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.