Beyond The Fog

I once heard the story of Florence Chadwick, a female swimmer who once held the record for swimming the English Channel. On a different occasion she attempted to swim the 26 miles between Catalina Islands and the California coastline. An excerpt from “Notable American Women” describes the experience as follows:

After about 15 hours a thick fog set in. Florence began to doubt her ability, and she told her mother, who was in one of the boats, that she didn’t think she could make it. She swam for another hour before asking to be pulled out, unable to see the coastline due to the fog. As she sat in the boat, she found out she had stopped swimming just one mile away from her destination.

That story came to my mind after reflecting on my most recent episode. It was about 3 weeks ago that I was in depth of an agitated mixed state. I was depressed and felt very little to no hope for the future. After, 12 years with this illness, it takes a lot for me to get to a point where I feel like there is no hope. Most of the time I feel pretty miserable but am able to tell myself that it will get better.  This was one of those occasions where those therapeutic skills were failing me.

I wasn’t helping myself either by not taking my mood-stabilizers consistently. I even told my Psychiatrist off a bit and let her know how easy it is for her to tell me to take the meds when she doesn’t have to fight through the haze and the complete lack of creative and intellectual thought process. When you’re on some of those mood-stabilizers, mixed with the anti-psychotics it feels like a miracle just getting out of bed and function on a decent level. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that’s a smart thing. As bad as all that haze is, I get a lot less impulsive and suicidal when I consistently take them. She finally suggested we try a liquid form of lithium which has since been really helpful, as it doesn’t make me severely nauseous, like the lithium does when I take it on an empty stomach.

Back to managing the feelings of the episode. This was a pretty bad episode. With my history, the first thing I have to work through is the urge to self-harm. I’m not sure why it is so strong, mostly because I’ve used it in the past a lot and probably because I feel it’s a way to force my emotions out and purge them and quickly re-gain emotional stability. It’s a horrible way to cope and it scares and stresses out everyone you love. It can also lead to more and more aggressive forms that can unintentionally or semi-intentionally lead to suicide. The number one job in those times is to keep myself out of those situations. During one period I hadn’t slept the whole night before and just kept trying to watch shows to distract my brain from thinking about how much I wanted to hurt myself. The next morning Teana was planning on going to very special day for my cousin but I walked in early that morning after pacing much of the night and told her I needed her to stay. I knew that if I had 3-5 hours alone that day after no sleep that my mind was ready to lose it and I may do something I truly regret. I did the right thing by letting her know where I was and how serious it was especially since it’s hard for her to gauge, as sleepless nights aren’t too uncommon and I’m agitated quite often.

The day and period passed with no occurrences of self-harm or any other major issues. I got focused on catching up on a bunch of movie’s I’ve never watched from a list I have and stuck myself in front of the computer on Netflix for the better part of several days. It kept my mind on something and then I’d drug myself up with a greater than normal dose of anti-psychotics (as directed by my doctor) and then I’d sleep.

I was pretty proud of myself as I finally started to feel relief. Teana had a church camp to go to the next week and so I was going to have Zeke most of the time, except for when my Mom said she would help and he did have daycare some. I still had to take him from the time work ended until bedtime, as well as one full day, on top of that I planned on working 3 full days, per my usual schedule. I tend to not give myself as much slack as I need and to try and push myself when part of me knows I should slow down. I probably shouldn’t have worked much, if at all, that week but I felt like I needed to because they needed me and because I don’t want to be shown favoritism, even though I really could have chosen not to work if I wanted to without repercussion at work. Anyways, I got halfway through the week when I hit a wall and started to feel deeply depressed, as well as exhausted. My parents were already helping a ton and Teana was gone so I felt like I had to suck it up and keep going. It was at this moment that I was like Florence Chadwick. I was immersed in fog and I decided on some level to throw in the towel and say “Screw it! Screw God! Screw Life! Screw everyone who doesn’t get it!” The good and the bad of this was that I had to take care of Zeke. I knew I couldn’t hurt myself or anything because he needed me and so I turned to old negative coping mechanisms. Later that week Teana finally came home. I played off like everything was fine until she could tell it wasn’t. My mind filled with thoughts of suicide and anger and I deeply wanted out. I was tired and I felt like it was useless. Teana made me take a larger dose of anti-psychotics, like I’m supposed to take in troubled times and made me stay in bed with her until I fell asleep. The next few days were a little better but manageable. Finally, after a few more days the fog lifted and I felt relief.

Now that I am in a place of stability I look back and think, if I could have just seen the shore ahead or known it was there even though I was in the fog, how would I have made better decisions? I still did pretty well, all in all. I didn’t hurt myself but there were pieces to be cleaned up after some stupid decisions. The story of Florence Chadwick continues with her trying again but the next time she was in the fog, when she felt like she could go no further, she pictured the shoreline just a mile away as she had seen once she stopped before.

That may seem like a simple thing but to learn to see the end in sight when in the midst of an unbearable depressive or agitated rage or while experiencing psychosis, but I believe it can be learned.

It has been a long journey for me. 10 years ago I lived and breathed for my emotional states and acted out on whatever I felt like doing during those ups and downs. That led to emotional abuse, the beginning of several different addictions, a distancing myself from God, and a lot of reckless behavior. I didn’t care until the consequences caught up with me. You give someone an opportunity to end a relationship like that and they will, rightfully, leave to mend themselves. You realize that no matter what you do, where you go, what you buy that your illness doesn’t leave. You may find freedom from its cares for a period but you stay long enough in any environment and it will catch up. When your brain is the problem, lifestyle changes won’t create lasting solutions. So one day I looked myself in the mirror and knew I had to change. First it was finding God. Then it was overcoming addictions, which took years and years, eventually I added attempts to reincorporate myself into society. A simple job. A few college classes. At times, I’d get excited and try to bite off more than I could chew and then would come crashing down and have to slowly pick of the pieces again. The first few years it felt like you were building up and tearing down the same stuff and not making much progress but in time and when I stepped back far enough I could see simple undeniable progress. After 2 years, I finally worked part time successfully. After 3 ½ years, I got through some classes. After 5, I went full time to school and even though I only showed up 50% of the time I still did well because I got accommodations even though it was embarrassing. My relationship with God slowly improved. I went and met with church leaders more times than I care to admit and every time I made progress. I eventually found a confidence in who I was and how Heavenly Father saw me. There are times that the old thoughts creep in, especially when I’m cycling. Even today, with the amount of stressors in my life, I have a pretty significantly debilitating episode every 3-4 months, where I spend 2-4 weeks mostly in bed. I’m working on pushing myself to still show up for work at least part of those times or a few days a week during those times even if I’m horribly unproductive. My boss supports and encourages me in that and it has been helpful. Those days are very draining but they are also very rewarding because at the end even though you feel like you ran a marathon, you feel encouraged that you have greater capacity than you realize.

I have seen miracles in my life, or at least what seem to me to be such when I consider how broken I once was. I haven’t heard psychotic voices in my head in years. Nine years into these issues, about the time I graduated from school I quit feeling the everyday desire to kill myself. I now have a son that brings me so much joy and just last night I sat with my wife talking and felt as in love with her as I ever have. I am working now, when things are good, to prepare myself for the fog that will come again.

There are two sureties in my life. One, I’m Bipolar, so bad days are ahead and some of them will be close to unbearable and will take all I can muster to endure. Two, those periods are like a fog, they will entangle my mind into false precepts that their pain is never ceasing, but I am working at remembering that the shore is just a mile away.