It’s been a long time since I updated here.  Last year I transferred everything here from another blog, which I have since closed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I now reject the label “bipolar”, but that’s a long story that’s going to take some time.

One of the reasons I stopped blogging was because I had absolutely nothing to say that I hadn’t said before, and there was nothing good to report, at all.  The last year I blogged with any regularity was 2015, and a lot has happened since then.

Perhaps the most notable thing that happened was that my nephew came to live with us.  He’s my brother’s only child and had spent the first ten years of his life bouncing between dysfunctional homes and child welfare offices, for a wide variety of reasons I’m not even going to get into because the story is so complicated.  Let’s just say he had some behavior problems that were exacerbated, or perhaps even caused, by the circumstances of his life, behaviors and circumstances that reminded me of my brother’s in a very alarming way, and as such I felt it my duty to do what I could to prevent him from walking his father’s troubled path.

And in that endeavour, I feel I have largely been successful, though the road that got us to where we are now was fraught with peril.

My nephew came to live with us in June 2016, and while things were okay for the first few months, they rapidly turned sour.  I felt like someone had hit me with Tyrion Lannister’s curse: “and your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth.”  I had experienced this back in 2001 and again in 2006 when I let my brother (and later my nephew’s mother) come live with me, and deep down part of me was saying, “oh no, not again”.  I was afraid I had made a horrible mistake.

Our troubles were due, in no small part, to the fact that I was still taking psych meds for a bipolar diagnosis that I now know to be incorrect.  I’m not bipolar: I’m mildly autistic, what was once referred to as Asperger’s Syndrome and has now been shuffled under the much more inclusive umbrella of neurodiversity, a controversial label in a number of ways, both from the perspective of Western medicine as well as American society.  I generally shun labels because our society has a tendency to define people by them, but from the perspective of needing context and therefore guidance, sometimes finding the appropriate label to go with your troubles is just what someone needs in order to find the answers they need.  That’s how I operate, anyway.

The trouble is that psych meds were the wrong thing to give me: they made everything worse in so many ways, and I’ve spent the last eight years in an unhealthy relationship with my now-fired psychiatrist, a man who I realize now was just another in a long line of authoritarian, patriarchal narcissists in my life.  But that’s another post.

Long story short: over a period of several months, I stopped taking the offending medication, and while the transition period was rough, things have drastically improved in our home in many ways, most notably by getting a new home!  We moved nearly two years ago from our small house in the urban center of our city to a much larger house in the suburbs.  While it’s been a bit of culture-shock to live out here amongst the suburbanites (“the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth” – Rush, “Subdivisions”), with whom I’ve never quite gotten along with, the house itself is nearly perfect for us and the neighborhood is quite nice.  We’re close to a lot of ethnic food that heretofore wasn’t available where we lived, and when it was, it was often packaged in the form of a trendy restaurant with high prices, snobby clientele, and a lack of parking.  Now there’s a fantastic Indian grocery a mile down the road and it’s easy to access a number of other interesting stores that were previously inconvenient for us to get to because we had to cross the middle of town, which is now clogged with traffic thanks to our city’s growing popularity.  We’re also closer to like-minded people in our community that we lost touch with over the years for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was them moving due to not being able to afford living in the city anymore.

On a personal level, it’s difficult for me to recognize the person I was a year ago compared to today.  I have undergone a transformation that has affected me on all levels: body, mind, and soul.  I had so little energy or motivation to do anything for so long, that after we finally moved (a Herculean effort), I made sure the kitchen and bathrooms got unpacked, and left everything else.  I wanted to care, but I couldn’t.  After my body and brain had purged enough of the offending medications, I “woke up” enough to finish unpacking and get the house in order, which meant about two solid months of unpacking, organizing, cleaning, and flensing.  Our old house was so small we didn’t have the room to properly sort our belongings or stage anything, so we basically crammed our stuff into boxes haphazardly, including stuff we knew we didn’t need as well as the accompanying dirt and cat hair, and took them to a storage unit until moving week (and it did take a week, as well as two 18′ trucks and 3 10′ trucks, to move TWENTY MILES).  Bags and bags of trash went onto the curb, and I swept the floor dozens of times to catch all of the dirt that had accumulated in the house (because I had stopped cleaning), as well as the dirt from the old house that came tumbling out of the remaining packed boxes.

From a family standpoint, re-engaging with life has had a profound effect on everyone, though not without some difficulties.

A year ago, a conflict with my nephew was likely to result in a lot of unpleasantness, to put it very mildly.  A conflict today still isn’t fun, but it no longer results in the kind of potentially violent dysfunction we were suffering from last year.  In fact, quite frequently the opposite happens: we’ll butt heads, separate from one another briefly, and then everything is not just fine, but sometimes better than it was before.  Progress has been slow, and occasionally we take a step forward only to fall back two steps, but it’s so much better than it was.  Things were bad enough to get social services involved, which move at a snail’s pace in Texas, but the opinion from our lead social worker is that we’re doing an awesome job.  She frequently remarks on the positive change in myself and my nephew.

Things are also much better with my son, which may confuse those of you who have kept up with me all these years, because the last time I spoke of my child, I referred to him as a daughter.  That’s because my son announced he was transgender about three years ago, which as been an adventure unto itself, one I am totally on board with but that comes with a number of difficulties given that we live in Texas, a place where trans-hate is extremely strong.  I will save my kvetching about being a progressive in the worst bastion of ultraconservatism for some other time.

Anyway, my son was very happy to have me back and caring about the house and family again.  He gleefully helped me get the house in order, assisting with unpacking, cleaning, and getting rid of things.  He’s nearly 16 now and, as such, suffers from fairly typical teen angst, amplified by his trans status, but overall, his life has also improved thanks to moving and my re-engagement, though he could be happier, something that we’re working on.

If there are any major black marks in the history of the last couple of years, it would be the death of my brother in September 2017 (a tale for another post), and an unfortunate health emergency with my husband this past September.  You can read about that adventure here on Medium.

That story includes more details about why I now shun Western psychiatry and am generally leery of Western medicine, for many valid reasons I intend upon expounding on in further blog posts there.  In fact, reading it over, it’s time for an update, because several things have changed.

So that’s life now in a nutshell.  A much happier nutshell, despite some continuing financial troubles, instead of the one I lived in for so long, best illustrated by the master of words himself, William Shakespeare:

oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams