Perspectives

I finished another school year.  Thank god!  It was a better year than last year.  And my transition (I am famously terrible at transitions) has not been terrible.  I glitched slightly today, but Sir made me stand in the corner (“meditate”) which is his new thing, not as punishment, just as sensory deprivation and forcing me to do some kind of meditation practice.  

I grudgingly admit that it works…  Because of the fact that I’m… standing in a fucking corner, I manage to avoid my perfectionism trap that I get into when I officially “meditate.”  Normally, I end up chasing my tail about how poorly I’m meeting my own expectations of meditation (because, of course, I was taught the way to do it properly and now must always meet exactly those standards…  of course…).  Instead, Sir makes me stand in a corner… and be bored.  We don’t call it meditation.  We, literally, call it “being bored.”  I’ll come home in the evening, we started this the last month of the school year, and Sir will leave me instructions to change out of my work clothes, walk the dog, drink water, then “be bored” for 10 minutes.

At first I hated it.  HATED it!  I hate corner as a punishment, it is the WORST punishment.  I hate it because… it’s boring… and also it has always felt the most childish of all the things that can be used against me.  Which maybe is silly, but in my mind, it’s a humiliating punishment and I hate it.  So when Sir decided it was going to be a regular thing, I was… displeased.

But now after doing it almost daily, I’m coming to respect it, coming to lose my resentment and my humiliation, and almost (almost!) see it as a positive, peaceful, resetting experience.  It definitely has an effect on my mood.  I’m more calm, I’m more grounded, I’m less scattered after my ten minutes.  And when I’m doing it regularly, I’m finding that my overall emotional regulation in life (not just during “be bored” time) is better.  Because, you know, I’m actually doing a meditation practice again.  But shhh, don’t tell me that, I might try to get all perfectionist on it.  So, that’s probably helped my transition, and Sir has a new tool to help smooth out bumps for me mood-wise.

In addition, today he added back in running.  That was our tool last year, but then, you know, pneumonia and asthma and death and shit…  I’ve tried to start running, or any kind of exercise, again multiple times this past year, and my lungs have not allowed for it.  It’s been frustrating and demoralizing, more than any other kind of physical setback I’ve had.  I’ve been off my feet with injuries, I’ve had hand and arm injuries, I’ve had times when I was restricted to only walking or only lifting weights, or only…  But losing my lungs was the most debilitating.  I could do NOTHING.  On bad days I couldn’t even walk the dog for ten minutes… slowly… without feeling like I was trying to breathe under water.  Sometimes I couldn’t even breathe just sitting still.  I’ve never been so incapacitated for so long in my life.  It has literally been 10 months.  But today… Sir said, “You’re going to run.”  And I felt that anxiety of… my lungs are going to fail and I’m going to feel all those horrible feelings of frustration and depression again, and it’s just going to shove into my face how helpless I am against this stupid disease.  I did NOT want to run.  Not because I was against running, I’ve actually missed it, strangely enough.  But because… I didn’t want to be reminded again of my loss.

But, miracle of miracles… I ran.  I had to scale it down to, you know, “I haven’t run successfully for 10 months” levels, but… I did it.  And my lungs didn’t fail.  And I don’t feel now, a few hours later, like someone took steel wool to my bronchi.  It’s been a long time since I have run and not felt, for hours afterward, like I’d inhaled ground glass.

No guarantees for tomorrow.  Indeed, Sir has already said I won’t be running tomorrow, we’re going to ease back in on an every other day schedule.  But… for tonight… I’m happy… and optimistic.  Maybe I’ve turned a corner.

So, I hit a glitch today.  I started to sink into depression.  It’s three days since the school year ended.  Sleeping off exhaustion got me through the weekend, but today… the reality of transitions on a bipolar brain started to glitch me.  But Sir… we… threw our resources at it, and we prevailed.

And I realized, as I was hunting through some old emails because I told S I would post something I wrote about Sir and me…  I realized that to some degree I use this blog, and my posts on the list I run, as… a kind of tracking device.  I can’t always remember my mood states long term.  It’s a weird thing.  I can’t remember how I emotionally handled the end of last year.  I can remember concrete details extremely well, but my emotional responses are very vague if I remember them at all.  So I sometimes go back through my old posts as a way of tracking the path of my life.

Tonight I was doing that, and realized it was what I was doing…  And I also realized that I tend to mostly only write when I’m in a bad state.  I tend to go long periods of silence in which nothing is terrible.  Things are up and down and being life… like life is… but I don’t write those times down.  Perhaps because I grew up in the mental health system and, ironically, in that system it is your symptoms that define you more than your health.  When you are healthy, you become, literally, persona non grata.

If you become permanently healthy, you are no longer part of the system.  If you become temporarily healthy, everyone just waits for you to become symptomatic again.  There is no… purpose… in health… in that system.  Health is something that exists on the outside, or so we believe.  I’ve since come to realize a shit ton of people walk around outside of the system and are as much or more fucked up than those of us who got identified and slapped with labels.  But, regardless, I’ve been “in the system” officially since I was 12 years old.  And getting labelled since I was a baby.  I was never “normal.”  I was the baby that drove my mother to read books… a lot of books… and I didn’t grow into an easier child.  And so, perhaps, despite all my work to become more healthy and despite doing significantly little “identifying by my diagnoses”, in my choice and drive to write about my own life, I still default, perhaps, to mostly writing about when things are going wrong.

It seems pointless to write about things going right.

But that seems like a completely backwards way to live, doesn’t it?

And it sounds an awful lot like an artifact of growing up in “the system.”

So, I’m writing about how things are going well.

I will probably still often write about things going not well.  Perhaps it simply helps me to process and I don’t need it at other times.  So, I won’t condemn that choice.  But I am going to make a conscious effort to write when things are not going badly… because… when I read back over this at the end of next year, I want to remember the times I was happy, too.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Like