Thursday, March 08, 2012

I wish ya’ll could live in my head for an hour.

... if you could even last an hour, that is.

It’s hard to describe to people what’s going on in there on a good day. On a bad day/week/month/year, it’s beyond impossible.

I dip into deep, deep, dark, scary dark, depressions a lot lately and they’re tinged with anger. Rage, even. The voices in my head are incredibly mean lately, too.

We’re working on fixing this, but it’s not like any other illness, where success is easier to measure. Therapy and pills are the weapons of choice, but they’re sticks and stones. I need higher power weaponry. Ninja level shit.

My body, however, wants to make this even harder to fight. Bad reactions to the slightest change in ingredients that makes a drug a generic, problems with my heart defects (yes, TWO! Two heart defects. Ha ha ha.), problems with insurance (because the pills that work aren’t always covered. yup.), and problems with side effects. (Remind me to tell you the story of how upping one of my meds two months ago made me go blind. Really.)

The wrong combination of pills fucks with my heart. The right combination of pills makes me top 200 pounds. A tolerable, almost perfect, combination of pills has me experiencing extremes lately: extreme stability and extreme bipolar. After all the trial and error, we’re not quite ready to give up on this combination. It’s worked so well for years. YEARS!

We tack on an extra milligram here and there, we change the times the meds are taken, we cross our fingers.

And we hope.

A lot.

——-

I stopped hanging around with other mentally ill people online a while ago. Some of them were faking. Some of them had learned how to work the system and get disability even though they’re not entitled to it. Some are seriously fucked in the head, and probably misdiagnosed. It’s not a world where I can find people I have things in common with anymore. The landscape has changed.

As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten worse. I’m on my fourth go-round of trying to decide what we would need to cut to be able to live on J’s salary. I am getting to the point where I can, unquestionably, undeniably, qualify for SSDI. I’ve been subtle about it, but I’m exercising my rights under the ADA* that my employer make reasonable accommodations for me. And yet, I refuse to give up. Even though the writing is on the wall.

I grab my helmet, and my gun, and I head into the battle.

I refuse to give up this fight until I’ve won.

Or I die.

——-

*Thank you, Teddy Kennedy. I will always love you forever for that.