So go figure, according to a certified medical professional I've been visiting, the kind who has a prescription pad in his pocket and isn't afraid to use it, I'm in the midst of an episode of major depressive illness. How's that for a kick in the ass? Oh, and with anxiety, let's not forget the anxiety. As the good doctor put it, on a scale of 1 to 6, 1 being A-OK and 6 being "poised to swan dive off the Tappan Zee Bridge," I'm a 5.
I'll admit that this diagnosis wasn't a shock to me or I wouldn't have found my way into this amiable fellow's office. It all started months and months and months ago when I began waking up, every morning while it was still dark, let's say 3 or 4, to experience a full-out attack of what I've affectionately named "the ball of terror." He also goes by Adolf. (For those of you familiar with Ekhart Tolle's work, another term for this entity would be "the pain body," but for now, Adolf will do.) Adolf lives in my solar plexus, and when he's active he whirls there like a cyclone, but with offshoots that radiate through the rest of my body sending all my bits shaking and clenching, arms and legs, hands and feet.
There's really no defense against the ball of terror, but what my body does to cope when it hits is to curl up, fetal as fetal gets, and just ride it out until it's time to get the kids up for school. Not that Adolf is done with me at that point, he pulls back and whirls around in my center for a while, stays just enough out of the way for me to get Grace and Cal where they need to be, and then he really lets loose. He sort of regurgitates himself right up from the solar plexus and spews out in some pretty impressive histrionics where the whole body quakes on the floor and snot and tears fly in all directions and names of angels and saints are invoked and I call out for my mother. If it's a Tuesday or a Thursday when I have to get Cal to preschool by 9:30, I can have this fit while driving the car. Let me tell you, it is a HOOT! New motto: Mental health, not overrated.
Now as exciting and dramatic and Lifetime movie-worthy as that all sounds, the bizarre thing is that by, I don't know, maybe 2:00 p.m., I'm pretty good. There's a rhythm to this madness. And it's not even madness. I'm completely in charge of my faculties, and I'll tell you how I know. If all of a sudden in the middle of an Adolf attack one of Cal's therapists comes up the stairs to inform me that he's extracted a handful of poop from his diaper and wants to use it for fingerpaint, I can pull myself together like I've just been calmly filing my nails the whole time and deal with the matter, spit spot. Plus I hide it from my husband, who has enough on his plate. And Gracie, who it would scare the bejeezus out of. (Cal, he doesn't mind so much, he just burrows merrily into my belly button, business as usual.)
Isn't that nuts, though, the way I can squash it down when I feel I absolutely have to? And is Adolf not a wily and sneaky little bugger? Keeps me sane enough so I do NOT get a vacation in a nice quiet padded room somewhere (goddammit), but in enough agony that my daily life, at least from the predawn hours to around 2-3 in the afternoon, is a debilitating, exhausting suckfest. That's where I pay the piper for the times I fake it.
Even one of my old favorite things to do, shoving food in my face (I mean does anyone not love to do that?) does nothing for me. This blows. And yes, I've lost a bunch of weight as a result, which is not the 5-alarm-fire disaster that some people seem to think it is (i.e. my mother) because while not exactly a humongous girl to start with, I had a few extra pounds I didn't need so much. So I'm thin, I suppose, as a result of this recent adventure. Or so my clothing size suggests...I don't see it in the mirror, I just look like me, only a bummed-out version. In the second verse of "Need a little Christmas," Auntie Mame and company sing that they've "grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older," and that they go on about how they need a little angel sitting on their shoulder (hear the rhyming?), and it all sounds incredibly Broadway cheery and hokey when they sing it, but I couldn't hear it during the holiday season without doubling over in pain.
Ok, so enough with the bad news, because here's the deal. I have a two-pronged strategy in place to climb my way out of this creepy little pit. Firstly, Dancing with the Stars has started up again, and I think I need add nothing more on that topic. Secondly, like I mentioned, I finally got around to visiting the nice man with the diplomas on his walls and the prescription pad.
Frickin medication. I fought it hard this go 'round. Because I've been at this show before. Post partum with Grace was a trip, took me a while to realize that lying down in the hospital shower in a curled up naked ball the day after childbirth and crying convulsively was more than just baby blues. So yeah, I have some predisposition to speak of. Got dragged kicking and screaming into a pharmaceutical solution back then...and of course it goes back farther...I was a high school and college student with one of those major cases of "amazing-that-I-lived-through-it" bulimia, which is just another way Adolf rears his ugly head.
Anyway, fast forward to today, and can I tell you how much I've had enough of this garbage? I've had enough of the drug companies and their dumbass commercials showing those sad sack people slinking around in brown oversize sweaters before they take the magic pill and then playing golf and picking flowers after. I'm sick of all of it. How many times does a reasonably sane person need someone with a prescription pad to pull her back from the abyss?
And before anybody gets mad at me for sounding anti-medication, let me settle that right off the bat. Brooke Shields is one of my personal heroes, and her courage in telling her story of post-partum hell and the utter necessity of medical intervention to deal with the real-life horrors of that experience was one of the ways I got through mine. She's been there, I've been there, countless others have been there. I am NOT, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be anti-medication. I am pro-doing whatever you know in your gut is right for you at the time, which might be one thing in 1987, another in 2004, and a whole 'nuther thing today. I just don't want to need the crap anymore, is that so wrong?
So I tried every trick I could pull out of my hat this time before I submitted. St. John's Wort, sunlight simulating lamps, exercise, vitamin this and that and the other. I had this almost ineffable feeling in my gut, that despite the pain, despite the struggle, my body would find a way, natural healing will take over, the body knows how to right itself. Like I've heard Christiane Northrup say, "Depression is not a Prozac deficiency." Just give it another week. Ok, how about another. You're probably almost there. And then there's always that niggling, needling, scary little point of rage ready to explode deep inside of me about how it's altogether possible that the very drug industry that's peddling the chemicals that I'm picking up at the CVS drive-thru to help me in my healing is the evil empire that's helped autism become so prevalent that you wonder how long it'll be before you can find a household without it. You know what Adolf thought of all these musings? He could not keep from holding his sides and laughing. Got 'er right where I want 'er.
Finally, one Saturday morning, during a routine phone chat (we call it coffee talk) with one of my "sisters" (who's really an aunt, but that's just a technicality), I lost it for the umpteenth time. Lost it so bad. Again. Can't tell you how many times she's heard the same song from me. And I'm sure most of you know how it is with your soul sisters and brothers, they can feel what's roiling around in your guts even when it's hundreds of miles away and on the phone. So this is how she gently tugged me back in off the ledge: She softly and pleadingly said to me, in so many words, that enough was enough...and that yes, it's hard to have a beautiful boy with autism...and then have enough left over for the beautiful girl without autism...not to mention maintaining any modicum of health in a marriage....and trying to make your part of the household income out of the home office so that you can do what you need to do for the beautiful boy...which has evolved into a financial nightmare of epic proportions that requires nothing short of a Frank Capra miracle to resolve (not that I don't believe that those happen every day, they do). So why don't you do the thing that could just possibly make you wake up in the morning and look at all of it in the face without Adolf tearing you a new one every single God-blessed day?
That did it. That conversation was several weeks ago and I'm slowly getting better. I'm not yet where I need to be, some days are bad, some are ok. But Adolf's visits have been fewer and further between, and when he does show up he doesn't get the better of me like he could before. He may just have to move out entirely and find someone else to torture. And omellettes taste good again. And I could do some damage on a plate of burritos at a really good Mexican restaurant, I'm almost sure.
I know what you're all thinking, don't hold back so much, Trace. Tell us how you really feel?
I figure, what the hell, Brooke Shields told it all and it hasn't done her one bit of harm, not to mention the untold thousands or more (myself included) that have received the indescribable comfort of knowing that they aren't alone. And that if she could heal, maybe the rest of us have a shot at it too. I mean really, she and Tom Cruise have even buried the hatchet.
Although I'm a little miffed he hasn't returned any of MY calls or texts. I'm sure he's just been very busy...
So happy spring, friends, to all of us. So it has been written, so it shall be done.
Can I get an amen?
