It was with some interest that I noted recently I was making my 200th public blog entry on my site.  This might not seem like many posts considering that my blog is almost 15 years old, especially by modern standards that urge bloggers to post on a weekly or even daily basis, but it was meaningful to me, perhaps because of the deeply personal content of most of my posts.  I don’t post to please others, I post to please myself.  As such, my blog stands as a fairly large body of work that is a testament to the many things I have endured and survived.

My first post was in 2010, which may as well be in a different lifetime.  My son was only 7 years old and still a girl, with his transition still 5 years in the future.  I had not yet been diagnosed bipolar, and I was not yet entirely dedicated to a Buddhist path, although I knew that I was drawn to many of its principles.  I was doing yoga and karate for exercise, which I greatly enjoyed but did not participate in nearly enough to cement them as ongoing life habits.  As during most periods of my life, I was deeply unhappy, and it showed via depression and anger.  The common therapeutic vernacular of trauma did not yet exist, so I didn’t have a language to express my feelings, nor were there appropriate treatments for the unique and complex variant of PTSD that I suffer from, which didn’t even have a name yet.  Even if trauma-based treatments had been available at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to access them because the Affordable Care Act had not yet been enacted, allowing insurance companies to reject coverage for mental healthcare under the rationale of “pre-existing conditions”.

So much has changed in my life since then that it’s hard to grasp.  Only a few months after that first post, I received my bipolar diagnosis after a weekend of wild mood swings and angrily lashing out at my family in a highly unusual manner.  At the emergency psychiatric clinic the following week, I went between being normal, and sobbing uncontrollably, resulting in my new diagnosis.  This required finding a psychiatrist, which I did in fairly short order.  I thought that I had found someone competent and compassionate, but over the next 7 years of treatment, I would discover that was not the case.

The next two years saw me go through one medication after another in an effort to treat my symptoms, the two worst of which were anger and insomnia.  I put on 50 pounds after being put on lithium before he tried a different drug.  It had no side effects, but it also had no positive effects, either.  We tried many drugs, sometimes at the same time, but they all had either no effect or came with undesirable side effects.  At one point, I had 9 active medications in my medicine cabinet.

After two years of that, I was on a combination of only 4 medications that seemed to have some limited success.  Unfortunately, within about a year, my inner light began to dim.  My focus and concentration ebbed, as did my memory.  Motivation disappeared.  Even my body was affected.  My muscles lost strength, I lost almost all flexibility, my skin appeared unhealthy, and my hair and nails grew thin and broke easily.  By early 2014, I could no longer function well enough to keep my job and I had to quit.

Once at home full-time, I lapsed into a daily routine that would last for the next 4 years.  I got up around noon, put on my robe, made coffee and had a cigarette, and then sat down to read Facebook all day, interspersed with coffee and cigarette breaks.  At dinnertime I would dress, often in dirty clothes, go out for dinner with the family, and upon returning home, put the robe back on.  I either read more Facebook or watched tv until getting into bed around midnight where I watched more tv until falling asleep around 4am.

During this time, I stopped blogging entirely for 3 solid years.  I literally couldn’t think anymore.  My brain, which once steadily churned out snippets of stories and ponderances of a wide variety, slowly ground to a halt, until it was completely silent within my mind.  I felt dead inside.  I began to wonder if I wasn’t developing early onset dementia because I couldn’t finish a thought anymore.  I couldn’t even read a book due to the lack of focus and concentration.

In early summer of 2016, my nephew came to live with us to avoid his having to go back into foster care.  His mother, who was raising him without the help of my brother, would frequently put him into foster care when she was having trouble with him.  He had autism and oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to other issues.  They always sent him back home, though, where he and his mother would continue to have clashes.  I believe that was at least partly due to his displaying behaviors that reminded his mother of his father, who could also be a difficult person in no small part due to his drinking.  He also suffered from autism.

In early 2017, I mused aloud on Facebook about my distress over how difficult it would be to find a new place to live with 4 cats.  Either coincidentally or perhaps synchronistically, a friend was renting their house and was not only willing to allow all 4 of our cats, but also would not require a deposit from us, greatly easing a move on the financial front.  Suddenly I was faced with the task of packing up a 1000 sq. ft. house that we had lived in for 18 years, one that was jammed with so much stuff that we had to rent a storage space to take anything  that was packed.

The new house was more than twice the size of the old one, which was glorious.  We had outgrown the old house long ago but had lacked the funds or the opportunity to find a new one, nor was house hunting something that my addled brain could handle.  We managed to get everything packed and moved, but it took a few days.  We had so much stuff in the house and the storage unit that the movers had to make two trips with a 26’ truck, and over the weekend we had to rent a 10’ UHaul to empty the garage.  Another trip had to be made in the car to retrieve items from the backyard, and we had to pay someone to haul away some trash that wasn’t suitable for our normal pickup.

We unpacked the essentials, and then I lapsed back into near-catatonia.  The only difference was that I read less Facebook and watched more tv.  The house was a mess because no one was doing any cleaning.  The kids were suffering from their own mental health and school issues and were also miserable.  My nephew continued to display troublesome behaviors despite living in a more stable environment and we all felt like we were walking on broken glass.

In late 2017, I received a phone call informing me that my brother had died of alcohol poisoning.  Whether this was deliberate or accidental remains a point of speculation, but I do know that he was about to be kicked out of the homeless housing where he was living for breaking a window.  His caseworker found him after being unable to get a hold of him on the phone.  Some months later, I paid the fee to have his ashes shipped to me, where they lived on a shelf for a while.

That same fall, after yet another session in which my psychiatrist urged me to get off one of my drugs, I decided to give it a try seeing as how it was time to refill it anyway.  Within a couple of weeks, I wasn’t feeling so dead inside and I had more mental activity.  By Christmas, I was definitely feeling better, although still a bit sluggish.  Over New Year’s, while watching the PBS special “The Buddha”, I had something of an epiphany, in which this blog was born.

From New Year’s until late spring, I dropped one medication after another, with the admittedly loose supervision of my psychiatrist.  At his recommendation, I also engaged in microdosing LSD to improve my mental health, which had a remarkable effect.  It was like my brain was full of cobwebs from the decades of mental health issues and the years of medication, and the microdosing swept those cobwebs away, enabling my brain to function better than it ever had before.  I began laughing again, something I had not done in at least 4 years, no lie.

Unfortunately, I was still suffering from insomnia, only getting about 4 hours of sleep per night, and had been for months.  This would become an issue when I had an episode that could be considered psychological in nature from one perspective, and spiritual in nature from another perspective.  Psychiatry would label my experience “manic”, while those of a more spiritual bent would label my experience an “awakening”.  I tend to lean towards the latter since that’s what it feels like, although I’m not in denial of the psychological aspect.  My initial awakening was several years ago (and continues to unfold), and to this day I continue to struggle to reconcile the two perspectives of my experience.

The months following my awakening were largely filled with trying to basically screw my head back on.  I felt like a supernova had gone off inside my skull.  I had to re-establish continuity with common time with everyone else, as otherwise I was utterly clueless as to how much time had passed or what time it was.  At the same time, I was engaged with interactions with my psychiatrist that ranged from frustrating to infuriating.  We would discuss doing one thing and he would do something completely different.

Otherwise, I spent the vast majority of my time listening to music, which held immense importance to me during this time.  I used music as a form of memory processing, since each song reminded me of something else from the past, and I had a lot of bad memories.  I would listen to a song and process the memories that came with it, and then would play the next song I thought of as the one I was listening to was coming to an end, as though my own subconscious was guiding me.  I made a lot of playlists, one for each different emotion or “thoughtstream”.

This would be my life for about fifteen months, after which I would have to endure an almost 3-month long psycho-spiritual ordeal I can only refer to as The Madness.  I can’t really say exactly what happened during this time period, mostly because I don’t remember much of it, and what I do remember is horrible.  It’s safe to say that something inside me became completely unhinged, but that typically only happens when I am in deep, life-threatening distress.  That is a part of me that only rises to consciousness when it feels I am in mortal peril.  It shuts down Conscious Me and completely takes over, and all I have afterwards to mark the occasion is a giant black hole in my memory.

And so I have mixed feelings about that time period.  I am simultaneously embarrassed and ashamed by my experience, yet also enraged at the people and the environment that caused me to become unhinged in the first place.  In the words of the song ‘Ruiner’ by Nine Inch Nails, “maybe it’s a part of me I hoped it would never go, and maybe that fucked me up much more than you’ll ever know”.

The next 2-3 years were turbulent, to say the least.  I was trying to recover from The Madness, both of the kids were a mental mess in multiple ways, and my husband was also recovering from his own health crisis in the form of a perforated colon that required life-saving surgery, just after my awakening.  The cherry on top was being informed that our landlords wanted to sell the house, so we would have to move by the following spring.

A horrible hilarity ensued shortly thereafter involving the house of old friends, one of whom it became apparent was in the midst of losing their minds and exploiting the age of their elderly spouse.  We spent around 3 months in constant chaos trying to make the situation work to no avail, due in no small part to a substantial amount of deception on the part of the younger half of the couple who owned the house.  We were finally forced to abandon any effort to move into that house and had to make other plans.

That meant leaving our city and state entirely, for about a dozen different reasons.  We made a spreadsheet of relevant points to consider when it came to moving, and we had absolutely zero reasons to stay and every reason to leave.  The possible exception would be leaving the tattered remains of our social circle behind, itself rent by the departure of others over the previous couple of decades.  But friends were not enough to keep us there, especially not after the state declared the parents of transgender children to be abusers subject to investigation by CPS.  It was time to leave, immediately.

I detail our journey and the preparation for it in this post, so I won’t belabor it here.  Tl;dr – getting rid of half of our stuff was both fun yet hellish, and packing everything up was just hellish.  Our last week at home, my husband and I were frequently up until the wee hours of the night in an effort to get everything done before it was time to pack the truck.  Then we had to spend a week driving our stuff, ourselves, and two of our four cats over 2200 miles and five states, two of them the largest states in the continental United States (the two other cats flew with our son and nephew the week before we left).

As with when we moved into our last house before leaving the state, I unpacked the essentials we couldn’t live without, and then lapsed into a daze.  It was clear we hadn’t gotten rid of enough of our stuff, because there was barely enough room for our belongings in the new house, and we had a lot of stuff still boxed up in the garage.  We also didn’t have anywhere to sit indoors other than the kitchen table and the bed.  Consequently, I spent a lot of time sitting on the covered deck watching it rain, which it did for about two solid months after we arrived.  As though Mother Nature herself were welcoming us from the dry, parched lands we once lived in.

I’ve changed a great deal since arriving in the Northwest.  To quote Sarah McLachlan, “the life I’ve left behind me is a cold room”.  I’ve done everything possible to put as much distance between my present Self and my old Self as I can.  I didn’t just move, I fucking changed my name.  My only remaining task is to get a local phone number and change all of my account information everywhere so I can ditch the old area code I’m still using.  Then my geographical transition will be complete and I can proceed with making my Outer Self match my Inner Self, as much as possible anyway.  My Inner Self is about 24, so I’m going to have to create an appropriate persona for my 54-year-old Outer Self that makes me feel 24, even if I don’t look exactly the way I did then, which would be impossible, of course.

Things I’ve done since arriving in the PNW include getting involved at the local Unitarian Universalist church with my husband, visiting local and state parks and Crater Lake National Park, having an art showing at the UU church featuring a couple dozen of my paintings, starting a gardening group at the church that has held two plant sales for church fundraising, and attending and later co-facilitating a spiritual book club at the church.  I’ve also turned my health around in some big ways, both physically and mentally.  Consequently I feel a lot better than I have in a very long time, perhaps ever.  We’ve had to move yet one more time, but hopefully we’ll be able to stay here for a while.  It’s a great house in a great neighborhood, we’re very happy here.

It’s hard to believe so much has happened in 15 years.  It feels unreal sometimes, to the extent that I occasionally feel as though I don’t recognize anyone or anything in my world.  I’m much happier than I used to be, though, so I just try to focus on that.  Not long ago, I was inwardly begging for an early death because I was hopeless and miserable even though I finally lived in a beautiful place I had yearned to be in for over 20 years.  Then I went though the last stage of my transformation of the last 8 years, which is described in this recent post.  Where I once wondered what was so great about surviving my trauma, I no longer wonder.  “The lenses inside of me that paint the world black”* aren’t there anymore, so I can finally see what’s worth surviving for.  And like Joe Gardner in the movie “Soul”, I am going to do my best to “enjoy every minute”.

*Rush – The Anarchist, from Clockwork Angels