The thing I hate the worst about being mentally ill is that my freaking brain doesn't work right - and that's where I live. Lately I've been struggling a lot with it just not working right and it's pissing me off.
This is a frank talk about mental illness and the toll it takes on a person - namely me. It's not pretty and sometimes is just plain gross. So, I totally get it if you don't want to hear about it. If you do want to hear and don't know the backstory - here's a short version:
Military kid, liked the moving, did well at school. Dropped out of college due to mostly money and schizophrenia becoming more pronounced. Worked and moved around the US several years, did okay gradually falling into worse and worse jobs and living situations as disease advanced. Ended up camping on a boat for a couple years before living with my parents and receiving poverty level outpatient treatment for a year and a half. Eventually won my SSDI case and moved back to Oregon, where I live on a nicer boat with a companion - in the Dr Who sense.
More below the dooblydoo.
You don't really notice it at first. Really. Things just kind of slip away from you. Sometimes words, sometimes ideas. Sometimes it's things you meant to do.
Lists help a little, but you have to remember where you put them and why you made them. And you just have to plain have the energy to do them. There are some days that just making my bed is a good day. Others I can roadtrip to Portland and grocery shop and hang out with new people. It really depends on the day.
I take a lot of meds. An antipsychotic twice a day, mood stabilizers twice a day, asthma medication in four forms. A statin, an aspirin, antihistamines in high doses. A pill that makes the music go away - twice a day. Even a vitamin D cap once a week because I'm too paranoid to go outside most of the time. And finally - an antidepressant that somehow got forgotten 3 months ago.
We're still not sure how that happened, but it did. Somehow, it just fell out of the rotation. Maybe I was out and thought I called it in and didn't. I don't know. But I do know that something has been off for the last couple months. And not only did I miss it, my doctor did too.
The worst of it is the knowing that I used to be able to manage things like a normal person and I can't anymore. Yes, the bills get paid. Yes, there is relatively healthy and decidedly kosher food on the table. But the other things - they're much harder.
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=GROSS STUFF HERE
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Hygiene is particularly difficult, which is be weird because I used to shower/bath about 4 times a day, to the point I stripped my skin and got a full body rash. Even in Arizona when I was definitely not well, I still showered every day. That stopped after I lost my job in Oregon and moved to the garage.
I still showered about every 3 days for the next year and a half, then they kind of tapered off at the marina. The marina showers are a bit of a walk, but they aren't super super gross, or always full or anything like that. I just stopped bathing.
I had really long hair too, and I just... didn't look gross enough or something - I still got 3 other jobs while very ill and not bathing. In one case I went 4 months without bathing other than washing my hair in the kitchen sink at work every couple of weeks. (Yes, I know - SO much in violation of health code.) But that was what happened.
There's kind of no point in pride in this situation. Eventually I was such a paranoid wreck in a literal wreck of a boat that my parents basically cajoled me into coming home. That was supposed to be a couple of weeks - it ended up being a year and a half.
I needed over $1000 in dentistry. I had a shower literally next to my room - still showered maybe once a week. Usually when my Mum TOLD me to take a shower. Even now, with a companion (in the Doctor/Donna sense, yo) she tells me when I need to shower. Because I literally have to have someone to tell me to do that. And it's pathetic, but it's part of life right now.
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=GROSS OVER
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I honestly can't live alone right now. Well, I could - but it wouldn't be pretty and I wouldn't be sailing anywhere. I might be able to develop some kind of routine, but it would be existing. Not living in a real sense.
Words and thoughts slip away into cracks in myself. Sometimes they come back, other times they are misshapen lumps, broken and useless. Random thoughts and repetition - song lyrics, watching the same clips over and over - I check repeatedly on the computer and with my pill case to see what day it is.
I can tell things aren't working right. But the mental clouds are frustrating. Missing cues. Misreading. Mishearing. Being unable to follow comments or threads on diaries here or on other sites. Even managing my on Facebook wall is more complicated than it should be. It's like looking at math problems and you know you went over it all in class and here it is homework time and it's all martian.
New episodes of the few things I follow - I can't sit through. I literally can't sit through an episode of a show without stopping to play solitaire or repeat a couple Graham Norton clips. Or spend hours lost on BuzzFeed videos before going back to it - where I may or may not actually remember what was happening.
Writing anything is a nightmare. The words just... don't come out right. It's funny, when I was unmedicated I could write the hell out of some words. Now, every paragraph is a struggle.
I don't know what will change now that we've put the pill back in circulation - and I have an upcoming appt this month to talk about how things are or are not working. But I'd really like to be the guy in the brochures who is leading a normal life despite his schizophrenia.