Waiting

CW: Depression, Medication, Food, Weight

It’s been months now that I’ve been dealing with a long bout of bipolar depression. It started towards the end of November, lightened up a little around Christmas and then dove down to the depths as soon as December 26^th arrived.

I’ve tried to paint (with limited ‘success’) and tried to write (with no success other than a few blog posts the past month and a few creative writing Tweets) but my brain is stuck in low power mode and just won’t kick over into a more cooperative state.

This is especially frustrating because a med change almost three weeks ago was going to bring some improvement, or so I hoped. But nothing has gotten better, and to add insult to injury, I’ve gained back three of the pounds I’d tried so hard to lose in the past six months. Since I can’t exercise weight loss is especially difficult. With the meds I’m taking, it has felt damned near impossible. Still I managed to lose ten or so pounds (a small miracle, in my book) and was within two pounds of reaching my first small goal. Now that goal line has been moved, I’m cutting back even more on portion sizes and overall food intake, and I’m almost always hungry.

Weight loss and psych meds do not go hand in hand. The fact is they’re known to cause the kind of weight gain I’ve suffered over the past ten years. It has been almost a decade since I was finally properly diagnosed with Bipolar 1 (for decades before I was miss dx’d with major depression).

In that decade my body has become something foreign to me; a weight I have to drag along with me like some hellish personal version of Marley’s chains. Though he ‘forged his chains in life’, mine have been clamped onto me by the diseases that plague my brain; Bipolar, OCD, PTSD.

It’s gotten to the point that my doctor told me with concern that I was pre-diabetes last year. He told me he believed it’d reverse if I could lose twenty pounds. I looked at him with tears stinging my eyes, thinking he may as well have asked me to fly.

My relationship with food has never been great. Eating disorders run in my family, and I picked up destructive behaviors in my teens that have stayed with me through the years. It makes all this tracking what I eat and watching every bite nerve wracking; it feels like unhealthy behavior, and yet I don’t want to become a full-blown diabetic. I need my meds, and I need to lose weight. How am I supposed to do that?

First, I gave up the sugary drinks I shouldn’t have been drinking in the first place; gave up a lot of other things and cut severely back on even more. And after six months, it seemed to be doing something.

Then we upped one of my meds by two lousy milligrams, and that progress in weight loss seems to be going away. And for what? For no improvement in my depression?

I’m waiting to hear back from my psych doc with further instructions. Either she’ll tell me to keep going where I am and hope things improve, she’ll tell me to cut back my dose again, or she’ll tell me to increase it even more.

While my sad brain hopes she wants to increase it because I’m so sick and tired of feeling how I feel, the food-obsessed, unhealthy part of me hopes we cut it back down and that those three pounds will go back to wherever they came from.

If you’re struggling with meds and their side effects, please know you’re not alone. That’s why I’m posting this, in case anyone else out there is fighting this unending battle and needs to hear it’s not just them. From responses to tweets I’ve posted in the past few days, I know I’m not alone, even if it feels very lonely while I sit here and wait.

Sending love, love, love out into the skies…

~bru

Taking My Medicine

 I’m in the middle of another med increase right now, and my brain is refusing to cooperate to write a blog post that is anything other than absolutely dismal. So to spare you that, I’ll just say I’m hoping you’re safe and warm out there (oh Texas and surrounding states, my heart is breaking for your suffering…) and I’ll post a painting I did this week.

 

"Ballerina" acrylic on canvas

Hoping I’ll have something hopeful or positive to say next week, if only the med increase will do something to beat back this awful winter bipolar depression, the surging OCD, and PTSD.

Sending love, love, love out into the sky…

~bru

Winter Sleep

 

I think sometimes I was really meant to be born a bear. Strictly for the whole hibernation thing. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to stay awake most of the time when it’s so cold and snowy outside.

In addition to craving piles of blankets and long sleeps when it’s cold, my mood tends to drop severely in the winter, and I know I’m not alone in this. The decline begins sometime around Thanksgiving, with a slightly buoyant rebound phase around Christmas (Lights! Music! Giving gifts! Wheeee!) But then the day after Christmas comes, with that nowhere/nowhen week existing between Christmas and New Year’s Day and I get lost somewhere in there.

If I’m lucky, in the weeks following I can devote enough of my scattered attention when I am awake towards art and writing; if I get too depressed, though, I can’t rally the strength of will to do much of either. That’s where I’ve been for a while. It causes me to doubt myself as a creative person, and makes me long for times past when mania would drive me to write all night long and there were no medications reigning those impulses in.

I know, though, going back to the way it used to be isn’t an option. My health would suffer too greatly, and the price to be paid for those long manic phases is too high. Not just for me but also for those I love. So I’ve struggled through many winters (and springs, and summers, and autumns…) to find a balance somewhere creatively where I can make things that bring me some sense of accomplishment but don’t set alight the fragile rope bridge upon which I balance my existence.

"Winter" 12X12 acrylic on canvas, painted last week.

 

Social media is a challenge, as well, during this time when every instinct I have is telling me to withdraw from all social contact… something my therapist is opposed to for obvious reasons. It’s not healthy not to connect with people somehow, and with my bad health (physical and otherwise) online is where my socialization, such as it is, has to take place. 

It would be nice to have some ‘in person’ friends I suppose, someone with whom, when there wasn’t a pandemic, I could browse a bookstore with or go for lunch with now and then. The problem is I have so little energy to invest in life in general with the pain levels I live with that I fear I’d make a pretty awful friend.

Long ago, back when I had ‘in person’ friends, I had to often cancel plans because of pain and chronic illness. I get tired from long phone conversations, even texting can wear me out quickly at my normal pain levels. When I’m at ultra-high pain levels? Forget it and call me a hermit. My solitude becomes my survival.

I care deeply for my online friends though, despite (or more correctly, because of) all of this. I wish I could give them more than I can but I try to support, encourage, and cheer on as I’m able. I hope those interactions bring something of value to the online world in general; telling others "I see you, I hear you, I will hold space for you if you need it, to the best of my ability."

My doctor has just tweaked my meds after a long time of staying at the same levels of everything, and I am desperately waiting and hoping to see if this change will start chipping away at the iceberg of depression I find myself stranded on.

Thank you to all of the dear, kind friends I have on the bird app, who have thrown me more lifelines than they know. I appreciate you, I adore you, and I hope I can do the same for you when you just need to know someone is out there and hears you.

I hope your winter is cozy and filled with moments you want to remember.

I’m sending love, love, love out into the sky…

~bru

No Make-Up, No Filter

 

CW: body image, weight, food. 

I had a very strange dream last night. The details of the dream don’t matter, really, it’s the message it sent me that hit hard.

That message: If I’ve ever been accepting of my appearance (and how it’s affected by disabilities, by extension) I can’t remember it.

Not even back when I was in my late teens and looked, arguably, the best I ever did in my life. 

Me, at age seventeen. I thought I was so ugly then...

  

Not in my mid-twenties, when motherhood changed my body entirely.

Not in my late twenties, when I’d changed hair color but not my unhealthy relationship with food.

Not in my early thirties, the first time I gained weight due to medication (steroids), and not in my (now almost past) forties, when I gained more weight than I ever had in my life due to medications used to treat the bipolar and other mental illnesses I grapple with day to day.

I wished, after I woke today, I could feel for a moment the way I felt in the dream: whole, as a person, and accepting at last of how I am in this body I live in.

I’m like a well-loved teddy bear by this point, to be honest. I’ve got scars and defects that can’t be denied. They’re quite apparent when you look at me (though perhaps not all so clearly in the photo I’m about to post today… deep breath…)

Me, three months or so before my 50th birthday. No make-up, no filter.

 

You can’t get past the huge aphakia glasses that allow me some use of my sight (though I’m grateful for them every moment of every day). Muscle weakness from a stroke more than twenty years ago seems more apparent now, as does bone loss in my jaw and face I suffered after an infection that could have killed me a decade ago.

There’s more but I don’t want to make a laundry list of my defects now.

I want to remember that with those huge glasses, I can see well enough to enlarge the font and type this post. I can see the faces of the people I love with decent clarity. The glasses may distort my appearance but without them I’m legally blind and always will be. They are something to be loved, and grateful for.

I want to remember for all illness and disability have taken from me (the ability to drive and to be independent. The ability to make choices in life others simply take for granted, the ability to live without medications that alter not only my mental/physical health but interfere with my creativity…the list goes on…) that I’m still here, and I’m still me.

I want to remember today that the young girl I was (who always thought, to her peril, if she couldn’t be the prettiest girl in a room she could at least be the thinnest) was never happy with her appearance then, so why really is it surprising I should be unhappy with it now? What have I done in the meantime to stop being so hard on myself?

I need to stop being so hard on myself.

Instead of focusing on things I can't change, I’ll try to celebrate the things I’ve learned. A lesson, I like to think, with each strand of gray hair. 

I’ll be grateful for the fifteen surgeries/procedures I had between 2009 and 2011, six of which restored some of my sight and others that saved me, entirely.

I will be kind to my body and feed it as well as I can, as I fight off a host of age and disability related threats like pre-diabetes and high cholesterol. Arthritis and connective tissue disease may make typing impossible some days but today I'm here.

I’m hoping if you’re reading this and you’ve ever felt down about the reflection you see in the mirror, you’ll learn from all the time I’ve wasted worrying about it since my youth and put your own time to much better use. 

Please believe me when I say you’re more attractive than you know, more attractive than you’ll ever probably believe. Try to see yourself through the eyes of someone who is trying to learn the lesson once and for all, finally: our worth is not tied to how much we weigh, or how we smile, or how youthful we look.

It’s tied to who we are beneath, just existing, as we are. Cultivate kindness towards the person within and thoughts of the person without will seem less important over time.

At least, that’s what I’m still telling myself, as I walk away from the mirror, put the camera down, and go on with my day.

Sending love, love, love out into the sky...

~bru