I love Full Circles

It’s 2am and I cannot sleep.  I have been lying in bed for the better part of three hours.  My mind racing, my anxiety levels through the roof and my heart broken into a thousand pieces around me.  I cannot calm the things that haunt me.  I am tired of medicating myself with pharmaceuticals.  So instead of sleeping, I write, because it is my therapy.  I cannot listen to the silence of the bedroom.  It’s maddening.  I want to scream. My mind is everywhere.   

As I lay there, feeling entombed in my body and my bedroom, my mind instantly replays a variety of different things I’ve seen on the internet over the last week or so. Primarily in regards to Robin Williams.  I find the lack of respect for his death highly understandable.  He committed suicide.  He did it.  He caused his own death.  He had a choice.  He took the easy way out.  He was a coward. 

It may seem as if I agree with those statements.  But I don’t.  In fact, I quite disagree.  As I lie in my bed feeling the overwhelming rush of bile build up in my stomach fueled by fear and stress and lack of control, I know all too well what he must have felt.  He had zero control.  If I could control the very feelings I just described that rush through my body, I would gladly take that responsibility.  But they are uncontrollable, and I am left to deal with them.  Just me. 

I want to let anyone reading this understand that what you are about to read, it going to “get real.” Because I have something that needs to be said.  And hiding behind a partial truth doesn’t do my story any justice. But the truth of the matter is that until about three months ago, I also felt that someone that took their own life was selfish, lacked self-control and had zero respect for their loved ones.   That was until I felt so out of control of my own life and my own body that I simply didn’t want to feel that way anymore.  Sure, I have felt sadness but never such a strong sense of despair and personal demise.  At the worst of times, it is wholly disabling.   

We live in a society where community is measured by income brackets and tax returns.  Hopefully, if you are lucky enough to play every move right, you will live a happy life, in perfect health, surrounded by all the luxury you can find in life.  But those of us who weren’t able to find that are left to fight a helpless battle when something goes wrong.  Or at least that’s how it feels.   

The reality of my life (and everyone’s life for that matter) is that one day, I am going to die.  However, in my case, if I don’t have surgery, I will end up dying much younger.  The tumor will eventually cause my central nervous processes to stop functioning and I will stop being able to breath.   See, now, here the reality of this situation.  I am standing at a crossroads in my life that most people never know.  If I don’t do anything and I don’t have surgery, I know almost exactly how I will die.

So let’s start that as the base of my equation.  Although I am not considered terminally ill, I have a medical condition that can currently kill me.  And no one can say for sure that it won’t before surgery either.  Now, at 39 years old, I didn’t exactly plan for my own mortality to come sneaking up on me.  No one really does.  I wasn’t ready to takes months off of work.  As it stands right now, even with disability (which is an absolute joke when you look at what you’ve paid into the system versus what you get from it when you need it), I stand to financially lose everything.  I have no idea how I will pay my health insurance, doctor’s bills, rent, car payment, car insurance, credit card, student loans, plus buy groceries. 

I’m not considered disabled because I can still work, but I can’t work as much as I used to because realistically I’m disabled.  But not according to our governmental standards.  And social programs sometimes take months to get approved for, but I’m not allowed to apply for those because I’m not, in accordance to those programs, yet in need. So while I’m dealing with the fact that I’m unable to feel the left side of my body and that I have a massive tumor overtaking my spinal cord, I also have to deal with the weight of financial burdens with no stress relief. If I declare bankruptcy, which is more than likely my path, it will take me years to overcome that stigma. 

And that’s when the light bulb flickers at me.  What’s the point? Why go through any of it all?  Why have the surgery? Why put myself in a horrible position to struggle for the rest of my life when I can simply not deal with any of it? Why should I continue to lay in my bed night after night scared, depressed, and fearful for my future? Why should I have to deal with insensitive tool bags that are more concerned with their collections quotas over my past due bills rather than the fact that person on the other end of the phone is dealing with a real life and death situation? And the answer is, is that I have a strong mind.  I deal with it, because I was designed to deal with it. But, short of being homeless and unemployed, my situation is still pretty gnarly. 

For every moment of someone’s life that you see, there are a thousand moments that you don’t see.  We let people see the best of our worlds because that’s what we are trained to do.  But I’m here to tell to remind you that what you see is almost never the reality.  And that’s the problem when a celebrity like Robin Williams takes his own life.  The public sees only what it was allowed to see.  Yet, it judges based on those limited life glimpses rather than with a full book of facts at its disposal.  And as I have wrestled with my own mortality, my own health and a huge mountain of obstacles in my path,  I feel that I  can safely say that I’m pretty sure why he chose to end his own life. 

We forget that the brain is a delicate organ with a delicate balance.  And just as someone can have an unhealthy heart, or stomach, or spinal cord, a human can also have an unhealthy brain.   Depression affects someone with an unhealthy mind like an eating disorder affects someone with a displaced body image.  It doesn’t matter how beautiful you think that girl is, she doesn’t see it.  Her brain doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to in that regard.  For someone that has a healthy mind, it seems like an easy fix.  Eat some food, tell yourself you’re pretty, and get over it.  But mental disorders don’t work that way.  Psychology is such a foreign and fairly unknown science.  Doctors can’t just make someone’s brain work the right way.  That science hasn’t been developed or mastered yet.

I have hope that my surgery will go without a hitch, I will eventually overcome the mountain of financial stress and I will move forward with my life.  Despite my heartbroken sob fest at 2am in my kitchen, I don’t have any plans to end my life.  I have things to do.  And I have a strong willed, healthy mind that makes me understand that I have reasons to move forward.  Now, my spinal cord on the other hand…well, no matter how healthy my mind is, my poor compressed spinal cord is no match for the growing cystic tumor at its mercy.  Luckily for me, neurology is far more advanced than psychology. So, my life has a fighting chance. 

I’m lucky. When my moments sink to their darkest, my brain produces the right chemicals, I kick myself in the pants for acting like a whiney baby (see the first portion of the blog for an example) and I kick things into action.  Because even though my heart and my soul are sinking, my brain is hard at work literally saving my own life.  And for all that Robin Williams had – talent, money, charm, humor, intelligence, heart, drive, passion... what he didn’t have was the one thing he needed the most to get through those tough times. 

So when you hear of someone suffering from a mental disorder and they take their own life, rethink your instinctive reaction.  Avoid words like selfish, coward, loser, pathetic, and weak.  Those are adjectives that describe the closed minded individuals who chose to not see the scientific basis behind depression and other mental disorders rather than the terms to describe someone afflicted with some of the most scary and unfamiliar medical diseases yet to be tackled by the medical community.  Instead, when you hear of that amazing person, like Robin Williams, was no longer able to battle against their disease, take solace in the fact that your mind is strong.  Because one day, another part of your body may not be as lucky. And you’ll be so thankful that healthy mind of yours is there to save you.

This is the link to my fundrasier! Thank you for the gracious donations to date. I am thankful to everyone that has given so generously of their love and themselves.