Crazy, erotic, and academic dreams all night. I kept waking up (no doubt from the double cocoa brownies I ate far too late in the evening) with bizarre, titillating images rolling in my mind’s eye. I awoke this morning with paragraphs forming, and reading themselves aloud to me. If I were a visual artist, I would have leapt out of bed, thrown on my robe, and dashed to the studio to frenetically put paint to canvas.
The academic dreams were very pronounced. I was back in college, it was the beginning of the semester, and my books and schedule were gone. I had no idea what, when and where my classes were, and even after tearing apart my room naught could be found. I was anxious, worried and dead out scared. I had to be somewhere that very morning and was unable to know where! Why did someone steal these from my room, the very night before the semester commenced? What had I done to deserve this?
WHAM. Actual college “footage” rolls through my mind: Working as a lifeguard at the pool, wandering campus in a fog, nestling in to the branches of my favorite tree at the footbridge overlooking the creek near Reinhardt Alumnae House, hiding from the world.
Hiding – that is the key. I would go there in times of great distress, for no one ever walked past there but for mealtimes. It was great, blood-curdling anxiety that drew me there, as if it was the last refuge on Earth from an overwhelming world. I remember the fear and anguish I shared with God, and my journal, while listening to the water and birds around me. Words cannot illiterate inner turmoil such as this.
How I wish I could go back in time and find myself in that tree! I could tell that scared undergraduate that the punishing world around her was not real – that is was all a construct of her mind. Depression and anxiety makes us see through thick, distorted lenses all too darkly. The mental illness I fight to this day was undiagnosed and untreated 31 years ago.
The thief in last night’s dream was not a person – it was illness. Mental illness, clinical depression, to be exact. I now see the message these dreams have been trying to communicate for all these years: my “life” was stolen from me. It was not my fault. I did nothing to create or cause it.
Why didn’t anyone at Mills understand? Why was I ridiculed by faculty, and punished for being mentally ill? Was there NO ONE on a small, nay intimate, college campus who could see the truth of my affliction and reach out to me? Was my “cover,” a strong, I-can-do-it-myself demeanor so convincing that even the psychologists in the student health center were fooled?
Hell no. I almost did not graduate from high school because of a serious onslaught of unipolar depression. They knew this, and yet offered no tangible aid. WHY? Why in the name of God did they leave me out on the end of the gangplank to fail and drown? Semester after semester I would start out all gangbusters, excited about the classes and studying accordingly. Yet, as the weeks wore on I would miss a class here and there, and then out of fear of being behind not return until I was “caught up.” That, of course, rarely happened, and the fear and anxiety grew steadily. In fact, I would even take substitute lifeguard shifts at the pool when I ought to have been in class as an escape from the terror. How could something as benign as missing one class evolve into a true, fight or flight response such as this?
The difference between this morning’s dream, and all the other college dreams over the years, is that I saw something new, brand spankin’ new, in the chaos of looking for the stolen registration papers and class schedule: It was not a fear of failure riddling my conscious, but a fear of accomplishment.
Everyone on the planet experiences fear of failure at one time or another (I present the 2007 and 2008 Chicago Cubs as evidence) so that is an old story not worthy of blog space. However, realizing that I was afraid to achieve is rocking my world this morning. From what I can feel and perceive so far, it takes root in all the sexist, misogynist bullshit I grew up in: I could be pretty OR smart, but not both, for boys do not like smart girls. (Unbelievably, a “man” said this to me, not six months ago, at a
Walking the child of alcoholics’ tightrope, I desperately attempted to appease them both. I became overweight by about 20 pounds, rendering me less attractive than my insecure former model Mother, and surrounded myself with vastly intelligent, yet far “uglier” (to use my Father’s exact word) girlfriends. Believing I was so beneath any boys’ eye, I kept to a self-esteem worthy of dirt. Yet the world saw me otherwise, overwhelmingly otherwise – in fact, the opposite – and I scrambled (unconsciously) hysterically, dousing the kudos and male attention with dung to keep to my parents’ views of my identity, for fear of losing their already scant approval, and non-extant affection.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that at 17 I could no longer keep the game afloat. For while visiting Oberlin College (sorry Mills, you were not my first choice…) over a cold, grey, God-forsaken February weekend, the captain of the football team bought me dinner, and said he hoped I’d be accepted because he’d really like to get to know me.
WHAM. That shot from a canon shattered my fortress and sliced the tightrope in half, hurling me into an abyss. Here was a handsome, smart, accomplished older boy saying he liked me. No games, no B.S.; it was genuine and significant and I could not escape its power – or message: I was pretty, I was smart, and boys LIKED me. With that realized, I knew my Mother would never love me again. One night she screamed at my Father, “Tell her to shut up, I can’t take it anymore!”
Over the next three months, I spiraled into what we now call unipolar (clinical) depression. I could not function, cried for hours at the drop of a hat, stayed in bed, refused to go out, go to school, or talk to friends on the phone, listened over and over to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” album in my dark room, and repeatedly asked God, through painful, plentiful tears, “WHY?” The song repeated:
“I don’t know what is real, I can’t touch what I feel, and I hide behind the shield of my illusion. So, I’ll continue to continue, to pretend, that life will never end, and flowers never bend with the rainfall.”
Then, when the mental and physical pain became so great I could no longer bear it, I thought of suicide.(For those of you unaware, it truly, physically feels like a painful massive weight bearing down upon the chest, inhibiting heartbeat and breathing.) My cat, angel that she was, convinced me otherwise. She stared at me as I contemplated throwing myself to the ground from our third floor kitchen balcony, with eyes that said, “Don’t leave me.” She knew. Here was someone that loved me, and would miss me! The thought of hurting her was too much to bear, so I stepped back inside. I truly believed that no other soul on the planet cared whether I lived or died.
Oh to have attended college, and graduate school, at a time when psychotropic drugs were available to me! For it was not until my mid-30s that SSRI’s, like Prozac, entered my life. It was only then that I began to have a life, MY life, not a life run by unbalanced brain chemicals and autoimmune disorders like PMDD. The drugs presented me with an observer consciousness from whence I could see and feel the swarms of emotions and crippling fears playing polo in my mind, with my head as the ball. WHAP.
All those antagonists are still I my brain, as Lyme and Bartonella reminded me; when the bacteria took over my central nervous system even the more effective drugs like Effexor and Lexapro proved weak in their stead. Fears, crippling behaviors, and bad words flung from my mouth. How precarious is the mental balance!
“I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam” says Popeye. He is correct, for we cannot biochemically be what we are not. I am angry, sad, and full of grief for my stolen – not lost – academic years. How I wish I could repeat the dream armed with psychotropic meds and a full understanding of my mental measure! Yet I cannot – none of us can. All we can do is live forward, embracing opportunities we discover.
So thanks, Popeye, for helping me accept my birthright, and allowing me the reality of grief: 31 years ago, there was nothing else I could do.
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