Not Waving But Drowning

My least favourite public goodwill/branding exercise (HASHTAGBellLet'sTalk) passed by a few weeks ago, and I briefly thought about prying off that scab again and talking about the state of my mental health. The first post I wrote, about my time in the hospital, was a look back; this second post would try to look forward, as a way of figuring out why I've found it so difficult to move on from that episode.

Which is a great narrative, provided that I'm actually moving on--and not finding myself sinking back down again, as I have for the past four months. I could blame my job and I could blame school, but I often come back to blaming myself, and wondering if I don't have some congenital form of failure.

Right now I'm throwing medication and money (in the form of therapy) at the problem. It might be helping. But I haven't been writing. Unfortunately, most of what's been on my mind is me, which isn't a very interesting topic, and certainly not one I think there's a public audience for. I find a certain kind of toxic narcissism is one of the side effects of depression/anxiety/lack of resilience/whatever I have. However... however. Perhaps there's a reason I've kept my Blogspot going even as nearly everyone else migrated over to Tumblr. Maybe I need the outlet that early 2000s blogs, in all of their lumpy, barely monetized, confessional glory, can provide. So join me--won't you?--for a journey into the kind of surly, kind of whiny hallways of my mind.

Don't worry, there will still be knitting.

Ok, So You Want to Talk?

For two weeks of 2012, I fell out of this world and into another one. This was no fantasy novel, though. My new world wasn’t conducive to adventure; instead it was a perpetual waiting room, quarantined from time, like being in an existential play but hey, it was real life.

This was my life in the psych ward of a major city hospital.

We weren’t barred from interacting with the outside world. There were 24 hour cable news channels on the TV, and a desktop computer. They gave me my phone back eventually. But why bother to try and contact anyone? The outside world didn’t offer much for me. Our breakfast, lunch, and dinners would have come at the same time, on the same plastic dishes. My world would have still been circumscribed to a building floor. I told my job I was sick and the hospital wouldn’t let me leave, I told my family the rest of the truth, but otherwise I was checked out of the real world for two weeks.

I have kept very little from that time. Even the memories are beginning to go. I can’t remember the name of the form that the hospital kept me on, or the colours of the wristbands and how they related to privileges on the ward. Until I started writing this, I had forgotten the minor-key crush I had developed on someone there, out of what I can only assume was a combination of desperation and boredom. The memories I do have seem mostly funny now: trying to spear a slice of pork tenderloin with my fork because they wouldn’t let me have a knife; completing puzzle after puzzle in the break room; covering for someone I knew was smoking in the “reflection room” out of loyalty.

The physical evidence is even slighter. I threw out the paperwork, so now it’s just my hospital card and a mask. That mask isn’t metaphorical. It was just one of the many activities offered by the hospital so we could, I suppose, busy ourselves into sanity. I made something vaguely inspired by Cthulhu. It seemed appropriate, inside of a modern-day madhouse, to make a mask of a being who causes madness.

With a collection of memories and objects like this to remind me, it’s easy to forget it all. And yet, here comes #BellLetsTalk Day, to remind me every year that I’m more than just a headcase; I’m also a marketing tool!

So, let’s talk about #BellLetsTalk. I’ll start: I hate it. I hate that it dominates our national conversation for one day, causing my newsfeed to become bloated with endless retweets of trite sayings and quotes photoshopped onto Instagrammed photos. I hate that Bell wasted four letters of the official hashtag pushing its brand forward. And I hate that I have to justify my hatred. This year, I noticed more tweets than ever criticizing those who would criticize this day, often along these lines:

I'm sure that for each cynical tweet criticizing #BellLetsTalk, the tweeters are donating generously out of their own pockets. Right?
— Peter Moorhouse (@PeterMoorhouse) January 28, 2015

I dislike this kind of argument. In seeking to derail criticism, it turns what is just one type of support (in this case, financial) into the standard of engagement. Instead of responding to what someone is saying, it questions their commitment to even say it. So, in the interests of confounding these critics (and to regain the moral high ground of this piece) I donated $15.00 today. That’s not a lot, but I would have had to tweet #BellLetsTalk 300 times before Bell would pay out a similar sum.

Still, there are those I can’t ignore, or undercut with a donation; they are the people like me. The ones whose experiences were just like mine, or even worse, and who still like #BellLetsTalk. Many of them have powerful stories of how this day has helped them, that seeing all of those tweets and shares made them realize that they were not alone. I can’t criticize that, but I-the personal, highly subjective I- I still hate #BellLetsTalk.

I hate it for more than the corporate cynicism of Bell, a stronger cynicism than even the harshest anti-hashtag sentiment could contain. #BellLetsTalk reminds me of how angry I was, and remain, over this time. First: I did talk. Hours before I walked into an ER, I tried to talk with a friend about what I was going through. Instead of hearing that I was suffering from too little happiness, she seemed to hear that I had too much desire, that I wanted too much.

She wasn’t the only one I talked to either. Reactions differed. Sometimes people would change the subject and deflect it to something more manageable. My family, my lovely and supportive family, would just become exhausted by the obsessive mantras of my depression. I’m an ugly, stupid failure, I would say, disgusting, repulsive, unlovable. Uglystupiddisgusting. Unlovablerepulsivefailure. And on and on, until I could hear how tired they were on their end of the phone. Remembering all of this sometimes makes me angry; but sometimes it makes me feel grateful, for whatever these people tried to give me before I exhausted their energy and sympathy. A more honest version of #BellLetsTalk would also talk about how difficult these conversations can be for all parties.

And, finally: I am angriest at #BellLetsTalk for reminding me, with every hashtagged tweet in my timeline, of who I am now. That I don’t feel solidarity with the person muttering on the bus, but guilt and shame that I'll back away from them like everyone else.  #BellLetsTalk reminds me that I’m not a person who can find strength or creativity in this experience. Mad Pride marches will pass me by, because my madness almost killed me. And it probes into that place where I keep all the rage for what I lost. Going to the hospital probably saved me, but it changed me. I was tempered into something stronger, but at the cost of the ambitions and the spark belonging to the girl who checked herself in. I don't miss her misery. But I sometimes miss her.

So. Who wants to talk about that?

The Waterworks: A Damp Geography of my Employment History

In recession-era 2009 I fell into the employment pool, with something that definitely sounded like a splat. Since then, I've had four full-time jobs, triple the number of job interviews, exponentially more job applications, and a brief part-time stint at a butcher shop on Roncesvalles, where I quickly became famous as the clumsiest person to ever work there. All of these jobs were a little different, but it didn't matter what city I was in, or the sort of work that I was doing. I always cried. 

I cried at desks, and I cried on park benches, but most of the time, I cried in bathrooms. 

Yesterday, I found myself in that most familiar place: trying to sniffle softly enough so that the person in the stall next to me wouldn't hear (horror!), try to investigate (no!), and then attempt to console me (I'll just drown myself in the toilet, thanks.) Sensing a pattern, I was forced to confront my own failings. 

Eh, no. That would have just made me cry harder. Instead I thought about all of the bathrooms I have cried in. 

First, there was the rather dingy affair of my first job. This will forever be known as "the porn job," though it was more of a writing gig and no cameras were ever, ever involved. Shared bathrooms are bad enough for crying - everyone must hear, but pretend not to know, your shame - but this one smelled of urine and was perpetually out of toilet paper. Colleagues would head down or up one floor just to crap in nicer surroundings. Clearly, not ideal. In fact, most of my crying was eventually done in a parkette across the street, the traffic of St. Laurent hypnotizing me back to calm. 

My next job, a publishing internship out in BC, was an improvement in both prestige and weeping areas. A floor above, in a barely tenanted area, was a solo bathroom. The ideal workplace cry, in the ideal bathroom. Unfortunately, with the next job, at a university bookstore, it was back to the stalls. Worse, these bathrooms were shared with the very customers I had to serve, and I didn't want to show any more weakness than I already had. A weakness probably shown by crying at my desk. Here's a platitude for you: Sometimes you don't need a bathroom to cry, because you carry the bathroom inside your heart.

The stalls have also followed me to my current occupation, where I work in sales and customer service at a publishing company. They are better than the other shared bathrooms I have known - cleaner the first, and customer-free compared to the third - but we share the floor with two other offices. So I am perpetually scared of roving bands of stray women, practising a kind of tissue terrorism with their sympathy and concern. 

I should let them in. But I would rather be alone behind the metal door, please and thank you (it's just some allergies!) Not just because I'm bothered when others see me cry, but because all the tears bother me. I feel like I've gone past the stereotype of the emotional working woman, crying in between bites of desk-drawer granola bars, and all the way back to something real: a girl, the tearful child I used to be, again reacting childishly to what is only a regular, and pretty manageable, life.

And so I always grab the rough brown paper towel (no matter the location, this has been constant), blow my nose, and get back to work. Because every time I hope this will be my last trip to this soggy geography, and at the very least: I've never had to cry it out in a port a potty.

Dispatches from Blue Valley

I've been struggling to write a few posts for the last few days. First, I wanted to write about detective shows, and violence, and how my Mom's fearful reaction to them both - she had just been for a visit and insisted on securing all windows and doors - affects me. But I couldn't.

Because I am depressed as fuck.

And then I struggled with writing about that too. Writing about all of that, the Big D, makes me angry. It's like the bitterness has become cystic, and writing slices it open. It might be cathartic, but the result is unpleasant. I also have a policy, a mostly reliable one, of not posting anything written through tears. The emotional tone is so embarassing the morning after, and there are so many typos that need to be fixed, that it's not worth the bother.

So I looked at the half-finished but already overwrought post, and deleted everything until the "fuck." There it is. I am depressed now, but I also know, as the benefit of so many trips to the emotional valley, that I won't be sometime soon.

Better luck tomorrow.

Bonjour Tristesse and Gin and Tonics

There's a rhythm to the radio silence on this blog. I work a job that alternates periods of intense stress and business with stretches of relative calm. Last week came from the first category - classes were back in session, and the children-who-are-our-future were banging on my door, demanding textbooks. But, for once, my job wasn't the thing weighing heaviest on my mind.

I haven't yet put Project OKCupid out of its misery, though recent events have me reaching for the shotgun. If they were hilariously awkward dates, I would write about them here in excruciating detail. Perhaps there would even be diagrams. But, instead, it's the fairly banal fact that some people* don't like me as much as I would like them to. I try to reason with myself. "Noted philosopher Bonnie Raitt wisely noted that 'I can't make you love me'," I'll say, before returning to gaze morosely out of the streetcar window. "It's not me, it's him. Or the situation. But definitely not me. I'm perfectly acceptable." But these sunny-ish thoughts fail to stop the deluge. It sucks that he doesn't want to see me again, it sucks that I can't change that, and it particularly sucks that I feel this way after just a few nights spent with the boy, because that is irrational. And I want to be a creature of reason instead of bad habits.

Oh, if I could have a feeling-ectomy I would, and have all this silliness neatly cut out of me. Unfortunately, with the current state of medicine, that's a no. And as much as I'm (again, irrationally) hurt with the fella, I'm really mad at myself. Every time this happens, I worry about my judgment. Then there's the wasted hours of reflection, which I probably could have used to write, knit or at least clean my room. The time I just spent reading the dating advice book of a friend's friend isn't helping. I feel like I'm stewing in relationship slurry. So, tomorrow: we cancel the OKCupid account, we sign up for a class, and we start drinking instead of thinking.

*Well, a particular person, but it ain't like it was the first time.

Stupid Animals and Annoying Broken Hearts

I am fickle, I am selfish. I spoil my dog, and let my houseplants die. It made me angry would no one would adopt my foster cat, Oliver, but when I found out that somebody had it made me sad. Last semester, the Semester of Heck, I felt like Oliver. Nobody wanted him; nobody seemed to want me either. The thing was, he was hardly a perfect cat. His personality was somewhere between "dog" and "chubby stoner", but all his bizarre habits and quirks became my favourite things. He was my cat, and the longer no one wanted to adopt him, the more attached to him I became. For many reasons I had to go home for the summer, and for a handful I couldn't take him with me.

I tried to find him a home, but I guess I'll admit that part of me didn't want him to be adopted. I figured that if no one had wanted him from January to April, what was another four months? I'd save up money, cut myself off from the yarn stores and the book stores, and adopt the fat cat myself. It lasted for a month, and then I found out that someone had adopted him. Logically, I want to be happy. Someone wants him, he doesn't have to wait another three months for a home, his new place is probably bigger and nicer than our apartment. That's what my lovely and more balance room mate says. I try to tell myself that too. But I was selfish, and I wanted him for myself. Relationships with pets are a funny thing- they're supposed to be easier to work then ones with humans, particularly since they can't talk. But there are those funny times when they seem like something more, when it seems like a dog or cat can read your mind. You're probably reading too much into some dumb beast that's rolling around in some the remains of some other dumb beast while you have all these silly thoughts, but whatever. It works. Oliver was like that for me. I hope his new home loves him, takes care of him, and lets him wake them up at four in the morning by a paw to the head. And that they don't let him get too skinny. That was one of the things I liked best about him.