The Wellness Formula
03 Apr 2012 8 Comments
in Diagnosis Tags: depression, doctors, formulas, goals, growth, medication, pets, physical illness, the life of erin, therapy, tips
Guess what? I still have the flu! Today is day seven of lying on the couch, taking Gravol to keep food down, and boring the pants off my puppy. Yuck!
I said to my friend S. the other day that I should be better by now. After all, isn’t this the formula for getting well?
Liquids + rest = wellness
No? Okay, how about:
Liquids + rest + Vitamin C + chicken noodle soup + flat ginger ale = wellness
Whenever I’m doing something that “should” be working but isn’t, I have this magical belief that I actually need to do something totally random to get better. Like the universe wants me to chew bubble gum while brushing my hair and listening to Radiohead. That exact combination will equal kicking this cold to the curb! Unfortunately I don’t have the energy to try every combination of activities under the sun while I’m sick.
I know that if I went to the doctor and ask her how to get well, she would say almost the same thing as my formula above:
Rest + liquids + time = wellness
Ah, yes, time. Time and patience, those slippery things. Maybe some faith doesn’t hurt either. And so as I lie here staring at the ceiling, I have to remind myself that even though I’m doing everything that I “should” be doing to get better, my body is only going to get better when it decides to. I have to let go and wait.
The same thing could be said for depression. When I was first diagnosed I was told:
Medication = mental wellness.
Well, that didn’t make me better. I tried another combination:
Medication + therapy = wellness
That wasn’t the quick fix I was looking for either. Adding time to the equation didn’t fix things either. Now, after eleven years of trying to get well, I have learned a formula that kind of works for me:
The right medication + intensive psychotherapy + routine + eating well + getting enough sleep + social time + alone time + writing + grounding myself + humour + pets + time + patience = the start of wellness
What a ridiculously long formula! And after all that, I only get the start of wellness?
Unfortunately, yes, and I could have added a lot more into that equation, too. In fact, I add new parts to it every day. Sometimes I take away pieces but usually I add them back. And to make matters even more frustrating, the formula is different for every person. It’s common for certain parts of that formula to work for other people, so much so that doctors pretty much always recommend medication, but it doesn’t mean that medication always works for everyone.
It sounds really unfair, and it is. As human beings we don’t like unpredictability. We like things to fit in neat little boxes that we can sort and pile and then put away. But even the things we can measure EXACTLY don’t always act like they are supposed to.
For example, take time. There are 365 days in a year, twenty-four hours in a day, and sixty minutes per hour. Nice measurable and neat! Think back to what you were doing a year ago. Does it feel like a whole year has gone by since then? Not for me, it feels like spring of 2011 was maybe four months ago. What about when you’re really looking forward to something? Time slows right down, so that kids waiting for Santa cannot believe how long it takes for those 24 days of December to go by. And when we’re dreading something, time seems to travel faster than ever before.
So time is measurable and immeasurable. Same with illness, both physical and mental. If I were to go to the doctor today and tell her my symptoms she’d probably say that I have the flu, but there are no blood tests or breathalyzers to confirm that diagnosis. Same for depression and many other kinds of mental illness. Medicine isn’t an exact science. Life isn’t an exact science.
Luckily for me, I was never really a math or science person. I passed those classes fine but man, were they boring! Now the arts, they overflow with unpredictability. I loved drama and English and art. Pretending and writing and painting all make my feelings more manageable without putting them in neat little boxes. In drama and English and art, there are rules, but it takes more than following those rules to create something artistic. It takes heart. It takes life. It takes unpredictability.
So, back to me beating the flu. I’m still going to keep downing liquids, resting on the couch, and taking Vitamin C but I need to add some more faith that those things still will work, but on their own time. I’ve read two books in the last week, and maybe a third will bring my wellness to the surface. Maybe I’ll try walking Digby a little bit today even though I still feel nauseous.
The beauty in the unpredictable formulas is that we get to participate in our remedy. We get to stretch our comfort zones and try what we like and try what we don’t like and by process of elimination we get closer to what we really need.
What is your formula for wellness?
We Aren’t Broken
06 Nov 2011 6 Comments
in The Big Picture Tags: coping, depression, fear, hospital, psychiatry, therapy, tips, writing
We can FEEL broken, flawed, or even crazy but it does not mean that we ARE those things.
For a while there I felt like the diagnosis of being mentally ill meant that there was something wrong with ME. I thought that I’d screwed up and failed at life. In reality, there was something wrong with the chemical balances in my brain. There was something wrong with my coping methods to deal with stress. There was nothing wrong with me as a person.
It’s super important to get help when you are depressed or are having trouble functioning in everyday life. You might see a counselor or a therapist or a psychiatrist, and they are trained to help you in the ways that they know how. Trust them, work with them. But guess what? You still have a hand in your recovery.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: YOU are the expert on yourself and your life. So even though people helping you with your illness are great, they can’t help you 100% because they don’t know you 100%. You are the only person who does.
This means two things. The first one is that everything your doctor or therapist or even your friend recommends for you to do to help yourself has to feel right for you. If it doesn’t, tell them. Ask for clarification about why they think it would help and if you still don’t agree, then say no. There will be times when your treatment team can still do things even when you say no, like if they think you are going to harm yourself or someone else, but most of the time they have to listen to you.
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How to Survive the Impulse to Hurt Yourself
28 Sep 2011 4 Comments
in Survival Tags: risk, self harm, the life of erin, therapy
Hurting yourself is an individual thing. We all have ways we hurt ourselves, whether it’s overeating or smoking or driving too fast. Some methods are conscious, others are not. Obviously, hurting ourselves hurts us. Why on Earth would we choose to do something that weakens us, makes us more vulnerable, and threatens our survival?
I can’t explain it except that, for me, hurting myself has been a way to align with the world hurting me. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” kind of mentality. It also has made me feel in control of some of the hurt in my life. Actually seeing my physical pain has helped me accept the emotional pain. So it has helped on some levels, or else I never would have done it to begin with.
For a long time I embraced the urge to self-destruct, but I’ve learned the hard way what it does to my physical and emotional strength, not to mention my self-esteem.
Today I had a rough patch and I pulled through without harming myself. What works for me might not always work for you but we can’t be THAT different from one another. Here are some tips for you to try to survive the impulse to hurt yourself, especially if it involves self-harming through injury or suicide.
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Therapy: School of Life
11 Aug 2011 3 Comments
in Therapy Tags: depression, life direction, mindyourmind.ca, school, therapy
My last post mentioned one reason I didn’t go to university or college: the fact that I felt invisible. There are actually many reasons I never went, but another reason that I am going to share with you now is that I couldn’t leave my therapist. When all my peers went away to school I stayed here because the rapport I had with my therapist was essential in keeping me afloat. I could have found a new therapist in the city I went to school in but I was so fragile that doing so was out of the question.
So I stayed in London and while there is a university here, it had no appeal for me. I decided to wait until I felt better emotionally and by the time that happened all of my ambition was gone. People tell me all the time that I should go back to school and they don’t realize that school is a really sensitive topic for me. So many things factor in to my decision not to go yet, one of which is maintaining proximity to my therapist.
When we hear about depression or other mental illnesses, we hear about their debilitating symptoms, but not about how debilitating treatment can be. While I acknowledge how fortunate I am to be receiving treatment at all, treatment is hard work.
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Screw Shame
04 Aug 2011 4 Comments
in The Big Picture Tags: feelings, guilt, life direction, mental health superhero underpants, risk, shame, therapy
I’m learning a hard lesson: shame about being mentally ill is not something I can just fix and then forget about. The shame lingers, waiting for a chance to reattach itself to my back. At the blink of an eye it jumps on me, making me heavy and slow. It sticks on the bottom of my shoes like gum, willing me to stop moving forward, to stay stuck and hide instead.
Bummer. I thought I’d outgrown my shame! Me and my mental health superhero underpants that maybe don’t fit me as well as I’d hoped. Today my mom repeated to me a question she’d heard on the radio: If you knew you only had one day left to live, would you go to a nudist beach? Talk about a serious question. Maybe what I ask myself is whether or not I’d be willing to take off my mental health superhero underpants and show up on the internet nude.
Wait, that didn’t come out right.
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My Typical Therapy Session
24 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in Therapy Tags: the life of erin, therapy, timeline
Have you ever wondered what a therapy session is like? Even if you haven’t, knowing about my typical therapy session is going to help you know me since therapy has taught me most of the mental health stuff I know. I hope that this description can help you see therapy as more than just a clinical place for treatment. It’s with a real person in a real place and can often feel like meeting a friend on a regular basis.
I usually drive to therapy and have to find a parking space on the surrounding streets. I keep toonies on me always for therapy parking! I briskly walk to my therapist’s office which is a three-story building full of therapists and other independent offices. My therapist actually has two offices in different parts of town so sometimes I arrive at her one office before she does and I’m locked out. I sit in the hallway and read, often seeing other therapists scoot to the bathrooms with a sheepish look on their faces. Yes, even therapists have to pee!
1:00 pm – My therapist arrives – usually out of breath – and unlocks the door to the small waiting room where I hang up my coat. She turns on the radio softly so that our voices won’t be overheard through the office door. I follow her into her office and she runs around turning on lights and moving chairs together. Sometimes there are toys on the floor because she treats a lot of kids as well.
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