My ride has been very bumpy for the last two weeks. I completed two huge, exciting projects about three weeks ago – and about a week later crashed pretty hard. I haven’t stayed on the floor for the whole last three weeks, praise god – never more than 3-4 days at a time, but i have also not had more than about 3-4 days at a time without again ending up there. And this morning was as bad as it’s been.
I was so painfully contracted that any movement increased the pain – it was like trying to move through a solid wall of hypodermic needles. I retreated to the sofa, which i have not done much in the last 9 or 10 months, but have done about three other times in the last couple of weeks.
A good friend called and i let the call go to voice mail. I like talking with Tebbe, but was no way up to this. I laid really, really still and the pain subsided. i didn’t fall asleep as i hoped, but in about 40 minutes i felt enough better that i thought maybe i was at least a little bit out of the woods. Wrong. I returned to the sofa.
(I’m not quite sure why i don’t like going to my bed during the daytime, when it is so comforting to me at night. Maybe some internal norm that you aren’t supposed to be in bed during the day.)
But i did have a phone commitment that i actually wanted to keep. My friend Byron (back in Chicago) and i talk on the phone for almost an hour every week. We each listen to the other for a solid 20 minutes, with typically a little chit-chat between each other’s “counseling session” and at the end. (We met, over 25 years ago, doing a personal growth, peer counseling methodology called Re-evaluation Counseling. Neither of us is involved in that organization or approach anymore, except with the somewhat modified form of “co-counseling” attention that we still give each other.
We always start with a quick update on “How are you?” – and this frequently informs our decision of who should talk (receive attention, love and support) first. We both knew, from my few words about having a real hard day – but even more from the paralyzed sound of my voice – that i had better be attended to first.
I took my 20 minutes in a different way than i ever had. Over the course of the morning, i had been strongly resisting the nihilistic thoughts about myself and my life which only sometimes accompany my depressive contraction, but were trying to get at me today.
I fought hard to stay rigorously with just my immediate physical reality – observing my brain. I picked up a couple of expressions from an interview on Fresh Air, about a year ago, with a clinical psychologist who has written a book about his terminal cancer – and has dealt with extreme depression for many years. He used two terms that i had never heard before, but which i grabbed onto immediately because they spoke so much of my own truth: he referred to depression as “your brain is in pain” and “is suffering”.
So this morning, as i lay very still on the sofa, I thought “My brain is in pain – let’s observe it and see what i can learn.” I thought words like “malfunctioning”, “misfiring”, even “having a little seizure”.
A shrink speculated with me years ago that maybe the reason that anti-seizure meds seem to work for bipolar disorder is similar to why they work in preventing seizures: they somehow help the brain get more solid, more resilient, more stable. They’re not just mood stabilizers: they are maybe even more accurately “brain stabilizers”.
I remembered that i had the day before missed my dose of Lamictal, my morning mood stabilizer. (I’ve been told by a couple of shrinks that Lamictal has a little bit of energizing effect and is best taken in the morning, whereas the Seroquel that i take in the evening has some sedating effect. It does, in fact, sometimes – even at the low dose that i have over many months worked my way down to – totally knock me out, and i no longer can sleep through the night without it. i do kind of resent this, because i used to be a good sleeper. Maybe eventually i’ll wean myself off it, but i don’t know.)
I tend to not have any real confidence that these two mood stabilizers – which have been my drug regimen for almost five years now – really help me any, but i keep taking them in the hope that they actually are doing some good. But thinking about my brain as having a kind of seizure prompted me to get up and take today’s dose of Lamictal.
So, as i lay very still on the sofa and talked to Byron, i treated my whole self very tenderly, speaking slow and soft and saying out loud some of what i had been thinking about my suffering brain. By the end of my 20 minutes, i was actually feeling a little better. The outside rain had let up and the outside sun had come out, so i decided to see if i could sit up out on the porch without the pain reasserting itself. And, amazingly, it did not – and i enjoyed sitting out there on what was now a lovely early autumn day.
And by the end of Byron’s 20 minutes, i felt even better. I had said during my time that i was releasing any expectation that i would accomplish anything today. “I’m liable to stay right here on the sofa all day, to be unable to move around much at all without the pain coming back. Walking the dog feels right now way too much, but he’s outside free to run anyway” (which he always is in our country location). “I can’t picture that i will have it in me to go into town for choir rehearsal tonight.”
But, amazingly, by the end of Byron’s time, as we were starting to wrap our phone call up, I told him that i thought i might be ready to tackle a fairly mentally challenging task that i was very attached to getting done today. Iwasn’t quite sure this was so, but i thought maybe.
My energy state continued to right itself fairly rapidly over the next hour – and then gradually over the rest of the day, until now (having returned from choir and even one high-priority errand on the way there) i’m basically fine. There’s no predicting about tomorrow, but in this moment i’m really fine.
Maybe the Lamictal kicked in that fast to get my biochemistry back right with the world, but I bet my shrink would say that was impossible. Maybe my biochemistry was just getting ready to shift anyway. It often does happen that fast – and I can’t believe this could have happened without that being at least being part of the picture. But the interactions between my biochemistry and my psychology are so complicated that who knows what drove what.
All i really know is that i am very, very grateful.
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