Bi-polar

NaPoWriMo 2024: Grateful Haiku

“Grateful”
My heart is grateful
I’ve done the work of healing
Continuing growth

lem 04/05/2024









Ten years ago I finally ended an 18 year toxic and abusive relationship. I was subsequently diagnosed with Bipolar 2 disorder and PTSD. I was drowning in anxiety and depression. I felt broken beyond repair and never imagined I would ever independently support myself again. I hadn’t been employed since mid-2012.

Four years ago, as COVID shut down the world, I graduated from a Peer Certification program and became an Adult Mental Health Peer Wellness Specialist. I started working for the organization I currently work with as a part-time Mental Health Aid. I didn’t know if I could hold that job. I had a panic attack and went to the Urgent Walk-in Clinic for mental health support after I made a medication error at work.

A year later, I got my first professional Peer position, working with people classified as living with Severe and Persistent Mental Illness. I struggled to figure out how I could support them with my vastly different life experience…but I did it and I did it well.

I’ve transitioned into two different Peer roles since then. The most recent one was when I started working full-time in the program I had once been a client in. Since I began that position on October 30, I’ve been challenged to take on leadership responsibilities, making decisions and co-leading a team that includes professional counselors with Master’s degrees. Due to my mental health issues I only have a high school diploma. I never imagined I would ever be in a role like that.

Today I had my second interview for a Peer Supervisor position at the Urgent Walk-in Clinic I utilized four years ago. This afternoon I was offered the position.

With the help and support of my faith community, Bridge City Community Church , I have faced and fought through my trauma and seemingly never ending personal and family crises. Five of the last ten years, I have been a client of the organization I now work for. It’s been a long, hard, painful journey. The recovery process isn’t over and I will always have to manage symptoms. But now I have the tools and support to do it.

All of this to say, we can and do recover!

To the me I used to be

As many of you may know, yesterday was October 31st. Some cultures celebrate it as a sacred day, others don’t celebrate it at all. In my corner of the world it is celebrated as a fun, commercialized way of being in brief community with neighbors you don’t know, with children in costume knocking on doors and acceptably begging for candy, while caregivers observe from a short distance…aka Halloween. (It’s also a way for those same caregivers to get their own sugar rush when they tax the candy haul.)

Anyway, that only has passing connection to why I’m writing today.

Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. For some of us who blog, this is Nano Poblano – “the World’s Least-Official November Blog Challenge”

I won’t be writing a post a day, as I have attempted in other challenges. Instead, I’m committing to 10 posts this month. I’ll also be linking to 10 other posts this month.

Welcome to my first post of the month. Now, back to what I was writing about.

Last night I shared the requisite costume pic of my youngest, who will be 11 in a little over a month.

She looks older, huh? Sooo not ready for that.

When I woke up this morning, there were many “👍” and a few “♥️.” The last “like” was from a guy who had attended the same high school as I did. Just about the only interactions we have are reading and occasionally clicking our reaction to each other’s posts. But, he posts nice pictures of nature and other things I find mildly interesting. We reconnected at our 30 year class reunion a couple of years ago.

He may or may not remember, but, we had previously connected on FB back in 2010 or 2011, when I first joined the ‘book. It ended after a contentious interaction when the world didn’t end according to the 2012 Mayan Calendar predictions.

Depression had its hold on me and I posted some joke about being disappointed that the predictions had been wrong. He took exception to that and expressed his disagreement and disapproval.

That triggered anxiety and activated my defensiveness. I felt attacked. I was shaky and feeling threatened for no apparent reason. That was about the time another h.s. acquaintance and I got in conflict over something else, entirely.

I reactively “purged” my FB account, hoping to deactivate my hypervigilant hypersensitivity of the moment. I remember that I still felt threatened in some vague, amorphous way.

Some of that stemmed from my desire and need to be understood and accepted. However, I equated being understood with being agreed with and being accepted meant being justified and approved of. Anything else felt like I was under attack and unsafe.

I still don’t really understand the root reasons I experience anxiety around feeling rejected and not acceptable. I guess that hearkens back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with a sense of belonging being a basic need.

All I know, is that my gut clenched, my breathing got shallow, and my heart hammered when I saw the guy at our class reunion. Our online disagreement had such an impact on me. I wanted to avoid him and hide, because I was certain he would remember our interaction and be judging me by it.

Chances are he doesn’t remember that interaction. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be connected today. If he does remember, it likely doesn’t matter to him one way or the other. Regardless, the fact is that a molehill had been amplified to seem like a mountain, and, I think it’s possible that interaction will stay with me for a long time.

Part of me looks back on that time and sees the degree and type of reactivity and judges past me harshly. However, there’s a bigger part of me that understands and accepts who I was back then.

So, here’s my message to the me I used to be:

I love you. You’re not ridiculous and never were. You were living with the results of trauma. You were living without knowledge or understanding of the mental illnesses in your brain. I’m proud of you. You knew your reactions were signs you needed help and you paid attention to those signs. You had the courage to ask for help. You put in the work to change, heal and grow. You had the strength of character to own the consequences of your actions and behaviors from then and before. I’m grateful to you. You made me, me. You’re amazing. Thank you.

Stupid Hallmark Movie! You made me cry

I don’t usually watch Hallmark movies. I think it’s because, regardless of the quality of the acting or production, I have a tendency to completely immerse myself into the circumstances and psyches of the characters.

Don’t believe me? Go read my posts about sitcom moms and office assistants, as well as animated characters and anthropomorphic animals: Brave, Babe, Wreck It Ralph & his pal Vanellope Von Schweetz.

Yeah, I know. I think too much and am too egocentric. It’s a problem.

“Finding a Family” is based on the true story of Alex Chivescue and his mom, Ileana Nistor. The part of the story that makes it Hallmark worthy is the fact he initiated his own search for a foster family in order to maintain academic stability and achieve his dream of attending Harvard.

The supporting facts that make it such a memorable story are that his mom is a Romanian immigrant who wound up a divorced single mom who, earned her PhD, and learned six languages.

Their tragedy is that a car accident triggered bi-polar depression and they were alone without family or community supports and she became unstable, neglectful and abusive at times. They wound up on the big roller coaster of inadequate mental health supports and services at odds with the child protective services system.

Watching this was very, very painful in so many ways.

Obviously, I identified with Ileana. Kim Delaney’s portrayal of verbal anger, hair trigger rage, overwhelming depression, and medicated fugue and frustration, complete with devastated remorse over her actions toward her child, hit me at the deepest levels.

Watching her shame-faced approach and meeting with him and his new family stripped me raw as I contemplated my son’s wedding with his adopted dad officiating.

I know I have done those very things, to varying degrees, with all of my children. Yes, even dear little Luna has been subjected to mommy not being able to force herself out of bed and snarls of overwhelmed and exhausted frustration.

Thankfully, I’ve learned better how to prepare and cope. I try to make sure there are nutritious and vitamin rich things on hand, like Odwalla bars, cheese sticks, Ovaltine to make chocolate milk, and her favorite clementine oranges.

On days I can’t drag myself out of bed, I put edutainment television on and she brings her toys onto the bed, or uses the bed as her personal gym, and the sits pressed up against me. I make sure to hug her, tickle her, and hold her even when being touched or interacting is the last thing I feel like doing.

When the snarling rage turns into a loud and mean tone of voice and she has hurt feelings, she gets to give herself space by running to her room and closing the door. I call her out a few minutes later and we talk about her feelings and what happened while I hold her on my lap and listen to her tell me how mean I was and that she didn’t like what I did. If it was triggered by behavior that she needs to learn differently, I try to focus on the behavior. If my behavior was out of line, I do apologize.

I wasn’t capable of making these kinds of choices with my oldest two during my worst times. I tell myself they didn’t have it as bad as Alex had it because I was never quite as bad off as Ileana.

It’s a lie.

I may never have had the diagnosis she did, but I am realizing that everything they showed her doing was a reflection of what my children got from the combination of me and Keith.

It was shattering to see those effects from an observer’s viewpoint. At least it was for me because I identified with Alex’s character as much as Ileana’s. I saw myself and my son, certainly. However, I also saw myself and my mom. Not only that, I also saw myself with my uncle and my maternal grandmother.

My mom aspired to be an author. She wound up a teen mom. Married three times in six years. We moved around a lot. After finding out, when I was 10, that her third husband molested me, she went completely under. That’s when I remember my grandmother’s influence the most, just strong impressions and a few specifics. We moved around so much that I attended two or three schools in fifth grade and two or three in sixth grade.

By the Summer I turned 12, things were horrible between us. We were both so damaged and overwhelmed. Constant arguments or total silence. Everywhere we ever lived on our own was always a chaotic hodgepodge of clutter. One day we got into it so bad because I didn’t want to be inside, but there was nowhere to go outside, so, I stood just inside the door, with my head in between the door and the jamb, with my body blocking the exposed area behind me. She kept telling me, the yelling and screaming at me to close the door. I argued and refused; I stood my ground.

Suddenly, she yanked me backward by my hair, pulling me over the arm of the sofa, while slamming the door, and sat on my legs. I was yelling and trying to get her off of me, but couldn’t. I finally sat up, bent forward, leaned my head down and bit her as hard as I could on her right thigh.

She jumped up off of me. The next thing I know, my uncle was coming through the door and getting in between us. I told her I hated her and didn’t want to live with her anymore.

Soon after that she wrote a letter, “To Whom It May Concern,” stating my uncle was my guardian, took it to the bank for notarization, and moved back down to Houston. That was sometime in July or August. By the end of October she was dead.

I spent the next couple of years figuring out I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. I started trying to run away when I was 14. My little cousin was born, my uncle’s marriage disintegrated, and I became the grown up. I fielded collector’s calls, became responsible for figuring out how to take care of adult’s business, and looked after baby girl so much people thought she was mine.

More moving around and I was living with my grandmother while my uncle retained his so-called legal custody. So she couldn’t sign school registration paperwork to re-enroll me into a prior district. I could have registered myself if I was still living with my mom, but not under someone else’s guardianship.

I was 16, I hated my life and my family and knew education was the only way out – just like Alex Chivescue. Only, we hadn’t ever been involved with Child Protective Services, and we were a “Don’t talk, don’t tell” kind of family. Besides, I wasn’t being abused or anything bad.

This was what all led to me becoming a mom at 17. Now he’s married at 26 and I’m parenting a 4 year old, full-time, and a 19 year old, part-time.

Yeah, this movie triggered a lot of tears and grief. It’s a tremendous amount to process.

It helped me realize something else. It helped me rethink the storyline in my mind about Marco’s adopted parents. His wife, Bridgette, told me at one point, that his other mother has a lot of the same conflicted feelings about her role as mom that I do. The other mother in the movie speaks compassionately and empathetically of Alex’s biological mom. It helped me to let go of my anxiety about facing her at the wedding.

It even prompted me to send them a message thanking them for being there for him.

Stupid Hallmark movie! I’m all teary again.