OK, I’m sick with the latest iteration of lung gak, this time of the variety requiring inhalers, antibiotics, and codeine to suppress cough. And perhaps it is the drugs for why I find this hilarious:
Reminds me I need to get some fresh catnip…
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bipolar, Book Conservation, Depression, Failure, Gardening, Health, Press, Publishing
I mentioned last week that I was somewhere in the downswing of my bipolar cycle. It’s sometimes hard to explain what that means. For those who haven’t ever experienced a true depression, here’s perhaps an insight into what it is like.
This morning I got a lot done. Errands ran, exercise in, seeing to a lot of annoying administrivia for my (soon-to-be-over) position as president of our Neighborhood Association. Then this afternoon a nice young woman reporter came by for a long interview for Vox Magazine – a profile piece they wanted to do about me as a book conservator. She was well prepared for the subject, asked a lot of solid questions, and gave me plenty of opportunity to brag on my profession. Then we got into some other personal things about me, and by the time she left I knew that she was quite impressed with all I have done, all that I have accomplished, and the successes which are currently in process.
She left, I got some conservation work done. Then I went out to the garden and harvested the first couple of ‘Lemon Boy’ tomatoes and green bell peppers – which I just chopped up and added to a nice tortellini salad waiting for dinner.
Sound good? Well, yeah, it should.
Know what I was thinking? That I had waited far too long to take care of the administrative tasks. About the client who called me during dinner last night to check on a conservation project which I didn’t even remember having been told to proceed on, and how I needed to scramble to get that done. And that the tomatoes and peppers are late, and an indication that this year’s harvest from the garden was going to be waaaaaaaaaaaaay down – perhaps only a quarter of what it usually is, and that was clearly due to some kind of ineptitude on my part.
This is not a major depression. I can function just fine. I am able to motivate myself to get things done. I can recognize my accomplishments.
But I take little joy or pride in anything I’m doing. I feel like I am constantly trying to paper over the cracks in my world, to hide the screw-ups I make lest someone figure out just how incompetent I am.
Don’t misunderstand this as a whine or a plea for “help”. I’ll be fine – I have been through this more than enough times to know the path out of the valley. I just thought I would share a little perspective on what it is like to be where I am.
Jim Downey
I can be . . . ah, stubborn. Yeah, let’s just call it stubborn. Not bull-headed, not thick, not dense, not stuck in my ways. Stubborn.
But sometimes I learn.
This weekend I wanted to spend some time getting yardwork done – stuff which had been neglected a bit, due to the recent class I was teaching and the high temps and heavy rains. Yesterday’s task was to chop up a bunch of larger brush bits, turning it into kindling and small logs for the firewood ric.
So I got out the chainsaw. And it wouldn’t start.
Now, mind, this saw is only a couple years old. And hadn’t seen a lot of use. But the last couple of times I tried to use it, I’ve run into problems with it.
I am very mechanically inclined, and usually have no problems tacking small repair job or other such tasks. Just Saturday I rehabbed the wheel bearings and did other minor maintenance on my chipper/shredder.
But me and chainsaws . . . well, we don’t get along. Just one of those weird things. Still, under most circumstances, I would go ahead and spend the time to take the saw apart, checking the various components to make sure that they’d work, then putting it back together. Eventually, I’d sort out the problem, get the thing working properly.
Except now I’m fighting a mild depression, as noted the other day. And if I couldn’t find anything wrong with the saw on the first pass, it’d really piss me off. And depress me further for getting pissed off and letting a simple mechanical thing get the better of me. That whole cycle would just spin until the whole day was ruined.
I looked at the chainsaw again. Then I put it back in its case, and stuck it in the garage. Then I went out and bought a new chainsaw.
Silly? Maybe. But as I told a friend in an email:
Well, this is one of the things that I have *finally* learned – that I don’t have to do the hard thing every single fucking time when fighting a depressive cycle – that it’s OK to take the easy way out sometimes.
The old chainsaw will still be the same, sitting in the garage, later. When I’m not struggling with my own personal demons I’ll get it out, fix it (or determine that it can’t be fixed for a reasonable amount) and then either find a new home for it or keep it as a spare.
The new chainsaw worked fine yesterday. I got a lot of work done with it. About to go out and finish up here in a bit. Even better, the same company who made the old one (I like their products generally) had since come out with a line of saws which have vibration control. At first I thought it was a gimmick, but when I started using it I found out that it works pretty well. And as a result, my hands do not have a fraction of the ache and pain they usually do when I’ve been using a saw a lot.
Yeah, sometimes, I learn.
Gah. I hate to be right, sometimes.
In January 2009 I wrote this:
As usual, it’s only in hindsight that you recognize it. The typical seasonal downturn is something more. Oh, you’re aware of the symptoms. The intense introspection. Desire to sleep more. Lower level of creativity. Difficulty in finding the motivation to do anything. Lack of enthusiasm for the usual things you enjoy. Tendency to drink more, without getting the slightest buzz from it. You’re aware of the symptoms, but until you’ve been dealing with them for a while they don’t all add up to something that you can see.
The ‘black dog‘.
And as noted previously, my bipolar condition tends to run on an 18-to-24 month cycle, though that can be effected by external factors.
Count months. Yeah.
Which explains why teaching my class the last two weeks was so hard, so draining, for all that it was also very enjoyable. Being a public person in the midst of a depressive slide is doable, it just takes an inordinate amount of energy.
Ah, well.
But the good news is that once I realize how deeply I am into this cycle, it usually means that I don’t have a whole lot further down to go. Typically, just a matter of weeks. Something to look forward to. And now that the class is done I can put my energy back into the other things which need my attention, and slowly build on the small accomplishments.
Walk. One foot in front of the other. It’s the only thing that helps.
Jim Downey
This morning Weekend Edition – Saturday had an interview with Barry Petersen, who has a new book out about the experience of dealing with his wife’s early-onset Alzheimer’s. The whole interview is worth hearing, and I imagine the book is worth reading, but here’s a bit that really struck home:
I thought with the live-in caregiver I’d solved the problem for another 2-3 years.
We lasted 8 months.
And this is perhaps the worst part, the most difficult part of this for me: the woman who was the caregiver, the nurse, who was monitoring both of us, said “Jan us always going to have someone to look after her. The caregiver has no one to look after the care-giver.” Then she looked me in the eyes and said “you are going down.”
My health was beginning to suffer. I almost literally walked off a cliff. I don’t mean that I thought about walking off a cliff. I mean that I almost literally walked off a cliff. I was living in a house which was next to a cliff and I thought this was a way to end the pain – was to walk off that cliff.”
His experience caring for his wife is fundamentally different from our experience in caring for my wife’s mother. The stress of being a single caregiver and caring for your spouse must be horrific, and I do not in any way want to criticize or second-guess his decision. Indeed, one of the things which really emerges from “Her Final Year” as I have been working on it is that there is no ‘correct’ decision about when or if to put a loved one with Alzheimer’s into a care facility – each case is individual, and no one can second-guess that incredibly difficult and painful decision. I just offer the interview as another insight into what the caregiving experience is like, and how it is likely to touch us all.
Jim Downey
PS – this post marks #900 for this blog. More on that, later.
Filed under: Aldous Huxley, Augmented Reality, Government, Health, Music, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Synesthesia, Writing stuff
Almost 30 years ago I took psilocybin for the first time. I repeated the experience several times over the next couple of years, and have largely spent the time since making sense of the whole thing. Some of this is reflected in Communion of Dreams: descriptions of synesthesia in the book were based largely on my own experiences while under the influence of ‘shrooms, and the use of ‘auggies’ (drugs designed to increase neural processing) were also inspired by those experiences.
But the use of psychedelics was largely from another time. Not the first instance of my having been out-of-phase with the rest of society.
So it’s somewhat surprising to see new research being conducted using these drugs. Research which really should have been conducted decades ago, were it not for the paranoia of the “Just Say No!” years. This weekend’s edition of To The Best Of Our Knowledge provides a nice insight into this:
It’s taken decades for study of mind-altering drugs to be taken seriously. Now a handful of scientists are at the forefront of new research. One of them is Roland Griffiths is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. He’s just turned his attention to psilocybin, a classic hallucinogen commonly known as magic mushrooms. He tells Steve Paulson about his findings.
And:
We hear a clip from Annie Levy who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the late stages she took part in an experimental study designed to see if taking psilocybin could help with the fear and panic about dying. In her case, taking a single dose was a life-changing experience in her final months.
It’s a shame, really, that the therapeutic use of hallucinogens has been stymied for so long. There is such a long tradition of using these drugs to access deeper insight and spirituality in many cultures that one is almost tempted to say that humankind’s evolution has been influenced by psychedelics as much as learning to use fire. That we have cut ourselves off from these natural psychotropics is a shame – and again is reflected in Communion of Dreams in how we have artificially lost part of our natural birthright.
Jim Downey
*From the Moody Blues, of course.
I haven’t written much about it, though it is mentioned in my bio and most of my close friends know: I lost both parents when I was just entering adolescence.
Well, no, I didn’t “lose” them. They died. My dad was a cop, killed on the job, and my mom died in a car accident about a year and a half later (no link here – believe it or not, relevant newspaper archives online don’t yet cover the 1960s and 70s). I’m not being pedantic – it was crucial for me to face the hard reality of my parent’s deaths in order to come to terms with them being gone. Why? Well, because everyone just wanted to dance around the fact that they were dead, relying instead on the usual euphemisms about death in our society.
And that’s why I mention it here, and now. Because there is a new survey out showing that we as a society do not deal well with children who have lost a parent. Here’s a bit from a Wall Street Journal article sent to me by a friend:
Their responses, part of a wide-ranging new survey, indicate that bereavement rooted in childhood often leaves emotional scars for decades, and that our society doesn’t fully understand the ramifications—or offer appropriate resources. The complete survey of more than 1,000 respondents, set for release later this month, was funded by the New York Life Foundation on behalf of Comfort Zone Camp, a nonprofit provider of childhood bereavement camps.
Among the findings: 73% believe their lives would be “much better” if their parents hadn’t died young; 66% said that after their loss “they felt they weren’t a kid anymore.”
Childhood grief is “one of society’s most chronically painful yet most underestimated phenomena,” says Comfort Zone founder Lynne Hughes, who lost both her parents before she was 13. She says she is worried that educators, doctors, and the clergy get little or no training to help them recognize signs of loneliness, isolation and depression in grieving children—and in adults who lost parents in childhood.
Yet 1 in 9 Americans lost a parent before they turned 20.
I have sometimes surprised people by saying that my experience of losing my parents isn’t unusual – not in the span of human history. Given normal lifespans and mortality rates, a lot of people through the ages grew up without having one or both parents. But our culture is really in denial about death, and so we don’t have the same traditions and rituals that may have been in place to help in other times.
Now, I came to terms with the deaths of my parents many years ago. Not all at once, but over time, and in my own ways. That’s what grieving is, and we each do so on our own schedule. But there are things which could have helped – and even to this day, occasionally I come across an insight that helps to explain some of my own emotional landscape.
A decade or so ago I read a book that helped to explain a *lot*: The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father. It showed me that many of the things I just assumed were my own personality quirks were in fact common reactions to the death of a parent. What I wouldn’t have given to have that information decades previously.
And that is why I mention this today. I told my friend who sent the WSJ link that I was not surprised by the results of the survey, but that it would probably be very much a surprise to anyone who hadn’t had this experience. And that should change. Because there are things that we could do to help make the lives easier of those who lose a parent while still a child. And it would help our society at the same time.
Jim Downey
I’ve mentioned working on Her Final Year, getting things transferred and re-organized. That process continues apace, and is going very well.
One of the things which has struck me recently has been seeing something which I hadn’t planned, but I don’t find too surprising: the structure of the book as we have set it up is reflecting the content of the book. Let me explain.
As I noted previously, the book is divided into “months”, each month reflecting a stage of the disease and the impact that it has on both the patient and care-providers. “January” is just the suspicion that there’s something wrong, “February” is detection of actual symptoms of dementia, et cetera. This way we convert the experience that two families had into a generic template which will fit anyone’s experience with the disease and care-giving.
Well, as we’ve gone through and allocated different entries relating to each “month” (entries drawn from blog posts, diary entries and email) there has occurred a striking distribution: just a very few entries in the early months when dementia is only a minor thing, the total rising until September, October, and November. These are the most intense stages of care-giving, the time when it completely occupies your life. Being in the role of care-provider is a labor of love, but it is also emotionally and physically exhausting – just as the number and intensity of the entries in those months shows.
No brilliant insight in this, I realize. But it is just one of those artistic things – a kind of ‘unity’ of design and message – which is very difficult to achieve intentionally, but is elegant when it happens.
Jim Downey
Whew – this morning I completed transferring entries for Her Final Year from the website my co-author set up so we could jointly work on it, and organizing them into files by “month” (this allows me to print out the entries and shift them around to find a good organic narrative in each month). Anyway, it was the first time that I had an actual sense of just how large a body of material we’re working with. And that material is 98,470 words in the current form – the length of a solid, commercial novel.
Now, there will be some adjustments to that total. Some editing will be done, and we still need to do the introductions for each month. Also, the entire body of the second (shorter) part of the book – His First Year, which is the recovery period following caregiving – still needs to be tallied. Even with trimming, I expect the final version of the book will still be in excess of 100,000 words – likely more on the order of 110,000 to 120,000.
No wonder it seems like a lot of work. It is.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Health
Got a call this morning from the doctor’s office: the results of my CAT scan are in. Muscle tear, but nothing penetrating the abdominal wall. No hernia. Just take it easy for a while, let the muscle heal. I should be able to get back to doing things in another week or so, so long as I don’t over-do it.
Which is a relief, on several counts. The pain and downtime I can put up with, now that I know what’s what.
Ironically, early this AM I developed a nasty lower GI bug and fever. Probably something I picked up while over at the doctor’s office or at the hospital. So I have even more incentive to take it easy for the next day or two.
And so it goes.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 