#when I’m only back home bc my therapists in treatment have said I shouldn’t be on my own yet

[iwatcheditbegin]

My family has absolutely zero understanding of mental health

[jadelyn]

Heya. Recently saw a post of yours going around regarding mental illness and not having to censor your own experience, be constantly positive, offer up your success story ect. I suffer from clinical depression and anxiety myself and I was kind of interested in your referring to yourself as an "old crazy" and what not. A lot of times I feel like depression is more like a... comparatively "pretty" MI and like it's barely even valid to talk about having a MI in certain ways you know? 1/?

But you're confident enough with it that you'll say things like "old crazy" and just generally... treat it with the seriousness it deserves? I feel like there's almost two sides of it. When talking to nurotypicals yeah, depression is obviously a MI and our experience is way different from theirs, but when talking with other folk with MI's it feels almost like... whining? Maybe a bit like being a "small fat" in regards to fatphobia vs someone who is much bigger and receives more scorn for it? 2/?

Anywho, if there was a question in there I supposed it was going to be"is depression the only mental illness you suffer from? And what's your opinion on "reclaiming", I guess, stigmatized words like "crazy" when one suffers from comparatively less stigmatized MI's?" I mean I've got best friends who deal with hallucinations, family with bipolar disorder, in laws with disassociative identity disorder and I guess I low key feel like I cant even call myself someone with an MI by comparison. Idk. 3/3

So...okay.  Let me start by saying, I’m really trying not to be an asshole about this.  If I come off sounding like a jerk, it’s not intentional, and I’m mad at the ideas and social forces behind them, not you for giving voice to them in my inbox.  

That said...fuck that noise.

My specific diagnoses are honestly nobody’s business but mine and my doctor’s.  I’m pretty open about them here, but it does rub me a bit the wrong way to be asked, basically, “what are your Crazy Credentials?”  

I’ve been formally diagnosed with chronic major depression and social anxiety.  My therapist has made noises about C-PTSD a few times but never anything official, more just letting me know that some of the things I thought were shitty personality quirks actually fit the diagnostic criteria for C-PTSD and may be less my own fault than I think.�� And I’m about 99% sure I have ADHD, to the point where I’m about ready to seek out official diagnosis to see if I can get treatment for that in addition to my depression, bc I think it would really help me.  

Short answer re my thoughts on reclaiming “crazy” as someone with...I can’t even bring myself to say “less severe” tbh considering that my depression has tried really hard to kill me several times over the past 20 years and has almost succeeded more than once, but someone who doesn’t have psychotic or personality disorders, is that if people use it against me I have a right to reclaim it for myself.  And that has happened enough times that I’m feeling pretty confident in my Earned Right to call myself a bitter old crazy fucker.

I also suuuuuper object to the classification of depression as a “pretty” MI, even comparatively.  Like.  That shit made me drop out of college, cost me the first ten years of my adult life, I have literal physical scars from the self-harm I used to do because of my depression, I’d have died years ago if not for the family and loved ones who took care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself.  None of that shit is fucking “pretty”.  I hear you say it’s a comparatively “pretty” MI (and like I said, I’m not mad *at you* so much as the ableist cultural attitudes that make people think that about it) and all I can think of is the nights when I would be curled up as tight as I could get, sobbing so hard I couldn’t breathe, hating myself so intensely that if I could’ve spontaneously wished myself out of existence I would have.  I think of the emotional neglect I perpetuated against the man I love, the way that him trying to take care of me left him with scars and issues of his own, and all I can do is offer my experience in how to cope with those kinds of things, I can’t undo it for him, I can just ironically use my experience of the depression that harmed him to help him learn to cope with his own.  I think of the fact that I’m 32, but I’m a mere 4 years into my career, basically the point where someone in their mid-20s would be, because of the way my depression crippled my ability to work for so long. I think of the fact that I only stopped stashing razor blades around my living space “just in case” I needed to self-harm about a year or two ago, and even now I know without having to even pause that if I suddenly decided to go back to that, the exacto knife in my little home toolkit under the kitchen sink upstairs has a box of extra blades that I could use.  

That’s...not...pretty.

But I think you’ve actually hit on a pretty perfect comparison in the “small fat” thing, tbh.  I’m fat, undeniably so, but I’m a smaller fat, only a size 18.  So there are parts of the “fat experience” I’ve never had to deal with, like having to use seatbelt extenders on an airplane or buy a second seat or get kicked off a flight.  

But that doesn’t mean I’m insulated from fatphobia, including the deadly kinds like medical neglect.  It doesn’t mean I can’t or shouldn’t call myself fat.  

If you can look at someone who’s a size 16 or 18 and simultaneously acknowledge that said person is fat and faces fatphobia for it, and that they’re a small fat and that bigger fat people face unique issues that the smaller fat person doesn’t...can you do the same with MIs?  If you have depression, or mood disorders or anxiety disorders in general, you are mentally ill and you face ableism and stuff because of it; at the same time, there are types of ableism that you aren’t targeted by since you don’t have a personality or psychotic disorder.  Those things can be true at the same time.  And it really sounds like you’re struggling with some internalized ableism around this, that you’ve picked up some of the general cultural attitudes around Real and Bad MIs like psychosis vs meh MIs like depression.  

It’s okay, and entirely possible, to both understand that someone with a mood disorder faces a different level/type of ableism than someone with a personality disorder - and still understand that both of those people are still mentally ill, both of those mental illnesses “count”.  There’s no mental illness olympics.  Having different types of MIs results in different experiences, sure, but that doesn’t make people with mood disorders not *really* mentally ill.

We need to stand together, all of us, in fighting stigma and ableism around mental illness.  Those of us with less-stigmatized disorders need to stand with those who have more-stigmatized disorders - but doing that doesn’t require that we minimize or dismiss our own illnesses or experiences.

Don’t let mundanes divide us against ourselves.  

[brunchbitch]

When you get a moment could you please bullet update on your week?

sure! i’m putting it under a read more bc it’s long and boring.

2/19/17

this week has been okay - up and down.

i moved back to W (the group home) last tuesday and the first couple nights were very very hard, but since then it’s gotten a little better. or, rather, i’ve been trying to change my attitude towards it. i’m going to be living here for at least another year and i don’t want to be miserable the whole time so i’m doing my best to try to be a little more positive. laura, the residence director, has been nice and helpful, but not too overbearing which i was worried about - (can’t remember if i’ve already written this but) courtney called her to let her know they supported me moving back here and she was like “okay i would like a copy of her meal plan and her exercise plan. i will be watching her closely” and courtney was like “umm… usually by the time they’re in iop, they don’t really need to be watched outside of program” but laura said “i don’t care. i am not letting what happened in the fall happen again on my watch.” so i feel really bad bc i feel like she partially blamed herself for not intervening sooner. so i was worried about her watching me like a hawk but she’s been good. she asked me a little about partial/iop but hasn’t asked me what i’ve eaten or anything like that so that’s good.

on thursday i did shop and cook with another girl - we made chicken walnut cranberry goat cheese pizza and it was yummy. friday we went to a sandwich place for lunch. it was both my and another girl’s last outing in php, so we begged to get ice cream even though it was really cold. we were so excited when the dietitian said we could go to ben & jerry’s and obviously it was still scary and i felt guilty for being excited/asking for it, but i was also able to reflect on how far i’ve come since september and that’s really cool.

yesterday i finally had galentine’s day with my best friend and we did some painting and had coffee and lunch together while watching phantom of the opera. i was supposed to go to multi-family group at mnlh but my check engine light came on and i was too nervous to drive 30 min on the highway so i took it to a shop and bri and i went shopping at a fun store for a little bit. once i got my car back ($280 later ugh), i ended up still going to mnlh to say hi to some of my friends, but those three clients weren’t even there - they were all on pass. so i hung out with one of the recovery coaches who i was really close to. and T was there and i got to talk to her about brandon’s phone call which was really helpful. when i told her about the time limit/end date, she was like “does he think your ED is just going to go away by then?” and i was like EXACTLY and said how i wanted to tell him to put a time limit on our therapy too lol. i’m wondering if the director of mnlh might be able to talk to him and say that the end date wouldn’t be advisable. i don’t plan to see liz for the rest of my life, for sure, but i think it’s problematic to start out knowing when we’re going to end. if i really wanted to be in treatment, i probably would’ve said i didn’t need an ED team, and then just let myself relapse again so i could go back to residential. but i am ACTIVELY trying to make my outpatient team as supportive as possible so that i DON’T have to go back to a HLOC. so i’m gonna try to talk to him about this on friday. i really need to work on being honest with him, especially when i disagree with him. so i’m really glad i stopped by mnlh and got to talk to her. i told her i would try to come next weekend too so that i could update her on how the meeting went. while i was there, i saw a new client who looked really really awful, like should’ve been in the hospital, and she is T’s client. that was hard for me. i was jealous of her body (i know i shouldn’t be, but i am) and jealous that she was probably going to be there for a very long time which means that she gets to work with T for a very long time and that’s hard. i miss T so much and wish i was seeing her outpatient. but one thing that’s really helpful is that she does work on saturdays which is the day of the alumni group, so i can convince my bpd (or whatever) that i don’t need to get really sick to see her again - i can see her in group every week! and hopefully i won’t need to go every week for months and months, but i know it’s there if i need it and it’s a much healthier way of transitioning than saying goodbye to a therapist for good and knowing i would have to return as a patient if i wanted to see them again.

i milieu'ed last night (milieu is where we have to be in the common area of the house playing games or watching a movie - you can’t study or read or do anything too isolative - and we have to milieu three nights a week) and it was pretty low-key. i made dinner (brussels sprouts, sweet potato cranberry onion mix, and chicken breast) and prepped breakfast (baked blueberry oatmeal) then started some art journaling (mostly just cutting things out of magazines at this point).

this morning i was supposed to meet a friend for coffee but her car broke down and i’m bummed i couldn’t see her but was also kind of relieved bc i didn’t sleep well so i went back to bed for an hour. i had oatmeal for breakfast, did a load of laundry (still haven’t folded that whoops), unpacked a little, then went to volunteer at the cat shelter! that was fun and three kitties got adopted. i’m really happy i found this shelter bc they’re so nice and i love being around the cats so much so that’s been a source of joy for me. then i went to get snack at berryline and see my outpatient dietitian, kellie. 

we had a really good session and laughed a bit about the ridiculousness of the fall (she was like “how did you even have ketoacidosis, i mean that is so freaking rare! it’s one thing if you have ketones in your urine, but for the actual pH of your body to change…” and then she shook her head and laughed and i laughed too bc it really is fucking ridiculous. and then she reminded me that she was talking to me on the phone in between the two hospitalizations and i was saying that my legs were numb and she had said “well if it gets worse, you should go to your doctor” and i replied “how would i know if they get worse? i can’t feel them!” and she was like “umm… ok you should definitely go to your doctor” lol i did not remember having that conversation. i just remember being terrified of going to the doctor or the walk-in clinic bc brandon had told me if i was hospitalized again, he wouldn’t work with me again.) i talked about how frustrated i was with the end date issue and she agreed with me, not by saying that i should be able to see liz for the rest of my life, that there should be an end to it, but to not necessarily set a date at this time. we also talked about some goals (continue eating out at a restaurant at least once a week when i step down to iop even though i don’t “have” to bc there aren’t any outings in iop, log everything in recovery record, and practice more intuitive eating while challenging judgements). we decided she’s going to do blind weights and she’s not going to give me feedback unless it continues to trend in one direction or the other and she’s concerned. i know my general 5-pound range from britt so kellie is only going to bring it up when i’m outside of my range. i think that’s probably better bc i get really obsessive about “it’s up a little” “well how much? still in the range? how close to the upper edge of the range?” etc. although it was really hard to agree to that from the outset. she’s also going to be weighing me with clothes on at 4pm on sundays and i wanted so badly to see it today bc i’m sure it’s so much higher than usual. i joked that she must have a really good poker face with this job and she was like “yeah i’m really good.” so i don’t think i’ll get any info there. overall though it was a really good session and i’m so happy i get to start seeing her again.

i’m milieuing now but am probably gonna get in trouble for being on the computer so much so i better end here. sorry this update was probably SO boring.