Mileposts I Have Not Passed, Yet

They go:
Me and your mom have been noticing lately that you've been having a lot of problems, you've been going off for no reason and we're afraid you're gonna hurt somebody, we're afraid you're gonna hurt yourself. So we decided that it would be in your interest if we put you somewhere where you could get the help that you need.
And I go:
Wait, what are you talking about, we decided? My best interest? How can you know what my best interest is? How can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say, I'm crazy? When I went to your schools, I went to your churches, I went to your institutional learning facilities? So how can you say I'm crazy?
-- Social Distortion

Around kindergarten my dad divorced my mom so he could quickly date, live with, and marry a younger woman who had had a troubled life. This wasn’t dad’s first attempt at playing savior – before I was born he taught history and English to poor, inner-city kids. He remained in the education field after I was born, transitioning into a job to improve teaching methods with the latest theories. How odd it was for him to care so much about helping others while he shifted from being my parent to pretty much being a seagull manager. This term is used in business when a work situation needs attention and a manager swoops in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, then takes off. Dad, the eternal optimist, made his noise giving me his assessment seen through rose-tinted glasses, simultaneously voiding my issue of the moment while crushing a little boy’s eggshell-thin ego.

But dad only had me on some weekends – the rest of the time I lived with mom who entered the workforce to keep a roof over our heads. In first grade I convinced both parents that I no longer needed after-school daycare and so became a latchkey child, skateboarding the several miles to and from school alone.

Soon after an older neighbor boy paid attention to me and at this point, attention was what I craved. His attention morphed into peer pressure followed by dares, grooming, sexual touching, coercion, threats, molestation, and ultimately wanting me to become a victimizer like him. This happened part of first grade and all through second grade. I spent the summer between second and third grades with relatives halfway across the country. Part of that summer I went to a camp where I was picked on and beat up enough that I longed to return to the only person who paid attention to me, even if that attention was traumatic. I only saw the molester once more at which point it was clear I had served my purpose and was being discarded.

On the rare occasion I felt I had a right to my voice, what I said did not matter. On the rare occasion I felt I had a right to my body, it was only on someone else’s terms. During trauma I dissociated to the point of living in the ancestor of cyberspace: a fantasy world in my head. I preferred fantasy since it was the only way I could have power – no amount of positive mental attitude changed the reality of meatspace.

Unconsciously I repressed huge chunks of memory for more than a decade, unable to recall what lead me to becoming such a submissive, overly-compliant people-pleaser.

When I escaped my home situation to go to a college on the opposite side of the country, the freedom allowed memories to bubble up. As my eventual graduation with a BS in chemical engineering came and went, diagnoses psychological in nature and otherwise seemed to come at me rapid-fire. Major depression, dyslexia, pilonidal cysts, tinnitus, obesity, hi BP, hi triglycerides, hi cholesterol, acid reflux, generalized anxiety disorder, type II diabetes, lo testosterone, persistent depressive disorder, PTSD, and most recently severe sleep apnea.

For 15 years now I have been on hundreds of combinations of meds. These meds have given me yo-yo-ing side effects including sex drive, acne, appetite, and weight. I also tried, with no lasting success, bilateral electroconvulsive therapy, Ketamine infusions, and deep transcranial magnetic stimulation. I think it is safe to categorize my depression as medication-resistant and treatment-resistant.

Rather organically a few years ago, I incorporated a passive suicidality during my frequent trips into my better-than-the-real-thing fantasy world. I developed a fantasy suicide plan. I was tired of illnesses and meds and growing old so I determined that for too much of my life, my body and mind were out of my control so I’d be damned if I was going to die that way. I wanted to die on my terms with my wits about me. For me the paradigm of (outside of an accident) live as long as you can until massive organ failure was, and frankly still is, the height of absurdity. This absurdity grows out of a question that some people find taboo: the question of who decides what sorts of deaths are acceptable and what sorts of deaths are not. Enough of us have internalized that suicide is selfish, that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and/or that suicide is a one-way ticket to everlasting suffering that it appears these themes have been in our societies for generations.

Pardon my lack of a graceful segue from that. Allow me to touch on being a victim versus being a survivor. I don’t fall neatly into a category here. There were absolutely situations when I was victimized but I do not know if the victimization ends. One might argue that if someone were to heal and come out the other side stronger that that would indicate leaving the victim milepost and approaching the survivor milepost. Through the years people have assured me that I may not have reached the survivor milepost – and here is the key word – yet. I like yet. I can hang my hat on yet. I have tried suggestions for determining which way to travel to improve the odds of finding that milepost but it remains elusive. I sometimes think that folks who swear they see the milepost are fooled by a mirage.

This brings me to what recovery means to me. I don’t know. I don’t know what recovery means to me. I suspect if we polled everyone in this room on what recovery means to you and displayed the results on a pie chart, we would see a bunch of tiny slices. So I will punt and say maybe it is a milepost which, again, I have yet to see.

So what keeps me going? In addition to an amazing wife and our boy – and by boy I mean cat we adopted right after our honeymoon – I have an urge to understand how various media can trigger those of us with mental health challenges and to do what I can to improve that dynamic.

If I could leave you with three take-home messages, they would be:

1. Just because you are comforted by positive ideas of what the future holds does not mean reality will oblige. Consider this sobering thought: it was a small number of NASA managers who considered the risk acceptable when engineers and others alerted them to the fact that the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters had not been tested for the 18 degF weather the morning of Space Shuttle Challenger’s final launch in January 1986, killing 7 and irreparably damaging the reputation of NASA and possibly the government, engineers, and science in general. When the managers made their decisions leading to this, I don't know what their thought processes entailed. Hope, positive mental attitude, prayer, wishful thinking, pressure from their bosses to launch, and bucking for a promotion come to mind – my point is that the universe/nature/reality was not influenced by their positivity or hubris.
2. You can’t universalize your own experience. As I was walking out of a cancer ward with a nurse recently, a guy stopped us and asked if we were patients. The person I was with explained she was a nurse to which he replied "I just have been telling every patient I can about alkaline water" at which point we parted ways. I likely will never google alkaline water to see if it is supposed to help cancer patients in some way because I am skeptical that it is universally good, and universally not bad, for cancer patients. "True believers" abound but all I ask is if you ever become one, be a True Believer* and by that I mean temper your gospel with an asterisk. An asterisk that I feel works well is *YMMV so Alkaline Water Advocate Guy if you are out there, ending your spiel with "your mileage may vary" will net you considerably more interest.
3. Any number of rationalizations can be made for judging yourself or others. Avoid these sorts of rationalizations and avoid judging when you are able. This is a milepost that, I am glad to report, I passed years ago. Your mileage may vary.