Unhealthy Study Habits

One time my therapist asked me one of the most personally significant questions I’ve ever heard.

She said, “What is more important to you? Cutting yourself in order to ace the test… or putting your health first and failing the test?”

(Just to explain, I used to cut myself before studying because it helped soothe me and allowed me to focus. I got all the pent up anxiety out that way so I could “ace the test.”)

And it was so embarrassing to tell her the truth. The truth I’d lived numerous times over and over. The truth that got me through so much of college.

I told her, “I’d rather cut and ace the test.”

Because it is true. To me, my academics and my future career are so much more important than my health is.

And I know that’s messed up.

But we are so hardwired to believe that success is more important than anything. That being a hard worker is so desirable.

That we ignore the damage it can have on us.

The worst part is, if you asked me that same question over again today- I’d still have the same answer.

-Quinn

Loser Who Thinks Too Much

2 Comments

square844Both those terms have been used to describe me. An insult just doesn’t stab, it leaves a wound — not a scar, but a bleeding dripping lesion that comes to you in your worst depressions and sometimes — like now — when you are feeling just fine. I am a loser because I have not worked since I was 33 and do not have kids. I did not make a million in Silicon Valley and no one buys my photography or my writing (which I haven’t tried to sell in a long time.) Never mind that I have been married 27 years to the same woman, never hit or threatened to hit her or called her a vile name. I am a loser, a pariah.

The isolation of bipolar disorder is hell, but the isolation of my personality is worse. When I take tests such as the Myer’s Brigg, I keep scoring in the rarest categories. Less than 1% of people out there share my characteristics. We wander around, seldom meeting each other. The way we see the world, the things we strive for just aren’t appreciated or discerned by the rest of you out there. You come onto my blog, read my accounts of my illness or other aspects of my life and you don’t get me. I am a cipher, a shadow on the wall swept by the wind, a curiosity that cannot be. I, like others of my kind, feel alone. No wonder so many of us end up in monasteries or convents.

An article from a 2010 issue of The Guardian cites a pundit who believes that the InterNet has destroyed our ability to think deeply. All the shallowness of our political talk, our inability to concentrate works of art that encourage us to probe our minds, the simplistic and self-serving grasp of religion — those things I believe have always been there. InterNet debates are only emblems of a longtime tendency for their participants to refuse to engage with people who disagree with them, to damn new ideas with oversimplifications and patronization, to mock differences. People have always told me that I think too much, even educated people. They twisted the gifts of my mind into a curse. So I hide from them. I do not speak of my cogitations in any place other than here. Yes, I pretend to be something that I am not, but what am I supposed to do when I am so alone and the mass of human beings cannot and will not trouble to understand me?

Bipolar disorder with its wild antics and chilling depressions hogtied me for the longest time. I’ve come out as a new person, but the rest of you remain the same. Freak is how you thought of me when the disease ran my thoughts and freak is how you think of me now that I am in my right mind. Was it worth it?

Cults, Witches and Mental Illness

1 Comment

When I was 15, one of my brothers, who was 21 came home from college because he wasn’t well. He would sit and stare and do nothing for awhile. Later he would start talking but he said strange things and acted bizarre. He could be generous but was also unpredictable. I feel bad now because I was afraid of him for no real reason. He scared me because he seemed unusual.

My parents tried to figure out what had happened to him. He seemed fine when he had left home. They suggested maybe someone slipped him some drugs but settled on that he had been brainwashed by a cult at college. That his new girlfriend had brought him into the cult.

Of course, there was no cult, but the story grew. I was told not to speak to certain neighbors as they were part of this cult. My father didn’t believe in mental illness or psychiatry. He thought the hospitals were like the one in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and discouraged my brother from going.

They also accused people of being witches. It was like mental illness was contagious. It was scary and confusing living in that home.

It can be difficult to be the sibling of anyone with a chronic illness. All the time and attention was on my brother and I felt ignored. My older siblings moved out and i just had my younger brother to confide in. I felt everything was strange at our house and didn’t have any friends over. My brother felt like every family has their own issues and we weren’t that unusual. I think he was able to roll with everything easier than I did.

Sonya Sones wrote a book of free verse “Stop Pretending, the day my big sister went crazy” about how she felt as a sibling, that I read as an adult and could relate to. I didn’t want to be home. I stayed out and used alcohol, other drugs and later sex to escape.

My brother didn’t get treatment except when he would get picked up for 3 day observational holds. This started in 1979 and it may have been easier to be taken in. He would be yelling or saying he was some famous person and the police would take him to a hospital. They said he had paranoid schizophrenia and put him on anti psychotics. Not Thorazine, but similar. All they did was slow him down. So, then you had a slow moving psychotic man. He knew he was not acting normal, so he would imitate people around him, which was even stranger.

The last time he was picked up, it was in a different county. They tried lithium this time. It was 6 years from when he had originally come home. Everyone told me it was like magic. He was back to his old self. I don’t know what his diagnosis was. Maybe bipolar, or schizoaffective like me. I was looking forward to seeing him. But, when I visited him, he wasn’t well. He was edgy and nervous. My mom said they had to adjust his medication, but she was waiting until Monday ( I think I came there on a Friday night). My brother took off and we didn’t know where. He had been talking about hiking at Yosemite. On Monday I got a call that he had fallen at a waterfall at Yosemite and died. No one knows if it was a suicide or accident. People do fall there.

Recently I was talking to my oldest brother and he was saying that he wished there was the information then that there is today. I thought he meant support, but he then said that we would know it was a mental illness and not a cult. I was perplexed that he had believed that. The 1980s weren’t exactly the dark ages. I have had to let go of a lot of anger towards my parents for what I now feel was dependent adult abuse by not getting him treatment, and all the time he thought they were right.