This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
So, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this summer was a weird one. This last year was a weird one. If we get right down to it, the last few years have been weird ones. Just under three years ago, a series of unexpected events and changes set off a lot of long-lasting impacts on the health of pretty much every member of my immediate family. Following that have been a lot of struggles and strange times.
our clematis vine blooms in September and makes me really happy.
I try not to air all of this publicly very much, since most of it is health-related and my family’s health is a private matter. But I can summarize here. September of 2014, my best friend flew across the country to begin attending university in Vancouver, and since then I’ve only been able to spend about three months around her per year. The following October, my Nana (the only grandparent I’ve ever had) had a stroke, and while she’s very lucky it wasn’t worse, she hasn’t been the same since. The same month, my mother was rear-ended in what seemed like a minor accident, but turned out to leave her with lasting nerve damage. The legal battle with the insurance company is ongoing, and in the meantime she had to leave her full-time job of nearly fifteen years and only managed to pick up some part-time work last December. Then, in the fall and winter of 2015, both of my brothers began to miss a lot of school due to chronic illness – and they’re still barely in school now. One of them is diagnosed but little treatment is available; luckily, he’s likely to outgrow his condition in another couple of years. The other remains largely undiagnosed despite thorough attempts by many doctors, and we have no way of knowing what’s going on or how to treat it. At this point he’s past most of his symptoms except for chronic fatigue, which results in his sleeping at least twelve hours a day and being nearly impossible to get up in the morning. All of this was a lot for our family to deal with, and while we still maintain healthy relationships and a happy household, it’s a very stressful life to live. As a result, my mental health took a dive from my standard high anxiety levels into full-on depression late in the summer of 2016. And then, if that wasn’t enough… in January 2017, my father – anxious, diabetic, sleeping about four hours on most weeknights, and now effectively the sole provider for a family who’s never been doing great in the money department – suffered what turned out to be a heart attack. We’re very lucky that he’s okay, but some major life changes are lined up for the next few years to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And it definitely didn’t do anything for my state of mind.
Late in January, after getting the latest news on my family, a friend of mine told me, “If I don’t hear anything about your family for six months, there will be peace in my heart.” That sounded awfully reasonable to me.
I want to be clear: everyone is on the mend. Things are getting better. Seeing my best friend so little does a number on my separation anxiety, but I’m coping. My Nana will never read again, and she has a lot more trouble finding the word she wants, but she’s living happily in a lovely assisted living facility. My mom’s pain levels are improving, and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel that is her lawsuit. My brothers are improving a lot and going to school sometimes, seeing their friends, beginning to get back to the lives that a couple of fifteen- and seventeen-year-old boys should have. My dad is healthy and back at work and looking for a job closer to home so he can at least have a shorter commute (and a better night’s sleep). We’re looking at moving in the next couple of years, somewhere relatively nearby but less expensive, possibly helping to shorten my dad’s potential future commute.
And I’m… well.
Things were really rough. I spent almost a whole year badly depressed and barely holding myself together. Luckily, most people were understanding. I have the most amazingly supportive group of friends in the world, who did so much to help me feel better and keep me all in one piece. I was also blessed with some very compassionate instructors at school, who generously gave me extra time for important assignments when I fell apart at the last minute and couldn’t turn work in – or who were forgiving when I did things like sleep through classes when I was supposed to do a presentation, or give a presentation without having slept at all the night before. (Tip: try to avoid having to present on the day your instructor’s thesis supervisor is sitting in if you’ve been awake for 26 hours straight. Fortunately he was a very nice prof, and asked no questions when I laid down on the floor afterwards…)
this sign I spotted at Supercrawl this year, made by Kyle Stewart, felt like an apt description of my life.
For a while my doctor was encouraging me to get a handle on my sleep schedule, as our first attempt at tackling my depression. To be fair, my combined insomnia and delayed sleep phase were completely out of control, and I didn’t really have a sleep schedule at all, so much as a life littered with naps and occasional twelve-hour sleep-binges. More of my sleep was during daylight hours than nighttime. But even with some strong tranquilizers, this wasn’t working very well. Neither were attempts at diet regulation or other lifestyle changes. About halfway through the summer my mom and I decided it was time to insist on something more. My doctor agreed, and increased the dosage on my anxiety meds. If you’re not familiar with the process, most of the time anxiety is medicated with low doses of antidepressants – so boosting those up to a depression-appropriate dosage seemed like a good first step.
I’m here to tell you, it’s done a lot of good. It’s been… roughly two and a half months since I started the new dose? I believe? And I am so much better than I was. I feel like a human being again, I feel like myself again. That was a feeling I had only been grasping at for almost an entire year. Sometime in January I found that sinking myself into writing projects got me the closest to that feeling I could get, and I latched onto that so desperately that sometimes I completely ignored other things – schoolwork, sleep, meals, even loved ones.
It’s worth noting that there was one other thing that helped: that live flor show back in May. Remember how I talked about how alive it made me feel? Their music has that impact on me to a lesser degree, but the show was kind of life-changing. The memory of it and how I felt that night was one of the biggest drivers for me in wanting to get better. I felt so human and so myself that night, and I so badly wanted to be that person all the time again. I’m still head over heels in love with the band, listening to them basically 24/7. (That’s only a mild exaggeration – I listen to their music for, typically, hours every day. I hyperfixate. We’ll get to that later.) And in a way I kind of owe them my life now. Not in the sense that I wouldn’t be alive without them, but kind of more that I may not have found the motivation to bring myself back from nothingness without them. They mean the world to me.
I’ve been changing a lot recently and it’s showing in my style. I’ve been hoarding patches lately, waiting for the perfect jacket…
Another thing that came about over the course of my last few doctor’s visits was an ADHD diagnosis. I mentioned my concentration issues to my doctor, and she gave me an ‘adult ADHD symptom self-report checklist’ to fill out at home. When I brought it back to her we found that I scored pretty highly. As a whole, this isn’t really a surprise. I hadn’t considered myself a strong contender for ADHD before she gave me that sheet, but I have many friends with ADHD, and had often found myself relating to the experiences that some of them described. After filling that sheet out, I reflected a little more and found that it really did make a lot of sense. Many of the symptoms overlapped with other parts of my life in ways that would make it harder to pin down (and, it’s worth pointing out, ADHD is dramatically underdiagnosed in females). Things like my lifelong inability to sit still could be blamed on anxiety and being a kinaesthetic learner; my inability to concentrate – especially on things that didn’t interest me – could easily be blamed on a childhood of being too smart and subsequently never learning good work habits. Even my tendency never to stick with a project for long (crafts, drawings, stories I was writing, learning a new skill…) could be an aspect of ADHD. And of course, so could my hyperfixations and intent focus on things I do care about. Those are on the less-commonly-known other side of ADHD. Like many people with the condition, I don’t usually concentrate on anything unless I’m concentrating to the absolute exclusion of literally everything else, and even then it’s only on certain things that I care a lot about.
Like being obsessed with a fandom. Or a band. You know, like I’ve been doing a lot in the last year especially… but also, my whole life. I’ve always been the kid who listens to one song or album or artist on repeat until everyone wants to kill me. Or who dives so deep into a given fandom it’s all I think or write about.
This diagnosis also helps explain why it’s been so hard for me to accomplish anything while still recovering from depression. Depression drained so much of my energy, and I’m still getting back to normal levels where that’s concerned. As a result, all of my other mental health issues – social anxiety, separation anxiety, mild OCD, and apparently ADHD too – were worse as well, because I no longer had the capacity to manage them. That’s why it felt like, even once I was out of school for the summer and doing nothing but spending time with friends and family and working on personal projects, it felt like I had way too many balls in the air. It was really frustrating at times, because these were all things that I wanted to do, so it seemed like it shouldn’t feel like too many balls in the air. But I had so little ability to concentrate on anything most of the time, even the stuff I really wanted to do.
That’s why this blog went dry (again). I’ve had to drop nearly everything just to have enough energy to keep healing and doing the most important things – like spending two precious months of my summer with Susie while she was home. Seeing her as much as possible – and our other friends, too – was top priority, and ultimately I let almost everything else slide. There wasn’t much of me to go around, so I had to focus on what mattered most. I don’t regret that at all. The last two weeks of August were particularly incredible – I was with my friends almost every day, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
as per tradition, my friends and I spent Labour Day flying kites before Susie left for Vancouver again.
Sometimes I feel really guilty about that. There’s so much I want to do, but I just can’t be as productive as I want to be – in all honesty I can’t be very productive at all, and it’s super frustrating. I want to do things. But I’m slow and scatterbrained and tired, still. I’ve had the Motion City Soundtrack song Can’t Finish What You Started stuck in my head a lot of the time, because I keep getting ambitious and starting a project and then petering out, over and over. (The title of this post, by the way, is the final line of that song.) Hell, I can’t seem to finish watching the TV shows I start, lately. But I have to give myself some space. Healing is not linear. I need to be kind to myself and let failures happen and just make peace with the process, or I’ll slow it down even more.
Right now I’m still putting myself back together. I’m not in classes this term – I go back in January for four courses, after which I’ll finally be finished my degree. In the meantime I’m doing a little work – some at-home stuff for a prof at school, and a seasonal weekend job at the big fall farm in town. (Do you know how heavy apples are? Most of my job is weighing apples for people after they’ve been apple picking, and let me tell you, spending six hours hauling thirty-pound apple bags is not pleasant for your shoulders.) I’m writing every day. Those are just about my only really consistent things right now. But that’s okay. I’m home with my family, and I’m healing, and I’m doing my best to take care of myself.
the farm is a beautiful place to work.
I’m gonna be all right. I don’t feel like that 100% of the time, but maybe 75 or 80%, and that’s a huge improvement.
Everything is gonna be just fine.