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April 30, 2007Psst…wanna get high?Actually, no.THE ALLURE OF MANIAA reader wrote to say he was glad he is a plain old depressive, so he would not have “the allure of mania” to tempt him to go off his drugs, as some of his friends have done, because, well, they miss the highs. They miss the “on top of the world, one with the universe” feeling of mania. And he found it “ironic that people spent money on drugs that counteracted effects that other people spend money on drugs to achieve.” Well said! Even more ironic that the drug I paid money to balance my lows and highs, made me higher than ever. Another reader commented that he had “traded the highs for the absence of lows.” Well said! I WISH I COULD PICK AND CHOOSE.I think I’ll be manic tonight, for just a few hours. Leave that credit card home! As my reader acknowledged, after the high, “the crash is bad and dealing with the consequences (Oh, God. Did I really buy/sleep with THAT?) are a pain to deal with.” No, at this stage I can’t say the highest highs are worth enduring the lowest lows. The highest highs are extraterrestrial; the lowest lows, full of fear and trembling. But everyone experiences heaven and hell in their lifetimes; I don’t need them stretched to their unmanageable extremes. And anyway, for a change of pace, there are always the “other” drugs, the ones your doctor can’t prescribe. I DON’T NEED PEOPLElooking at me sideways because I’m dancing on the ceiling in a world of my own. People used to make room for me on the dance floor, and once when a friend picked me up by the waist and spun me around with my legs flailing, I actually kicked someone in the head without noticing it. He told me about it later. Marty H., it was. As I said, you apologize for a lot of stuff after the fact. There’s nothing abnormal about dancing hard, but in the context of my life story, I flew as high as ever I would, using this great outlet for outrageous “acting out” without (mostly) hurting anyone. I was riding the crest of a wave of collective energy and I was on top of the world, at one with the universe. I got into The Last Hurrah one night without paying cover because the doorman and some guys from the band were standing around as I entered and I told them, “Boys, I am here to kick ass.” Maybe I kicked Marty’s head instead. I remember lying on the floor of the club one night at closing, with one foot up on the stage, wearing a tuxedo with the tie untied, completely spent, and the bass player said to me, “Someone should bottle your lifestyle.” I ain’t ever gonna dance again, the way I danced back then. Sigh. I BET MOST MANIC-DEPRESSIVESin treatment have been through this routine, though, as my reader put it: “as soon as their lives became manageable they stopped taking [the drugs] and reverted to their problems in a flash.” “I FEEL GREAT!and I’m doing great! What do I need the drugs for?” Well, duh. NO THANKS, I’D BETTER PASS–NOT.Sometimes drunkenness will drive me through the roof, but I generally avoid drinking too often because it really goes to my head. Of course you’re not supposed to “drink and drug,” the warning is right on the label. Most say “alcohol may intensify” side effects; Bupropion (Wellbutrin) says baldly, “Do Not Drink Alcohol While Taking This Medicine.” So there! I know my limit, but if I’m feeling expansive or at one with the universe, I willy-nilly reach it, wave it bye-bye, and surpass it—and sometimes don’t remember anything about it. DEPRESSIVES,I know this well, will generally not want to see other people during low periods 1) because they don’t have the energy to be responsive, and 2) because they don’t want to be seen like that. Some depressives are able to hide their affliction in this manner, rousing themselves sufficiently to hold a job or socialize, thus not arousing suspicion. Inside, they are suffering. I know for myself that sometimes the only thing that kept me from collapse and hospitalization was my two mortgages. I couldn’t afford to altogether lose my mind. OUT OF THE CLOSETI am talking about this because, though there is nothing shameful about depression, a friend commented that it was a shame it still is a question of “outing” yourself because many do not want to admit to mental disorders. Some people, though, seem to gain their identity from their illness, as if that’s what gives them meaning and substance, and their story of ongoing struggle and survival is foremost in their minds. An acquaintance asked me recently out of the blue, “Do you medicate?”—a question it would never occur to me to ask anyone in the course of general conversation. Why would anyone assume anyone else might be medicating? But sometimes the illness leaves little room for anything else, and must be constantly dealt with and compared with others’ experiences. People need to know they are not alone. IN MY CASEI have dealt with my disorder with medical treatment; it works, and I want to go on with my life. I occupy myself with art, literature, music, film, beauty, the life I was “meant” to live, whatever I mean by that. So I swallow a mouthful of pills a few times a day. No big deal. That’s why I don’t generally bring it up, any more than someone would shine a spotlight on their use of high blood pressure medication. But I decided to discuss it here because I pass as a normal. I want people to know that I suffered to the point of incapacity, that I got help that is readily available, and that I am living proof that it is possible to surmount debilitating attention deficit disorder and live a productive creative life as a manic-depressive, in or out of the closet. THE STATISTICS ON SANITYare that one out of every four persons is suffering from some sort of mental illness. Think of your three best friends — if they’re okay, then it’s you. I don’t know where I got that quote, it was something I jotted down without ascribing. But I’ve heard comments like “Who isn’t?” (bipolar) or “Aren’t we all?” It can be tough to recognize or acknowledge a problem when a “disorder” is a malfunction or drastic extension of regular human behavior. Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist who is herself manic-depressive, says in her book An Unquiet Mind, A Memoir of Moods and Madness, “Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one’s notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood or behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.” WE ALL GET ANGRY,depressed, ecstatic or confused. But chances are this stuff is not going to rule, or perhaps ruin, your life. The same problem applies to the challenge of weight control. Life depends on nourishment. Eating disorders can’t be cured by not eating. CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO SANITYWhen my girlfriend recently shocked me by telling me she’s been trying to get invited to my place for a year but that I’m always having to “clean my flat,” I realized that I will never really clean my flat as I myself envision it, perfectly orderly more than clean, and that I’m better off just living with it—or no one will ever be able to come over! EXCEPT, WELL—I don’t want to be seen like that! I told my friend, I’m not talking about dishes in the sink or laundry on the floor, but the chaos of a mind as reflected in its environment. “It’s possible you’ve never seen anything like it!” (She doubts that.) Day after day I swear I’ll take care of it, but I just don’t. My shrink asked me if I’m capable of cleaning up if I need to, and I said, when someone’s coming over, I do the bags in the closet bit, and he said some ADD patients are literally incapable of straightening out their messes. They simply cannot do it, ever. When I think back on the packrat status of a certain tenant’s apartment, I wonder if he had the same problem. Much of my mess these days comes from starting to organize things and losing interest or becoming exhausted in the process, and everything just stays “out” with more crap getting piled on top of it, my cats treading lightly around all the obstacles. THERE’S A HARROWING SCENEin the Jamison book of her brother walking into a room covered with the consequences of her manic spending sprees, piles of bills, overdraft notices, credit card receipts, and letters from collection agencies: “The chaotic visual impact upon entering the room reflected the higgledy-piggledy, pixilated collection of electric lobes that only a few weeks earlier had constituted my manic brain.” Her brother had to take out a private loan to get her out of trouble. THE ADD BOOKby Drs. Hallowell and Ratey, Driven to Distraction, opens with a fellow pacing around his room, taking in its disorder. “The room looked as if the contents of a bag lady’s shopping cart had been dumped into it. Books, papers, odd socks, old letters, a few half-smoked packages of Marlboros, and other loose ends lay scattered about, much like the bits and pieces of cognition that were strewn about in his mind.” Ah, yes. IT USED TO BE,in my youth, that I kept my place neat because my life was simpler, and I couldn’t stand seeing the chaos of my mind brought to life in my surroundings; at least then my home would give me some peace, but I can’t pull that off now, perhaps because I’m more accepting of myself. BENJAMIN DISRAELI SAID,“Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and…you must cultivate a taste for them.” Children have to be taught to keep their room neat, and some never learned this lesson. I myself do have a taste for orderly surroundings, but in my case, my inability to maintain them is similar to my collating problem and even my thought process: I am constantly trying to filter many sources of information into one coherent whole I can fully grasp, but try as I might, I cannot see the big picture, only the million little pixels I can’t make sense of. IF A MILLION LITTLE THOUGHTSarrive at the door (my mouth), how do I distill them into one sentence? If I have a pile of originals, turning them from one comprehensible unit into many parts while my brain campaigns to condense them back to one is nerve-wracking. I had four forms I had to file for my tax extension (of course I didn’t get them done!) with some simple arithmetic and questions to answer. It took me two hours at the end of which I was nearly in tears. Then there’s arranging the crazy salad of my surfeit of possessions into an orderly landscape spread through seven rooms–it seems like a task for Hercules. SAME WITH PEOPLE.If I’m distracted by all the stimuli of the world—here at Café International it’s buses and cars passing, people talking, what they’re wearing, phones ringing, Zara bustling behind the counter, the smell of coffee, the Latin beat music, dishes rattling, blurs moving in my peripheral vision, items on the bulletin board fluttering in the breeze coming in the door, new patrons arriving, the colors of the patio mural—how do I keep my mind focused for the duration of a conversation? Most normal brains filter out the irrelevant information, but in the tangled circuitry of my mind… THESE THINGS DEMANDI acknowledge them, which I must do in the “background” while someone is talking. Sometimes one of them, much less the other thoughts in my mind, nabs me and I drift away, and back again. If someone is giving a speech, how do I focus on him and him alone when the entire room, all the people in it and my own ideas, are competing for my attention? Well, that’s exactly it—my brain remains disorderly and unfocused because I don’t have enough attention to go around—I have an attention deficit disorder. I’m spread too thin. Now if someone tells you she or her children have ADD, don’t roll your eyes. It’s a challenge for anyone of any age. PARDON MY CRUDE MINDI discussed in Axfiles #12 of 8/11/05, the concept of “the polyphony of thought” advanced by psychiatrist Wilhelm Stekel, that is, that people have many “themes” operating in our minds simultaneously, different melodies being played and sounding through our minds while we are talking, most of which don’t make it into conversation. YOU’RE TALKINGto a friend about global warming, at the same time that you’re thinking her dress is ugly and that you have to pick up groceries and mail that package and that you’re in love with Mr. X and that this makes you miserable and that you can’t afford that new car right now and that your high school teacher once forecasted the advance of global warming, which theme you choose to voice as it is relevant to the discussion at hand. The themes combine into a “polyphony” (many sounds) of thought—defined as “musical composition that uses simultaneous, largely independent, melodic parts, lines or voices.” WELL IN MY CASEthe polyphony is not harmonious. I don’t follow any one theme to its logical conclusion, because of the dissonant interference of the other voices. That must be why the fugue is my favorite form of music—no matter the number of voices they combine in the most exciting manner and resolve themselves in the most satisfying manner. I SUSPECTmy lack of a physical sense of direction has something to do with this failure to grasp the big picture while immersed in the details. I can’t picture what streets are parallel and perpendicular to each other, I can’t visualize how streets connect unless I’m looking at a map, I have no “feel” for where I’m supposed to go, even if I’ve been there a dozen times, unless I have memorized the route. I’m constantly thinking, What’s Duboce doing in the Mission? What’s Castro doing by Duboce? If I walk into a department store and get turned around, I can’t find the door I came in by. If I go out a different door I get lost, etc. I know I should proceed in a L-shape, but I’ll go north and east when I should be going south and west, then have to backtrack. I’VE DEVELOPED EXERCISESfor various tasks. The other day I was walking around my flat practicing my concentration homework: If you see something that needs doing, do it right now and do it till it’s done. It was in this manner that I changed the cat litter, ironed and hung some curtains, watered the plants, got my mail, opened it, paid some bills and recycled the rest—but it’s tough to sustain even that pitifully minimal focus for a prescribed period of time. Usually if I go to the laundry room to iron something, I’ll start sweeping up scattered litter and putting my laundry away, and when I go to the closet, I’ll start pulling out stuff for the thrift shop, and when I put it in the thrift store pile I notice that the cat furballs need vacuuming and I go to get the vacuum from the pantry but in the pantry I need to gather all the wineglasses together in one spot, and then—oh yeah, I’m back at the laundry room—I’d better finish ironing my shirt and turn off the iron. BEFORE STRATTERA,this kind of stuff, negligible to most people, would paralyze me into inaction. Some people may dream of a vacation in Hawaii, untold wealth, the love of their lives—but my dream is to have my flat, particularly my papers, organized, the ultimate goal: a place for everything and everything in its place. Imagine knowing where any given article you tore out of the Times is and not having to blaze a trail to get to it. Before Strattera, I’d survey the confusion of whatever the situation, the scope of the task, and couldn’t handle it. I’d hyperventilate, my hands shaking, and fling myself on the couch without doing anything. I’d come home from being bombarded from all sides by my work environment, and spend the evening decompressing, sometimes literally with the covers over my head to blot out at least the visual component. Or I’d lose myself in a movie by assuming some character’s identity for a couple of hours. AFTER STRATTERA,I don’t blank myself out with tranquilizers to “stop the madness;” I will go ahead and search for the article, make piles of like things that are not the article for ultimate filing, not find it after all, and leave the results on the floor, because separating the items into discrete categories has worn me out. I can do this without freaking out, but it’s still a challenge to actually complete tasks, and later, I’m tiptoeing amongst these piles, and before you know it, every available surface is covered with the abandoned items I started and ceased paying attention to. (Part of the “X percent” of failed projects I can expect from my ADD.) BECAUSE IN MY BRAIN,there are no places for everything; it’s all in the same place—the great big turbulent mess of my mind. Adding a new element can take quite a bit of processing and mental gear-shifting, as in trying to start a book and not finishing it, not finishing even the first page. I have a hard time retaining facts. Right now, it’s remembering names and faces and putting them together, and where I saw them before. I usually need an initial meeting and a refresher before the information sticks. Please don’t take it personally if I don’t remember you, especially if you’re among the hordes of people I’ve met through h. It’s possible you’ve even been to my house (either with me there or not, at parties thrown by him) because now every time I run into someone or meet someone it’s “Oh! I’ve been to your house!” “Who hasn’t?” “Oh my God, that’s your flat?” “I can’t deny it.” “You have such great stuff!” and so forth. THIS WEEK,I had three visitors to my flat, one of whom had never seen it before, who said to me, “Do you always keep your place this clean?” HAH! It had taken me all week to get it presentable, hiding and stuffing stuff out of sight. IF YOU DON’T NOTICEor never suspected these tendencies in me, it’s because now, on drugs, I can keep them at bay (hah hah, I mistyped “can’t”) whereas before I could not. My ADD and depression had grown progressively worse till my face was in the pillow at age 40, blanking out the entire world by having zero response to it. Now, I don’t take things so seriously. I don’t feel pressured to make sense of my life, so pressured that I’d overload and blow a fuse, or use the next opportunity to be mad at someone to fulfill my need to scream “Enough!” If I can’t find something, well, that’s too bad, better luck next time; if I abandon my attempts to organize things so I can find it, so be it. I’M IN THE PROCESSof reeducating myself to be neat, and I’ll give myself exactly as much time as I need. Yes, all of us have periods of “letting things go;” such is the nature of entropy, but most people are not incapacitated by it, they do not cease functioning because of it. Ironically, I create worse disorder trying to order things. But I no longer care like my life depends on it. You can’t imagine the relief. It’s truly revolutionary. For instance I used to think, well, I can’t work on this till I’ve worked on that. I can’t address that mess before I clean up this mess. And then I’d never clean up this mess or that mess. What if I thought, I can’t write my column until I’ve straightened up my writing studio? You’d never hear from me again. I’ve dropped a few clues here and there:
IN OTHER WORDS,I’m so used to being distracted by external stimuli and the themes running through my mind, that I actually need to divide my attention to some extent. If I’m on a roll writing this column and paying careful attention, something seems to be missing. So I almost always write with the TV on but the sound turned off, to occupy my peripheral vision because it’s used to having things moving and passing, and that way I can shift my focus and turn to the images for relief for both my eyes and my mind, from both my writing and the computer screen. I have a tough time staying “on” all day. If I’m on my own I’ll lie down several times throughout the day to recover and recharge. THE UPSIDE OF ALL THISis that, because I am constantly noticing so many things, significant or not, I notice things that others don’t—and that is of use to me as a poet and writer. As mentioned in Laurence G. Boldt’s The Art of Making a Living, artists use their limitations as a springboard to inspiration. “The artist accepts the limitations of form, not with fear and dread, but as the starting point of creation.” If I notice that someone has dark eyes I might write: “Black eyes roost on me/Black eyes washing over me/Painting my heart blue.” Okay, I command myself to notice something; how about what’s right next to me: One cat grooming the face of the other/The other oblivious in sleep Disorder grows like a fungus/On the edges of my mind The soles of my bare feet/Long to be stroked/By the cool, smooth skin of your palms A tea cup, sunglasses,/Books on a rug/Chaos creates a still life Zzyzzy’s tail/Wrapped around my wrist/A fur bracelet OK, I have tired of that game now. What else can I or can’t I turn my attention to? GOOD NEWSThere’s a bright spot in my future. On May 3rd I will be 52 years old, and playing with a full deck for the first time in my life. Watch out for that Joker, though!
The author will clean up that mess in a minute, really. ------------------------------------------------------------ I had an idea
Huh? copyright Alexandra Jones 2007 |
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