Category Archives: bipolar

Take things deliberately

Posted on July 12, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 2 Comments

I should be rest­ing, I know, now while they don’t know what’s mak­ing me woozy and weak
but I need to do some­thing when I’m not used to lying here idle,
and I’ve got friends com­ing soon.  I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing them, ever so much.

Cleaning’s not an urge I get often, so when the urge comes, I’ll take it.
Broom, plas­tic bag, recy­cle bin, check.  Stor­age bins, maybe,
and at least I can put stuff into piles so I’ve got some idea.  I can make lists.  I like lists.

I can’t for­get a fan, a ban­dana, an open win­dow,
a tall glass of water.  It is mid-July and even with the rain of this morn­ing, it’s awfully humid.
Still, it’s more than time that I got on top of things.

The finan­cial papers– so long unlooked-at for that wave of panic at all things legal-financial
are all scat­tered across bags and boxes. At least I can put them into one box,
con­dense them into one place Pan­dora, and Hope that I can deal with it soon.

And the old clothes from the old job I’ll never go back to, the ones that need clean­ing–
the ones I’ll do what with?  Sell?  Give away?  I’m not sure I can afford the dry-cleaner’s bill for them all.
At least they can go into bags to shove into the closet until the company’s gone.

The win­ter clothes I’m going to keep can go into con­tain­ers and down into the base­ment, Christ­mas orna­ments too.
The dust and dirt can be swept and tossed if I’m care­ful about lean­ing over– take things delib­er­ately.
The books can be sorted into keep and not-keep.  Sell or donate– that I can decide a lit­tle bit later.

The party clothes from last summer’s wed­dings– the ones I barely made my way through,
so mis­er­able as I was, heav­ier in body and soul as I pasted a smile on and wished them the best–
I’ll send those to the cleaner’s, they won’t fit any more, meta– or physically.

I’ve changed, for bet­ter or worse, and at least I’m aware of that fact.
This last year’s at least brought self-consciousness to me,
even if hap­pi­ness is still some­thing I’m chasing.

Clar­ity– or grop­ing towards it, I guess comes first in the effort.
And for some­thing to be clear, you do have to move the clut­ter off of the sur­face,
wipe off the grime, sweep off the mouse-scamper of I-am-afraid-and-don’t-make-me-face-it.

My jew­elry box is also a mess– lots of pins I won’t wear again on suits I won’t use,
lots of pieces my mother gave me that I never did like and never did wear– except when she was here,
some­times, and not even then, because it wasn’t my taste and she never did learn.

A small part of me wants to throw all of it out, since right now I’m angry,
but there are pieces I do like and which some­times I wear.  Just because I need a break
doesn’t mean I have to toss every gift she ever gave.  Some were quite valu­able– I do know that much.

And that red suit, and maybe the bright cobalt blue.  I could have them tai­lored to fit my new, smaller frame.
Most of them should prob­a­bly go.  I could use the space and could get rid of some emo­tional bag­gage.
But I always sus­pected a spic-and-span house.  Why should I toss all of my past, when not all of it’s painful?

And if some of it stays in a box for just a bit longer– well–
I’m still going to pat myself on the back for the con­den­sa­tion of things, and the fact that I even looked at
it to begin with and I know that it’s there.  I’ll delib­er­ate upon it some more as I make room for my friends.

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Posted in bipolar, poems

The limits of elasticity

Posted on July 9, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 6 Comments

It’s funny—she’s so used, in a way, to the feel­ings of sad­ness, depres­sion, lone­li­ness– all the other emo­tions that go along with her manic depres­sion that all of the— the bleak­ness —some­times despair and siren, clichéd thoughts of that final dark­ness. Most days she doesn’t think of them much, at least when the meds are mostly work­ing and she’s doing her yoga, keep­ing her diary, keep­ing up with her appoint­ments, telling the truth to her­self and her hus­band and fam­ily and doc­tors and giv­ing up on the lying, because crazy peo­ple? Experts in denial, the next thing to lying.

That kind of pain she’s well used to—almost– except for those moments of break­down, the ones she tries to for­get when most days she gets out of bed and func­tions, god­damnit, and even when she doesn’t quite feel like func­tion­ing, well, she puts on her com­pe­tent mask and smiles like she means it. Some­times, by the end of the day and enough laughs with her favorite cus­tomers and col­leagues, she actu­ally does.

But the weight loss, the effect on her body, the way that she shrinks and bones and lines re-emerge, curves dis­ap­pear? All that Depakote and emotional-eating weight—though of course she hadn’t noted it as it came on, only noticed when it began to melt off—it was padding under which she didn’t real­ize she’d been hid­ing until it was gone and oh—shit—now peo­ple could see just how fucked up she was?

The xylo­phone ribs at the top of her chest, the even-spaced ridges of spine that once hid under flesh, ilia that once were padded by ass but now hurt on long bus rides when she sits and jut out on the oppo­site side over skirts and pants that now are too big. She feels less­ened some­how, even as oth­ers flirt with her more, com­pli­ment her on her weight loss, and some in the know of the source—it’s the meds, it’s always the meds, because she’s start­ing to learn the Seren­ity Prayer in her mar­row pray­ing that some­day, some­day, she’ll accept all the things she just can’t fuck­ing change.

She doesn’t mind being a healthy weight—but she’d just like it to be under some kind of con­trol. She has con­trol of so very little.

And still, she keeps losing.

She’s already got stretch marks from prior weight loss and gain, mark­ing her legs—hips—the under­sides of her arms– scars and reminders of her body’s stretch­ing then shrink­ing again. She was a fat kid in school, lost it through con­trolled bulimia cut short by Lyme dis­ease that made her lose the rest of the weight and left lin­ger­ing aches in knees, hips and shoul­ders when the weather is rough. But hey—she’s thin when she starts high school, and isn’t that the thing that mat­ters the most?

The first time she shops for new clothes—the few tran­si­tional ones that she’s bought are all hang­ing by belt­loops and her friends and bosses at work tug at them gen­tly and tease her—the lean sil­hou­ette in the mirror—it just isn’t her because it’s the twenty-five year old body again– but the eyes, the face, they’re tired and haunted and all of it is just wrong because she’s still los­ing and she knows, these four­teens that she’s buy­ing? They’ll be loose in a week.

Still. She needs pants. She buys one pair and a sweater and dri­ves home, hands gripped hard on the wheel and thin fin­gers knob-knuckled and bony so they won’t shake.

In the late win­ter, she has a cold she can’t shake for a month, one that lingers and leaves her cough­ing and rasp­ing so badly the cus­tomers at her store who are doc­tors chide her and tell her to get in to see some­one for a Z-Pak—or they’ll write it them­selves. She does it, even­tu­ally, sees a cal­low young doc­tor who assumes her mood stabilizer’s been pre­scribed to her for overeat­ing (because off-label, some­times it is) and pays no atten­tion to the manic depres­sion diag­no­sis right at the top of her chart and doesn’t have a word to say about the weight she reports she’s still losing—but the antibi­otic he gives her does clear up her cur­rent phys­i­cal ill­ness, and she feels more like her­self for a while.

Still, though, she’s tired. She chalks it up to depression—she always is in the spring, and after all, wasn’t it just May last year that she really went off her rocker? They add an anti-depressant and it works for a while, an uptick of mood, but soon she’s tired again. It’s hard to notice it, really, because she’s used to ignor­ing all kinds of dis­com­fort and push­ing through things and get­ting out of bed every day.

Her dad has this say­ing about airplanes—she likes to think about it when it comes to her life. He says—it’s not a won­der they don’t fall out of the air. It’s a won­der they get off the ground in the first place.

Get­ting off the ground every day is her goal. She focuses on tan­gi­ble things, tries not to think too hard about all the larger goals in her life that sit by the wayside—except in the con­fines of her ther­apy ses­sions, when she’s free to rail and cry and think dif­fi­cult thoughts, then crawl in to bed in the after and sleep off the anti­cli­max of the feel­ings of fail­ure all over again.

And then her mom comes to visit.

Now, don’t get her wrong. She loves her mom—or tries to. But mom’s crazy, in her own spe­cial way, and dis­abled, too, and she rep­re­sents all the poten­tial decline for the future, and not just because she’s enor­mously fat. She rep­re­sents all sorts of things—reminds, too, of all sorts of things—and she pushes her over the edge—just pushes, really—and that and other things at work and at home make all those clichéd thoughts of bleak­ness come rag­ing out to the front of her mind (they’re never that far away to begin with, the meds just push them to the back, behind the gro­cery lists and clean­ing the house and going to work every day) and wishes that it would just stop and reminds her that there is some­thing in the bot­tles behind that door in the bath­room that can make all of that happen.

It all hap­pens quickly, in the astro­nom­i­cal sense—a week of mom’s visit, two really bad days—three really bad hours—twenty really bad min­utes of look­ing up on the ‘net to see what com­bi­na­tion of meds would be most effective—because she’s so tired and it hurts, not just in her head but with a phys­i­cal pain, her whole body aches, and not just with the cry­ing that she’s been doing.

But instead she con­fesses that she might need the hospital—confesses that those bot­tles seem awfully tempting—and instead of tak­ing all of the pills, she just takes two small yel­low ones, enough to make her finally—finally—sleep and give up her grief and her anger and rage at the world, at her mom, at her fam­ily, herself.

It’s only four hours, but it brings a sem­blance of calm, and in the morn­ing, she talks with her hus­band, enough to restore another bit of esteem, and she makes some calls to her doc­tors to report the past night’s events—and then she goes to work, puts on a smile and pre­tends like she means it.

The scale in the bath­room says she’s lost another two pounds. By the end of that week it’ll be five. And she’s tired—aching—exhausted, in bed by nine every night, and her head hurts and she’s increas­ingly woozy and dizzy, until one night at work, she feels so ill that it shows on her face and her gal­lant young man­ager (he’s twelve years younger than her and the light glints of his vir­tual armor so brightly she calls him Gala­had in her mind) feels the need to check in with her every half hour.

The next morn­ing she falls on her way in to the doctor’s—not los­ing con­scious­ness, so far as she can tell—it’s just that one minute she’s stand­ing, the next she’s on hands and knees and peo­ple are ask­ing if she’d okay.

Clearly not—she’s had that headache and light­headed feel­ing for days. After a nurse makes her eat a banana and drink some Gatorade, she sees her to the suite of her doctor—it shows that her blood pres­sure and pulse are dan­ger­ously low, lower than they’ve ever been in her life, and she tells the nurse—no, it isn’t the heat, she’s felt tired for weeks, felt like this for days, even inside the A.C. at work.

Her doc­tor thinks it’s maybe one of her meds—of course, one of the ones that helped her sleep that night when she thought—anything would be bet­ter than wak­ing up in the morn­ing. That or exhaus­tion and stress. Or blood sugar, maybe, because she’s lost all this weight, sixty-one pounds since this time last year, forty one of it since Novem­ber, twelve in just the last month. Except, well, she had a very good break­fast that morn­ing, and then that nurse-pressed banana and drink. And yes, well, it’s true, the new meds have short-circuited her stom­ach and brain, such that she can go eight hours and more with­out know­ing she’s hun­gry and sweet things taste like sweet, dis­gust­ing wax in her mouth and rich fatty things that were once her delight make her gag after a cou­ple of bites—but the fact still remains. She really has been good about eat­ing lately, she’s got the proof in her diary that she keeps of her meds and her moods and her food and her sleep, and it isn’t the heat.

Maybe she’s just stretched too far—the stretch marks on the out­side of her body now mov­ing inward. She takes her doctor’s advice and her note, pushes flu­ids and salty snacks at work the next day, and by lunch she feels ready to faint. That half hour sit­ting was barely enough, and by a half hour before her next break, she’s bro­ken out in a sweat. Still, they get a rush and there’s no one to call for relief—so she grits her teeth, pushes through the dis­com­fort, and when her relief comes at three, she heads down and sits for a blessed fif­teen min­utes before doing the last forty-five of her shift.

She lies in the ham­mock on the back porch for five straight hours after work, then goes to bed right at nine.

By 11 a.m. the next morn­ing, she’s clocked out sick and gone home sick from work. The home blood pres­sure cuff that her father has brought her has told her that it’s a mir­a­cle she hasn’t fallen out of the sky, because her vitals are still really low, even though she’s by now cut her dose on the advice of her docs and is eat­ing salt and drink­ing elec­trolytes like they will save her.

Maybe they will. She’s got a follow-up in a week when they’ll run some tests and see what there is to be seen. But like the Seren­ity prayer says– Wis­dom to know the difference.

She hopes there’s an answer, that it’s maybe the meds—though the thought of switch­ing off the blessed yel­low pills makes her want to vomit, they bring her such blessed relief from all of the panic that fires her blood and short­ens her breath until she’s all prick­les and fire, sweat­ing with noth­ing but ner­vous dis­or­der– or at least this is some­thing she’s just got to wait through before she—hah—bounces back—and hopes that the inside of her body heals and the stretch marks fade like they have on the outside.

She hopes she hasn’t learned the lim­its of elas­tic­ity, that no-return at which you point a rub­ber band at some­one and instead of it sail­ing in a slow-motion beau­ti­ful arc over the room and sting­ing them in the arm—so hah-hah it’s funny and every­one laughs at the mild pain even as your tar­get shoots you a look of annoy­ance– it flicks back and blinds you, leav­ing you gasp­ing and clutch­ing and wondering—

What hap­pened?

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, bipolar, meds, mom

Little, yellow, different

Posted on June 28, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 4 Comments

No.  Not Nuprin, but my anti-anxiety drug, a stronger one than I used to take.

It’s been a long sev­eral days, and I shan’t/won’t go into details, other than to say the following.

Crazy peo­ple are liars.

They lie to them­selves about how much they can han­dle, until they just can’t any­more.  In the mean­time, they pre­tend that they’re fine and go through their day, smil­ing and cook­ing and work­ing and doing all the things that make it seem like they function.

At least until they don’t.

Some­times, they rec­og­nize in enough time that they can’t, and they take their anti-anxiety pills (or what­ever it is that tames that roar­ing beast inside their head that threat­ens to kill that last sense of Self.)  Some­times, when all their mul­ti­plic­i­tous stres­sors pile on and smother and threaten to drown their psy­ches at once, they even rec­og­nize through all the sob­bing and feel­ings of com­plete, utter fail­ure, total aban­don­ment and rejec­tion, feel­ings of worth­less­ness and use­less­ness and the bur­den they (think that they) are and they’re con­tem­plat­ing all those lovely pills in the bath­room, the ones that if you just take enough, well, all those wor­ries will just go away– some­times they take just one or two more of those anti-anxiety pills, just enough so they can sleep and wake up in the morn­ing, the drugs like an oil-slick over the panic and worry that threat­ens to drown them.

It lets them bring out into day truths they’ve been too scared to say– for what­ever rea­son.  Because frankly, once you’ve already admit­ted that you might need the hos­pi­tal because you’re afraid you might take all the pills in the cab­i­net, every­thing else seems, well, pretty small in com­par­i­son.  (For the record, I’m fine, or at least work­ing on it.)

So.  If you want to under­stand what your beloved crazy/depressed/bipolar per­son is lying about, I highly rec­om­mend that you read not a med­ical book about the dis­ease that they’re suf­fer­ing some or some gen­eral mag­a­zine arti­cle, but a first-hand account from some­one who’s been there.

Kay Red­field Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is an account by a renowned psy­chol­o­gist of liv­ing with Bipo­lar I.  I’ve never been manic/psychotic like she, but her account of her dis­may of being smart and wor­ry­ing about the loss of her mind, and her accounts of her depres­sion, her sense of loss, sense of self– they are price­less and perfect.

William Styron’s Dark­ness Vis­i­ble is a short, con­cise, utterly accu­rate account of both depres­sion and the black despair that sur­rounds some­one who’s think­ing about killing themselves.

There are oth­ers, like The Noon­day Demon and Lonely which also tell aching, true stories.

None of these will fully explain your loved one’s crazy behav­ior, but they will at least give you some insight into the black depths they can feel, even if you’ve never felt it your­self, never imag­ined feel­ing that way.  It’s inex­plic­a­ble, some­times, why the moods will come on, and other times, it’s com­pletely within rea­son to under­stand why some­one freaks out– and yet the freak­ing out is beyond their con­trol.  The only thing that is in their con­trol is those nice lit­tle pills.

Yel­low and small, an oil slick of calm, cool and col­lected until the cri­sis is past, some­thing to let the crazy one think past all the things that are caus­ing the stress and think, if not this too shall pass, then at least, what next.

What next, indeed?  Some­thing dif­fer­ent, one hopes.

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Posted in bipolar, books, links, meds

Mending Wall(s)

Posted on May 10, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 3 Comments

Mr. Frost relates that “Some­thing there is that doesn’t love a wall” and the con­trary opin­ion, “Good fences make good neigh­bors,” in his poem Mend­ing Wall– it seems to be frost heaves and win­ter and grav­ity, the upheavals of win­ter, weather and cows.  He talks not of insid­i­ous creep­ers like ivy or bit­ter­sweet vine that grows thick and wild in the wood and with its gor­geous color and tap­roots digs into stone and cement and tears things apart, instead talks about things seen such as Hunters and unseen like Elves that his more prac­ti­cal neigh­bor is unlikely to humor.

The poem, on its face, is about their once-a-year meet­ing and mend­ing of stones that have fallen over the win­ter from sources known and unknown, how they nearly need magic and have to work hard and closely together to get it all bal­anced between them again.  Frost’s char­ac­ter won­ders at the old-fashioned stolid­ness of his neighbor–

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

and then

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Some­thing there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’

before his final reflection:

He moves in dark­ness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s say­ing,
And he likes hav­ing thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I used to agree with Frost’s mis­chief, because wouldn’t you want to be open to peo­ple, as open as pos­si­ble? Now I think more like the neigh­bor– ironic in a woman who keeps a blog and bares large parts of her life open to stranger as the only real means she has of real self-reflection.  And yet.   There are things I don’t share, and bound­aries I am try­ing to repair.

I’ve been think­ing about energy con­ser­va­tion and bound­aries and walls of the per­sonal type, namely those of time spent with fam­ily and friends.  How much is enough?  How much becomes too much?  I have always been a per­son who lives too much in my head, and clearly too much intro­spec­tion is quite bad for me, but at the same time, I have a ten­dency to be socially anx­ious and awk­ward (when I’m not being hypo­manic and there­fore incred­i­bly funny and witty and charm­ing and ON, which in itself is a bit of an iden­tity cri­sis, because I know it’s not my default state, so hey, yeah, no, I’m not really that funny all of the time.)  I’ve been feel­ing much bet­ter from my most recent crash and resur­gence, but work­ing retail’s exhaust­ing and I’m often sub­ver­bal when I come home at the end of the day and I don’t always have two days off in a row.  It leaves me one day to myself, often taken up with errands and doctor’s appoint­ments.  Spend it with friends?  Or take that time to myself?

And if I spend it with friends?  I feel guilty, only see­ing them for two or three hours, but still– I get tired.  Over­stim­u­lated, exhausted and all-of-a-sudden-bratty-short-tempered even when I’m with just one per­son, because it’s a lot of focus to pay all that atten­tion to some­one else still at this time– and the fact is, I’m still not quite myself.  I’m still rebuild­ing all my social mus­cles.  It’s good to get out, to see peo­ple, to get re-acquainted, to re-make con­nec­tions, to decide even whether to keep them, because peo­ple do change and good­ness knows that I am chang­ing each day, but still– I am try­ing to be care­ful, to bal­ance those stones on the wall so they don’t fall imme­di­ately over.

So yes– there is some­thing in me that doesn’t love a wall, because part of me would love to have all the energy in the world to spend all day with you and more, to laugh and hang out and chat and do what­ever you want– but part of me still needs to wall myself in, wall out all your well-meaning ques­tions and needs, because, well– I’m still tired and frag­ile and I am not yet ready for a whole day of walk­ing the prop­erty lines, talk­ing of hunters and elves and agree­ing with you that yes, there is noth­ing there to take offence at, and if even you did have cows, they could roam at will.

Every­day truth, though, is never so sim­ple, and that bit­ter­sweet vine is a pain to pull out if your wall’s not care­fully tended– even if it is pretty to con­tem­plate as you sit all alone in your hut in the fall, watch­ing it blos­som and grow.  Leav­ing it there all on its own ’til the spring will only bring trouble.

–

Unre­lated and yet not:  This arti­cle in yesterday’s NYT about cen­sor­ing your own life online.


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Posted in bipolar, links, poems

Asking the questions about what lies beneath.

Posted on April 28, 2010 by bipolarlawyercook| 6 Comments

There was a long arti­cle in the NYT Mag­a­zine Sun­day about whether psy­chophar­ma­col­o­gists do their patients a dis­ser­vice because their med vis­its are short (20 min­utes) and they focus on symp­toms that can respond to drugs that those self-same doc­tors are able to prescribe.

And yet.  The doc­tor describes the slow creep of doubt, of the grow­ing belief that he does his patients a dis­ser­vice in these short vis­its, that per­haps he’s not get­ting all of the pic­ture because he doesn’t prac­tice psy­chother­apy and get into the issues that also occur in his patients’ lives.  You know– the things that make those chem­i­cals in the brain get all wonky, because eggs don’t occur with­out chickens?

It was, in some ways– in many, I’ll take it that far– a good arti­cle.  His cri­tique of the con­straints placed by insur­ance com­pa­nies on med­ica­tion vis­its was valid.  In so short a time, it’s impos­si­ble to get at all of the things that go on in one patient’s head.  And he acknowl­edged that he hadn’t gone far enough in know­ing his patients– that as he dug fur­ther with one, he learned that there was more going on, and that he had in fact, either under or mis-diagnosed, and what the patient needed was a whole dif­fer­ent cock­tail of drugs, one that suited much better.

There were prob­lems, how­ever.  The doc­tor acknowl­edged that he, as a pre­scriber, did not have time to pro­vide ther­apy.  Acknowl­edged, too, that ther­apy is often looked-down upon even as it can be mar­velously, incred­i­bly help­ful.  And yet, there was no indi­ca­tion that this par­tic­u­lar doc­tor had ever reached out to his patient’s treat­ing ther­a­peu­tic providers.  His assump­tion seemed to be that instead, he should be the one pro­vid­ing the therapy.

Um.

Yeah.

Ever heard of a phone call?

Email.  That could work too.

And also, there’s such a thing as a detailed his­tory, and learn­ing to fina­gle the insur­ance com­pany forms so the patient’s diag­no­sis is such that the extra time you spend with them on intake and the occa­sional longer med visit is jus­ti­fied and gets paid for, so you can ask the extra ques­tions about sit­u­a­tion stres­sors that are nec­es­sary to find­ing out how your patient is doing– to observ­ing if your patient fid­gets, is avoid­ing your ques­tions, seems really dis­tressed, all of that jive.

Now.  I don’t know this doc­tor from Adam.  And he teaches at a respectable med­ical school, has had respectable hos­pi­tal affil­i­a­tions, too.  But there was a cer­tain arro­gance under­ly­ing his writ­ing in pre­sum­ing that hey, presto, it’s just time for him to rein­cor­po­rate ther­apy into his prac­tice when he hasn’t been doing it for what sounds like at least sev­eral years and he’s been almost entirely med-focused.  Why not work col­lab­o­ra­tively with the peo­ple who do it day in, day out?  You know, like doc­tors and nurses do on a care team in a sur­gi­cal ward?  (Oh, wait.  Did I say some­thing shocking?)

I shared the arti­cle with my ther­a­pist.  I’ll share it with my shrink when I see her next.  She is one of the good ones– she col­lab­o­rates with my ther­a­pist– and takes time dur­ing our med vis­its to ask those detailed ques­tions, to ask after the stres­sors, to call me after hours if that’s what is needed to see how I’m doing.  It’s clear that psy­chophar­ma­col­o­gists do need to change. I could give Mr. Car­lat a ref­er­ence, if he were interested.

—

I saw Noah Baumbach’s Green­berg yes­ter­day.  Or per­haps I should call it Ben Stiller’s Green­berg.  Because for all of the beau­ti­ful shots, all the won­der­ful writ­ing and cast­ing, all the whole-ness and fractured-ness of it all, this is Ben Stiller’s movie.  David Denby did a review of it in the New Yorker, and there was a sep­a­rate pro­file of Stiller in a dif­fer­ent New Yorker issue (sub­scriber access required) as well as a review in the NYT by A.O. Scott that was like­wise full of praise.

I wavered a long time about see­ing this movie.  And yet I went to see it.  The reviews tell you what it’s about– but here’s what I saw, and let me try to at least link it to the first part of this post and the last.   (Themes, Erika, themes.  We can haz them.)  Here’s a man let out of a men­tal hos­pi­tal, seri­ously frag­ile, adrift in his brother’s empty house, peek­ing out the cur­tains at neigh­bors who use the pool while his brother’s away.  He’s tak­ing the pills he’s been given and reach­ing out– grasp­ing at straws– at peo­ple he hasn’t talked to in years.  He also grasps at his brother’s PA, the young, lost, doesn’t yet know what she wants Flo­rence, who’s lovely and despite her own lost­ness sees past Roger Greenberg’s dam­age to what lies beneath.  (Roger doesn’t yet know it’s there.)

At no point does Roger see some kind of ther­a­pist.  But he asks all kinds of ther­apy ques­tions to all kinds of peo­ple unqual­i­fied to give him any answers that are going to do any­thing except hurt him some more and make him lash out– be angry– be hurt­ful and hate­ful and self-focused because, well, yeah, um, he’s still kind of crazy.  (Every­one around him hates him for that.  What they don’t see is– they’re also a lit­tle bit crazy too.  All of us are.  Roger’s just more crazy than most.)  And Roger, because he sees some­thing in Flo­rence– oh, but she’s lovely and good– he hurts her a lot, even as he does some awfully nice things for her too.  He grasps too hard at the bird in his hand, and it’s crushed and wounded and messy, flap­ping away one-winged and squawk­ing.  He should’ve had a ther­a­pist there, ask­ing him ques­tions that let him think about it when ses­sions are over in a way that let every­one feel a lit­tle less reeling.

There are lots of great cin­e­mato­graphic metaphors– him walk­ing alone in LA in places where no one should walk, sound effects coin­ci­dent with panic attacks, things that he sees on the out­side that mark what’s going on his very, very still face (Stiller does some­thing won­der­ful here with his expres­sions, he’s really got the blank face of some­one on a lot of anti-anxiety meds or some­one in such denial until the rage just comes pour­ing out, blast­ing past that self-preservationist wall) that just from a film student’s per­spec­tive, it’s a movie worth seeing.

But if you’ve ever been depressed, in denial, been some­one try­ing SO FUCKING HARD to keep it under con­trol, and then you just can’t, and you lose it, hurt peo­ple you don’t really want to and then fuck, what do you do, you still have to get out of bed the next morn­ing, and the sun hurts, it’s too fuck­ing bright, Ben Stiller does some­thing amaz­ing.  He just totally nails it.

See­ing this movie hurt, yet there were some won­der­ful, won­der­ful moments that gave me such hope for the char­ac­ter, because given some­thing con­struc­tive to do, out­side the lull in his head, god­damnit, he did it.  He made the dog­house, even if it took him a while.  He took care of the dog.  He took care of Flo­rence when push came to shove, even if it was within the lim­its he still had to work in.  He put up that pic­ture on the wall, and that moment of care when with soft, ten­der fin­gers he mea­sured off where the framed niece’s pic­ture should go?  And though it took too much booze, some coke and a joint to break through that wall of denial he’d built between him­self and the denial of “I’m try­ing to do noth­ing” he kept telling every­one he was there in LA to do?  He was finally hon­est.  Painfully so, awk­wardly so, and oh, with poten­tially great and unknown con­se­quences, since the movie fades to black just as Flo­rence gets to Roger’s voice mail con­fes­sion of like-maybe-love with per­haps the great­est end­ing line I’ve heard in a movie in years.

“This is you,” Flo­rence says, and Roger’s eyes dart away, because he can’t bear to look as she lis­tens.  We can only guess what hap­pens next.  But yes– that is Greenberg.

—

Last spring, I stopped work­ing.  I just couldn’t do it any­more.  And I couldn’t tell any­one how depressed I was either.  Not my ther­a­pist, not my hus­band, not the peo­ple at work, not one of my friends, online or in life.  I felt help­less and hid­den and awful and use­less and while I didn’t actively con­tem­plate sui­cide, I did wish there were days I wouldn’t wake up or I’d just not pay atten­tion and get taken out by a bus.  So I hid.  And I wal­lowed.  And then hid some more.  There were lots of rea­sons why I couldn’t admit how depressed I felt, lots of old issues and new, some of which involve peo­ple whose feel­ings I won’t drag into this blog.  But suf­fice it to say it was messy and awful and com­plex and I felt utterly, totally, lost.

I stopped tak­ing my meds, stopped tak­ing show­ers, avoided phone calls and emails, didn’t eat much, all sorts of things.  And peo­ple knew some­thing was wrong, but I wasn’t talk­ing, and every so often I could put on a facade of half nor­mal and go out to a fam­ily din­ner– and it wasn’t like I was cut­ting or burst­ing into tears or doing some­thing so obvi­ous as drink­ing myself into a coma.  Things occurred– like in Green­berg– that forced me into func­tion– and those were help­ful, because the focus on some­thing besides myself got me mov­ing.  (And I was never so mean to other peo­ple as he.)  There were wed­dings to attend, my mother-in-law’s apart­ment to clean, other out­side things to get done, and my truly Bet­ter Half sat my ass down and said– “I don’t care what you do, but you need to get out of the house every day.”

Thus the bookstore.

I have got­ten out of the house every day and smiled and sold mem­ber­ships and looked up books for eight hours a day and been com­pe­tent and slowly– so slowly– got­ten back some of the sense of self-worth that I utterly, totally lost by giv­ing up on my legal career and some kind of proof that I was smart and knew what I was doing despite all the feel­ings inside my head that tell me I’m stu­pid and worth­less and not wor­thy of love, even when the med­ica­tion is working.

To date, despite the fact that I see a very good ther­a­pist and keep up my vis­its with my excel­lent shrink, I have walled off those feel­ings and not thought about them and taken my meds and got­ten out of bed every day and con­cen­trated on doing my job really well– my stu­pid retail chain book­store job, because that’s how most rich, “suc­cess­ful”, pro­fes­sional peo­ple think about peo­ple who work in book­stores, didn’t you know?  I have made friends with kooky book peo­ple who love all my bak­ing and think I am smart and amaz­ing to recall all the names of those books and come to me to ask me what I think about X because some customer’s ask­ing.  I feel bet­ter because I have reg­u­lar cus­tomers who come to me for book rec­om­men­da­tions and think I have excel­lent taste.  I feel bet­ter because my bosses tell me I’m awe­some on a reg­u­lar basis and I can tell that they mean it. I felt bet­ter because  my shrink and my ther­a­pist ask me excel­lent ques­tions, and even if I haven’t been entirely hon­est with them about how depressed I have been, they ask me excel­lent ques­tions that make me think about things I don’t want to think about and yet, with the increas­ing effec­tive­ness of the meds, I can’t help but do.  I have been tak­ing my meds.

But it’s spring, and spring is a bad time for me.  So a few weeks ago, when it rained and rained and rained, I used my high-intensity-UV light a lit­tle too much to com­bat the hor­ri­ble weepies I get, and after a few days I was wash­ing dishes and could get the new-fangled dish soap IN THE CUCUMBER SCENT AND I HATE THE CUCUMBER SCENT AND JESUS FUCK WHY WON’T THIS OPEN WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS FUCKING CONTAINER?

Yeah.  Some­thing was wrong.  It’s just dish soap.  So the Bet­ter Half came and opened the dish soap, retreated, and I went back to wash­ing the dishes.  When I was done, I took an ati­van and real­ized I was prob­a­bly manic and told the BH so.

Ati­van is a won­der­ful thing, and we went to a fam­ily party for my nephew’s first birth­day that night, and except for need­ing to go be off by myself for a lit­tle bit when there were a lot of peo­ple all laugh­ing at his smear­ing the cake that I made him all over his head (noth­ing so sat­is­fy­ing as a baby lov­ing your cake enough to smear it all over his hair)– and there’s a scene in Green­berg where Rhys Ifans comes in to ask Ben Stiller if he’s going to play Gatsby the whole way through the party that spoke to me oh, so very deeply– so I was mostly bet­ter by the next day and kept up with the ati­van, except by the end of the next week I was spi­ral­ing deeply again and wishes of buses and not wak­ing up and let­ting go of the steer­ing wheel, while not yet man­i­fest­ing, were edg­ing toward con­scious­ness again.

I called the doc­tor this time.  And the ther­a­pist.  And told my Bet­ter Half.  And we’re work­ing my way up through new meds.  And I am feel­ing bet­ter.  Still tired and weepy.  Still prone to need time to myself.  But I am see­ing it’s time to break down that wall that I’ve had because I have to get out of bed every day and just get to work, because you know what?  I have.  And I also saw that I almost couldn’t, and yet I still did. I’m kind of proud of that bit.

So.  I’m blog­ging and blath­er­ing again, and I’d sug­gest to Mr. Car­lat and Mr. Baum­bach and Mr. Stiller (espe­cially Mr. Stiller, even though you’ll prob­a­bly hate his char­ac­ter as much as you love him, and yet Roger Green­berg is now for­ever a hero of mine).  Talk to your patients.  Talk to your ther­a­pists.  But most impor­tantly?  Talk to yourself.

I’ve been avoid­ing what Flo­rence said in so very clear-eyed a way.

This is you.

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