Amy's Randomness

State of the Amy - One Year Later

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 18:23:01 GMT

Hi!
I’m Amy. Content Warning: I’m going to be talking about some tough stuff here, namely suicidal ideation and death by suicide, but also depression, anxiety, and treatment.

I’ll give you some space to decide whether that’s something you want to read about today.

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I never got to meet my maternal grandfather. Mom was always very honest about why. He shot himself after a bad business deal. It happened while she was in college. It was such a shock that she didn’t start to grieve for a year afterwards, and then it was hard to explain why she was grieving then. It was really tough for her.

Over time, I grew to learn that my mother’s uncle also shot himself. Twice, in fact, if the family story is true. The first time he lived, and he did it again ten years later, and did not live.

At first, I thought being obsessed with death just meant I was a goth, until I really, really, really wanted to jump off a roof freshman year of college and it never entirely went away.
Because we had a family history of suicide, I had some warning. I got into student counseling. I started taking meds.

I had intrusive visualizations of crashing my car into walls and trees, of cutting myself with sharp objects, of taking all the pills I could find. It seemed like almost anything could trigger them, whether I was at home or away, no matter what kind of day I was having.

Later on, my sister attempted suicide after a rough time in her life. Thankfully, she lived, and things are a lot better for her now.

Eventually, my mother killed herself. The entire time I knew her, she struggled with mental health. I used to say that her mental house began to lose rooms until she felt trapped in one hallway, with only one door. The way out.

I tried going to a survivors of suicide loss support group. I learned some very important things there. I’m glad I went a few times, but at the end of the day it was hard to attend.

I tried different meds. I found one that made the intrusive visualizations go away, and for a while I thought it made the suicidal ideation go away, but it just became episodic.

I had wake-up-crying days, where the tears would start as soon as the reality of the world hit me and my mood would tank for weeks thereafter.

I looked up different therapies and medicines. I tried two more SSRIs, even though the one I tried in college hadn’t agreed with me. I was so nauseous, and I wouldn’t let myself stop trying for a while, even though I couldn’t eat, because what if this worked?

Eventually, I found myself at a crossroads. Try lithium, which has a lot of drug interactions, or look into electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or try TMS.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, it’s called. It’s sometimes recommended for people who might be running out of other things to try and aren’t ready for ECT, which sounded about right for me.

I didn’t think my insurance would cover it, but I worked with the local TMS center and provided form after form and Beck Depression Inventory questionnaire after Beck Depression Inventory questionnaire.

I was ready to do benefit concerts and crowdfunding if I had to, but thankfully I didn’t have to.

A post I made on September 9, 2022: “Yesterday was my mapping session and first therapy session of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). The office I'm going to uses a BrainsWay branded machine.

The first thing they put on me was a blue skullcap (which happened to match my face mask!) and then they affixed a measuring strip to the cap. Then they used the helmet, one pulse at a time, to find my motor threshold. The magnetic pulse would make a loud click, and if my right hand twitched (just a tiny movement of my ringfinger for me), they knew they had found the right place in my brain and the right strength. Once they had located that, they could use the skullcap to measure to find my left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Then they position the magnetic coils there and fire almost two thousand pulses per session to make the neurons fire and give me neurotransmitters and regulate them. (I may be explaining this poorly. Feel free to google!)

I will be completely honest with y'all: the first session was terrifying. I was all strapped into this atrocious thing, it was incredibly noisy (they have very good earplugs there and you are required to use them to protect your hearing, never fear), and it made my head and jaw tense up (they gave me a mouthguard and the jaw thing will likely go away in a week). It sounds like woodpeckers and feels like tiny hammers. It doesn't hurt, exactly, but it doesn't feel nice. It has the otherworldly buzzing sensation of a tattooing needle. I sat there unmoving except for the tears running down my face dampening my mask. The pulses continued every twenty seconds for about twenty minutes.

I hated that I had to do it. I hated my brain for putting me there. I hated the psychiatrist and technician there for doing this to me, and I hated myself for not taking it off and leaving.

However. The pain and oddness only happened a few seconds at a time, and it stopped as soon as the session was over. They had tissues at the ready. My husband told me how brave I was. We went home and ordered in and I got pasta and tiramisu. I reminded myself that I have been suicidal for twenty years. Can I not withstand eleven or twelve hours of intermittent magnetic zaps over 2-3 months to try to combat those twenty years?”

I continued those appointments until I had completed thirty-six of them in the span of three months. The mouthguard never went away. I kept it as a trophy. I had my last appointment on November 10, 2022.

It has now been one calendar year.

My depression and suicidal ideation did not go away immediately. And I think my depression is still there, it’s just easier.

But since January, my suicidal ideation has been gone.

Just gone.

In May, I wrote: “I haven’t been suicidal. For four months in a row. I don’t know if that means that TMS works for anybody but me, and I don’t know how long it’s going to work, and it doesn’t take away all the problems in my life. I’ve had fewer wake-up-crying days. Most of the time I’ve been at a four or under on my mental health scale, but I haven’t felt the need to categorize or journal to document my moods. I am having more good days.”

My friends say I’m more resilient lately. I still cry a lot, but it turns out I’m just a naturally weepy person.

I’m not getting a lot more done. I feel bad about that. I thought if I fixed my suicidal ideation, then maybe I’d be more productive because I wouldn’t be crying on the kitchen floor all the time.

I spend a lot of time confused and unsure. I spent a really long time living sort of pass/fail, as though I was telling myself, "okay, if everything doesn't work out I can just go home and wipe myself off the face of the planet!" And I'm taking that option off my table for myself. Now, I feel like I'm being graded with the rest of the other students, which is terrifying.

Living with the consequences of my actions, living long enough to suffer the indignities of aging, living long enough to see my partners die… It’s a lot to come to grips with.

I’m still glad I get to try.

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Struggles, failures, and to-do lists

Sat, 23 May 2020 17:50:20 GMT

There's this thing I do, in my mind.

And some of it might come from the executive dysfunction part of mental illness,
And some of it may stem from being a supposedly 'gifted' kid being presented challenges differently,
And some of it could be plain old laziness...

But I tend to assume that any struggle signals failure.

Any struggle signals failure.

Not for other people! I LOVE other people trying things, and I believe in them so much! Other people are great at doing things and it is beautiful to look at but kind of foreign to me, because I am full of the benefit of the doubt for them and I am so tired of trying to give it to myself that I don't, not much anymore anyway.

But for me. If I have trouble starting a project, if I have trouble finishing a project, or something in-between, it doesn't matter, any trouble along the way and I am sure I am The Worst.

There are ways I combat this!

One is getting comfortable with perceived failure in general, and reminding myself that when others see me, even if I'm not doing great, they might be thinking "plucky underdog!" instead of "loser." Heck, they might even be thinking "successful lady I want to be like!"

One is getting comfortable with perceived failure in specific.

---With the violin, I make mistakes onstage basically constantly. Recovery and not letting mistakes bother me most of the time, and knowing *when* to let repeated mistakes in the same place/doing the same thing bother me.

---With cooking, I have an idea of risks I'm taking and I'm usually convinced that even if a dish fails, I can do *something* with the result.

---I've started trying watercolors, and one thing that's immensely freeing is letting myself be a beginner! There are so many things I've always wanted to try where the thought of being a beginner scared me off. And painting was one of them. But I've gotten to a place I feel like painting with watercolors is something it takes years to do well and I'm comfortable not ever getting there.

The last one is something Brooke has helped me with over the years. Benet sometimes dislikes it because occasionally I run afoul of the intricacies and it saddens me. And what it is is making to-do lists. I can get really frozen in a fear-guilt-indecision spiral when it comes to trying to achieve anything, and after just a little of that spiral, EVERY task seems huge and nebulous and insurmountable.

So I sit down with pencil and paper, and I write out the things that scare me, and I write out some of the steps to accomplish some of the things, and anytime something seems too big or too complex, I tell myself that's just a sign that I need to break it into smaller steps.

But the most important part to me making to-do lists is CHEATING. I try to make the list have things I've already done, things I was already going to do that might have seemed de rigeur, and things that are trivially easy and wouldn't ordinarily warrant being written down.

So let's say it's Monday, which is groceries day right now, and I want to get the kitchen floor cleaned but it seems impossible, and all I've done is drink tea and shower.
That to-do list would look like:
-~~make tea~~
-~~shower~~
-~~get dressed~~
-get groceries
-put away groceries
-sweep kitchen floor
-clean kitchen counters before mopping
-mop kitchen floor
-let floor dry

It sounds kind of silly to fill a to-do list with small things, but the only other thing that works is bribery. For that to-do list, I might "bribe" myself with buying the nice, really-good-smelling surface cleaner at the store to use later on the counters. Or I might add at the end "play Animal Crossing," and then I get a reward *and* I get to cross something extra off the list.

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A life where you can choose

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 21:06:27 GMT

Content warning: suicidal thoughts

I’ve been struggling with depression more than usual in the last month, and in particular I’ve been having more suicidal thoughts.

Things have been slowly improving. I did what I could. When I’m all alone and feeling that deep, unreasoning despair, wondering why I should go on, there are three things I try to do, and I do them in whatever order I can think of them:

1. Take my rescue med for panic attacks
2. Call the suicide helpline
3. Make a very very simple to-do list based on basic needs and getting through the next ten minutes, which often looks like this -
a. Go to the kitchen and get a glass of water and drink it
b. Go to the kitchen and find a snack, any snack, whatever appeals, and eat it
c. Consider taking a shower or changing into clean clothes

I did some other good things, from reaching out to a few friends so I would have more company to taking items that made me feel unsafe or tempted and giving them to someone who could hold onto them for me.

Last night I had insomnia and was considering whether or not I’d be a good candidate for a more in-depth program, everything from a few hours during weeknights doing group therapy to a month-long stay somewhere.

I still don’t know if that’d be right for me right now, and that’s not the point. The point is, I was looking at options, and I had a change of perspective.

“What if,” I thought to myself, “what if I took the money I’d spend on mental healthcare over that month and ate my way through France instead? I've always wanted to do that. It would probably cost about the same.”

On the one hand, it’s an idea fit to make you laugh, right? Ha ha, healthcare is so expensive I might as well take a vacation. On the other hand, though, it’s a beautifully different way of looking at suicide: if I’m going to die, what can I enjoy in the meantime? What would keep me alive for a month? What if I could choose? Wait. I CAN choose.

Here’s to having a life where you feel like you can choose.

For those of you who need a reminder, here’s Boggle the Owl: https://boggletheowl.tumblr.com/post/41509206591/ive-been-getting-a-lot-of-these-lately-and-i

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Nine Years

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 16:20:56 GMT

Content warning: child abuse, alcoholism, suicide.

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( It's been nine years since my mother died. )

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Pleasantness

Sun, 16 Dec 2018 17:42:07 GMT

I slept in. Benet is making me breakfast. There's laundry in the dryer. Tonight I get to see a concert where other people play music. Tomorrow I go someplace nice for a short trip. Tuesday some of the family stuff I've been dealing with might get resolved.

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Not Perfect, but Better: Survivor Day 2018

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 19:33:42 GMT

I usually make a post for Survivor Day (International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day, to be more precise), and this year I couldn’t come up with anything. I usually talk about my family history of suicide and the loss of my mom, and lately I’ve been talking about my own experiences with mental health crises.

In 2016, I talked about how I sat down with my psychiatrist and had her last session of the day, and we went over what my low periods were really like. She said, "I know you feel like you're in a good place. But I think we can do better. I'd like you to think about adding a medication to the one you're already taking."

I thought it would only take a few months to zero in on the correct dose. I was wrong. I had to deal with a lot of side effects and take the dose further and further down. Last fall, I had a severe depressive episode. My suicidal ideation was back, and it seemed worse because it seemed like a failure. Things eased off, but I was devastated. We tweaked my medicine again, bringing up the dosage of another med and adding vitamin D when tests showed my levels were low.

Since spring, I’ve been in a different place mentally. The drugs are working. Waking up in the morning is easier. Going to sleep at night is easier. I have fewer anxiety attacks. I spend less time on my psychiatrist’s emergency-cancellation list. It’s easier to look at knives, or drive my car, or eyeball a bottle of pills, because none of those things look as attractive - as a way out - like they used to.

I used to operate by getting through five minutes at a time and never looking too hard at tomorrow or too far forward in my calendar because that meant facing the fact that I didn’t want there to be a tomorrow. I faked having the little things together because that was all I could manage. With the help of years of practice and a psychiatrist and a really good support network and months of balancing medication, I faked it till I made it.

I lucked out, right? I dreamed the impossible dream – a life without suicidal ideation – and it came TRUE.

Except… It turns out I’m a babe in the woods now. I’ve been slowly learning what it means to live for tomorrow, and I’m not good at it yet. I’m trying, and I’m learning, but things keep happening. My doctor, or one of my partners, or my financial planner, one of them will say something about the future, and now I’m in a place where I’m not blowing them off. It’s freeing, in a way, because I’m not expending energy pretending that I’m taking their thoughts into consideration. I’m not painting a landscape over a black hole of desperation and hoping nobody notices. It’s also terrifying, because now there’s real dirt in that landscape and I never learned to garden.

I’m having some interesting moments where I listen to people and think, “maybe I could do that!” I’m not even talking about big things like changing my career or moving or getting married. I’m talking about things like going to the grocery store on a whim, or reading a book on a difficult topic, sending out holiday cards, making a phone call to my elected officials, or buying an article of clothing. Before, these were things that I would have to plan for and procrastinate about and berate myself about for days before attempting them. Now, I still don’t feel capable or important or like a responsible adult. I am, however, not in so much mental pain that the idea of making a meal differently than initially proposed sends me into a spiral of dread.

So I’m taking it slowly, and trying to remember that nobody – not even the idealized “normal” neurotypical person I’ve spent time wishing I were - feels like their lives are neatly sewn up and perfect.

I want to put this story out into the world because I want other people to know that “things will get better” isn’t always a lie. It’s not the total lack of suffering I dreamt about when I was suicidal. It’s not immediate; life doesn’t become easy or flawless, but it’s real. There’s hope for better.

If you’re in a place where you can’t see past the next five minutes, and you feel like you’re holding on by the skin of your teeth, you’re not alone. If you’re just pretending to smile most of the time, if you have the sensation of always being on the brink of despair, you’re not alone. Please, talk to someone you care about. If you feel like you can’t tell anybody you know, check out the International Suicide Prevention Directory and options through sites like NAMI.

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Kindness

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 19:15:47 GMT

Last week I telephoned our San Diego Comicon hotel to make sure my name was on the reservation and that Seanan's was spelled correctly.

Today, after landing and a cab, and an alarming phone call from the mobility scooter rental place asking when I was going to pick it up (it got sorted out and they delivered the scooter promptly) I went up to the desk... and they wouldn't check me in. Because my name wasn't on the godamned reservation. I checked my bag, sat down, and cried. I got maybe four hours of sleep last night and chock-full airplanes are not calming to me.

I got myself together and had a Slim Jim and a granola bar, used a wet wipe on my face and hands, and felt a little better. A lady came up to me. "Excuse me, I'm sorry, but I saw you crying a little while ago. Is everything okay?"

I explained what had happened and that I was mostly just tired, having anticipated a nap upon arrival.

"Do you have something to eat?"

"Yes, I have a bag of snacks, thank you so much." I squeezed her hand.

Little glimmers of hope and caring when you're feeing low are priceless. It will be my privilege to try to pass it on in a convention where so many can get swept by the wayside.

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