Make It Happen

I hate the reception area at my therapist’s office. Everyone in the waiting area seems completely burnt out. The two receptionists, an older man and woman both either over the age of sixty or severely ravaged by the passing years, were particularly nasty upon my first visit. This time, however, they merely acknowledged my presence at the wood panelling covered intake counter by sighing accordingly and handing me paperwork without once making eye contact.

It was certainly off putting to meet them on my first visit. I was scared and nervous and I was greeted by people who simply grunted and sighed with exasperation at any questions I had. Today I realized that it can’t be easy for them as the appear to be the only receptionists that work for a non-profit metal health organization that is located directly in front of a row of group homes. Over the years I can see how people in that position can build up such nastiness and call it a defence mechanism.

The wait wasn’t as long this time before I was able to see the doctor. As far as I could see, there wasn’t even a patient in her office before I was. My agent, who dropped me off as planned but had to back out of a lunch engagement, had left only minutes before I was told to take a seat in the doctor’s office.

I have yet to be in a therapist’s office that has one of those neat couches you see in the movies or on television. I always end up in a cramped room devoid of the volumes of books you would expect to see in such an office. This is probably attributed to the fact that I have never had to pay for therapy yet in my life, and as such routinely see doctor’s who have more of a travelling practice rather than a steady office.

The chair I sat in seemed made for fidgeting around in with high arm rests that were too uncomfortable to rest your arms on and yet too pushed together to comfortably cross one’s legs. I repeatedly slouched as it seemed the only way to be truly comfortable since the ungodly looking red leather backing was both padded and oddly curved from years of use. I would have switched to the chair to the left of me, but the rip in the cushion always makes me think that something has fallen into the chair or it has been the victim of someone’s ill placed rage. I never once consider a ripped seat to be the work of simple wear and tear.

I could see my file on the desk in front of me and it was alarmingly bigger that I remembered it being the last time I visited. I was tempted to look at what information she had gathered in my few week absence. My somewhat delusional paranoia kicked in and I began to wonder who she had talked to and what they had said about me. Then I began to wonder if she had left it on the table deliberately to see if I would bite and try too peek into it. Then again, one of my biggest problems was always questioning other people’s motives.

My doctor (who I shall now refer to as my doctor since I don’t anticipate seeing another one) entered the office dressed a lot more casually than the last time I saw her. Last time it was a pant suit with a slightly mismatched jacket; today it was jeans and a button down shirt. It seemed like it was a much more laid back day at the office all around.

We exchanged pleasantries and got all the juicy details that I am not going to discuss here out of the way. The one thing that I am not going to discuss here are, oddly enough, my feelings. I can’t give all my secrets away. We discussed people in my life, how I feel about them and how they feel about me (or at least how I perceive it). Since a lot of those people could very well be reading this, I find it very unfair at this point to put things like that out into the open. I will say that what was talked about was nothing that I wouldn’t tell someone to their face. Also, without frame of reference, many readers of this blog would be completely lost.

Technically, I shouldn’t be discussing any of the therapy session, and I probably wouldn’t have but in an odd way the talk we had pretty much demanded that I did.

The file on the desk had been bulked up with my past medical records. I expressed during my last appointment that I feared my problem was more than simple depression. I lied to a lot of people that I cared about and did some very stupid things. I felt trapped and lashed out in the worst and most self serving ways possible. I distorted things to create a more palatable reality for myself. The first thing that sprang to mind was that I was bipolar; a disorder that I brought up the last time I was hospitalized for trying to kill myself in October of 2006 with an ill advised overdose of Tylenol P.M. Instead of getting a concrete answer, I was prescribed sleeping pills that made me sick and an antidepressant that I was weaned off only a few months after I went on them. Then I was given anxiety medication that I avoided like the plague and threw away.

When I tried killing myself it was my second hospitalization for depression; the first coming shortly after my parents passed away and I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me over the span of what remains the worst two weeks of my life. Both occasions were now in the file in front of me, along with every trip I had to psychiatrists and psychologists over the course of my life dating back to high school.

The doctor told me what I heard time and time again when researching bipolar disorder; that one in three people who have it will go undiagnosed and will not receive proper treatment. I was delighted and scared at the same time to learn that she was inclined to agree with me based on the evidence in front of her.

She said that she noticed in the U.S. that there is a stigma surrounding diagnosing anyone as being bipolar, or even calling it manic depression. Much like how a person who is bipolar will try to blame their problems on other people or situations (no matter how well placed the blame might be), doctors in the states prefer to look simply at the “depression” part of the equation rather than the “manic part,” preferring to place the blame on other tangential societal forces or more Freudian notions.

The reason the last doctor I saw never really said much about my condition is because she simply believed I had a nervous breakdown brought on by extreme stress and despair. She thought my problem was solely societal and had nothing to do with the fact that I lied and deceived friends into thinking I was fine. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my brain’s fault. In the old doctor’s eyes, society was to blame.

The new doctor said that the signs all point to me being bipolar, but she was going to stop just short of diagnosing me on the spot. Being bipolar means sometimes having to take some potentially dangerous medications that need to be continuously calibrated and tweaked as time goes on, and as such further testing is needed on my part. She said since I have been showing some signs of progress, she was not going to have me committed (not that she really would have been able to do that anyway), but she scheduled an appointment for a physical where some tests will also be run to make sure my liver isn’t damaged since Lithium is most likely what I will be prescribed along side an anxiety medication and some sleeping pills. Two days after the physical (which will be handled in the same building when they have their monthly “physicalpalooza,” as she called it) we will meet again and talk about medication.

I am willing to go along with anything at this point. I think I have done a fairly good job thus far of pulling my life out of a nose dive and am slowly pulling back up from the floor of the jungle, but I know I need to stay on something regimented. I don’t want to go through what I have just gone through a second time. Or a third time. Or ever again.

In the meantime, I have been given a homework assignment-slash-job of sorts. Which is why I am posting this not just to let people know how I am feeling, but to explain what I am going to be doing over the next few weeks in this blog and also in its companion “Because You Want To....”

My doctor knows all about the troubles I have had with my past publisher and knows how I have been struggling with my writers block and lack of motivation or stimulation. She also knows that I fluctuate wildly between narcissism and extreme self deprecation that it makes sense that I delete half the things I write.

She wants me to realize that art for art’s sake is not art for the sake of life. She also knows that without steady paying work, I have a lot of downtime where I lamentably either flip through the channels over and over again or compulsively check my email in hopes of something arriving.

She said that if I want to consider myself a writer, I need to start treating it as if it were a job again. As such, I am now on a strict writing regiment. I must write five hours per day (research not included, but drafting is), four days a week, and I am not to delete anything. I must turn out four pages of material per week either typed or handwritten that I am truly proud of or at least think sound coherent. She will be calling to make sure I am doing as such and checking these blogs to see if I am following through.

She didn’t give me a list of Dos, but gave me a list of Don’ts.

-Do not substitute writing for action. If something comes up, by all means tend to that first.

-Don’t be overly intellectual unless you have to. It will only give you a bigger ego.

-Don’t use writing to complain unless it is necessary to prove a point or it is in a jocular manner. If you do, make sure it is to convey a feeling. If you bitch and complain all the time, no one will read anything you write.

-Don’t become self-absorbed. Over analysis is counter productive.

-Don’t use writing as a substitute for therapy.

-Most importantly, don’t delete or throw anything away regardless of how you feel about it. If you aren’t proud of something or it isn’t ready, simply hide it away.

-Don’t repress your feelings. All you will do is kill your soul.

-It doesn’t have to be serious (recipes even count as writing if you commit them to paper and make them up creatively) and don’t take it as such.

I was also given a suggested reading list of authors and books I should look at and study in my off time. I do plan on reading some of these if I get the chance, so if anyone reading this has any of these, a loan for a week or so will earn you baked goods as soon as the oven gets fixed.

Living by the Word by Alice Walker

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

The Crack-up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Anything by Elizabeth Bishop

Anais Nin’s Journals

The Diary of Alice James

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”

The Liars Club by Mary Karr (which I started reading years ago and never finished)

Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (which I wouldn’t mind reading again)

The White Peacock by D.H. Lawrence

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Jazz by Toni Morrison

House of the Spirits by Isabele Allende

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

The Pinch Runner Memorandum by Kenzaburo Oe

Now to end this on a somewhat abrupt conclusion because I am tired and just want to post this before passing out and going to bed. I still do have one more issue from today to address.

My agent was going to have lunch with me this afternoon after the appointment, but we had to settle for a quick cup of coffee at Tim Horton’s before she had to go away on business. In my last blog I stated that I had two potential options with regards to my old publisher. After much thought, I decided that I don’t want to fight with them right now.

In such a business you don’t want to make too many enemies as the very people who said no to you before might very well come around in the future and want you for something else. Now with the notion that I have to push myself on a constant daily basis, I am positive that I can come up with pieces I can sell over the next year or so. I’m not going to pressure myself more than I have to. I am going to let things come naturally. A lawsuit is not guaranteed and could very well take longer than waiting for my option to expire. That’s more stress and uncertainty than I am willing to expend on a gamble.

I will wrap this up now with a simple thank you for those who have stuck by me over the past few months. Without you guys, I am a fraction of a person.

So until tomorrow then?