Reflecting Back on 2019

What a year this has been. It’s been a year that has dragged on, it’s been a year that has flown by.

When I left the Bad Situation in December 2018, I was terrified of 2019. What it would look like, what it would mean to me. I was afraid of the unknown and change. But for us to grow, our old selves must moult and die.

In the last dredges of spring 2018, I had willingly, hesitantly, worriedly added my name to the waitlist for an intensive therapy outpatient program. I waited and waited and by late summer, I received a call that I was next up on the list. I balked and asked to be pushed back until the next opening. I wasn’t ready, I didn’t have my affairs in order. I didn’t have my head on straight. I used all of these excuses to stay stuck and safe, even if it was slowly eating me alive.

Then in the fall of 2018, I received yet another call. It was time. I had to stop being afraid and take the plunge. I left the Bad Situation in December 2018, rushed to get my affairs in order, and finally, in January 2019, I entered treatment.

Half of 2019 was spent healing myself. I look back at treatment and am proud of myself. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, but it was also the most rewarding. It was twelve weeks long. Twelve torturous weeks of walking through hell. Dealing with the past, facing consequences of a reckless life spent (mentally) ill, immersing myself in past traumas to finally face them and let them go. It was cathartic, and it wasn’t easy. But I survived. I found my strength and resilience. It was in me all along. I just didn’t know it until treatment.

I do miss treatment, I miss the structure, the cathartic verbal purging of my soul and mind, and I miss group therapy. But all good and bad things must come to an end. At the end of the twelve weeks, I ‘graduated’. I was healing and just starting my journey.

I look back at the beginning half of 2019 and try to remind my present self that I was so confident in my skin, I liked myself, I liked who I had become, I was strong.

It’s a struggle. A struggle to try and continue to be that person at the end of treatment. To remember that person. The person that exuded self-like and confidence. I did fall back into my old behaviours a few times this year, but that was to be expected. I’m still struggling and still learning how to execute all that I learned in treatment. 

Reflecting over the past year…

On this day last year, I was struggling.

I remember the day exactly. I had woken up feeling good. I had gone to the library to rent a stack of cookbooks to find inspiration to make my dad an appreciation dinner for taking care of me; his adult kid who can’t even take care of herself most days.

Then my mood had taken quite a beating.

There had been a woman with her companion snickering and laughing and making rude comments about me and the stack of books I was checking out. She had even gone so far as making a grand show of waiting impatiently for me to finish, despite there being other unoccupied self-checkout kiosks for her to use. This stupid little interaction had bothered me, eaten away at me. Something so silly and trivial had impacted me. When I look back at this interaction, I roll my eyes at how this grown woman had acted and how I had let it affect me.

 

This time last year, I was on the precipice of a breakdown, relapsing, trying to leave an abusive relationship/environment, my self-care had become non-existent and I was on the waiting list for treatment.

I was a mess.

Closure and saying goodbye…

On Saturday, I saw my psychiatrist for the first time in months and later I found out, for the last time. 

He spends Monday to Friday in a hospital but works Saturdays seeing clients at a clinic. I found out that he was ending his Saturdays at the clinic. I was happy to hear that since I knew he had mentioned his fear of burning out and working to exhaustion but the happiness selfishly ebbed when I realized it was goodbye. 

He was the reason I am stable today. Sure, treatment and intensive therapy have helped immensely but without him, I know I wouldn’t be in such a fantastically bright place as I am today. With his aid, I was able to wean myself off of Seroquel, the first drug I was prescribed when I was first diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder back in 2015. I feel energetic and lighter than I’ve felt in a long time. I also started a new medication which has helped stabilize me. 

I owe most of these positive changes to him and I am indebted to him. I am filled with gratitude for this doctor that helped me tremendously. He was the first doctor to listen to me, the first one to care. 

When he told me, I was heartbroken. It was a short visit, mostly to get refills for my prescriptions and mainly to say goodbye. I gave my thanks and forced myself not to cry. I didn’t care if my makeup smeared, that hasn’t stopped me from crying before and it won’t now. I didn’t want to cry because this was a happy goodbye. 

Radical acceptance or forceful denial?

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently struggling. With life? Trying not to relapse? With my new job? Okay, so life in general.

I’ve been trying to reframe my thoughts and tell myself, “accept what I can change and accept all that I can’t.”

Has it worked? Not really but I’m trying. I’m constantly turning my mind away from the negativity that threatens to engulf me and towards positivity. It’s hard, really hard and I’m discouraged. All I want to do is give up, give in and fade away. Go back to my old habits and self-destruct.

Am I lying to myself–convincing myself over and over how great things are (or at least, how great things should be)? Or am I practicing radical acceptance? I think I know which one I’m stuck in.

Hopefully this funk will leave soon and I can go back to talking about makeup and skincare! Here’s to hoping…

How do you escape your thoughts? Seven Months Clean.

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Possible trigger warning: like all of my personal posts, there is a slight trigger warning but more so in this post in particular. In this post, I mention self-harm and b/p. It’s not graphic but I just thought a trigger warning should be mentioned.

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I’ve been “clean” for seven months. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say, I haven’t relapsed in seven months. It’s been a breeze but recently, it has become an hourly struggle.

Since I was eleven years old, I self-harmed and had an on and off relationship with binge/purging and restricting. So really, I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to self-destruct.

There are many reasons why I started when I was eleven; too many to list. Was it a cry for help, to be noticed, to regain control, to remain small, to become invisible, to die, to alleviate the emotions? It’s so much more than any of that but this post isn’t about the whys and the causes.

 

I stopped (cold turkey) all of my self-destructive behaviours by the beginning of January 2019. I entered treatment in January and when I “needed” a release the most, I forced myself to feel and not escape; I didn’t want the distraction that self-harming and b/p would give me.

Don’t get me wrong. Quitting was hard. It’s been a coping mechanism since I was eleven and it morphed, along the way, into an addiction. You’re wondering how could self-harming and b/p be addictive? Endorphins, pain, release, peace, calm, control…all of the above. Even now, I still think about self-harming, b/p and restricting daily. I realize it’ll always have space in my mind, it’ll always stay with me. You can never fully get over your addictions, you just learn to live with them.

 

In treatment, I left my self-harming kit by my bed as a “back-up plan” in case things got too much for me to bear. As treatment progressed, it became a totem for me. Needing and wanting it, then realizing I no longer needed or wanted it; a reminder I could be strong and I didn’t need to self-destruct to deal with life. Then it hit me in my second last week of treatment. I still used the self-harming kit as a coping mechanism, even if I didn’t use any of its contents. So I moved it out of sight and moved on with my life.

The hours turned into days, days into weeks, weeks into months. Now, seven months later, I find myself here.

 

Here, in an hourly struggle of trying not to relapse. It’s been really hard since Saturday night. I fucked up hard at work on Friday and I spent the weekend crying, unable to sleep, not eating and yes, wanting to reach for my old coping strategies. I’ve tried ones I learned in treatment: self-care (face masks, makeup, vlogging), watching new tv shows, you name it, I tried it. It hasn’t worked, I even try and take naps to escape my thoughts but even in sleep, my thoughts haunt me. I can’t seem to shake my thoughts from my head. I’m mortified, ashamed and self-loathed when I think about my colossal mistake at work.

I can’t escape my thoughts and I don’t know how I don’t remember how to release them in a healthy way. I don’t have anyone to talk to in my life, my support network imploded into dust so I’m writing it here. It’s not enough but it’ll have to do until I see my therapist in two weeks.

 

I journaled last night and almost, almost relapsed. The only thing stopping me is that it has been seven months. Seven. Months. I keep reminding myself. The competitive and obsessive part of myself is pushing me to continue this seven-month streak.

I know it’s just a number, I know relapsing is normal when starting recovery, but we don’t fully recover and leave behind our old selves. We fold them into pebbles and place them in our pockets, carrying their weight with us wherever we go. Even if we let go, they never fully let go of us.

I’m trying to get through the days without relapsing, taking it hour by hour. I’m scared, isolated and terribly sad. But I’m trying, hour by hour, it’ll have to be enough for now.

 

I hope you are well and taking care of yourself. If you are in the dark, know I am there too. If no one has told you today, I love you, stranger. Even if we’ve never spoken or met, you matter to me. You’re working hard at living and you’re doing your best. Be proud of yourself for that.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

 

Much love,

Annie xoxo

Coming home, Coming Back to Myself.

| April 2018 | June 2019 |

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I’ve come a long way–survived hell and back, and back again–to finally end up here.

I mentioned before but for three years, I was in an abusive and toxic situation/relationships. It was soul-crushing and destructive. I worked hard in group therapy to re-wire my broken mind and I’m still struggling with the ramifications of leaving the situation behind me.

Even before those three years, since the winter of 2015 (when I was first diagnosed with having bipolar disorder), my life started to crack at the seams. Until finally, my life fell apart, myself with it.

I fell so hard and like Alice, I tumbled down, down, down the rabbit hole, free falling for years until group therapy. There, I learned how to climb out of hell, only leaving it behind after I walked through it.

Momentously Small: Wearing a Skirt

If you’ve read my post about finally being okay, after all of these years, then you know I’m trying to come alive and be present in my own life. For the most part, it’s working. Other days, I fall back into my old ways but I catch myself, each time, which is the most important part.

Since the last two weeks of group therapy, I’ve started to dress differently. In grade 8, something happened and I changed how I dressed. I used to wear clothes that fit me, skirts, t-shirts; I wasn’t ashamed of my body, I wasn’t disgusted with it. Then grade 8 happened and I couldn’t bear to wear skirts anymore. Dresses, yes but they had to be long and my clothing, for the most part, had to be loose fitting and baggy.

So I always wore clothing that was two or three sizes too big and wondered why I was so fat. I didn’t like when my clothing hugged my body, with all of the messages I heard growing up (I was fat, I was ugly, I needed to diet. I had any bulges painfully pinched and laughed at), maybe I really was disgusting and gross.

An Embarrassing Update in which I realize I’m Not Hypomanic, just a Twit.

If I could bury my head in the sand, trust me, I would. I’m more amused than anything, even though I did something less than brilliant, I still can’t help myself but laugh (at the situation and my twit moment).

Loving life or Hypomania?

I have Bipolar disorder. I’m not going to really talk about the journey I went on towards the diagnosis, that’s for another day when I don’t feel so ambivalent or off.

I always say mental illness has flavours, we all have different flavours of the same terrible ice cream; how it manifests for each of us, what it looks like on us, what it means for us and to us. It’s a crappy piece of chocolate we never wanted and it’s an ill-fitted campy shirt we never asked for.

On me, the bipolar disorder manifests through intensely destructive, long periods of depression and bouts of cataclysmic and wonderfully amazing hypomania. Both are devastating, both are tornadoes upending my life into chaos.

 

It has taken me years and years to finally be stable, to be where I am now, to be here. But that isn’t to say I don’t fall back down or I don’t fly towards the sun. Slipping back or slipping up.

As the seasons’ change, so does the disorder. I’m still on the fence whether it’s a mental illness or not, mainly because when I’m stable, I consider it a disorder. But when I’m ill and falling apart or falling upwards, it’s an illness. It’s an exhausting, perpetuating cycle that just takes and takes and erodes and destroys. I’m being quite melodramatic, I know.

Because of the nature of the disorder and the fluctuations of my moods, I am very apprehensive when I feel emotions…when I just am. I don’t trust what I feel, at all. I’m scared when I’m happy and I’m terrified when I’m sad. When I’m tired, I can’t help but think, “is the depression coming back?” or when I can’t sleep, I worry, “is this hypomania?”

There’s always this nagging pull in my brain telling me, “are you getting sick again?”, “are you going to lose your mind again?”, “will you weather the storm this time around?”, “how much of yourself are you going to lose this time?”

 

I remember this one day in group therapy, I felt good about myself and I was having a particularly good day (compared to the dreadful weeks before and after that day). We were supposed to draw ourselves as rose bushes and we were only given thirty minutes so we couldn’t overthink anything. I, of course, drew a blossoming rosebush, growing from thorns, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. When I went home that night, I felt good about it, about myself.

a view into my heart

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting recently, perhaps it’s because I recently turned the big 3-0 (ouch) or I’m in a much better place now. It’s both reasons, I think.

Thinking about why I’m here–not in the philosophical, “what is the meaning of life?” sense (when I find the answer, I’ll let you know), but more so, “why am I here?” in this spot, this point in my life, right here, right now.

 

I’ve been practicing a lot of radical acceptance and turning the mind. Turning the mind is when we’re struggling to accept something or we start to fixate and ruminate on this one thing, we have to consciously turn our minds away from obsessing over it and turn back towards acceptance.

We have to think, “if I can’t change it, I can change how I think about it.” If I can’t do something to change what I’m struggling with, I need to accept it (in all of its painful glory), and I need to reframe how I view it. It sucks, especially if you’re like me and you like to needlessly worry and make yourself feel bad. Hey, I’m not judging, that was my favourite hobby for years, it’s just not very productive or healthy.

So I’ve been accepting that this is where I am and you know what? That in itself is a victory for me and if you think about it, it’s a victory for all of us, regardless of where we are in our lives. For the longest time, I didn’t feel alive, I didn’t feel present; I wasn’t here.