Blog for Mental Health Day.

I logged into Twitter today to see so many of my Twitter peeps (Yes, I have peeps...and no, I don't care what you say, I'm not too white to have peeps or say that I have peeps) linking to blog posts about mental health. Apparently, today is blogging for mental health day. Thank God for the Twitter, or I'd never have any fucking idea what day it is.

I found this oddly appropriate as I'm desperately trying to hold off an imminent panic attack, and as it turns out, since I only take my atavan when I'm having a panic attack, I didn't know I was out of them. So...no calming drugs for me, and I have to get through this one on my own. It's not the end of the world, I've done it before, many, many times. But expecting to be able to reach for relief only to find it's not there is disconcerting to say the least.

I've talked before about my bipolar disorder, how the highs make me chatty, keep me up, can aggravate me or turn me into someone who snaps over every little thing, and the lows keep me locked into myself, too sad, too miserable to talk about it. It sucks and I hate it...but given a choice, I'd take bipolar over the anxiety disorder any fucking day of the week.

Anxiety disorder makes me...well, it makes me anxious..but it's so much more. I feel like I can't breathe, my clothes, my skin are too tight, and are suffocating me. My heart pounds, my brain (never really all that slow or rational to begin with) races at lightening speeds with every paranoid thought you can imagine. I've seen numerous therapists and a couple of shrinks, and the general consensus seems to be that the anxiety is a holdover from a childhood so awful that I spend everyday in a state of anxiety, and, as it turns out, these responses become habituated in your brain chemistry, so now...even though I haven't had the cause for the anxiety in over 20 years, even though the main perpetrator in my childhood nightmare is dead and buried, I still get these bursts of panic.

I've tried everything...meditation, exercise, biofeedback, medication...nothing works. Nothing has managed to put a stop to the panic attacks. I take a medication that makes me so that I'm not so anxious I can't leave my house most of the time, but for these burst of adrenalin that kick off the panic? Nothing works because there isn't a pattern or a trigger (though sometimes thinking too much a panic attack can induce one). Most of my panic attacks occur in the middle of the night. I'm either suffering from insomnia and find myself freaking out...or, far worse, I wake up from a dead sleep in the grips of a panic attack. In those moments, the only thing that helps is the atavan. Otherwise, I doom myself to an hour or more of panic...and it sucks, my friends.

By far, the worst panic attacks are the ones that happen in front of other people. My brain just plays the same thought over and over..."What will people think of me?" I've avoided large gatherings for years just to avoid the chance that it might happen in front of other people. Because, I'm already the crazy one...how bad would it be to be even crazier? Even though the people I'm usually around are family or beloved friends, the idea that they would see me that way? Terrifying. Worse still? That those I love would know just how screwed up I am. Used to be I only talked about this with the exgirlfriend...and occasionally my beloved Archaeogoddess.

In recent years I've been trying to be more open...talking about it here, making jokes about it, because that's how I handle things. And, frankly, the fear monster doesn't seem so bad if you can laugh at it.

I know how hard it is for me to talk about, and I'm one of those people who has no problems discussing just about anything else. Pelvic exam post, anyone? So, if it's hard for me? How much harder for other people...you know, people who have filters?

It's time we take the stigma off of mental health. Just like with my Fibro, Grave's and various other illnesses, I didn't ask for this. I didn't make my brain betray me in the worst possible ways. It's time that we stop looking the other way when people we love are in trouble because we don't want to embarrass them. And it's time for us to stop being so damn uncomfortable with mental illness that we write off friends and loved ones who self-medicate as attention seeking addicts. Mental illness affects not just the one who's sick...it affects everyone around me. And pretending like it doesn't can lead to tragedy.

I'm blogging for mental health today. How about you?



And for the record...that panic attack I was talking about? Just writing about it helped so much...maybe I'll try to remember that the next time I wake up feeling like I'm going to crawl out of my skin.

Effing Disneyland, Ya'll!!

I'm getting ready to depart for The Happiest Place on Earth. We're leaving early Sunday morning (4 am) and making the 8-10 hour drive to Anaheim. We'll be in Disneyland and California Adventure Park for five whole days. This trip has been six months in the planning and we cannot wait to get there and have fun.

All this Disneyland stuff has me remembering a Disneyland trip when I was just a wee little girl...probably 30 years ago, now. (When the fuck did I get so old?) It's a somewhat clouded memory, but one that made me deeply afraid of Winnie the Pooh for years. It wasn't until my kid was born that I started to be able to handle exposure to Pooh Bear. I was there, at the happiest place on earth, and out of nowhere this giant yellow bear comes at me with his arms stretched out, intending to devour me, no doubt. I took one look at that menacing beast, noticed that no one was making any kind of move to save me and hauled off and kicked Winnie the Pooh in the leg, and ran and hid behind my mom.

Laugh if you want, but those fucking characters are huge and scary, especially when you're all of three feet tall. I couldn't even read a Winnie the Pooh book for years. It wasn't so much that I was scared of him (okay, I'm totally lying here...I was afraid of a fat yellow bear), especially as I got older and realized that there was nothing to be afraid of, that Pooh Bear wasn't an actual bear looking to devour little girls, that he'd much rather snack on honey than me, it was just that I couldn't get over that feeling of being intimidated by something so much bigger than I was.

I'm ready now...I want to get my picture taken with Mickey and Minnie, and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. I'm going to be one pissed off camper if she isn't at the princess meet and greet. She's always been my favorite.

I haven't been to Disneyland in 15 years, and I've never taken the midget, so this trip is a really big deal for us. I'm not about to let anyone (not even some scary ass yellow bear) ruin it. The midget's been pretty sad lately...bullshit drama with the exgirlfriend who should be damn thankful that I'm a civilized woman and that it would hurt me more to punch her in the taco than it would hurt her. But that shit isn't going to interfere with us being happy at the Happiest motherfucking Place on the motherfucking Earth. I've kicked a six foot yellow bear with a gaping mouth and paws as big as my head. I'm hardly afraid to deliver the same treatment to some selfish bitch who isn't worthy of being spit on by the midget.

I'll be updating my Twitter stream but otherwise I'll be MIA here on the blog (Nothing unusual, right?). I'll be sure to put up a lengthy post complete with pictures.

As Aunt Becky of Mommy Wants Vodka has said...being sad is bullshit, and I'm totally hopping on her Bringing The Happy Back bandwagon. Because the midget and I have had a couple of shit years and Goddammit...ENOUGH IS FUCKING ENOUGH!! The midget and I are going immerse ourselves in the happy, happy, joy, joy that is the motherfucking Happiest Place on Earth, and we're going to bring that happy back and pound it firmly into our lives with a big fucking mallet. It's time to make 2011 my bitch, ya'll, and Disneyland is just the place to do it!

Use it

For my entire life I've been fascinated with putting words together. I love writing. I love playing with words to make prose and poetry. Putting the constant running of words in my head into print was always my outlet.

When I was 24, ten long years ago, I lost a beloved friend. I wrote a poem for him, and then, I was visited by the worst case of writer's block. I still have it. I've written only a handful of poems since then, and hardly any prose.

I started this blog in the hopes that I would write more, get more of what goes on in my brain into print. And it's been fitful, and part of that is knowing that my audience includes people I know in real life, and a very small portion of those people would love to find something here that can be twisted into something ugly and use it against me. Having that kind of censorship built into everything I write certainly doesn't help.

Thankfully, I found the sparkly, and awesome Aunt Becky's blog Mommy Wants Vodka. If you aren't reading her, and you're not a member of her loyal Prankster army, you're totally missing out. And as if sharing her twisted brain with the world wasn't enough, she's also the force behind the collaborative blogs Mushroom Printing and Band Back Together. The beauty of a collaborative blog is the variety of voices you find, and the sense of community. And for me, it's a place to publish things that I can't publish here, which gives me a freedom this blog hasn't given me.

I'm not giving up my blog. I am the Queen of the Universe, and nothing will ever change that, and in fact, I think getting to publish elsewhere what is unpublishable here will grant me the freedom to really explore the rest of my brain. So, while I will occasionally cross post things from my blog on one of the above blogs, for the most part the two worlds will remain separate, unless I find something there that absolutely must be shared.