mercuryfern

Tuesday, April 12

A little tidbit from my top secret first attempt at blogging.  Keep in mind, dear reader- by yesterday I mean April 11.

I came unwound yesterday for reasons still unclear. For at least a week now, I have been building in energy, thinking it would crest into some of the productive exuberance I have known. Instead, it twisted into an implosion.  A retail smile hardened on my face while my tethers frayed and snapped.  My hearing went.  Sounds became vauge and distant like my head was underwater.  I found myself stopped in the middle of small tasks, staring at nothing, my eyes still and unfocused, drowning.

As with deja-vous or a sneeze, you kill it by calling its name. I told my coworker, a college student who shares her secrets with me, I am having a panic attack just now. She listened so generously and intently, my voice happy and calm, smiling through my terror, how surreal it must have sounded. Did I need any help? Well you see, its like when you look at a light and then close your eyes. Those spots you see? If you stare directly at them they drift and fade. I need to face this head on, to say it out loud. It usually goes away if I do that.

It stayed. It worsened. I spent that entire afternoon at work quickly building to something that spoke of bad times ahead; hard rain in the midwest from a green sky, you know a twister is coming. I feared days in bed, unable to talk or eat, shivering under blankets whatever the temperature. A few days ago, my husband and I had agreed that I would finish the taxes last night but I asked him if I could write instead, I needed to, I was freaking out. Of course honey.

I don't know how to explain what happened next. I sat down in this very uncomfortable chair. It didn't lift but I got my bearing. I sent some emails out. Please help me. This could get bad, to a dear friend who I knew would send me her love instantly, to a near stranger who I suspected would reply, to a list of women who have been there. I threw those ropes out and started putting other words down. I got replies. We care. You will be okay. Something shifted.

By the time my therapist appt came two hrs later, I was exhausted. I didn't think I could ride my bike the nine tenths of a mile. I did, though, and I finished breaking when I sat in her chair. My whole body felt so heavy. I could barely speak. When the words did come, they were slow and quiet. She pulled me through it, put it all in perspective.

I went home, sent out some more emails, suddenly feeling all the sleep I hadn't been getting this whole week. I woke up this morning surprised to find the storm had missed me. I did what I could to make it stop, then hunkered down, ready. It just never got bad. Asking for help, putting words down, it worked.

My god. I stared those spots away.

Madness Running

I don’t do moderation.  Knowing this, I generally err on the side of under- rather than overindulgence.  Many people who share my brand of insanity struggle with substance abuse problems.  This has not been the case for me.  My experiments with recreational stupor were early and short lived.  Until recently I didn’t drink alcohol at all, ever.  I’ve been a vegetarian of varying levels of strictness for ten years. You could argue that I take abstinence to unhealthy extremes; perhaps in my long ago past this has been true.  I eat eggs and cheese now.  I no longer let myself skip meals.  In the last year I have begun to enjoy sipping a beer or two over the course of a night.

My affinity for obsession has advantages.  I excel at much of what I attempt.  Not that my achievements come consistently; no, it’s a torrent of writing, a fever of ideas and execution, and then nothing, nothing at all for days, weeks or months while I wonder if it all was ever real in the first place, while the people who depend on my initially demonstrated competence lose faith and expel me permanently from their esteem.

Recently, my intensity has been channeled into exercise.  Probably narcissism is not entirely absent from the equation, but mostly I do it because keeping a decent amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins is a good way to maintain my emotional ballast.  This summer I spent 150 weekly miles on the designated bike path at a pace that left me limping and queazy when I dismounted.  Unlike many other sports, running, for instance, on a bike you’ve got a piece of equipment between you and the task at hand, and as such, you really can buy speed.  I don’t ride anything fancy, but it thrills me to unsubtly pass the many people who do, to defy the money equation with my straight bars and cheap derailuer, my own private class warfare victory. 

This autumn, I go to the gym instead; everyday, for at least an hour.

Yesterday, I quit a job after only one day, a record even for my demanding self.  One thirty in the afternoon found me doubting my worth for all the old reasons and a few new ones, too.  I got on a machine and went for an hour.  Then I sped up and gave it everything I had for another ten, twenty, thirty minutes.  No matter how I tried to exhaust myself, there was still more to pull up from under my many failures, like a scarf of near infinite length from a cheap magician’s hat.  I kept expecting to find myself spent, holding an unattached corner, but instead the yellow just gave way to red then green and blue.  However low I fall, I hit bottom with the rock of my willpower as companion, and there it was again, giving birth in my unmoving motion to a small euphoria that grew until it was about to dwarf guilt and shame.  Before it could, though, before I reached that moment where everything is so clear, at three o'clock I stopped to cook dinner, to try and make amends.  I will be better to the people who care about me.

I guess the other thing about channeling my energy into tasks which are perhaps not particularly prestigious is that I want desperately to excel at something.  I squander talent and opportunity with stunning efficiency.  When I can exicute a simple task with dignity, I remember what it was like to feel that golden touch emanating in more useful directions.  How can it be wrong to want to be reminded of what it feels like to accomplish?

She came home while I was mixing up the batter for the frittata, veggies in the pan, parsnips sliced and roasting in the oven.  I was so exited about my ninety minutes.  I am not a runner, after all. 

“An hour and a half?  That is not okay.  That is not reasonable.”

“I think it’s fine.  People who run marathons or whatever go way longer than that.”

“Fern, it’s a kind of eating disorder to exsersize all the time.  90 minutes, I’m sorry, no, that is not reasonable at all.”

Later last night, I was doing something on the computer, and I had occasion to exclaim under my breath, “argh, I said submit, motherfucker.”

“Fern, you are manic, settle down.”

“No, I’m not.  I’m annoyed.  Not everything I do is a pathology.”

“Yes it is.”

Why I Love Abigail, or, Nothing is More Hilarious Than Mental Illness

My camera has been broken now for a couple of weeks.  There is nothing I can do about it, the warranty is in a storage unit in Ohio.  I can’t afford to replace the stupid thing for a few months at least.  Meanwhile, the most luscious light I have seen in ages comes pouring through the leaves, setting all this green aglow.  The trees take a deep breath and prepare to change into their formalwear.  Back from window shopping with Abby, I fell into a deep funk, precipitated mostly by realizing the camera I want to buy doesn’t exist, but then my sadness bled into other ideas.  If I can make a record of the beauty that has been, I can take it with me, I can get my bearing.  When I can’t take pictures, everything good seems to be slipping through my fingers.  The sun sets off the wood grain on that log just so for only a half an hour today, I watch it dance across and then slip off.  Tomorrow the sun will have sunk a bit lower, everything will be different, it is gone.  Explaining this to Abby, I began to cry.

“My god, honey, I never really noticed your bipolarity so much before.  I would like to point out, for instance, that you are freaking out right now about The Idea Of Time.”

It’s all in the delivery, friends.  I nearly wet myself laughing.  My psyche is bizarre, it needs to be mocked.

“Fern, can I cook you something?  Fajitas?  Forbidden Chocolate Explosion topped with fennel seeds and Chocolate Lucky Charms without the marshmallows?  Anything, seriously, I’m all yours.”

“No, I can’t eat, food is gross.”  Wait wait wait, I’ve heard that before.  Nice try.  You haven't eaten all day, damnit, let her make you something.   “Ah, some hot chocolate would be nice.”

“I’m on it.

“Oh, check this out, we even have cream.  Oh, baby, get ready for some homemade whipped cream.  It’s weird that you are so sad now, when you were so happy this morning, I mean, you skipped into the shoe store, remember?”

“Uh huh.”

“And you were, like, trying on all those silly shoes, dancing around in stripper boots, getting me to try those red things on, you were exuberant, you glowed, I mean, this happened so fast.”

“I know, I am who I want to be when I'm manic.  It’s worth it, on balance, to cry about The Idea Of Time every now and again, if that's the cost of being on top of the world occasionally. I feel like I’ve made that choice, I’m okay with it.  Frankly, I feel sorry for people who aren’t me.”

“Huh.  I can see that.  Although, I’ve got to say, I, for one, am grateful for the passage of time.  Seriously, if the sun never moved, I would cry.”

“True.”

“And you know, you can think about it as an infinite stream of moments passing by, but it's also an infinite stream of moments coming towards you.”

“Yeah, I know, but look at what the light is doing right now.  I should be taking pictures of that.  Early fall is the best time of year for photography. The sun is so low, making wonderful contrasty shadows everywhere, but everything is still verdant and it all just shines, just screams out to be immortalized.  By the time I have a camera again-  Wow, this is so rich.”

“I whipped the hell out of the cream.”

Leaves

I got lost in the woods this morning.  Adam, the ranger of the preserve, was with me , so I felt no need to stay aware of our location.  At some point he confessed he’d never been in this part of the forrest before, and wasn’t entirely sure  where we were.  No matter, I told him.  I had water and nowhere to be.  We made our way back to known ground without too much trouble. 

I like to get lost.  You make the best discoveries disoriented; besides which, the getting found again is much more meaningful than if you’d never been without your bearing.  As sometimes happens, I woke up feeling inexplicably achy hearted today.  It helped, I think, to just abandon myself to the mercy of the trails, to let them decide.  I have visions of emptying my sorrow into these stands of thin trees for the next months, of their young strength rebirthing vitality in me as I step through them.

There was email to be checked, books and blogs to be read upon returning, but these were unsatisfying in the way such things can be when you would like them to tell you the meaning of your life, and if its not too much trouble, of the universe as well.

So I rooted around in the fridge, and found a gorgeous stash of mixed young cooking greens, mostly kale and mustard.  I tore them gently into a sinkful of water, the way my cooking teachers taught me.  This was at Upattinas, the fist broken utopia to tear my heart in two.  Peter and Ceal, working actors both, had a life I envied: they cared about social justice, about healthy food and beauty and love, they Made Art Together.  I was their star student in the cooking class, attentively absorbing their wisdom about knife holding and garlic peeling and flour sifting.   

They had lived in Mississippi for a few years, (also in India, you can see why an aspiring bohemian might be entranced) and so cooked greens were important to them.  The first time we made them, I washed and rolled the large leaves then proceeded to slice them into ribbons, the crunch of the sharp knife a reminder of my new found competence.

No, no, they told me, you have to rip the greens.  The authentic sounthern way is to remove the tough rib from down the middle and to tear the rest into mouth sized pieces.

Sometimes I miss the people I’ve been, but when I cook old recipes I can be one of my old selves again.  This afternoon I turned fifteen again, desperately moon eyed over my chosen parents.  I lived with them my last year so I could attend full time, cut my hours at the greenhouse to twenty.  They adored me before they knew me well, the star student of self direction.  Once they saw me up close, though, I could no longer hide the awful debilitating force of my depression, how it exhausted me to be around people.  I wanted for them to love me, to be their child, but most of the time I had not the energy to to anything but lock myself in the perfect room they gave me, sometimes reading, sometimes only staring at the wall above the bed, drowning. 

I was ashamed of how sick I was, how it put distance between us, how easily hurt I was by any small disapproval.  We rented a Frijof Capra movie from the library once and it sent new wheels turning in my mind, but Peter found it didactic and I was sure that meant he hated me.  It got so I could not bear to face them.  When I moved out, I did not stay in touch.

While I have been writing this, the smell of the cooking greens has been drifting away from a sweet earthy one to something progressively more acrid.  Upon investigating, I found the water had evaporated from the pan.  The leaves, green and turgid when I last saw them, are now a mass of bitter brown paper, curling, inedible, at the bottom of the pan.

Another Fall

All week I’ve been running my mind over the idea of friendship. More than just thinking about it, I’ve been writing in my head a beautiful (profound, even) essay on the many faces of human connection. Yesterday evening I had a final, so I’ve been looking forward to filling today with leisurely introspection and careful boxing up of much loved books.

As so often happens, the bipole gods had other plans.

It hard to talk about such things, panic reasserts itself upon examination. Let me reprint some letters I wrote yesterday and we’ll go from there, shall we?

Date: Jul 13, 2005 1:09 PM Subject: all is lost

I have a final in four hours and I don't understand the material. I'm
having trouble concentrating. I need a 100% on the test to get an 89.4
in the class. There is no hope now of getting the a that seemed so
secure mere weeks ago.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 1:48 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

well, if i dont get an a in this class i might not (prolly wont?) get
into the school i really really really want to go to and all the very
hard wirk ive been doign this summer (not to mention the money ove
spent on classes) will have been a complete waste.

Also, i think my brain is broken. I keep thinking i undrestand this
stuff, but i'm gettgin wrong answers. Im out of ideas fo rplaces to
look. I havent even started on the ph calcs- the hardest equasions.
There is no time to ask the teacher- he's at his day job untill
moments before the test.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 2:22 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

Well, no i dont have their phone numbers, but i couldnt ask any of
them for help anyway, due to events yesterday, described here:
"http://www.mercuryfern.typepad.com/"

Ive given up. Ive done all the problems in the book, i dont
understand why my answers were wrong, what else can i do? Stupid
fucking summer classes.

We've had new material every day this week, includign yesterday, and
only got back our most recent tests from which tostudy on monday. I
got a c on that test, which is why im freakign out now.

and i can't type.

fuck.

thanks for the brain waves, though.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 2:25 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

true. lets see how a bike ride feels. It can't make me worse than i am now.

-m

Date: Jul 13, 2005 2:36 PM Subject: Re: all is lost

no wait. cant muster the energy.
back to selfpity.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 6:41 PM Subject: bad to worse

so i took the test, in a maner of speaking
i took 3/4 of it, at which point my brain shut down.
I turned it in with a note that said, i am havign a panic attack and
am unable to finish the exam. I understand that this means i will
recieve a failing or near failing grade for the class.
This is classic mercuryfern territory, glorious potential followed by
miserable disapointment.
i hate my spyche so much right now.

Date: Jul 13, 2005 7:17 PM Subject: Re: bad to worse

THanks.
my heart hurts so much right now. Im sittign here at a public
computor at school, not even really doign anything, afraid to go home
because that will make everything real, it feel like i am inbetween
now, it doiesnt count yet, im not even reading or writing anything,
just sitting here, feelign liek everything is over, disapointed in the
world

intellectually i can see that that is inaccurate, but it feels real

Im havign troubel formign sentances, htough i know it woudl be useful to write

sorry about the typing, i dont have the energy to fix it

Date: Jul 13, 2005 8:26 PM Subject: Re: bad to worse

Thanks, i think ive stableized a bit. Im gonna go home and make
the boy comfort me. He's good at that. Knowing yall are out there
makes a big differance.

love,
-mercuryfern
still no energy to edit.
sorry.

------------

To those of you who don’t already know that I am illegible without a spell checker, my dirty little secret has been revealed. I am one of those apparent morons who will actually go about discussing my neighbour's favourite labouring colours if my checker is set to British. I dare not second-guess my word processor. Since I am writing this in MSWorks, I can see that the density of little red squiggly lines coincides neatly with my level of distress. Ah, yes, correlations and intriguing patterns. When in doubt, intellectualise.

I did mange to calm myself down before the test. I closed the books and walked away, listened to some good angry music on the drive to school and just let it all go. I learned to do this in school prior to Srock. Not caring about grades is a mental health issue for me. As an added bonus, when I don’t care about them, I get excellent grades. Armed with this knowledge, I actually walked into the classroom happy and calm. Frequently I know things that I don't know I know. It seemed likely that the formulas I’d been clumsily manipulating for the last two sleepless days had made their way in past my anger and would float to the surface once I got my emotional state in order.

There was an Olympic swimmer a few years back who received quiet a bit of attention for his unconventional training style. He didn’t practice. When he did laps, racing became boring and dispassionate, and he couldn’t muster the excitement to go fast during competetion.

I thought of him as I started the exam, thought of how I’ve done spectacularly well on tests I’ve been woefully underprepared for. When I took the SAT, I’d been, for two years, either a high school dropout or an omnivorous autodidact, depending on whether I felt like being pretentious or confrontational with whomever was asking. My mind was engaged, but certainly undisciplined, and I hadn’t taken any math whatsoever that entire time.

I knew I would score in the 99th percentile for reading, but I couldn’t have guessed that I would score nearly that high on the math section as well.

Taking the SAT is clear in my mind, even now. It was fun. I’d never encountered some of the concepts before, but I just sat and logiced them out, not caring if I was right, enjoying, actually enjoying, the process.  It sounds like very bad hippy parenting advice, but once there were no costs to failing, I succeeded. Walking from the parking lot, I made a similar peace. The chemistry test would be like so much geometry. For awhile, it was. I began writing in my head a jokey apologetic email to the list about how I had vastly underestimated myself and had likely aced the test. I asked the professor to clarify a question, a question I just wanted to confirm that I understood, and something about his tone just set me off. I was gone.

One of the differences between a full on panic attack and garden-variety anxiety is a total inability to understand the written word. I can read, sort of, but at the end of a sentence all comprehension evaporates. The four remaining problems ran across my vision over and over, but I could not extract any meaning from them. I sat there trying simultaneously not to cry or otherwise visibly spiral out from normal, but also to delve into the recesses of my mind and pull some buried knowledge out. These are opposing efforts. My intellect lost.

I wrote my note and headed to the computer lab.

For two hours it comforted me to sit in front of the screen, not typing much, not reading much, not thinking much.

I went home, fairly stable, almost happy. I should mention here that I must be pretty far along in my terror before any evidence of it is visible to the casual observer. In fact, now that I‘m trying to remember, I can’t think of a single time when a stranger would have been able to tell. I batten down the hatches; I plaster a saccerine smile on my face. It’s a relief to finally hit the bottom after building up to it for hours/days. I am at my most confidant in the eye of the storm.

So it was that when I walked in the front door, I was skipping and laughing. In a cheery voice, I announced to my husband what had happened.

The person I love more than anyone else put his face in his hands and cried.

He begged me to consider medication, to drop my remaining classes, said that he was afraid for me, doubted my ability to take care of myself, his ability to take care of me. I know that my eyes were wet and my voice tight when I told him I could not talk about it, that I had just pulled myself out of some horrible anguish and I needed to think about something else for awhile or I would implode again.

We went out to dinner and talked of logistics for the coming move and my bloging stats. I ate two entrées, suddenly aware that my anxiety had kept me from food for at least one full day.  He ate not at all.

I have things to think about today. The books and superfluous textiles still need to be packed and put into storage. The bike must be ridden; my sister must be chatted with. I can’t write yet about some of the questions I’m asking myself now. What if anything to say to the professor? How much of this sickness is physiological? Will it inevitably cripple me without pharmacology?

I know one thing: I am not dropping those classes. Things shatter in my grip.  I pick them up again.