Out of the Cube

Comparing notes about Paxil

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. ~ Camus

I said to a friend yesterday, "I woke up this morning feeling like me inside for the first time in months!" That's "me" back on a small dose of Paxil. The weight of being alive has lifted so that being alive feels like something to look forward to rather than dread. When my friend went on Paxil to help her get through a period of deep grief and anxiety, she felt like her world was veiled and she couldn't get to anything out there or inside either. Another friend once told me that she considered Paxil her "happy pill"; it perked her up.

Interesting. It shouldn't be surprising that different people have different reactions to being on an anti-depressant. One of my sisters who suffers from depression can't take it all - it leaves her feeling weird and woozy. I've heard from people who get more depressed on it than off of it.

So if different people have completely different responses, how come we hear standard lines like this one (which I've heard from more than one alternative health-care provider):

"When your body is free of Paxil, you'll be able to really feel your feelings."

Hmmm. I was on Paxil when Mona died and that grief knocked me on my butt; a year later my sister died, more grief; a year after that I had to have my cat put to sleep, more of the same. And not just grief: I've felt kick-ass angry (which a harder place to go to under any circumstances, so Paxil has nothing to do with it) and full of joy over ordinary things. I call those things "feelings."

Not until I woke up Wednesday feeling a sense of "self" inside did I realize how fractured I've felt over the last month since I took the last dose.  I could feel the slide into a pit of sadness and I could hear the danger thoughts: life is not worth living; I don't want to live like this; I want to die. And I could feel the disconnection from people around me, like I was encased in fog. But not until Wednesday did I get it that I had lost a sense of my own being inside of this body. And that is just not OK.

I've had a lot of active support through this journey that, while it is deeply personal, also affects my friends and my family. And I've had tremendous support from people I don't know well and from strangers who became friends through blog postings.  I'm grateful for all of it. A hundred years ago, I'd have been shunted off to an attic and fed through a slot in the door for simply being who I am.

Here's one thing I want to take away from this experiment: Trust my body. Pay attention and trust my body. I think that we are hardier than we think we are and that we have more innate intelligence than we give ourselves credit for. If it takes a drug to sweep away the clamor and leave enough silence for the one true song, then so be it.

Happy Birthday, Bill!

Last week I had lunch with my old pal, Bill, the one I've written about before. We met in high school when we were both in the drama club, and we've been friends ever since, probably closer now than ever. For close to 50 years we have remembered each other's birthdays, even if we didn't send a card, and we have held shared memories. The photo below was taken in the girls' dressing room (which is why you don't see Bill in this shot) during a dress rehearsal for the spring musical, Wonderful Town, in our senior year. 

That's Robin on the left (we're still close and talk often on the phone), me, Nancy M, Laurie V, and Wana. Nancy is looking sexy as hell because she played the vamp in the play, but she was like that anyway, so she was type cast. Nancy had an older boyfriend who got a bottle of bourbon for a group of us who wanted to get drunk. I still remember Nancy handing it through the window of Karen's mother's Bel Air and looking at the bunch of us goody-goodies and laughing. We were having a sleepover at Susan's house while her parents were away for the weekend, and we had one bottle of cheap bourbon and a few liters of 7-Up. Susan had laid newspaper on the floor from the kitchen to the bedrooms and to the bathroom so that if we got sick, we wouldn't throw up on her parents' carpet.

No one got sick because no one got drunk. But I still can't stand the smell of bourbon, and that little episode was about 48 years ago. Funny what memories the body hangs onto.

Robin and Wana and I were close, and Bill and Mike made up the rest of the group, traveling into The City (San Francisco) to pretend we were beatniks, going out for fries and Cokes to Lyons and Togo's. We were all innocents, finding our identities in the characters we played on stage and the fantasies we shared off stage. When we graduated, Bill went to Stanford, Mike to Berkeley, Wana to Santa Barbara, and Robin to the local community college. I got a job as a telephone operator in downtown SF. And our high school bond kept us close for many years.

To have a good friend is to be rich. I'm blessed with friendships that go back 50 years. How lucky am I.

Happy Birthday, Bill!

Reading the signs

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
~ Mary Oliver from "The Summer Day"

I've been down this road before, and I know every twist and turn. My body remembers the shudders and bumps, the steep climb, the high-keening drop. The sign posts are familiar, and I know what's coming. I can choose to continue on this road or to take another, take - say - the high road.

The high road is not on the map.

So I asked the only traveler who could tell me what to do, and in a quiet conversation with myself,  I got the only answer that matters, the one that only I can supply.

Every day we make calculated guesses about what to do next - in little ways, in big ways, in baby steps and big leaps. I'm reading the only signs that have meaning for me - because they come from me. I'm going back on Paxil. I want my life back, the one where I can fully love the people I love; the one where I can follow through on my commitments; the one where I am present for myself.

This has been a trip worth taking. I'm not sorry I went off of Paxil. But now that the wild ride of withdrawal is over, I'm slipping into that old familiar darkness again, the one that made me choose Paxil in the first place 15 years ago.

When I got married many years ago, I went on birth control pills, and the first two days of every cycle of taking them, I would be so nauseated that I couldn't do anything but lie on the sofa. I was 19 years old and resented losing two days a month out of my life: two days a month is 24 days a year.  Now I am almost 64, and for the last month I have been losing as many as three days a week to depression so deep I can't work, can't play, can barely navigate the grocery store. And the downward spiral continues.

What do I want to do with my "one wild and precious life"? Live it. That's all. Just live it.

More from Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day":

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields . . .

Inviting dance

I screamed today in therapy. It felt really good. I imagine what my screams were like for the neighbors:

The nice couple who run the Chinese restaurant downstairs: He stops chopping vegetables for moo-shu, holds the knife against the wooden chopping block, cocks his head; she lifts the steaming pot of egg drop soup from the fire, looks at the ceiling.

The woman lying on the massage table in the next room: Does a shiver run down her oiled back? Does she wonder? Does she take a deeper breath, enter a deeper gone?

Pigeons on the parapet rise in a flutter of gray, dropping the useless downy under-feathers, flapping flapping away to resettle closer to the street where the constant hum of traffic is more reliable.

I cried in therapy today, that ugly snotty who-gives-a-shit-how-I-look sobbing that leaves me puffy-eyed and exhausted. I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, cried and cried and carried on - and carefully threw each wadded-up tissue into the wastebasket like a good little girl.

I danced in therapy today. I moved my hips, swayed to the music in a bit of acting out that is as relentlessly essential to the process as the screaming and the crying - and is the most-often forgotten. Oh! I remember with trepidation and then delight: I have a body!

Sonnet
~ Elizabeth Bishop

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

This world or that?

The world is too much with us . . .
~ Wordsworth

The world is, indeed, too much with us when we can't just throw stuff in the car and go - for a weekend away or, in my case, a trip to Indiana for the next round of my father's adventure in illness. First we have to find someone to watch the cat/dog/parakeet (which means signing release forms in case cat/dog/parakeet keels over while we're gone); then we have to check our bank balance and do whatever voodoo we have to do so we don't bounce checks (ever tried getting a wire transfer into your credit union account?!); call the doctor again to get that refill on a prescription we need for a daily maintenance medication (like our thyroid) but for which she will not write a prescription for a 90-day supply with a year's worth of refills (something about insurance, some grind behind a desk who deems this the "safe" way for us to medicate ourselves for a condition brought on by living in this ecologically screwed up world in the first place).

The world is too much with us when we can't care for an elderly parent without dealing with doctors who don't/won't/can't communicate with us about that parent's condition. My sister in California called my father's doctor in Indiana to ask questions about the few details he leaked out to my brother, and when Dr. Arrogant said, "I just told all of this to your brother," she said, "Well now you can tell me." Turns out he gave my sister different details than he gave my brother - not conflicting details, just different. It takes a village . . . 

The world is too much with us. I'm trying to manage my life without benefit of brain drugs. And while my brain is on tilt-a-whirl, I need to use it to a) transfer funds from an IRA to the credit union and b) find out what the hell is going on with my father so I can make a decision about when to 3) drop everything here so I can go there. My Ayurvedic doctor has a plan, but that plan calls first for ordering supplements from her office (I can't just call this in - I have to use the form on her web site) and waiting for one of her sporadic part-time people to fill my order and let me know it's ready to pick up. This very moment I am tapping my foot, waiting for a call to tell me I can come get some supplements that may or may not help me get my brain back in balance.

All of this on a holiday weekend. I hear Mercury is retrograde - I mean, so retro that it's so far ahead of the curve it can kiss its own - well, you know.

Normal, ordinary, day-to-day things are huge when your brain isn't functioning. It's no surprise I couldn't keep working at my grant-writing job when most days (more and more lately), I can barely organize cleaning the cat pan. Changing the sheets is huge. Following a recipe is conquering Everest. OK, I exaggerate, but not much.

I remember all of this from the Great Depression of '94 when I managed to keep my job and most (not all) of my friends while I was trying this and that and something else to alleviate the pain of living with a mis-firing brain. I was younger then. I spent six months in a downward spiral before I finally succombed to taking the medication that saved my life. Now on this quiet spring day in 2009, I'm trying to use my malfunctioning brain to decide whether or not to go back on an anti-depressant. Do you see the irony here?

The world is too much with us, even under the best of circumstances, and it's a testament to the incredible stamina of the human heart that we can navigate this ever more complex world at all. The whole mess works like a Rube Goldberg contraption, the bells and whistles, balls and spirals, chutes and ladders all turning, dropping, gliding, sliding, and climbing on its own self-generated energy - until one little thing is mis-timed. Then, what was a dance of perfect harmony becomes a chaotic clatter of collapse.

A brain gone awry has no place in the dance: it cannot find the rhythm, let alone move to it and with it. But what are we to do when . . .

listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
~ e.e. cummings

Dew-pearled and a-snarl with profanity

County library? Reference desk, please. Hello? Yes, I need a word definition. Well, that's the problem. I don't know how to spell it and I'm not allowed to say it. Could you just rattle off all the swear words you know and I'll stop you when . . . . Hello?
~ Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Dad is in the hospital again. So I marched around the house this afternoon saying all the swear words I could think of. Why? Because it felt better than weeping. Early this morning he had what's called in lay terms a "mini stroke," and the very idea of putting a mild word like "mini" in front of a big fat scary word like "stroke" is just plain wrong. Who thinks up these things?!

He needs surgery to unblock a carotid artery that is so blocked I'm impressed he didn't die, but he can't have the surgery because he's too weak, still has pneumonia (still?!), and is even now receiving three units of blood (and I want to know what he did with the three units they just gave him six weeks ago).

This thing I've been calling "depression" did not knock me to the floor and drool all over me when my brother called to tell me about Dad. No. In fact, I was remarkably focused today and only minimally weepy. I'm scared for my father, and maybe this fear is so damned big that it is pointless to quake in its shadow. Maybe if I go along acting like everything is normal, when I wake up tomorrow it will be.

My father tinkering around in the garage has, for my entire life, been the very epitome of "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world." Well, no wonder I've been so damned depressed. Dad has not been tinkering for the past six months. And I see that no matter how old I am (and I am old, Father William!), I am still my father's child, looking to him to make my world right.

I'll be damned.

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!

from "Pippa Passes" by Robert Browning

The care and feeding of depression

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you oughtta go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid. ~ from Star Trek, Next Generation

In the end, the only thing to do with depression, if you're not going to subdue it with drugs, is to ride it out (instead of "ride" I started to type "write" - ah yes, that too). My friend in the northeast corner of the continent calls it the Black Dog. Yes, the big slobbering moody spiteful suffocating thing.

Good doggie. Want a treat?

Depression continues, and the trouble is that sometimes I feel pretty darned good, happy even, and then with no warning, I slide into a dark heaviness. There is no repeating pattern, no star to navigate by, no warning sirens or smoke signals to tell me that the world shifted in that last blink and the one after that and the one after that. And then, there was that dog again.

He followed me home. Can I keep him?

Yesterday I canceled a couple of things I had planned, avoided the neighbors so I didn't have to make small talk, didn't look at email or answer the phone. If I had a cold, I could just say, "Hey, I have a cold, sorry, don't feel like talking." What do you say when tears start up out of nowhere and the weight of the dog makes it hard to breathe?

Sit! Don't stay!

During what I call the Great Depression of '94 (when menopause tried to kill me), I would go to work, stay as busy as possible, drive home, shut the door behind me, and cry all evening. I figured out that I could divert my attention with TV, and then I'd cry through the commercials. So I started renting movies, and I had to be careful about the content - no romantic comedies, for example, nothing that could nudge the heart to tears. So I went on a bender, first with all of the Alien movies (on a small screen, the big slobbering monster wasn't so scary) and then the Terminator movies (I still have tender feelings for Arnold Schwarzenegger).

This time around I'm reaching out more, asking for help from friends, acknowledging that I may need to recalibrate my judgment skills or that my irritability may be completely irrational. I'm trying not drive people away. I'm trying not to make big decisions that I may regret later. And most of all, I don't want to keep it a secret that I'm depressed.

Roll over! Play dead!

Some friends and some health care practitioners I've seen have encouraged me to stay with the grief, to travel where it takes me, let it rise, let it be as big as it needs to be. That's another one of those things that sounds great in theory and might even be workable - if I lived in a hut in the middle of a forest and the community left food at my door and gave me as much time as I needed and were all still there whenever I deemed myself done with the process.

During the Great Depression of '94, one friend told me to "get a grip" on myself and another told me to "lighten up." A person going through depression is often scary to other people, normal people, and just people who love her and want her to feel better.  I am that scary person having really big feelings and sometimes going so flat that even when someone hugs me, I can't feel it and don't have the energy to try. I don't need to be told to get exercise, it will help! I don't need to hear about someone's cousin's friend who cured her depression with a regime of  Gatorade and Gregorian chanting.

I don't know what I do want. I don't know what "help" looks like, so I doubt I'd recognize it if it showed up on my doorstep wearing a Red Cross uniform. I do know that I am deeply touched when a friend doesn't try to snap me out of it but just keeps treating me like I'm a normal person. I am a normal person having some big-shit scary feelings that drop over me in a murky haze or rise up out of me like a baby Alien monster. And then I just want to sleep.

Nice doggie! Want to go for a walk?

Meditation Trip

So we need to choose a way of practice that is deep and ancient and connected with our hearts, and then make a commitment to follow it as long as it takes to transform ourselves.
~ Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart

The word "meditation" evokes serenity, doesn't it? I picture a quiet pond, dappled shade, birds in the trees - which completely leaves out mosquitoes, sun burn, and bird poop.

Sometimes when I'm trying to meditate, a bunch of voices start up in my head, like siblings on a road trip in the back seat of a '57 Chevy station wagon driving from San Francisco to Terre Haute. Cranky Bitch wants a window seat and Miss Priss is complaining of the heat. Goody Two-shoes tries to calm them both down, and Cranky Bitch tells her to fuck off. Finally Mother of All Mothers steps in with her load of guilt and threatens to pull over to the side of the road and make them all walk if they don't let Meditating Me reach Nirvana.

I believe that meditation, like every other woo-woo thing in the world that works far better than bad press  ever gives it credit for, needs to be taken with a dose of anything-goes followed by a chaser of it-is-what-it-is. And whatever it is is only as good as we are willing to make it. So when I take what Jack Kornfield calls "the one seat," I've learned not to expect much - maybe a few minutes of quiet or maybe a ringing telephone; maybe some deep cleansing breaths and maybe the beginnings of anxiety. One thing I've learned over the almost 40 years I've been practicing (and avoiding practicing) meditation is that I've got a heck of a lot of ruckus going on in my head, and meditating doesn't make it go away; in fact, meditating often gives voice to the disenfranchised personas lurking just below my roiling surface. Jeeze Louise, kids, can't you just go outside and play?!

Jack Kornfield cracks me up: "Spiritual practice . . . is a widening circle or spiral that opens our hearts and gradually infuses our consciousness to include all of life as a spiritual whole." OK, I'll go along with that. God knows I love a good spiral and have been led by spirals since the morning in the fall of 1979 when I woke to a voice repeating softly, "Let your life be a spiral." It was a little like the voice you hear at the airport reminding you that the moving sidewalk is coming to an end. The thing is, I believe in the power of the human heart to heal itself, and I believe that having a spirtual practice is the key to said healing. And I try not to forget the difference between theory and practice, practice, practice.

Theory is our fantasy of what we hope to achieve by planting our butts in the one seat; practice is opening our hearts to the rambunctious voices of our consciousness, and we've all got them, loads of them, chattering, nattering, and arguing over who gets to sit by the window. Their purpose, I suppose, is to teach of us how to stay focused on the road, even when we miss the last exit off of I-15 and onto I-80 and find ouselves heading west on a desert road where we haven't seen any other traffic in 30 minutes and the voices are reminding us about that Flannery O'Connor story in which a whole family is slaughtered by a stranger when they take the wrong turn on a road trip.

Practice is the road in front of us, mirages and all.

When I make my annual road trips to Indiana every year (the real ones as opposed to the fantasy ones), I remember the summer road trips our whole family made back when that '57 Chevy station wagon didn't have seat belts or air conditioning and there were seven kids packed into the two back seats and lounging in the back. We ate bologna sandwiches on white bread at rest stops that had an out house, a picnic table, and a bare faucet sticking up out of the ground. We slept while Daddy drove and Mother held the baby and one of us, invariably, threw up (probably me).

"We had fun, didn't we," Dad  says now, nostalgia turning every trip into an adventure in family love.

"Yeah," I say truthfully. "We sure did."

 I take the one seat to stay connected with my selves, every single one of them, bless their nattering transformative voices.

Let's keep on dancing

I don't watch TV. I gave it up about 3 years ago for a lot of really good reasons, and I don't miss it. When I want a hit of a good crime drama, I have Netflix send me an episode of Law & Order or Saving Grace or CSI, one of those. So I'm really out of the loop when it comes to TV commercials, some of which are pretty darned good, or so I find out when I visit one of my favorite bloggers, Wise Web Woman. I just went out to her site to get caugt up on what's going on her corner of the world (and she is in a corner up there in Newfoundland) and took a look at a couple of YouTube videos she posted (Another "People" Commercial). I know it's just a big ad for mobile phones, but I'm a sucker for people reaching out and touching people, especially with music.

Toward the end of winter this year, my granddaughter and I went to Pearl Street Mall on a balmy Saturday to have lunch and enjoy the mall scene. There is always a mall scene, and the nicer the weather, the more - ummm - scenic, with jugglers and musicians, balloon hat makers and puppeteers, magicians, artists, palm readers, zip code guy (remember him?), and the contortionist who folds himself into a little plexiglass cube. This day an upright piano was parked outside the Boulder Arts Cooperative, and a small group of people gathered to sing along. A songbook was propped open on top of the piano next to the tip jar. We were just walking past when he started playing "Ob-La-Di" and I turned us around and started singing with the other goofy people, all of us laughing and making eye contact and harmonizing and jumping around.

It felt great! I did have a pang later, wondering if my 11-year-old granddaughter was embarrassed by Grammy's enthusiasm out in public. The next day she was going through my CDs in the car as I was driving her home, and she asked if I had that song on any of them.

"What song?"

"That song you were singing yesterday on the mall. I really liked it."

"Ob-La-Di?"

Yes! Not only was she not embarrassed - she wanted to know the song - a song that was popular the year before her mother was born. You know what I wish for my granddaughter? I wish for her lots of opportunities to be silly in public, to sing and dance and play just because it feels good, to make connections with strangers, knowing deep in her heart that we all want to be loved, to feel happy, to live our lives in peace with other people.

And now here's a scene from my granddaughter's favorite movie. This song was popular when her mother was her age.

Brain space

If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or her - it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind.  When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle . . ." 
~ from Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth

My friend Marilyn sent this Tolle quote to me the other day, and I appreciated the reminder about the brain's chatter, and I remember that I don't have to listen to it. Turning off the chatter, or just lowering its volume, is not easy; it is, in fact, a life's work to find space between the incessant yammering. And it's worth it.

Our brains are designed to keep at us no matter what, and they are pretty darned useful most of the time. Mine got me through a Master's degree in English and has helped me through all kinds of situations, but the brain wants to take credit for everything, and it doesn't want you to forget it:

Me me ME!! Look at me! Heart barely helped at all. Trust me trust me trust me!!!

The trouble is that the darned thing won't shut up. And it lies. It makes meaning where there is none because, I think, we are hard-wired to try to understand everything. What's the matter with just accepting that some things don't make sense. In fact, I think that most things don't make sense - not the kind of sense we try to make of them. And the very attempt to make sense is crazy-making. (This is sounding familiar. Have I been on this tear before?)

I'm reading A General Theory of Love in which the authors state early in the book, "The investigation of these queries is not just an intellectual excursion: people must have the answers to make sense of their lives." The queries they posed were about relationships and emotional pain. So when I read this statement (and the emphasis on must is theirs), I was incensed. First, I don't accept the assumption that we must make sense of our lives. In what way? What would "sense" look like? How can we know when we've made sense? And they say it's "not just an intellectual excursion" when the very act of "making sense" is an intellectual excursion.

I don't have any answers, but I have a whole freaking bunch of questions and I have some ideas, some wonderings and ponderings and general looking out the window excursions that lead me on a merry chase through - let's call it a mobius band - understanding of life. I am mostly willing to let my understanding of pretty much anything be flipped by curiosity and wonder. And when I can take that ride along the underside of understanding, I often find that sweet spot Tolle talks about, that "alive peace" that never comes from brain chatter - never. I can go there only when I can bypass the chatter, which means letting go of the need to understand.

Maybe this makes no sense at all. Ok then, that's good.