Trisha's posterous

Sisyphus Journals- July 27, 2009- Hallucinations, Insomnia and Happy-ness

If the doctor asks you, "Have you ever experienced hallucinations, visual or auditory?" isn't there only one response, the only truly truthful response (though there is room, great room as it turns out for semantic variations and poetic license).

This response, as follows", or something like it"

"I don't know, doctor, you tell me."

You can respond in so many ways:

"How would I know?"

"Yes, life in general is probably a kind of hallucination."

"No, I never ever hallucinate, except right...now."

"Are you talking to me?" (Taxi Driver, think Dinero, the perfect anti-hero, the paradox, why Capitalism doesn't really exist except as a hallucination or if you prefer....a dream, a requiem)

I've been asked that 'hallucination' question a few times, and only now, lately (due to some vivid and scary dreams) have I considered that maybe I should have answered 'yes.'

There was a black trench coat (very Batman-ish) that night, on the back porch back in my old life. The coat swooped across the sky. I remember being scared, feeling maybe also I might be being punished (like...religiously) for something, that I was in hell...and well, of course, I was. I was so drunk though.

There was that loud loud loud loud boom as I was leaving work one night, outside the Law Dept. Must have been mid winter cuz it was already dark, or I worked late. w/e And it was like the universe cracked open above my head. It was a remarkable 'boom.'; There was this other lady just up ahead of me, and she didn't flinch, seemed not to have heard it.

Again, therein lies the problem: how would I know?

It's just after 3am, have been in here, in this bedroom in this basement suite in my sister's house, since 11pm. Mostly, I am obsessing about my weight. If it's not one thing it's another. I am not faking it. I have just never been happy, not since about age 10. I started to worry compulsively about what I was going to do with my life, that soon so soon I would be ushered off to t his place in time called 'work,' that we are meant to hate it, that it's hard, that life is hard, that soon everything would be hard. Like...I really worried a lot. I can tell you the exact moment when I knew I was fucked in life, and have written in previous blogs, but will not repeat it here now.

So ya, can't sleep, obsessing about weight (it's the old ED, Eating Disorder, thing, cannot keep anything down). I don't want to 'talk' about this with anyone. I'll just make note of it here. It's like I can't help it. Having food in my body is unimaginable. I must get this under control.

Trying to work out some financial 'plan,' am so screwed financially, credit rating and so on, its kind of funny. I mean, there's nothing I can do, right now, seem, feel incapable of work, and it's not laziness, it's again, the unimaginable notion of simply leaving the house most of the time. (My mother is visiting right now and she has helped...I do feel slightly more on track, but when she leaves....I worry what will happen).

I looked up ways to kill yourself on google tonight, specifically with the medications I have access to, lots of them...a new one now which I think makes my frontal lobes tingle...called Welbutrin? It would be such a selfish act, if for no other reason than that it would really and truly ruin the rest of my mother's life...i just know this...she would never get over it I know she wouldn't. Plus no one would ever be able to love my rabbits the way |I love them...but other than that, those two things...I wouldn't mind 'going'. I just don't feel doctors particularly give a shit (as an aside, I am looking into med school...a late-ish in life career shift I know, but why not...i know it's typical of bipolar people to jump around with grand ideas like this, but it's also true that often this quality is why bipolar people often accomplish so much, while hating themselves so much of the time anyway).

I really think I'd be too afraid of dying to die anyway.

The other night I dreamed that I became divided into two different versions of me, identical versions. I was terrified in that dream, had to sort of wrench myself out of it, wrench myself awake. I was terrified because I didn't know which me was me. The truth is both were me. A whole divided makes two wholes right? There is something so accurate and obvious and vital about this wholeness and division, at the quantum level, that when we get it, we will be bound by nothing, or rather....that notion of 'nothingness' will become redundant.

It's 3:30am now and time is moving slowly. Something is 'clicking' in the dark in the corner of this room.

I feel uprooted and homeless, literally and metaphorically.

What is happy-ness?

Some variation of booze, drugs and religious fondlings?

Success, notoriety, fame, beauty???

Rabbits.

Posted July 27, 2009

Sisyphus Journals- June 27, 2009- WTF

I didn't asked to be saved. I just wanted a place to lay my head. This is not an episode of Oprah.

Being turned out of Megan's tonight...

Let me tell you, whoever you are, something about myself...

With absolute clarity...

I never would have done that to anyone ever.

She should have withheld her judgement and trusted me.

I resent this utterly.

I no longer believe in good intentions, not tonight. I'm fading and sad and hate life right now.

Everywhere is a shut door and a false pretense.

I miss Taylor.

Everyone else can fuck off.

Posted June 27, 2009

Sisyphus Journals- June 23, 2009- Thoreau meets Meth- decoded

I have passworded my blog again, so it is only the select handful of you who I have decided to let read this. Ah, the curse is yours, the indulging of me, the ball is in your court.

I still enjoy these 'ball' metaphors, used to play basketball, was sort of a star once upon a time, could have gone varsity, but I 'dropped the ball' in high school, gave away my medicine as RVC would say. In order to be an MVP you do not aspire to be a great ball player, a brilliant athlete...you simply know you are. In the same way I still believe that it is the mind, the imagination,, that willed every outside shot or 3-pointer of free throw into the net (compounded by a lot of practice shooting, a lot of 'communing with the ball so that in time the ball (its girth, weight, texture, rubber scent) becomes secondary but integral to your 'shot, so that when you are ready to be an excellent athlete, it is the ball that follows the mind and the mind that goes through the net with 3 seconds left on the clock.

My 15-year-old athletic moment of glory: grade 9 city championships, packed gymn, bleachers filled, both of them right to the ceiling, Duchess Parl School, Prince George BC. Being 5'5, I was a point guard and/or wing 'man,' although our offense was designed such that both Tina and I were 'point guards,' and split the top of the key, passing the ball back and forth, drawing the defense into us, then a cross key block from me, and Tina dribbles around her guard (who has unwittingly been neutralized...she drives up the middle of the key to the basket, which makes the low post giant defenders step in to stop her, at which point our offensive low post players likewise perform a double screen on each of these low post defenders (who are now all tied up and fumbling, lacking perspective, in the low middle of the key, under the basket.

Now let's take an objective step back. What does this look like?...

(Rememeber, a zone defense is illegal; this is important. In other words, the ref will call the defensive team,on an illegal defense right now if they all just sort of hover in areas around the key rather than guarding each "man." Zone defense is sort of regarded as half-commital and pussy-futting around, like a boxer who dances around the ring but refuses to engage with the fight).

So what does 'this' as described above look like?

(I wish I could draw this).

In a nutshell, the defensive team has been lured into the middle of the key where they cannot see the bigger picture, cannot physically or intellectually or even intuitively make any good plays or judgements.

The offense on the other hand (ie; me and Tina and our two wing guards and two low post players...we have all (except Tina...who remember made that initial drive down the middle of the key to the net, in order to lure the defense in, it was never designed to give her the clear shot...) ...so we have all...the rest of us, blocked and screen each other into the open, whether it is the post players down low who have zipped across the baseline to receive the ball and perhaps take a reasonable 15 foot shot,m baseline (shots they would have practiced thousands of times in 2 2.5-hour practices each week from late September through to what...February or March? Or there;s our wing guards who shuffle up and down the length of the key and inevitably find themselves open for a shot. Or there]s me, (or Tina) open at the 3-point line, a relatively unthreatening shot position, except if you can do it, and I could, you know, I just could, 7 for 10 at the top of my game, and so it was (my moment of glory)...1 3-pointer in regulation time to tie up the game, then 2 more in the 5-minute OT that followed.

And so, we won, as a team make no mistake about it. We won city championships that year.

I can't halp but think that basketball, all those screens and drives and shots, all that willing of the ball into the new from so far out,, it's just life. Making the shot because you know you can, before anyone told you you cannot.

I have something to say about that, as follows:

Whoever 'They are...is wrong.

But back to my opening subject line....the truth is, despite the game, all of its possibilities and built-in capacity for glory and failure....I have it in me to say fuck it to everything....which is why to my dismay...I spent the better part of my time out camping recently high on Crystal Meth or Crack.

It just doesn't fit ...;me. I am not someone who does Meth or Crack....

I was on a break in a writing workshop when I was about 23. Ultra shy back then. Lots of people, including my prof, went outside for a smoke break. I lit up and he said, "It doesn't fit." (meaning my cigarette...cuz I never wore makeup or fancy clothes and so probably ;looked about 12.

I said, (always saying the wrong or inappropriate thing), "I saw you walking downtown the other day...(because I had seen him), "and you looked far away...you looked sad."

He seemed totally taken aback, and sort of just walked away from me.

People generally don\t want to hear the truth...they want to have you mirror back to them a superficial idea of who they are or who they want to be. People for the most part just want to hear their own voice.

Posted June 24, 2009

Sisyphus Journals- June 22, 2009- Thoreau meets Myth

That subject line is code for something else because there are aspects of the past 10 or so days I've spent camping up island, beach walking, staring at long grass bending, quiet, too quiet, (if you want to know god, go to the ocean, do illicit drugs, don't sleep for 3 days at a time, eat two handfuls of dry cereal in 4 days, feel your blood sugar plummeet, and start getting scared of shapes in clouds)....aspects of it, this latest experience, I won't write out...

but you get the idea.

I am not okay.

Right now, this minute. I contemplate going back to the hospital, checking myself in, 'that' not okay...simply because it is too terrifying being 'out here.'

I am a dot, a pin prick of light in blackness, and so...do not know what i am...am both the subject and object of myself...it's a crisis....

This, 'this' minute, is the worst minute of my life so far....

Must go preoccupy myself with inane details so i don't fall off the edge of this planet.

Posted June 22, 2009

Sisyphus Journals- June 8, 2009- Mister Miyagi...

...is kicking ass.

I am watching Karate Kid II because these are my first moments alone, without company or pending company, since leaving work on May 7, 2009, to go see TIHDW (The Incredibly Hot Doctor Watt), my very kind GP.

I am watching Karate Kid II because the sound of the movie is comforting, reminds me of being a kid growing up in a small town in the Kootenay Mountains, mid1980s.

I went to see Dr. Watt because I was not doing 'well,' and possibly for a prescription renewal, can't recall now, and because it was all I could do to keep from descending to the basement of my marital 'dwelling' (aka, home) and curling up into a ball and writhing in pain, because I didn't know where else to go.

Dr. Watt came into the room in the clinic, closed the door, and seeing me there said, "You are not doing well."

It was an observation on his part, a quiet declaration.

I was sort of kneeling over, my elbows resting on my thighs, my face in my hands, my hair falling about my shoulders. This paints a melodramatic picture, not really what I intend, but somehow I need to describe 'me'...'there'...in that moment, if for no other reason than to locate myself to myself, and inferentially to you.

I was not doing well.

Dr. Watt had been in contact with my psychologist, Fiona. Fiona had two days prior tried to get me to go and check into the EMP (Eric Martin Pavilion), the Royal Jubilee Hospital Psychiatric Pavilion.

(Oh I love that..the Pavilion. I can't help but imagine ice skating, roller blading at least, some glassy surface, a pavilion, at night, a big oval gleaming under lamp light, stars in the blackness beyond the glow).

I told Fiona I took 20 pkgs of Neo Citran DXM plus 15 extra strength Robaxacet in one night, and didn't 'really' feel a thing, except I was totally high, so high I could not tell I was high I guess. You develop tolerance, you know how it is. I remember frequently checking my pulse throughout the night, for a heartbeat, and finding nothing identifiable. I was only eating every few days, a banana maybe, drifting in and out of my 'home,' my husband's home, going to work here and there, but not feeling anything anymore. So I took the DXM and pain killers, thinking I suppose it would be a sideways entry into letting go of all...of...this...but waking up in the morning anyway.

The truth is, I'm afraid to die. If I wanted to really be gone, I'd be gone.

I'm a chicken.

I am not like Mister Miyagi or Daniel-son.

(Karate Kid II is over now btw, and I'm sitting here typing to you, watching previews, my chest aching. I describe my emotional state as if I was still seven years old. 'I'm sad. I'm happy. I'm hot. I'm cold).

It is necessary to reduce life to identifiable quotients, sums, products and so forth. It is necessary (perhaps) to apply a number to various forces of nature in this thing we call ''a universe."

(I have a poem running in Room Magazine right now btw which looks at death and suicide in relation to 'this universe,' or at least in relation to 'our solar system.')

So, I'm "sad."

I don't know why. I just can't figure out why, and it hurts, and I seem utterly incapable of feeling good.

It's hit me just now, no doubt, because as I noted in my opening, these are the first moments I have been alone since leaving work and seeing Dr. Watt on May 7, 2009.

"You are not doing well," he said.

"No," I said.

We talked for a few minutes, but I don't recall what about. He excused himself to take a phone call, came back, and said, "that was Fiona..." or something like that. He said that she (Fiona) is very worried.

Somehow, in the next few minutes, he got me to agree to go to the hospital (with a free pass through the ER) to be screened by a psychiatrist, and from there it would be decided what would happen.

So I left and reluctantly made my way to the hospital ER.

They took my vitals (this guy in blue scrubs took my vitals but didn't say a word to me in the whole process).

Then I was ushered by this same guy to the Archie Courtnal something or other...center?

I waited around this sterile room for half an hour while other semi-crazy people got screened by the psychiatrists. A few people were before me in "line." They went into this meeting room across the way and came out half an hour later. This one guy came out and sort of wandered about the sterility of this preliminary waiting area. He was in yellow scrubs. Another guy seemed really tired and sat in a chair a little ways away from me. I got the feeling he would strike up a conversation with me if I made eye contact for more than a second, that he would tell me his life story and so on. (This really does happen to me a lot).

But I didn't want to make eye contact or talk to anyone, too distracted, plus my turn was coming.

So my turn came and I was retrieved by two psychiatrists, one in practice and the other a student.

I could detail here the general content of the dialogue that transpired in the interview room, or you know, w/e, but basically I detailed for this preliminary doctor and the quiet student what had been going on: no food, DXM, pain killers, cutting, depression, etcetera...and to my total dismay (I really did not see this coming), she said, "How would you feel if I said I would like to admit you today?"

I blinked, my chest caved. I said, "I would be extremely reluctant to that."

She then got to the finer point and said, "Well, I am going to admit you today."

Just like that.

I resisted, as follows, and in no particular order (because what followed was a blur, parts are completely gone):

"But I just started a new job...But I have my rabbits to care for...But I have things I have to do...But I'm going to New York in a month..." and so on.

I do remember her saying, "What good is a job if you're dead."

(Don't quote me directly as I said, but I think that's right).

It sort of hit home, but not really. I have spent so many years considering the option of suicide (probably since I was 12 or so) that to actual commit suicide now (via accidental sideways angled OD) is already pathetic. I could not, in other words, at this juncture, kill myself enough for it to mean anything anyway.

The drama and potential novelty has disintigrated, burned down; a crossword puzzle in black and white turned to ashes; or little bits of orange, Jughead or Veronica, a comic book tossed into a campfire. Only little bits remain.

And I'm not funny anymore.

So I was 'admitted involuntarily,' and stayed for the next twenty-something days (I have to do the math), but that will have to be another post. I'm rambling and sad and my fingers are getting weak.

They brought me a powerful sedative, and I cried after they left the room, after they left so I could have a bit of time to process or something. And I did, I processed it, let the sedative kick in (which it did), then emerged from the room as the others before me had, and just kind of drifted in oblivion, the odd person taking note as I continued to cry, in public no less (I don't do that, ever), and then a nurse came and gave me some blue scrubs.

I put on the scrubs, still in shock, came out, sat down at the table with the phone on top of it, and stared at the phone, thinking, ascertaining, what to do with it. After a minute, I just called my sister, because I didn't know who else to call, and told her what had happened. (She would take care of me after this moment, in the weeks to come, she would bring me things and chocolate and green tea fraps from Starbucks and books and socks and so on).

I don't know what happened after this, this night I mean. This is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me, as follows:

Shortly after hanging up the phone, a nurse came to get me from somewhere in the waiting area (I don't know where, can't 'see' myself in the room, but I know I was there somewhere), and escorted me to two young security guards (both good looking, strapping really, that much I remember), and advised that they would be driving me over to the main Pavilion.

I complied. I was wearing over-sized blue hospital booties. I remember the guys were friendly, but I was embarassed. They walked me to the curb outside, into the sunlight, opened the security vehicle door. I got in and slid over.

Now here's the weird part, though it doesn't translate well in type, but it just escapes me utterly: I have no memory of what happened after this sliding into the van, but there is no doubt that I was, must have been, checked into my room at the EMP, must have been taken in by the nurses, must have been shown my room, introduced to my roommates with whom I would soon form solid friendships, and so on and so on. But it's all gone, erased, vapourized.

I don't remember going to bed or falling asleep or waking up the next morning.

And this first vapourized night it seems became the ephemeral juncture of relativity against which all subsequent days and nights were measured.

Time became sketchy, fluid, shifty, irrelevant, and utterly relevant; all at once.

So my point is...now, here, while watching Mister Miyagi kick ass (even though the movie's now over on tv), this is the first period of 'time' since being admitted on May 7th that I've really been alone.

I left my husband while in there, or he left me, whatever, it doesn't matter now, it can't matter anymore, it just can't.

And ya, I'm sad and scared, and I'll keep on going.

Maybe I'll try to kick some ass like Mister Miyagi and Daniel-son.