Month: January 2022

I saw my new psychiatrist last night. Well, she’s actually my old psychiatrist, the one who I was seeing before this whole-year-and-then-some started. The one who told me to check myself into the hospital in the first place. She remembered me, not least of which because I have a last name that almost no one in this country has. Under the hat and behind the mask she still remembered the little immigrant who almost ended it all. She knew where I had been, but she was shocked at the amount of time I had spent in the different facilities.

She asked me a few questions, wanted to see my new diagnoses. She asked about my past, and why I hear the voices in my head. She asked all of the standard questions you get asked in a first meeting. She wanted to gauge where I was, and she did it all in less than thirty minutes. She told me someone would call me to make an appointment for six weeks from yesterday; I used to see someone every week or two for a year.

She was the one that first told me when I came to her that I had to change my definition of normal, of what was doing well. Normal was not like everyone else’s normal, it was functional. She told me that this was not going anywhere, and the goal of it all was just to keep me going. Keep me stable. Keep me functioning. Keeping me in that zone between so depressed that you want to kill yourself and so high that you feel like your blood is on fire and you talk too fast for anyone else to understand. That was doing well.

So, after a year of outpatient care, and two months of intense hospitalization, I’m here. I’m normal. I’m stable. I’m functioning.

So why do I feel nothing?

Why do I have no desire to do anything that would bring me joy?

Why does almost nothing make me happy?

Why do I put on the smile to make people feel comfortable?

It’s a marked improvement from wanting to die, from wanting to hurt yourself, from the screams in my head, from seeing other people’s faces on someone, from seeing things that just aren’t there, from feeling alien in your own skin, and from being unable to sit in your own chair without feeling like the very thing itself is rejecting you.

But I don’t know where to go from here.

I’m trying all of the steps I’m supposed to be taking. I (mostly) take my meds on time. I’m working with my support team. I’m looking for work, I even did well in an interview recently. I might even have a job some time soon.

It still feels like it’s all happening to someone else, that the real me just wants to lie down in my bed and sleep all of the time. The only thing that I can feel know with any consistency is talking with my wife and listening to music. Everything else feels like a waste of time. I tried to play a game on my computer yesterday, and I quit as soon as the game started. I felt absolutely nothing from something I used to enjoy.

Maybe I’m still tired from my trip abroad. Maybe I’m still jetlagged. Maybe I’m still getting used to this new schedule, or the lack of one. Maybe I’m having to relearn what life is like outside the confines of the program. Maybe it’s all of those things.

Maybe I’m just going to be like this.

I hope it will get better. I hope I can find new hobbies, something that I enjoy. Maybe work will give me some purpose, and new people to interact with in a place that isn’t devoted to recovery and mental health.

But like I’ve said before, the voices aren’t gone; and one of them keeps on telling me that this is the best I’m going to get. That I will forever be functional, never flourishing. I look at social media, which I know I shouldn’t, and I still can’t help but feel envy at all of the people and their happiness. My law school buddies with great careers. My friends holding their new child, or their newest one. My family smiling for real and not the kind that I put on, one that disappears immediately when everyone stops looking.

I don’t know what to say in the end here. I don’t have a hopeful message for you because I don’t have one for myself. I have hope, but I think that might just be the small light inside of me that keeps everything from just turning to darkness. It’s not a fire that keeps an engine going, accelerating, but just a flame that keeps the lights on, something that just points me in a certain direction. I hope that I can give you something soon to be proud of, because I desperately need something to be proud of myself for. I survived it all, but no one builds a monument to just getting by. Maybe this little flame will grow, maybe I will be happy. I don’t want to stay this way forever, there’s no point in just being another functioning machine in this world.

At least I have this, and at least I have you. There’s nothing else I do that leaves a mark like this, everything else is just writing in the sand. I need to keep writing, even if I’ve been told by some to just stay quiet. Talking to you is the only thing that makes me anything other than normal; and I need to be more than that. I’m already far from normal because of what’s wrong with me, I want to get to the point where my life marks me as more than just getting along. More than just functioning. More than just surviving. More than my kind of normal.

Much love from the Holy Land, hope I can keep the writing up. Thank you again for reading.

Tonight, my teacher from ulpan, my Hebrew school, gave us a little bonus assignment. It was a New Year’s card, and we’re meant to write all of the things that happened to us in the past year that we’re grateful for, and what we look forward to in the next. It’s a little optional task, something to add a little brevity to all of the grammar and vocabulary lessons; but it’s something that strikes to the core of how much I went through this past year, and how my future has never been more unknown to me.

For most of this year, in fact up until the last weeks of December, I was in a mental health outpatient clinic. I’ve written about the sessions, the times of clarity, the times of despair, and the nights I’ve spent losing myself to the madness. I would have thought that people would know what I was going through, that they would at least know what’s happened. Maybe I even let myself dream that someone would understand, but time and time again I was proven wrong by the interactions I had with people I was close with. Maybe it’s because they have no point of reference for what I’m talking about; you can read about the state of insanity until the end of your days, but unless you experience what it is like to have your mind unravel, you will only know the symptoms you can relate to your own personal life. Maybe it’s because it’s still just a taboo subject, and people would rather compartmentalize and ignore that aspect of you. Maybe it’s because no one wants to talk about suffering, because everyone else in the world is programmed to avoid pain when they can. Maybe it’s because they just don’t care, because what is my pain to them, or what is it comparison to whatever everyone else in the world goes through.

Maybe I will always be the black sheep, the friend who you worry about, the relative that you don’t know how to talk to, the person you whisper about, the cautionary tale, the one you would rather forget than remember. I am the target of extra care, of well-intentioned-but-ultimately-hurtful suggestions, and the usual measure of mistrust and self-distancing from someone that they don’t know if they are dangerous, or just maybe won’t always be around. It hurts beyond words to have to describe everything I have been through to make someone understand, but it hurts even worse when that flow of information changes nothing. It is not fun to be told what is best for you by people that don’t understand you, and this year has been filled with that. People are always ready to give advice and say that if I need anything to let them know, they are hardly ever ready to call out of the blue just to see if I am ok. It’s funny when the voices that tell you what you should be doing were never there when the voices in your head were telling you much more loudly what to do.

Every day, I wear a bracelet I made in the hospital over a year ago. It’s simple, I mean it was made in the crafts room in a psych ward. It’s eighteen beads on an elastic band, sixteen black and two white placed between each set of eight black beads. I remember thinking to myself when I made that bracelet that the black was all of the darkness in my soul, everything horrible in my mind, everything that I am damned for. The white was there to remind me that I am still on the edge, that I am not yet beyond saving. It’s become my totem, my constant reminder of who I am.

Blackness dominated this year, with only a few points of white breaking up the monotony of being caught in your own mind. I can’t look back and say this was a good year, even though I am in a better place than when it started. I learned some tricks to keep things in check, and I made some adjustments to make life actually livable; but nothing erases the horrible memories from this year that play in my mind when I close my eyes and try to sleep. It’s not even entirely mental. I hate looking in the mirror we have in our bedroom, to see what all of this has done to me physically. The little scars, the stretch marks, the extra weight, and the look in my eyes like I’ve lived much more than a year in 2021. I’m trying to apply the radical acceptance I learned in therapy, but it’s hard when you can’t separate yourself from how much you hate what you’ve become.

Still, I am trying to cling to hope. The voices are still here with me, but I know now how to lower their volume. The intrusive thoughts still come up, but I can put them in their box, or at least most of the time I can. I’m not ashamed of the scars anymore, and I don’t care anymore about the stares and second-looks they bring with them. Leaving my program didn’t end everything, it just meant I was ready to walk with one less crutch. I will live with this for however long I make it in this life, and that’s ok. I have no other life to live, and I don’t think I could see the world in any other way. I don’t think I even want to have a different kind of vision, if I wasn’t different I don’t think I would even be writing in the first place.

I have a job interview tomorrow, and my first appointment with my new psychiatrist. I am taking the steps to make this new year a better one, but I still can’t see as far ahead as I used to, and that’s ok. If I can make it through the day and accomplish something, if I can take it one step at a time, I’m in a lot better position than I was when 2021 first started. This year wasn’t perfect, it honestly really sucked most of the time, but it was necessary. If I hadn’t made the choices I did a year ago, I know I wouldn’t have made it to 2022 to write this. The past is ultimately just the past, and it’s never going to happen again (well, it will in my mind probably); my present doesn’t have to be dictated by it. I can write whatever I want for this life of mine, I don’t need to stay stuck in that place anymore. I can only hope that this year is better than the last, and take the steps to try and make that happen. I still have hope, and that’s more than I had a year ago. If I just have that, I think I’ll make it out ok.

Happy New Year from Houston to Holy Land, I hope you keep reading, I hope I keep writing, and I hope we can share something together. This whole endeavor is about connection, and I hope I can do just that with what comes next.

Much love.