAH.

intricacies

 her diamonds, by rob thomas - the notes for these words

 

It has reared its hideous head and I feel that I am a-tangle.  My head plays a soundtrack set to replay all the day long and all the night. Tears stream down my cheeks as midnight strikes and still my exhausted body won’t settle into slumber – its on hyper alert. I need a paper bag to breath, as I hyperventilate. I want to scream loudly. I jump up and down on the stop trying to let out whatever it is that is knocking inside me. My whole body tenses strongly as I sit doing nothing – I give myself the direction to relax my muscles and remain that way for all of a minute. Next time I become aware of it, all muscles are taut again. My bowels have given up proper functioning, and my fingers naturally bee-line for my hair – I pull it out and collect a tragic pile of it, I want to tear it all out in a bid to appease my cravings. Meanwhile my physical strength is paling, a miserable grey as it channels everything towards the beast inside me. 

I feel that I have lost control, that I’m a crazy, messy, miserable apology for a woman. I feel like I’m a knot in a necklace, disarranged, distorted. It’s resembles the mess my whole body is in.

What are you worried about? Someone asks. I shrug my tight shoulders in reply.

If I knew, I’d try my best to let it go, stop worrying. If tears and prayers could let it go, it would be thoroughly buried.

 But I don’t know. What makes me want to rock and cry and pull?

 It’s not logical, not simple. It’s a mystery – to man. One thing I know is that we are intricate, we are fearfully made, and these ways are not incomprehensible to the creator.

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.”

I’m intricately woven, and understood.

 -------------
 If I have one dream for tomorrow, it’s that problems in the mind come to be considered as shame-free as ‘physical’ illnesses like cancer or diabetes. Sufferers aren’t caged in asylums anymore, but mental illness is still an awkward topic. I’d rather talk about my CFS, than my mind problems. It’s so much safer, radically less chance of being labelled ‘mad’ - more chance of sympathy rather than alienation.