I Tried to Explain to My Mother

Mom called me today and wanted to talk about when Alan and I move back to WA this coming spring. I had never really talked to her about how much I’ve changed since she really knew me, and I thought it might be a good time to sort of open up the conversation. I think I’ve spent ten days with them in a decade. We talk on the phone a lot, but telephones make it easy to hide things.

So we talked about Dad and his cancer therapy, which has been ongoing for years, which will certainly have changed them as well. Then I sort of edged into the insanity issue. I realize that many people, including my doctor, do not feel that major depression and anxiety = insanity. I also realize that many people think that all this medication I take makes me into a regular person. For me, at least, these things are not true.

So anyway we start trying to talk about this. It is very hard to explain to someone how it feels to go insane. To lose the smooth hard base of reality that so many people take for granted. Mom also has had episodes of depression, but everyone has it in their own way, and mine was insane where hers was not.  She did not like the way the medication she took for her depression made her not feel much of anything. Not happy or sad. So she stopped taking it and just lived with it. If I stop taking my medication I will be trying to kill myself inside a week. Maybe less.

I have been insane for ten years. The medication, for most of that time, has kept it at a small distance, but not so far away that I couldn’t still hear it roaring around in my brain. This past fall, when one of the medications quit working and we couldn’t seem to find another one that could take its place, I had to be hospitalized (psycho ward) because I was a danger to myself.

Anyways, ten years of this has made me into a much different person than I had expected to be. I am frequently sarcastic and cruel, I have a tendency to say what is on my mind to people, and I have no patience or tolerance for anything, really. Back in the day I was sarcastic, but never cruel. I thought before I spoke, I took a master’s degree that I wanted to use to become a key person in the Smithsonian Institution. I read all the time, I slept well, I had friends. I was that person when Alan married me. These things are no longer true about me.

After I talked about this stuff for a few minutes I started to choke up, something of a surprise.