Goodbye Dear Friend

An employee of ours, a very good friend of mine, was found on the job dead this morning. His job is in a remote location and is during the night shift. A sheriff deputy making a routine patrol through the areas found him.

They know so far, that my friend used his cell phone to call 911 approximately 5 hours before his body was found, but the call was not traceable and evidently he was unable to speak.

My friend was an older gentleman who kept me supplied with fresh fruit and vegetables. He stopped in to see me almost every single week. He would tell me stories about his past, and how he used to be a mean drunk and how he had been able to stop drinking when he accepted Christ as his Lord. He would talk about God’s amazing power to forgive and His grace and His mercy.

I can hardly stand to think I will never look up at the door when it opens and see him walking in with his smile and his bag of produce. The thought of him dying in a parking lot, alone and unable to ask for help, breaks my heart. My only comfort comes from something my husband said…that he believes as he was dying the angels were with him and comforting him and ushered him straight from here to Heaven to be with the Lord forever.

The Bible says “To be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8; Philippians 1:23) To me that means that as soon as he took his last breath here, he took his next in the very presence of Jesus.

Much better....

I am much better now. That was the first major incident I have had since being put on the Lamictal. It was the worst I think I have ever had. That scares me.

It seems like a cruel joke...for the depression to go away for a longer period of time that I can ever remember, and then come back so fast and hard and seemingly without warning.

Thank your for your thoughts and prayers, comments and emails. You don't know how much it helps.

Being alive hurts, but I am trying to hold on to the hope that one day the pain will pass...

My Purse, My Mask & My Sanity

I’m wearing the mask today. It’s tight and it makes me sweat and the plastic crinkles with every movement, but I have to wear it. Without it I would appear unprofessional and uncouth. I would seem to be weak or “crazy” or just some “emotional woman”. I have to wear the mask then don’t I? There are times that I wear this mask for days at a time. Sometimes I wonder if I look in the mirror while not wearing the mask, would I even see a face anymore.

I dreamed last night that I was walking somewhere and someone took my purse from my shoulder and ran with it. I cannot see the person in my dream, I can only see my purse bobbing and weaving as it is disappearing from my sight. A friend and I have talked about this a million times. I’ve told her that if anyone ever snatches my purse, they’ll have to kill me because I am not letting it go. There is no money in it, but it would take countless hours to replace everything I keep in there.

Between the mask and my purse, and having to keep up with both, I am mentally & totally exhausted.

A Middle Aged Woman on Being Unwanted

Where is it we learn that our self worth is not based on other people’s opinions? Is that something we learn very young? If we missed that original class, is there some place we can take a make-up class? Like summer school maybe?

Sometimes I cannot read my own emotions. Most of the time I cannot read my own emotions. I try to think of who I am and what my opinions are. My opinions seem to sway with the wind.

One question I have had forever it seems like, is does the depression come first, or the thought that no one wants me? Is it the depression making me wish I could take a forever nap, or is it every time I realize I am not wanted.

When you’re my age, being wanted or not shouldn’t matter, but God how it does.

Quincy's Lesson

In my other life, I was a police officer.

I was one of two female patrol officers out of 80 in the municipality I worked for. To be successful in that career as a female then, it took two things… It took getting through the academy at an age where I was on average 14 years older than most students there, (while they went out and partied every night, I stayed in my little dorm room and studied my ass off), and it took allowing the men on my shift to test me, to see for themselves that they could trust me to cover their ass in a bad situation, to be successful in my chosen career. I loved that job and I was good at what I did.

That was, of course, before my mental illness began to manifest itself.

While on patrol, I met a lot of people from many different backgrounds, many lifestyles that I could never have imagined until I began working with them. One of those people was Quincy.

Quincy was a young homeless man of 24. Sometimes when it was very cold he would go sit on the porch of some business that had closed for the day in order to be arrested and get out of the cold and maybe a hot meal. Sometimes he would go to some big store where he could be somewhat ignored. and he would find his way to the restroom and go to sleep on the floor for a while, at least until an employee would walk in and find him there.

Quincy didn’t talk to everyone, but he talked to me on several occasions. I’m not sure why he chose to talk to me, but I learned so much from him.

Quincy carried everything he owned in a bag. He wore what appeared to be all his clothing, layer upon layer, all the time. He had a most pleasant face and an even more pleasant attitude.

One night, I had stopped by city hall to drop off some reports and Quincy was resting on the bench there in the hallway. Most of the officers didn’t seem to notice him when he was there, or at least they didn’t acknowledge him. This night, he nodded as I walked in the door, and I knew it was a night when he was willing to talk. It was a quiet shift so I stopped and talked.

Now we all have our pre-conceived notions about people, especially someone like Quincy, who was obviously homeless. We assume so many things as to why they are where they are in life. I had too, but Quincy taught me something that night.

He pulled his old ragged bad from under the bench and pulled a sketch pad out. Flipping through the pages, he stopped at a pencil drawing of a woman’s face. I was just dumb struck. I asked if he drew the picture and he solemnly nodded yes. He then flipped through several pages, showing me more of his artwork.

I told Quincy how beautiful his work was and what talent he possessed. He told me about his art and about when he was young and discovered he had that ability. He talked about his life on the streets. He spoke so eloquently. His grammar so perfect.

When I questioned him about helping him find a place to live until he could get back on his feet, he smiled and slowly shook his head. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He was content.

Quincy never bothered anyone. We never had a call on him other than he was attempting to make his bed on some sidewalk behind some business, or someone would call in a report of a “suspicious looking male”. People saw him with his bag and his dark coat with its hood which covered his face and they were afraid. I would have been too had I not known him.

He wouldn’t take money. I have heard more than one person say that, and I too had offered him a few dollars now and then. He would just shake his head and tell me thank you but I don’t need it. I had a friend tell me once that he was at a Burger King and as my friend walked by to go in, Quincy handed him a coupon for a free Whopper. He told my friend that someone had given them to him and he couldn’t use them all before they expired.

Some fast food places would see him outside and take him a meal, which he would accept graciously. He would also take clothing or a blanket if it was offered to him, but never money.

This week, on a night that it was 18 degrees outside, Quincy was hit by a car while trying to push his buggy full of belongings across a four lane highway. By the time the car came to a stop, Quincy was trapped in the windshield of the car, and everything he owned was scattered across the roadway. As of today, Quincy is in stable condition. He has massive internal injuries and it is expected he will lose a leg when he is in good enough condition for surgery.

The local news channel showed a picture of Quincy. I recognized it as an old mug shot. He had that same smile I always saw. They also showed a picture of all his things lying all over the road, and a picture of the windshield he was hanging from when the car finally stopped.

I cannot get his face out of my mind. I hear his soft voice as clearly as if I just spoke with him yesterday. I so desperately hope he will be okay, and that he will not suffer.

If he doesn’t pull through, I hope that when Quincy gets to Heaven, he will have the biggest mansion there. I hope he has more sketch books than exist in all the stores in the world.

God please take care of Quincy, and all the other Quincy’s in the world on this cold, cold night.

December 31 Hmmmmm....Fast Facts for today

December 31 Hmmmmm....Fast Facts for today.

It was one year ago today I had my last cigarette.
Although I may light up again tomorrow.

I have just come off a 2.5 day migraine.
I have 4 - 5 of these per year.

I survived another "Holiday Season".
Without eating a bullet.

I am bringing in yet another New Year alone.
He had to go to bed several hours ago.

Entanglement in Your Mind

Have you ever felt so deeply intertwined in something that no matter how badly you feel the need to escape you can’t? You feel as if you are trying to run under water. You are working and working to escape but it’s as if your body is entombed in cement.

You can feel the burning in your throat as the air has been blocked from escaping. Your brain is becoming so muddled from the lack of oxygen that your vision is becoming blurred and the face above you is no longer even clear enough to know for sure if it is a friend who has turned on you or a foe to begin with.

All you know for sure, is that at this moment, you’d give anything to be freed from the entanglement in your mind.

Maxi Pads & Love & Carrie

I received a phone call Saturday morning. My son-in-law informed me that my firstborn grandchild was in the closet praying, and was about to be beaten.

Now for Stephen King fans, you know what I am talking about. For the rest of you, my baby, my first grandchild, started her period Saturday!

I cannot tell you why I feel the way I do, or even how I do feel. It touched me. I mean I squalled like a baby when she got on the phone to tell me about it. Cried again Saturday night when I saw her for our Christmas dinner.

I was the first person to hold this child. I was her mom’s Lamaze coach. I kept her the 1st 4 years of her life while her mom worked or was busy with my 2nd grandchild, sometimes for 3-4 days at a time when I could talk her mom into it.

Today, at 12, she is a 5’2 inch blonde.
With boobs.
With freckles.
And now…with her period.

Merry Christmas.

The Cardboard Sign

The Cardboard Sign

The cardboard sign did not stand there on the sidewalk alone of its own accord, but the thousands of us who drove past it for three days in a row might as well have thought so.

He had been standing there most of the week, right at 5:oo, when people were leaving work and hurrying through the masses of people to get home. Brake lights and tires squealing and the blast of angry horns were what he experienced at that time of day.

The sign said, “Will work for food. Hungry”. Same kind of sign you can see in any big city any day of the week. Same faceless person holding it. The person you don’t look at. The person you really don’t want to catch your eye lest you feel like shit for not stopping and offering money.

I mean, who knows about these people? Do they really need food, or will they take your money and go buy their next cheap bottle with it? You work hard every day for your pay, why should you give it to someone who would rather bum off the sidewalk by preying on peoples conscience with their cardboard sign?

The third day he stood there was one of those days where it was all I could do to maintain control at work. For 9 hours I had bit my lip and forced myself to not breakdown. Once I was in my car however, once I was out of eyesight of the people I work with who see my mask everyday and think I have it all together, I finally burst like a damn after a torrential week of rain.

Part of my trip home I am literally fighting to see the road through the tears that I can no longer control. Tears expressing my frustration and my rage at having to live each day by convincing myself it is the right thing to do when in reality all I really want is to go to sleep and never wake up.

When I got to his intersection, there he was. I no doubt look 100 times worse than I feel, and I know my mascara has run down and smeared into the makeup on my cheek. Temporarily blinded by the pain deep in my soul, I looked at him. For that split second, I allowed our eyes to meet. The same eyes I had succeeded in avoiding every other day this week.

That faceless man, the one holding the cardboard sign, had a flicker of understanding on his face when he looked at me. I could see so plainly the change that so quickly came to his expression. He held his hand up to his forehead, as men in the old cowboy movies would do when they tip their hat at the women they passed in town. He held it there until I acknowledged the gesture by nodding my head at him.

That happened to me over a month ago. I cannot get out of my mind how that faceless man and I had a commonality that neither of us knew until that moment. It reminds me how much alike we all could be given different circumstances.

I have a steady job. I have never had to beg for money, or a meal. I’ve never had to stand on the sidewalk holding a cardboard sign saying I would work for food.

Ironically however, we both find ourselves in a big city, faceless, avoided & alone.

The Mask We Wear - Charlie C Finn ~ ~ 1966

By
Charlie C Finn ~
~ 1966

Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a mask, I wear a thousand masks, masks that I am afraid to take off, and none of them are me.

Pretending is an art that is second nature with me, but don't be fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled. I give you the impression that I'm secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within me as well as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game, that the water's calm and I'm in command, and that I need no one.

But don't believe me, please. My surface may seem smooth, but my surface is my mask, my ever-warying ever-concealing mask. Beneath lies no smugness, no complacence. Beneath dwells the real me in confusion, in fear, in aloneness. But I hide this. I don't want anybody to know it. I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed.
That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind, a nonchalant, sophisticated facade, to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance that knows. But such a glance is precisely my salvation. My only salvation, and I know it.

That is if it is followed by acceptance, if it is followed by love. It's the only thing that liberates me, from myself, from my own self-built prison walls, from barriers that I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me of what I can't assure myself, that I'm really worth something.

But I don't tell you this. I don't dare. I'm afraid to. I'm afraid you'll think less of me, that you'll laugh, and your laugh would kill me.

I'm afraid that deep down I'm nothing, that I'm just no good, and that you will see this and reject me. So I play the game, my desperate pretending game, with a facade of assurance without, and a trembling child within. And so begins the parade of masks, and my life becomes a front. I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that is really nothing. And nothing of what is everything, of what is crying within me.

So when I'm going through my routine do not be fooled by what I'm saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm not saying, what I'd like to be able to say, what for survival I need to say, but what I can't say. I dislike hiding. Honestly. I dislike the superficial game I'm playing, the superficial, phony game.

I'd really like to be genuine and spontaneous, and me, but you've got to help me. You've got to hold out your hand even when that's the last thing I seem to want, or need. Only you can wipe away from my eyes the blank stare of the breathing dead. Only you can call me into aliveness.

Each time you're kind, and gentle, and encouraging, each time you try to understand because you really care, my heart begins to grow wings, very feeble wings, but wings. With your sensitivity and empathy, and your power to understanding, you can breathe life into me. I want you to know that. I want you to know how important you are to me, how you can be a co-creator of the person that is me if you choose to.

Please choose to. You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble. You alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic and uncertainty, from my lonely prison. So do not pass me by. It will not be easy for you. A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls.

The nearer you approach me, the blinder I strike back. I fight against the very thing that I cry out for. But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls, and in this lies my hope ... my only hope.

Please try to beat down those walls with firm hands, but with gentle hands, for a child is very sensitive. Who am I you may wonder? I am someone you know very well. For I am every man and I am every woman you meet.

Charlie C Finn ~
~ 1966

Some days I think about my life in terms of each day…each 24 hour increment. The depression side of bipolar causes every minute in those days to be almost intolerable.

If I don’t stay totally busy, I mean non-stop activity of some sort, I start thinking about how long each day is when you’re just doing everything you can to hang on.

I begin to wonder how many more minutes I can convince myself that it matters if I stay.

Sometimes my mind goes so fast that I feel surely people can look at me and see my scalp wiggling, moving across my head as if it contains some trapped animal.

I believe that might be my brains way of not getting too close to the scariest question:
How much longer can I fight what seems to be the only ending to this story.

How long must one wait?

If I run away, from what am I running. If I run away, what will people think. If I never return it won’t matter what they think. What if I run away and can never find a place to stop. What if I run and I run and I cannot find what I need.

If I run away alone, is that not what I am running away from? Alone. ALONE. AAAAAAALLLLLLLOOOOONNNNNNNNEE.

Where are you God? Where are you husband. Husband are you not supposed to be God’s physical touch here on earth towards me? I don’t feel either of you.

First the sex left.

Then the kisses left.

The hugs are fast on their way too.

Talking is almost gone.

I lay next to him and I stare at him as he sleeps. He looks like the sensual man who woooed me. His voice is the same, but someone has went inside and taken over because that’s not the man I fell in love with.

I think I am on the verge of losing it and I don’t know how to stop it. I am afraid if they ever put me there in that place, that I’ll never get out; not the real me. I am afraid the part of me that is broken will never return and even though it is broken I still don’t want to lose a part of me do I?

My dad is still alive. So is my mom. My daughter and son of course and their babies. How long do I hang on to something that is so very painful in order to prevent other people from having pain? I’m tired. I’ve made too many dumb moves and had too many dumb moves done towards me to try to keep up the pace anymore.

I have somewhat of a plan.

I have the means.

Now all I need is the right timing.

Passive Suicidality

Active suicidality means you have means and a plan. Passive suicidality means that you are thinking about suicide, or have a vague idea around a plan, or you are setting up circumstances to execute some plan if you need to...I believe you referred to it as a "back door". The average person doesn't think this way. It's a problem. Get counseling.

This was a response I read to a question a reader had asked this doctor on a website.

I had never before heard of passive suicidality. I have thought that way for years. My depression has never lifted 100% since I first began suffering with it. Even during my “good” times, I have always kept in my mind that if it ever gets too bad and I just cannot stand it any longer, I can “get out”.

I honestly never thought that this thinking pattern was abnormal.

ADVICE PLEASE

I know I lost my readership back when I went through a very bad time and all my postings were coming from the manic depression. I have tried and tried to get some of my old readers back and get some new readers on board and it is not working and I am tired of trying to put on the happy face to attract them all. I think now my blog will be more of a journal.


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