The Sound of Chronic Pain

Every once in awhile, I re-write songs in my head to match particular situations.

*sung to the tune of "Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel*

Hello pain, my old friend
You've come to talk with me again

Because a sensation softly creeping,
Left its marks while I was sleeping

And the throbbing that was planted in my brain
Still remains
And echoes through the nerves in my body

In restless sleep, I tossed and turned
Hoping one side would hurt less
'Neath the cover of my blanket
I broke a sweat and said "fuck it."

When my back was stabbed by the flash of a sharp pain
That split my soul
And touched the sound of chronic pain

And in the naked pain I saw
10,000 people, maybe more
People judging that I take pain meds
People judging if my pain is severe

People deciding for me
Whether I should hurt at all
And to what degree,
Missing the point of chronic pain

"Fools," said I, "You do not know,
Pain like a cancer grows:
It consumes all your energy,
Painkillers change your personality."

But my words, like silent raindrops fell,
On the ears of those who do not know severe chronic pain.

And I sat betrayed by my body
While my mind crumbled to nothing
I became less tolerable to be around
Angry and frustrated with myself

I just want to function normally,
Have my personality
And be done with mood swings...
I want the motivation stolen by chronic pain.

Finding Purpose

Very recently, I hit rock bottom.

When I say rock bottom, I mean the lowest I've been in my life.

What got me there was a family member coming dangerously close to taking their own life. In response, I came ridiculously close to ending my own.

Let me explain what ridiculously means: For the first time in 35 years, I came to a conclusion as to how I would end my life.

I didn't know when I would do it, but in the moment, I felt it would be soon. I decided I would go ahead and update my will and start getting rid of any excess goods I had to lessen the burden on my survivors. Because I'm me, I suppose, I also came to the conclusion in the moment that I was not in a rational enough frame of mind to take action right then. I decided I would need to sleep on it and give myself a few days before I started the process.

You might think of me, what's happened in my life, what I've said about having a member of my family consider their own life and think, "Well, of course you hit rock bottom. Perfectly understandable." But as having had depression my entire life and having been through many other stressful situations, I myself was startled by finding the bottom. I was so startled that I struggled for a couple of weeks to get my head above water.

Fortunately, I already had a scheduled visit to a counselor because I've been feeling overwhelmed in general lately. Everything has felt immeasurably harder and I've been frustrated as to why. My conversation with my counselor involved a requirement to sign a contract that I wouldn't hurt myself.

Initially, I was angry:

"You can't take away my autonomy," I told her, "if I decide to take my life, that decision is mine and mine alone."

"Of course, it always is," she replied, "but the sum of it is that if you won't sign a contract, I have to call the police to take you to the hospital so you can be committed."

"Okay, let me think on that."

After a couple of minutes, she interrupted my thoughts with, "How would your children feel? There are still people that need you."

I became enraged, "But the whole point is that I don't have anything to live for. And I can't and won't live for anyone else anymore. I have to live for myself, but I have to find a reason why."

After I spoke it, I realized what I needed and was able to sign a contract, adding my own addendum that if I felt I was a threat to myself, I would take myself to the hospital. Over the next few days, I talked to those closest to me, letting them know what was there for me and telling them what I was searching for.

Finally, after a conversation with a friend I hadn't seen in almost a year, I realized what I was missing: My Purpose.

You see, when I was a child, as mentioned in A Promise to Myself, my sole purpose in life became turning 18. With all that was happening, I reasoned all I had to do was make it to age 18 and my life would be in my hands, to do with as I pleased. While I was still 18, I met my now ex-husband. On our first date, as he told me what his children had already been through in their very young lives, I discovered my next purpose: to ensure they reached adulthood feeling loved and cared for.

Well, guess what? My youngest turned 18 just over a month ago. This left me totally without purpose. Also, since he's a quite independent young man and has been for some time, I started feeling purposeless back in June or so. But it took this situation with the family member and then my own to realize that purpose was what I was missing.

I'm pleased to announce that I have already discovered my next purpose: To Love and Care for Myself. You've probably already noticed me working on this to some degree, but I feel it's time to own it. So I'm going to spend the next chunk of my life working on discovering what makes me happy individually and then obtaining it. I'm also working on falling in love with myself, loving myself the way I've always wished someone would love me.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to find this purpose fulfilled, but I do hope that I'm more aware next time, so I can find one soon after.

I can say this, at least: having the purpose of loving myself and making myself happy makes it so much easier to swim and not sink when major stress comes along.

From Unlovable to Loved

Confession Time:

I LOVE love songs, always have.

After getting divorced three years ago, though, I started to see how cheesy and unrealistic they are, promising your undying love to just one person. Promising to be someone's everything and have someone be your everything...wow, that's a lot to ask of one person.

A couple of weeks ago, I was curled up in bed with a partner listening to the song, "All of Me," by John Legend, as we both admired the song and the artist's talent. Laying there in bed, next to my partner, I found myself thinking the same thing I've always thought at love songs, "Man, I would really love to be loved by someone like that some day."

Just before last weekend, a tragedy befell my family, something so in depth that I'm as of yet unwilling to talk about it in a public forum. The fallout of this happening left me sitting on my couch alone for most of last weekend, crying. I questioned my worth as a human being, wondered if I had anything to offer myself or the world. As I sat there, mired in my own, not loathing, but definitely not admiration for myself, my mind drifted back to that song and it just hit me:

I'M THE PERSON I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR

My entire life, all I've wanted is to be deeply and truly loved by one person. But at my core, while I never hated myself, I never believed myself to be lovable.

This same partner, when I relayed this to him months ago said, "I don't understand. You are so much more lovable than most people I've met. Really, you should walk around all day just basking in the love of everyone you know." And while I smiled and blushed at his words, I couldn't let them in.

And I realized that day last weekend that I've never felt loved because I never loved me. I've thought I'm a pretty great person, I can enumerate all of my positive features (the negative ones, as well), but I've always known, down to the bottom of my soul that I'm unlovable. These are the words that are whispered in my head every time someone tells me they love me.

But then the most amazing thing happened to me just this morning.

I was practicing the song, "All of Me," because it's just so perfect, beautiful and right within my natural vocal range, when suddenly, instead of having visions of some imaginary man singing to me, I imagined singing to myself. As I sang, tears of joy formed in the corners of my eyes and emotion over took my voice as I suddenly felt the powerful love that this song conveys.

FOR ME

I found myself singing this song to myself and was overwhelmed with how loved I felt.

Anyone who has ever met me knows that I radiate love for my fellow human being. I love deeply, powerfully and fiercely,

AND I HAVE FINALLY DECIDED I AM WORTHY OF THAT LOVE.

Managing Depression

"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up, we'd no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability...To be alive is to be vulnerable."
--Madeleine L'Engle


You'll find I'm not ordinarily this vulnerable to, well, anyone and I'm certainly never vulnerable in public.

In this particular instance, I have a friend who was suffering recently from a series of setbacks. And I was standing there, holding them while they cried when they stepped back to look at me. I said, "Okay, go do x (thing that will be accomplishment)," and they blinked and said, "Okay," and walked off. In the moments after, I felt bad for having sent them off, but then I realized I did it because I know how important it is to accomplish something when you're having a bout of depression. So then, I thought I'd write this for everyone.

This may come as a revelation for many of the people who know me:

I have been chronically depressed for most of my life. Really for as long as I can remember.

The first time I recall contemplating suicide was when I was about 5 or 6 years old. My sadness at the world I lived in, my constant feelings of being alone, these were too much to bear at that age. I lived on a road that was a horseshoe and I lived right at the curve, the road sloped so that my house was at the bottom of two hills. I remember thinking that one day I might just jump out in front of the school bus and let it end my pain.

Thoughts like this plagued me my entire childhood. When the stress that was my life became overwhelming, I would hide myself in a small, dark corner (eventually on top of a shelf in my closet) and hold myself crying, wishing that I could just stop the pain. End my life, be done.

This perhaps explains why I was such an underachiever as a child. I recall my mother talking to my babysitter once when I was about 6 or 7. I had just moved to Texas from Washington after my parents had their final split (which in itself had been a traumatic event) and I was listless, I suppose. I don't recall the experience internally, because it was all a haze of not wanting to exist anymore. But I recall the babysitter and my mother discussing it while I sat on the stairs and I recall my mother saying that she attributed my behavior to what happened with my father and then the move, that perhaps after being given enough time to settle in that I would improve.

When I was about 11, I discovered for the first time what might be going on in my head. My mother had the newspaper spread open on the kitchen table and she was talking on the phone. While I stood patiently waiting for a moment to ask permission to go play, I saw an advertisement talking about depression. There were several questions, you know the standard, "Is it difficult to wake up in the morning, blah blah," and as I read the list, I found I had answered yes to five of the six questions and the ad said if you answered three or more with yes then you might have depression. When my mother turned her attention to me, I asked permission to play and she granted it. I then said, "Hey Mom, you see that ad there," pointing, "I answered yes to five of those questions."

My mother stopped, "Are you sure, Andrea?"

"Yes, I'm sure," and I pointed out which ones I answered yes to.

She read them, looked at me again and said, "And you still want to go play?"

"Yes, I don't feel that way right now. I feel happy and I want to go play, Steve and the guys want to play basketball."

And for my young brain, the situation was so black and white. Sometimes I feel that way and I can't function and sometimes I don't feel that way and I'm happy.

The results of this revelation to my mother however, were not good. I did end up seeing a child psychologist (not necessarily bad), but I ended up being diagnosed as manic depressive.

Because you see, I had already been living with the depression so long, it was already so much of who I was that I self-managed. And the opposing end of the depression was a happy, hyper girl. I had become already used to kicking my own butt out of those feelings and into the only ones that felt good.

But I was prescribed Lithium, which made me likely to fly off the handle and hit someone. And I did, I broke a boy's nose on the bus one day for swatting my butt with my textbook. Because that is what anti-depressants do to me, they make me so agitated that I'm ten times more likely to lose my cool and strike someone.

And anger for me is a scary thing. I witnessed abuse as a child, I was abused, I became angry and abused others. And that, too, like the depression, I learned to rise above on my own. Because more than any other thing in my life, one constant has been that I have been on my own. No one but me to take care of me and since, like every other human being on the planet, I want to be taken care of, I rose to the occasion.

So, here we are, roughly 20 years since I broke a boy's nose and decided that I would never use anti-depressants again. When I was 18 years old, a psychiatrist overturned the diagnosis of manic depression, indicating that I was far too grounded and aware of myself and my actions to ever be considered manic. We never addressed the depression and it's entirely possible he never noticed it. Because I have lived with it for so long that most people, even professionals, don't even notice that I have it unless I'm in the middle of a particularly bad bout.

And ask any one of my friends. Unless they are in my inner circle, they would answer "no," to the question, "Does Andrea suffer from depression?"

But I know the truth of the matter. I know that I am probably one of the most highly functioning depressives you will ever meet.

For me, a bout of depression is an automatic signal to go through the motions of my regularly scheduled day. Without thinking, I set little goals for myself, a to-do list, so that I can methodically tick off accomplishments. I re-evaluate myself and my life, look for what kicked off this bout so that I can avert one in the future. And most importantly, I reach out to people. To have them remind me that I am not as alone as I feel in that moment. And I keep within reach those strong enough to take my hand when I need it.

In short, for me, being chronically depressed simply means to manage a part of myself. Like any other feature, I notice it when it interferes with what I'm up to and I learn from it and find ways to make it better for next time. People who notice I have depression (professionals, other sufferers) often ask me if I self medicate. I guess you can say that I do, in the ways noted above. I also drink energy drinks, on constant bouts of quitting and restarting. It has been pointed out to me that these may also be self-medicating.

Either way, I see it not as a disease, but simply a facet of the being that is me...another part to consider as I go about the daily business of conducting my life.

Drugs are not the answer, self-awareness is.