It’s All in My Mind

Getting a Grip on Getting a Grip

There was a time, for a very long time, when I wrote about my mental health challenges on the regular. It’s been a while since I dipped into that topic. Then the other day, my iPad, which is in the habit of randomly tossing photos at me, prompting unbidden memories, offered me the one you see above. Taken four and a half years ago, it nonetheless has the power to drop me right back into the precise experience I was having at the time. 

It’s a selfie I took during a weekend in Boerne, where I’d gone to perform a wedding. My brain was particularly stressed after a phone call during which a man I considered to be one of my closest friends told me to fuck off. Distraught to the nth degree, I observed the argument one part of my mind was having with another part of my mind. This side was pointing out that death would surely relieve me permanently of the explosive pain I was feeling. That side was pushing back with two points. As a testament to how great my despair was, it seems to me both points were given equal weight.

The first point was that offing myself would be a major, major disservice to my adult son. I have lived in the aftermath of the suicide of friends. It sucks. I didn’t want to put my kid in that position. The second point was that if I did take myself out, the maid would find me and that just wouldn’t be very nice. 

In the end, something greater than these two things kept me pushing through the pain. I was able to tune into a faint frequency in the far recesses reminding me I am prone to temporary madness and convincing me to sit it out. I sat it out. I got through it. I am grateful.

I have wrestled with suicidal ideation for as long as I can remember. My best guess is that this began in earnest when I was a teenager. I think a combination of factors contributed—genetics, childhood abuse and neglect, and the alcoholism I began pursuing with a great passion starting on my fourteenth birthday. In hindsight, I’d say the booze was self-medication. In addition to dulling whatever genetic thing I had going on, looking back now I’d say all that booze also temporarily (one night at a time) helped me shut out a fact that lurked in me, one I could feel but not identify, one it would take decades of therapy to get to. 

It’s beyond cliché to toss about the notion that women are crazy, emotional beasts. Hell hath no fury and all that jazz. There is no shortage of personal anecdotes I could offer to illustrate times I have contributed to the stereotype. For while I can be very, very kind and reasonable and rational, if you want to see me totally and deeply lose my shit, the quickest way to do this is to lie to me and have me discover the lie. 

I believe now my intense reaction to being lied to hinges upon the late in life realization that my formative years had been built upon, at their foundation, nothing but lies. I was told on the regular that women are inferior, that I was not to aspire, that the bible had clearly laid out the map for my future. This future, as it was explained to me, involved finding a man, marrying a man, obeying that man, and delivering to the world a passel of children fathered by this man. And then, at the very end, I would go to hell because no matter what good I might do along the way, I was and always would be an irredeemable sinner. This was all but assured, according to my “father,” whose hobbies, among other things, included sitting in his car in the driveway angrily reading his bible then coming inside to reinforce on the daily what a pathetic disappointment I was not only to him but to god. 

Remembering this leads me to theorize that even if I hadn’t inherited totally whacked brain chemistry, I still would have grown up suffering suicidal ideation. To this day I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort the reality of my current life from the internalized traumatic memories of being lied to about myself for so long. Lies that were convincing only because I was so tiny when they began I had no idea there were alternative possibilities. The simple example I offer friends fortunate enough not to have been lied to like this is that it’s like I was told from the start that the sky is green. Even growing up and escaping and self-actualizing and undergoing intensive therapy all in the interest of helping me understand the sky is blue—well still sometimes I have to stop and think about that. Is it really blue? 

One reason I write less about my mental health is because these days you can’t swing a set of prayer beads without hitting some self-proclaimed mental health guru/social influencer yammering on about how we’re all fucked up and how they have the one true answer. When I started recording my mental challenges thirty years ago, a frequent message I got from readers was how they envied my ability to spill all, and that if they did so they stood to risk losing all they held dear: partners, kids, jobs. Now that everyone it seems is telling everything, I’m just another voice in the crowd. It feels less urgent and necessary to tell my story. 

I don’t feel displaced. I feel relieved. Finally it’s not taboo to work on healing one’s mind. 

I draw an imperfect analogy here between the sudden explosive destigmatization of seeking mental health care and the explosion of yoga studios beginning twenty years ago. I started taking yoga classes in 2000 with a ragtag group of students from all walks, led by an amazing teacher who began her yoga journey back when women were not allowed to attend instructor classes. 

Within five years, yoga had caught on fire as a trend and, as westerners are wont to do with eastern practices, things got super commodified super fast. A pyramid scheme seemed to emerge in which studios weren’t just teaching classes, but taking piles of money from students who themselves wanted to become teachers. (For the record, I am a certified Yoga Nidra and Yin yoga teacher, thanks to online classes I took mostly to keep from dying of boredom during lockdown.) 

I eventually quit going to yoga in part due to worsening traffic that made getting to class in less than an hour nearly impossible. I think I also quit because anytime anything gets wildly popular, I find myself growing suspicious. On the other hand, having benefited greatly from my yoga practice (which I still pursue rather lazily at home) I couldn’t deny a greater truth. Who cares if so many people were going to yoga for what I judged to be the wrong reasons (like “getting a hot body”)? Setting aside the multiple scandals in which “gurus” (almost always men) got sexually inappropriate with vulnerable students (mostly women), well wasn’t it great that people were getting benefits?

Watching the endless ads for online therapy, easy access to online prescriptions for ketamine, and the perpetual content of so many self-styled mind healers, it feels like therapy is now where yoga was a couple of decades ago. I read an article recently that suggested a complete about face regarding mentioning therapy to prospective partners. The reductive take is that in the past, up until very recently, one would fear revealing to a date that one has psychological issues to work on. Now the opposite supposedly holds true and if one does not have a therapist maybe that’s a bigger problem. 

If diagnoses were trophies, I’d have a room dedicated to mine: cPTSD, chronic anxiety, ADHD, chronic depression, suicidal ideation, body dysmorphia (and an attendant eating disorder), the list goes on. Honestly, my best guess is that the PTSD is the real culprit, an umbrella under which all the other conditions I deal with fall. 

What I dislike about all these labels is that in claiming them I might be considered a psychological hypochondriac swinging from syndrome to syndrome, possibly using these labels as crutches and excuses. Fortunately, I’m less concerned with how I am perceived (great progress for me) and more interested in how pathology can, at its best, offer trail markers in navigating the thick forest of mental health and mental illness. 

My ADHD is a great example. I had no idea that several of my “quirks” also were symptoms. Once this idea was presented to me, once I saw how many boxes I ticked off, I could then take next steps. I research ways to change or at least make peace with these manifestations that aren’t serving me. I better understand why I do some of the things I do (impulsivity for example) and this understanding helps me to take steps to do things differently in the name of calm. 

A few years ago, I fell into a depression so severe it terrified me. The good news was that by that point I’d had enough therapy to recognize I needed help, and I needed help fast. The upshot was that I began taking antidepressants, which I had stubbornly avoided since the ‘90s, when I had unsuccessfully tried four or five different varieties of the same. Each failed me, sickened me, frightened me. Now, though, so many years later, I could also see how at the time I still had a major adverse psychosomatic reaction to “needing medication” and, at least as importantly, I was still drinking back then (heavily), and the chemical combination was bad, to understate the matter. 

My more recent experimentation with big pharma yielded far better results. I was not dulled into a stupor, my emotions did not flatten out. I could function. To the point I became a classic convert, now singing the praises of that which I once feared. 

Last summer, I noticed I was forgetting to take my pills. I wondered if I still needed them. I was in no hurry to stop, having decided after they first kicked in that I would take them til the day I died. I observed myself closely. I talked to my medical provider. I stopped. So far, so good. But if I ever again fall into the sort of despair that necessitates resuming, resume I shall.

Last fall, I applied to partake in a clinical study testing the benefits hallucinogens have for people with PTSD. I was rejected from the study. I think the reason is that I answered yes to a question about THC, of which I am quite fond. Still curious, having read a slew of studies on the amazing results people were experiencing with psychedelics, I came up with a plan of my own. 

Once a month, for the past four months, I have gone on a little trip. These trips are courtesy of psilocybin. Initially, because I grew up watching Mod Squad, I was concerned how this would play out. Would I perceive myself to be someone else or possess powers I do not possess? In short, would I jump off a building thinking I could fly? 

So far, no. My adventures in neuroplasticity have been fun, silly, and once in a while profound. The best way I can describe the collective experience is as follows. Nothing ever seems surreal but things do seem more real. I do not feel inclined to bask in ecstasy. Instead, I find myself fully present for four hours, unable to dwell in past regrets or future anxiety. I like to listen to brown noise, slowly unpeel and eat bright little oranges, hold yoga poses for (pardon the pun) longer stretches than usual and paint pretty pictures. 

The trips themselves are lovely. The aftermath offers still more gifts. The first time I took one of these journeys with intent, the following day I was puzzled by something. My mind was experiencing a quiet of the sort that comes after a late night snow storm, when the blanket of icy white lies undisturbed by plow or shovel. A pleasant muffling. Something was missing. It was Original Anxiety, such an integral part of me since in utero that I didn’t understand it to be separate from me. Original Anxiety as I knew it was the same as having brown eyes. 

The absence, which lingered for days, was profound and inspiring. Before the trip I had no idea such mind quiet was possible. Now that I do, I am better able to recognize my anxiety for what it is so when it does arise I am better equipped to dispense with it swiftly using non-medicinal tools like meditation, physical exercise, asking someone to listen. 

I’ve also been able to recognize a capacity for joy I did not know my mind contained. To be clear, I’ve had plenty of joy in my life. But this particular kind of joy was so beyond reach I didn’t know it existed, just as I had been unable to previously experience an absence of perpetual background anxiety. It is joy that comes coupled with relaxation. It’s like the outer recesses of my mind have been strung with party lights forever, but it was too dark inside for me to know they existed, let alone figure out how to plug them in. The journeys have turned on the lights, illuminating more possibilities, chief among them: one’s mind can improve and heal.

To bring it back to yoga, I have often done what seemed at the time to be a simple stretch, a gentle bend, only to wake the next day to a muscle reminder that one part or another part of me had not been exercised in a very long time. I’d functioned well enough without properly using that body part, but awareness of it made me want to work it some more toward the goal of greater overall flexibility.

I hope that if you struggle the way I have struggled that you will learn to tune into that fuzzy frequency way in the back of your mind, the one telling you change is possible, and that you will take even some small action toward achievable calm. To be clear, I am not here to proselytize drugs—whether they come from big pharma or a cow patty. I do, though, want to advocate—as I have been doing forever and a day—for continued mental health awareness and continued diminishment of the stigma around getting help. If making progress means, for now, slogging through the charlatan influencers to get to the true healers, it’s still progress. 

The stigma is fading. It’s okay to talk about what happened. It’s okay to get help.

NOTES:

If you’re having a mental health crisis, you can call 988. Memorize that, please. 

It is SO BEAUTIFUL at the ranch right now. I hope you’ll come see for yourself at the next Tiny T Tiny Flea Market on March 25, 2023 from 9 am til 2 pm. I still have room for a few more vendors. Message me if you want in. 

We do have sleepover options and event space here at the ranch. Holler if you want details. 

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