The first thing I did the morning after I saw myself for the first time was to call a mental health crisis line. Since my regular therapist is a student at Portland State and they were on winter break until January 9th, I found an emergency therapist and grabbed the first appointment I could get, which was two days later. I tried to keep myself safe by going to work and calling my friends and apologizing to Joel. A surprisingly large number of my closest friends are bipolar and my every other thought was the dawning realization that I probably am too, so I called and asked them all a million questions.
(It's been nearly a month and I still don't know whether or not I am, but let's be honest: no one is going to be shocked if Amanda P. Westmont comes home from the doctor with a bipolar diagnosis.)
Anyway, during the 48 hours after I freaked out on Joel and before my first therapy appointment, I didn't eat a single bite of solid food. Not one. This may seem like a random thing for me to point out, but I think it was important on a number of levels, most of which I'm still trying to figure out. What I do know is that I wouldn't LET myself eat. Food felt like a reward I didn't deserve. So I survived on liquid protein shakes and Tylenol to stave off the constant headache I had from not eating enough calories.
I also didn't drink a drop of alcohol. I was afraid it would re-awaken the beast.
Joel was surprisingly kind to me during those first few days. He had every right to push me away and I would have understood if he'd stopped talking to me altogether, but he just... didn't. Instead, he looked me in the eyes and held my hand and made love to me so tenderly I fell asleep with tears on my cheeks. What he DIDN'T do, however, was come to my rescue. That beautiful, bald motherfucker knows better.
Therapy has been... wow. I don't even know where to start. I've been in therapy for a year already, but none of it has been this deep and intentional. I went to my new therapist in a state of crisis, more willing to do the work than I've ever been before, and duh, it's working a lot better as a result. Good therapy feels a lot like childbirth: the better it's going, the more it hurts.
I think the easiest way for me to talk about it is to use a movie analogy, so here goes. That moment when I saw myself for the first time was also the moment I left the Matrix.
"After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." (Morpheus to Neo, in one of my favorite movies of all time.)
All my life I've been believing the story I WANTED to believe, which, as it turns out, wasn't REAL. It was just the way I chose to see the world because seeing it that way made it easier to swallow. All year long, I've been steadily pursuing reality and trying to squeeze my way into it. Part of that process has included distancing myself from my parents so that I can figure out what I want those boundaries to look like. But the moment I saw myself as that crazy out-of-control woman screaming obscenities at her boyfriend, it clicked. I saw my whole life story for what it was: make-believe.
So basically, I took the red pill and now I can see my whole life as it ACTUALLY happened and my rabbit-hole is so deep and dark that I'm beginning to think I might never see the sun again. It's only been, what, three weeks? Four sessions? And I've already learned a metric fuckton about my anger. Joel has been super helpful with it, too (because he figured this stuff out for himself nearly a decade ago) and our weekly couples therapy has been the hardest/best thing we've ever done together. (I'm at two therapy sessions a week right now and starting this week, it'll be three. There is no such thing as too much therapy.)
So far I've learned that anger is at the top of the emotional pyramid. It's the easiest emotion for most of us to access and boy howdy, do I have access to that emotion. The other emotions? Not so much. I went into my first therapy session with an agenda: to find out whether or not I'm bipolar and whether or not I should be medicated like I've always wished my own mother had been.
I left my first therapy session with an unexpected, but meaningful diagnosis: I have a phobia of my own emotions. You know that thing I've talked about where if I start to think about my breathing, I freak out and have a panic attack? That happened during my first appointment with the new therapist. I warned him about it and he tried to walk me through a breathing exercise to help me calm down and I lasted all of three seconds before he made me stop. The more we talked, the more it made sense: I learned from an early age that emotions are scary and bad and that it's a lot easier to just show the world how happy and congenial you are instead.
You know, right up until you get angry.
It turns out that anger is always - ALWAYS - about fear. They are two sides of the same coin. Behind my anger is a giant, gaping wound of fear. I'm TERRIFIED that Joel won't love me enough. That he'll be just like Dave. That my needs will never be met. That I'll lose the best thing that ever happened to me. That I'll be alone.
Mostly, though, it's a fear of never being loved.
I'm learning to embrace that fear and just let myself FEEL it instead of turning it around and aiming it at the people I love. This is the hardest thing I have ever learned EVER. I've been doing okay (BARELY okay, but hanging in there), until I had a set-back earlier this week and kinda blew up at Joel during therapy and was pissy with Liza and...
IT'S SO HARD.
Of course, the anger and the fear suck, but unfortunately, they're not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that if the emotional pyramid has anger at the top and fear in the middle, the bottom of the pyramid is SADNESS (quoting Joel again...). So it goes like this:
I'm ANGRY that my needs aren't being met.
Because I'm AFRAID that they never will be.
But what's really happening is that I'm SAD that I have never had my emotional needs met in a meaningful way.
The only way for me to stop being angry is to grieve the crap out of my emotional past. It's to embrace the sadness of never feeling loved by my ex-husband or by anyone else. Ever. It's grief that even at 35, I'm never going to be good enough for my parents.
It's grieving that I never actually HAD parents. Not the ones I needed, anyway.
Let me repeat that: I'm 35 and I have never ever felt truly loved or accepted by anyone, ever. (Until Joel.) HOW FUCKING SAD IS THAT?!?!
Before I swallowed the red pill, I was convinced that I'd had a happy childhood. I used say things like,
“I have NO bad memories from my childhood. As in, zero, zilch, NONE whatsoever. Sure, my mom threw the occasional piece of dinnerware on the hardwood floor in anger and my brother cut the head off my Madame Alexander doll, but those incidents really only served to enrich the experience. Seriously, my first two decades were disgustingly happy and I wouldn't change A THING.”
But that was my PARENT'S reality. That was the public foot we had to put forward to protect the family reputation. Up until this year, I bought into that reality wholeheartedly. And now I've had no less than three therapists call me on my "happy childhood" bullshit because up until I saw myself, I still defended it as a good one. "Yeah, my mom threw dishes, but she was fun! I had a GREAT childhood!" Which is exactly what my mother convinced me to believe. Her reality was ever-so-compelling because believing it made me a good daughter. (This is why you've never seen me write an unkind word about her here: I WASN'T ALLOWED TO.) Protecting her self-image made me a good girl. It also made me weigh 309 pounds.
But that was the Matrix.
Which is a reality I no longer subscribe to.
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.
My worldview now takes place in reality. It is not the Matrix. It's the cold, hard truth. It's nowhere near as pretty and no small part of me wishes I'd swallowed the blue pill instead and gone back to believing WHATEVER I WANTED because that was so much easier.
In the meantime, there is therapy and my therapist is fantastic, but he's also a cruel, evil bastard because every week he makes me cry. On purpose. He wants me to mourn the shitty parts of my story. When I gloss over them like I've done my whole life, he makes me stop and rewind until I'm a huge sobbing mess.
The hardest part isn't the grief that everything you thought was fine actually SUCKS, but it's the enormous grief that comes when you realize it'll never go back to being the way you thought it was. In my case, it's the realization that I'm never going to have a mother. I don't have a mother. I have Barbara. She was a lot of things to me, but she was never, EVER the mother I needed. She never will be. (I know she can't understand any of this and that she'll probably never talk to me again after reading this, but all I can say is that she never had a mother either. She had Virginia...)
I have to murder all of that. Every notion I ever had about my family, what love feels like, my own happiness. I have to live in a world where never seeing my mother again is okay with me. Because it might just be what's BEST for me.
Reality sucks so hard, you guys.
It's the worst thing ever.
My brain is just about the worst place I can possibly imagine being these days. I want to shut it off. The voice that questions everything and everyone. The voice that tells me it's all Joel's fault even though I know it's not. The voice that snaps at my children. The voice that knows I don't know how to nurture my children because I was never, ever nurtured by my own parents. (My therapist actually had to walk me through, sentence by sentence, what it would have sounded like if my mother nurtured me through things like having sex with my 30-year old boss when I was fifteen instead of just blowing her lid and getting angry with me. The words "Are you okay, Amanda?" sounded like Arabic to me. I'd never heard them before. Totally foreign.)
The voices.
I'll do anything to make them go away.
But the only way to make that happen is to dig so deep into my vat of grief that literally everything makes me cry. I sob ALL THE TIME. On the way to pick up my kids. Every time I'm alone. Between waxing clients. Between text messages. Between Pandora tracks.
It's almost unbearable. I HATE being sad. I've fought so hard against it my whole life that I don't know how to do it. It makes me feel like a bad little girl. In fact, every bit of this red pill business makes me feel naughty. Like if I'd just done what my mommy and daddy wanted and chosen the blue pill instead, none of this would be so hard. Seeing the truth makes me such a bad daughter. According to a recent e-mail from one of my brothers, it even makes me a bad SISTER.
I want to be clear here and say that I'm not BLAMING my parents for my craziness. I own it 100%. This is MY problem. Seeing myself just brought my past and present into a collision course with one another. To ignore the past or to continue sweeping it under the rug and playing nice (and not talking about it on my blog) would mean to continue BEING THIS WAY. And I'm not okay with that crazy screaming lunatic. My children aren't going to have that mother. They're just... NOT. The only way to deal with MY shit is to deal with my parent's shit.
There is no spoon...
