I feel crazy
I’m not sure how this post will go.
I don’t have plans for what I’m going to write. I’m just going to explore my brain a little, publicly. When I created this account, I committed to focusing my blogging on my writing and mental illness. Well here’s the mental illness. I may update this throughout the day. If you think you have useful advice to offer me, you are wrong, so please don’t comment on this post—I’ll likely just insult you, then block you, then eat you.
To start:
I am obsessed with, and feel comforted by, maintaining the psychological upper hand with my relatives. It feels important for me to do so and I have the ability to do so because (as far as I perceive) I am dealing with people who have far blunter psychological tools than I.
With my dad, I am maintaining the upper hand by litigating his ass with a yes/no question that he cannot answer, because either way it could spell the end of our relationship (which there is not much left of at this point). The question is: do you admit to the potty training abuse (I’ll spare you the details) that happened when I was young. If he says yes, I can end the relationship with the upper hand based on his transgression. If he says no, I can end the relationship with the upper hand based on his denial of the transgression. So of course he can’t answer the question at all. But in not answering the question at all, he’s dropped the communication, and there I have the upper hand, because he’s failed to communicate with his son. I don’t actually believe it is likely that I will ever have a real relationship with my father; I am just toying with him, frankly, which I admit is a waste of time and immature and everything else but I would like to extract something from him, in the form of causing him pain, for the pain he has caused me. Fucked up, I know. It’s a game I should stop playing altogether, but I haven’t chosen to do that.
I have a sister who will not communicate about her life to anyone in the family. She doesn’t tell us about her relationships. I want to say, “Who cares?” and break out of the idea that she has to tell us—I mean why does she? But when she has someone who is important to her, and she holds us all at bay by not telling us anything about that person or their relationship (even that it exists), it feels like she’s not letting us/me into her life, like I’m not part of her life, as far as she’s concerned. She compartmentalizes her friends from each other, as well. I respect whatever she wants to do, in a way, but it cheapens my talk with her..when we talk, what are we talking about? I tell her everything. She tells me a carefully controlled subset of her life and I hate it. Suzanne: I hate it.
I’m not even gonna get into my littlest sister or her maladjusted husband. It’s too complex, too nonsensical. Even talking about them would give weight to their nonsense. All I’ll say is this: one day, my nephew Daniel is going to come to me, mad, and say, “Why didn’t you ever call me on my birthday?” And I am going to say, “I did call you. Every birthday. Your mother would never let me talk to you.”
Did I mention the paper towels? The paper towels, which I never noticed till today, have a multi-circular pattern that jumped at me from across the room. Then I got closer and the circles were like holograms, relief like something from a mushroom trip. I decided to remove myself from the kitchen.
I feel like my family doesn’t know how to communicate very well. Like my aunt Susan is recovering from knee surgery. I sent her text to say I hope she’s recovering well. She didn’t respond. In my world that text deserves a thank you. I met a very civilized woman named Ellen P, from my Mom’s last church. We spoke. She asked for a copy of my book. I sent her one. She read it. She sent me a note thanking me for the copy of the book and commenting on it and it was all quite pleasant and that’s what I expect from people when I communicate with them. Complete, rapid, end-to-end communication. If I text you and don’t hear back in two hours, I start to wonder. If I email you and don’t hear back in a day, something is wrong. “You didn’t check your email” is no longer an excuse because there is no such thing anymore as checking your email—you get a notification on your phone. You should be aware of all incoming communication within a few seconds unless you are 1) at a water park, 2) sleeping, 3) in the theater, etc. My sister Suzanne takes three months sometimes to get around to an email. By that point, I’ve moved on, baby—I could be married or living in a different town or dead or whatever—you’ve got to get on the stick.
I’m mad at my sister and her intellectually-challenged husband for insulting me with the word “gaslighting” while decidedly mis-using that word. If you’re going to use a word to insult me or attack me, better check the dictionary first. They have become obsessed with this word, which means to commit psychological warfare against a person by convincing them they are insane, and they use it all the time, in situations where it definitely does not apply. Basically, if you say something they don’t like, they attempt to use the term gaslighting to claim that you are wrong and you have manipulated their reality, so actually what you said is the manipulated truth and not only is their [false] truth right, but you are guilty of gaslighting! Gaslighting! They scream it at every turn! Everyone in their life is gaslighting them! Tell me, Amy, Jaymz, what are the chances, logically and rationally, that practically everyone in your life is gaslighting you?? That’s how you walk your way out of that delusion.
I know my focus is not where it should be. It should be on me, on my projects, on this apartment, my own body, food, medicine, writing, communication with people who haven’t decided I’m some kind of enemy rather than their flesh and blood.
I’m going to shift that.
I’m in between writing projects—that’s part of the problem. I need to be kept busy so I don’t focus on family dysfunction. So I’m going to get out my five or six best ideas for books and see what development I’ve done on each of them, if there are any that are developed enough and worthwhile enough that I could actually do them.
Bof, Idk, it’s only 9am. Did I mention the paper towels?
11:06am
Ok, here’s more. It’s considered a sign of mental illness by both my parents when I communicate with them. When I write them emails. When I write my dad email, he sometimes, instead of responding to me, writes my mom (an almost unheard of event, them communicating with each other) and asks where I am—not how I’m doing, or does she know if I’m ok, but where am I? like all he cares about is whether I’m in his vicinity or not (I know I’m assuming there).
This gets me even more, though, or is more immediate to me: my mom has decided that me sending emails at night (in the middle of the night) is a sign of illness. So if I am up to go to the bathroom at 3am and I write her a note about something I’m thinking about (even something innocuous like a grocery item to remember or something like that), the next morning I can be sure to receive many extra probing questions about if I’m doing ok mentally, etc. If I send meaningful emails at night, it’s even worse. As if baring my soul to my mother or father or sisters in in the middle of the night is any more indicative of mental illness than doing the same at noon! The result of this is, if I think of something (even something important like a doctor’s appointment change that we need to coordinate about)..if I think of such a thing in the middle of the night (this special, extra-sensitive time apparently), I now choose not to communicate it to my mother at all, and I forget it by morning, and the detail is lost..just because I don’t want to do anything that will make her think I’m any crazier than normal.
11:37am
Yeah, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from one of the dumbest counsellors I’ve ever had (and it obviously wasn’t original to him). He said, “You do you,” and it’s a fabulous operating principle. I need to constantly be involved in my own life so that I don’t get so wrapped up in other people’s. It’s hard for me, for everyone I’m sure to some degree, to be involved enough with someone to let them know you care, but not so involved that it takes me away from myself, which I believe should be my primary focus: what I can do, what I can say, etc.
I’m doing my best but I’m failing still.
I am an idiot.
12:55pm
I have taken the time to understand me from your point of view — have you taken the time to understand you from mine?
6:32pm
Lots of conversations in my head. Not voices, but imaginary conversations where I defend myself against theoretical verbal attacks from members of my immediate family. Then I analyze my responses to see if they’re likely cogent, possibly manic or hypomanic. Then I realize: why am I spending time on people who (to my way of seeing it) obviously don’t want to have any sort of relationship or contact with me. Why can’t I just write them off? I don’t know if I ever will. And none of them, if they want to end the relationship, have said so. They just don’t say anything. They ignore my communication, which makes me think they are not interested in having a thought relationship with me, but are not willing to ask for me to stop contacting them — probably because they don’t want such an action to reflect negatively on them. But I’m not going to give up, not because I care what anyone thinks of my actions, but because I really love these people and I see potential for some real, authentic, thought-intimate interactions — that’s what I want. But maybe that’s not realistic for me to expect to get out of these particular people, even my family of origin.
8:23pm
Talked with Mom. She agreed I have an expectations problem: too high. Unrealistic expectations have been known to me as part of my psychology since my late twenties. And yet, the pattern still remains. I bid a momentary farewell to my sisters, told them I would stop communicating with them since it is ether going nowhere or is completely asymmetrical. I told my dad goodbye (hopefully for the last time). I put notes in my contacts that say DO NOT CONTACT for these three people — actually four, even, sadly, one for my nephew — and I blocked calls, texts, emails, from those four plus Amy’s husband. Hopefully I will be less of an annoyance to them and at the same time I will spend less energy spinning my wheels with people who either never write me back or argue with me angrily and profanely or don’t meet my unrealistic expectations of them or whatever. I said to my sisters that I hoped I’d see them on the other side. And I cut the cord.
I feel happier almost right away. Got some dinner. Came into my room. My room feels cool, it’s clean, it feels like I live here. And my conversation with Amy, at least, was at arm’s length: I never got too personally or emotionally tangled up within it.
I left a message for my psychiatrist requesting a meeting in the next couple days, stating that I felt like I had become increasingly hypomanic over the last two days. They recently increased my Lexapro from 5mg/day to 10mg/day and changing that back is (in my estimation) most likely the change they’ll make to address this. It’s too bad, because I have crying spells at 5mg and not at 10mg..but antidepressants and manic depressives mate like porcupines. SSRIs push us manic, so when we take them, we have to take them in very small doses.
I’m going to watch a movie.
