How is mental illness recovery like climate change? Well…
Sitting on the couch one night last week, a thought crossed my mind that hadn’t in I don’t know how long. I looked over at my dog, who was curled up on her blanket at the end of the couch, and thought, “Life is good.” That was a real thought that organically went through my head. There was no prompting or backing into the concept intellectually. It just was.
What followed next was the realization that I hadn’t thought anything of the sort in a long, long time. I had a little happy cry about it. My homework from my therapist was to write down good things that happened, and my notes from that night are so full of hope. “I’m blown away that this thought legitimately crossed my mind,” I wrote. “Maia [our dog] is all curled up after a trip to the dog park and dinner. We have a nice house. Laura [my girlfriend] is a great decorator. I know my presentation tomorrow is going to be awesome.” I wrote, too, about how the thought had shocked me. I felt real joy.
Less than a week later, I put a knife to wrist for the first time in years. I didn’t draw any blood, but only because I knew I’d chicken out or screw it up and be left with terrible scars to explain. I thought about my new pill collection, wondered how much of what would do the job. It didn’t take long to come up with an answer. I next looked up whether the seizures that the combo would surely induce before my death would be painful. I thought about where and when I should do it, and then a quick flash of perspective broke me into pieces on the floor.
The storm
I’ve been meditating almost every morning, and the morning of this last attack was no exception. The same thoughts kept asserting themselves in my mind. Anxious thoughts. Resentful. Angry.
I won’t go into the exact thoughts themselves or the little things that knocked me off balance one after the next. Really, they don’t matter. They are not unique or even especially negative. After I let the first few hits land, I was going down. The details of why would sort themselves out.
The night before was my first night of group therapy (as opposed to individual). I’d been open and honest. We dissected one of my angry moments as a group. I’d even said something about how my anger often switches to intense depression after I “realize” that I’m a huge piece of shit for getting angry, that I’m ending up just like the rageful father I vowed to never be. Here I was, not 12 hours later, crashing down that path with reckless abandon.
When I got home and the garage door closed behind me, I couldn’t get out of the car. I sat, first frozen there, then curling into the fetal position. The car still was running. I could just roll down the windows and let it run, right? Wouldn’t that do the trick after not too long? I tried to shake it off.
I calmed down my breathing and got out of the car, pretending I had it together. I did not. It’s like being screamed at by a rapidly growing mob of people who hate you. It doesn’t take long for the voices to become indistinct and deafening. Frenzied, I flew up the stairs to where I knew a nice sharp knife was waiting, flipped it open, and put the point to my wrist.
A mess of self doubt and anxiety had me fearing that I’d botch the job trying to cut open my wrists. My mind lurched to other possibilities, from gruesome to increasingly methodical. Before I knew it, I was planning— what combination of the pills in the medicine cabinet would do the trick, where I could go die in peace without fear of misguided heroics— a huge red flag.
A sudden influx of work emails distracted me. It sounds silly, but I’d glanced at my phone, and they were urgent enough that I felt compelled to respond. I had, after all, said that I was going to work from home. After that, except for some short crying breaks, I actually ended up having a very productive day.
Butterflies, recovery, and climate change
These attacks are exhausting. It’s like whiplash. One minute I’m counting my lucky stars, and the next I’m walking myself through ending the pain once and for all. The intensity of the recent attacks has afforded me some interesting perspective.
Like tracing a hurricane back to the beat of a butterfly’s wings, I’m learning more about how the attacks really start. A few years ago while meditating, I realized that my anger, the rage I’d been struggling to contain for half my life, comes out of anxious thoughts. That was like finding out that storms start off as clouds. It’s helpful, sure. I could hunker down when the clouds were rolling in. Between this blog, a personal journal, and my therapy worksheets, I have a wealth of data to track things back, to get closer to that butterfly.
I’ve been finding that climate change is an especially apt analogy for my recovery. As things get warmer, weather patterns are becoming increasingly erratic. The resulting floods, droughts, super storms, record highs and lows — they’re all byproducts of shifting climate. When it’s snowing a month earlier than usual during an off-season cold snap, it’s easy miss the larger trend and proclaim that it’s all a hoax, just like an attack can make it feel like wellness is unreachable, that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t getting closer.
In reality, though, the planet is gradually warming — and I am gradually getting better. I like to think, to hope, that this is where the analogy breaks down, that the storms that pummel me are not harbingers of worsening situation but symptoms of a shifting one. Time will tell.
