Depression.
Living with it.
Sometimes.
Sometimes, not really living at all with it.
I think, the time spent living, out weighs the not living part, but thats the part that has the most impact. Its what you remember, carry around, and dread with a fear thats irrational and sometimes consuming. The real trick, for me, has been figuring out what it takes for me to happily live with it, without letting it be an all consuming, fear monster in my life. I know now, but its taken me a long time to get back to the creative part of my psyche.
The journey I will share, though it is unique, is probably very similar to many other people’s trips along that path.
I have lived the gamut of the diagnosis, treatments, stereotyping, labels and the downfalls of being open and honest about it.
Diagnosis List
Depression-1993
Manic-Depressive-1998
Bi-Polar-2003
Personality Disorder-2006
PTSD-2008
The medications list is too long to go over. I have been prescribed everything on the market up to 2006, except Lithium.
I have had many therapists and doctors, nurse practitioners, and medical doctors insist I must be medicated to get through it. I don’t think thats the case, not now.
I just have to be able to be creative about how I deal with it. I think the only way to live, for me, is creatively. I cannot go back to that place where all I did was get through this day, so I could wake up and get through another. I have to have some joy now, and my joy comes with my creativity. Really, from the time I was very young, its what has brought me the most joy I have ever had. But that presents a whole new issue for me. How can I make a living and be creative at the same time? Up to now, I have not been able to do that. My art, photography, writing, do not make me a living. I cant eat it. It wont put a roof over my head.
But I digress, thats as I said, a whole other issue. This conversation is about how I battle the depression.
To know where to start, I have had to look, hard at the past 48 years of my life. I have had to go back, and see what brought me here. Besides heredity, what were the catalysts for the life of fear I have had? How did I get here? Why? How do I get out of “here”?
I asked myself this question, finally, after a long time avoiding it;
What happened?
There is a long list of the happening part. It’s really not all that unique, lots of people have had these things happen to them, and lived perfectly fine, productive lives. If I were to put it into a list, which I have never done, list the “happenings” of my life, I am actually not sure I could finish it. Just getting through the first 25 years would really be the most difficult. Its hard to define the things I have lived through, as a list. But I am going to try. My therapist and I talked about this walk through the happenings of my life. Many times. She offered to help me write a book, about the chronology of my depression. And the recovery to what was a very “productive” and high functioning day to day existence. I was not ready. I say “was”, because I think its gone now. I don’t know if I will ever be back to that place.
A Look Back at My “Memory Lane”
I think one can only live with so much loss, before a certain age, and no more. Once a child understands loss, and has help dealing with it, working through how its really a natural progression of life, and its OK to have to take time to deal with it, there really is no going back to the “before the loss” period. Somehow, somewhere, my whole world revolved around loss. From the time I was 7 on, my life became defined by the losses in it. It became how I defined each day, a “what was I going to lose today?” thought pattern, habit, and then, way of life.
The first loss, was my security. When we moved to a new house I was 7. I had one pet. Guinea.
1964, Guinea and me. Before.
He was my guinea pig, dad saved from the lab he worked in, and gave me as a gift, for Christmas one year. We moved, and the day after we moved, I went downstairs to feed Guinea and he was dead. I never felt safe in that house again. Never. No one told me it was OK to feel sad, it was just a “damn guinea pig”. I truly felt in danger from that point on. I know its silly, but it was how I felt. But you didn’t say or have those kind of feelings in my family, or you were punished, criticized, mocked, by the very people who were supposed to help you understand the loss part of that. “You need to just get over it”. I cannot tell you how many times in my life I have heart that one phrase. Its enough to make me want to vomit. It does not work that way. Life rolled on, right over the top of that first loss.
So, about a year and a half later a family moved in next door to us. They too had a lot of kids. Eventually the count was we had 9, they had 11. I loved being able to have a friend who was my age. We had a lot of good times. And some bad ones. Remember, no security.
One of them chose to use me as his personal toy. I was 9, and knew that what was going on was wrong. I was terrified. On so many levels. I grew to hate at 9. I learned how to hate passionately, and intimately. I learned you couldn’t trust, and carried that all the way through my life. I still carry that. I hate that man now, and what he did to me. No one believed me then, and I am not sure who believes me now, so very few know about that period of my life. I trusted no one. Except my cat, Patches. I trusted him. I rescued him from a locked mail box at the age of 8. That was the beginning of rescue for me.
As I became a teen, and learned that I could actually stop that, I did. But it left me in a shambles emotionally. I lived in books. I did nothing in school. I went from a pretty good student to failing a grade within a year. I was “lazy, not working to grade level, not applying myself”, and all the other things that catholic schools said about kids that didn’t fall into the “clique niche”, as I called it. I didn’t go to slumber parties, I didn’t get invited. I didn’t go to birthday parties, I didn’t get invited. I worried about days like valentines day, would I get a valentine? Some days I didn’t. As I got older, I excelled at sports, and drinking, and all sorts of things that were not academics. I felt things differently than other kids, deeply, every slight, I felt. I made a world for myself that was brutal in its exclusion of anything that would hurt me. Including family members. I lived for my horse, my cat, books and sports. I rode an Olympic quality thoroughbred, trained as an event horse, like he was a toy. I scared the shit out of my parents the day I jumped him over a 5 foot jump with no saddle or helmet. I was 9. Talented, and uneducated. I was reckless, fearless, brutal. So was he. If I went too far, he dumped me. He was a good teacher. I lost Micah when I was 18. He was a rock star and I didn’t deserve such loyalty. He mopped so many of my tears up that I am sure heaven is soaked from the drops off his mane. I spent many afternoons sleeping on his rump, stretched across his back, in the safety of his heart. I didn’t deserve him. And I wish I could go back and do things differently, but I can’t. I have to live with that.
1996, Conner’s Pass and I
I am digressing again with the memories. Back to the list. I lost Patches when I was in 8th grade. Again, no grieving, get over it.
I moved out of the house at 14, and stayed with various friends, my boyfriend who beat the hell out of me on a regular basis and occasionally I went home. But home was like hell on earth for me. Beatings were easier, they hurt less, were tangible. I could deal with the tangible. So I spent much of my time out of that house.
I lost Micah when I was 18. My dad came and told me, drunk, at my apartment. By then, I knew he was an alcoholic.
Between 18 and 22 I hitchhiked across the country, learned to drive a truck, learned you could use your body to get almost anything, and did. Then I met a guy, fell in love, I thought, and wound up pregnant. I met his girlfriend, Esther, who was also pregnant, we had a chat with him, and I left. She was more pregnant than I. He wanted me to have an abortion, and I dumped him like the pile of crap he was. I moved back home while I was pregnant, and lived hidden because of the stigma for 4 months, an embarrassment to my parents. I didn’t go outside while it was light, I learned to like the night. The moon. People often wonder about my obsession with the moon. She was the only company I had for a long time.
Friend
I had my daughter, and placed her with a family I thought would give her the love she deserved, the support she needed, and something I never had.
Security.
I left town about 2 months later, and went to the race track. I knew about horses, I could make a living there.
I learned all kinds of things at the track. I moved quickly from the bottom of the rung to respected and knowledgeable. I also learned about drugs, rape, and became a statistic of that time, 1/16,000. I learned about stigma, again, and how “good girls don’t get raped”. The words from a female cop, to me in the hospital. This was really where I learned how to be a “Bad girl”. The story of that rape is another post, all together. In fact, there are a host of posts here. This is simply part of the list.
This post is about the “list”.
Again, I was pregnant, though it would be 6 months before a doctor would believe me. I had pregnancy tests out the wazoo, 7 of them, by Planned Parenthood, of Tampa. They were all negative, until it was obvious that there was an issue! My friend Linda helped me through this whole process. I thank God every day that I have had Linda in my life, you cannot know how many times she saved my life over the next 5 years. Numerous times. My family had no clue, until years later that I had lived through this. My mother still doesn’t know. Thats the way I want it. I don’t think I could live with the fallout. I don’t think the hurt would be worth it, for her, especially. No mother wants to hear her daughter has been raped. I don’t care how strained the relationship is.
So, according to the statistics of the time, I was 1/16,000. Thats how often women who got raped, wound up pregnant. I recovered from the beating, and left Ohio for Florida, about 8 weeks after I got out of the hospital. I spent about 2 weeks hospitalized, having my face repaired. I had no clue I was pregnant. I was told, by the one doctor I saw, that missing a period or 2 after such trauma was normal. After 6, and a growing belly, it was pretty obvious there was MORE to the story than just a missed period. I found another attorney, fired him and found Anthony, who was an advocate for me and my unborn child. He helped me get medical care and placed my child in a home that would love her and care for her because I could not. I loved her, too, and that loss just added to the pile of things I lost because I was not a capable adult.
After I had her, I fell into a dark world of drugs, music, work and more insecurity. But I felt awesome when I was high. It was the first time, in a very long time, I felt good, about myself, the world and my life. I didn’t care that it was killing me. It felt good, I felt good about me, finally.
1984
Then, as is common with my drug of choice, I had a day where I was coming off a week long binge and I looked in the mirror. I weighed 92 lbs. I was dying. I knew it, instantly. I had 2 kids, I didn’t know where they were, and I was dying. I knew, with a clarity that I had never before experienced, that I would die if I didn’t stop. Instantly. It was the day after the shuttle blew up in the sky over Tampa. The morning before, we had all watched the launch, outside the barn, and the subsequent disaster as it unfolded before our eyes. It was grounding, to say the least. It brought me back to reality, in a quick, hard hurry.
Cocaine was killing me.
I was gone from Tampa, 24 hours later.
Spontaneous!
I went to Detroit.
I think I need a break from Memory Lane.
I am not sure my story is unique, its full of spaces and as its written here, it feels very disconnected and scattered. Its kind of how my whole life has been, disconnected and scattered. No real continuity to it except maybe the lack of that. Its been spontaneous.
For once I have no art to go with this, I cant seem to find the right pieces. I don’t have a lot of photos of me, actually. I am always behind the camera, not in front of it.
So for today, I leave you with just my words, and the few photos I do have. Maybe, someday, I will find images to go along with this.
Tomorrow, maybe I will write more about Memory Lane. Its exhausting, these little trips back. Tomorrow is another day.
Today I have discovered I am just not very good at making lists, or following them.
All Over the Map 