my season in the attic

[knowbody0]

i can remember the beginning of the pain, and climbing the stairs, wooden stairs. opening the door my knees weakened and i dropped to the floor, which became the sea. reeds and grass swallowed me and i went inside of the inside. it was there i felt my primal scream, not from my vocal chords, but another place within the within of me. there, there was no time, no before and after, just a drumming, i could hear my own blood rushing through me and oozing out of my pores. at what moment the agony became exquisite i do not know, but i did love it, i owned it. it was me.
do you understand when i say i miss it sometimes? and do you understand that i have become comfortably numb?

[Kashka-Kat]

1. yes I think I understand

having come out of a pretty intense midlife crisis/breakdown/breakthru myself ... for several yrs the primal pain and reliving of past trauma was pretty much a constant thing, and yup oddly enough I actually do sometimes miss that level of intensity ... as awful as it was there was too the feeling that this is life, raw life, and to feel this and to break thru the layers of falseness and to enter the core of who you are... that is a powerful thing. (And then unexpectedly to find that by letting the lid off the repressed pain, to writhe and howl and cry buckets... was to also be able to feel for the first time joy and love as well... that was nothing short of truly amazing. And was a totally unexpected outcome, I mean I truly thought I was gonna die.)

I also understand that in this world, in this culture, such as it is, it's difficult to remain that wide open and that vulnerable...

I think it must be possible though to get to some kind of balance between being able to feel deeply but not get TOO overwhelmed by all the sickness and fear and pain around us -- I hope so anyway.

[knowbody0]

2. wow, you DO understand

it is many years later now, but it occurred at this time of year. i view the experience as a gift. thank you for responding.

[DemExpat]

3. This might sound really dumb to some of you here...

but this seeing pain as a gift even though it was excruciating and felt lethal at the time, is one reason I felt so strongly to try to find a way to manage my pain without medications.
(Of course they didn't help me feel good anyway, so that was not such a hard choice to make)
But I value everything that makes me "me", and want it here with me as pure as I can handle it and handle my life.

After time passing my pain has ebbed and found a place while still allowing me to me pretty wide open emotionally - and that is how I want it to be, and what my choice is.

We all have our personal choices here - even those of us who have been very handicapped.

That is why I hammer on free choice all of the time - this is so important to me that we ALL have this.


DemEx

[knowbody0]

4. life in a fog

or life "flat lined" is NOT quality life. you don't sound one bit dumb to me, you sound brave and strong.
peace and love

[DemExpat]

5. Thanks, kb....

we all have our strong and weak sides, IMO, maybe I meant to say my path can come across as being rather masochistic to some....:evilgrin:

:hug:

DemEx

[mopinko]

6. keeping these emotions as part of the universe

if that does not sound goofy. i have been in and out of sleep crazy depressions all my life. when faced with the decision of whether or not to take meds, i felt that extinguishing the rage of an overwhlemed mother was sort of a loss to the collective consiosness, if there is such a thing. at least the consiousness of those around me seemed to need that force of nature. not that that was the only factor, just to say that what are seen as destructive forces are not without merit. there is a line, obviously, and a cost to keeping such a "pet."

[Kashka-Kat]

10. well put

re "the cost of keeping the pet"... for me the cost of trying to kill it or to obliterate it was much greater... then I was really crazy, I was divided against myself, I hated my self. All my real feelings were submerged under a layer of fear and dread and self loathing... which I then projected out onto the outside world, onto everybody and everything ... Now that was hell...

I think it is possible to protect and care for the damaged parts of ones self, to have a place for it, *while at the same time* cultivating an adult persona which is competent and interfaces with the world and gives and gets love...

[DemExpat]

12. So true in my case as well...

I had to learn to accept myself as I was, to stop rejecting all that I loathed and feared within myself, to even embrace what I had "on my plate" before I could start to heal.

When I started doing this - accepting my handicap without projecting it out on the world and into ALL of my relationships - then I learned to keep it separate and was slowly able to become an adult. (More or less....:P :-)

DemEx

[Droopy]

7. I don't miss one single day of being ill

But I've heard of people with manic depression that miss the highs that they feel from mania. I've met a woman that refused to take meds because she was feeling so good despite the fact that she was clearly delusional to those of us outside of her head.

But the choice is yours. When I think of the impulses and delusional thoughts that I had I'm surprised I'm still here to tell you that. My freedom of choice could have been taken away very easily if I'd acted on one of those delusional impulses. I will not choose that life again.

[Maraya1969]

8. Great writing - sounds like Silvia Plath and that is a complement

Personally I don't miss one thing about depression or anxiety though. Not one damned thing.

[Kashka-Kat]

9. clarification

Hmmm we may be having a bit of a language barrier in this discussion, I don't miss the symptoms of my illness at all! Im not saying that. I make the distinction between feeling honest, true, raw pain and grief which is an honest human response to cruelties and injustices in life ... and the twisted warped subverted pain which comes from depression, self-loathing and me beating my own self up... my abusive father has been dead for 25 yrs but he lived on in me and in my neuro-biology... the latter I do not wish to feel at all, and indeed is/was a symptom of my "disorder" and I absolutely dread sliding into that pit which I still do from time to time...

But the other--the feeling of being grounded in the real world and reacting to it, all of it, with the totality of my being. And finding the strong sure voice of my true self ... that to me is emotional health...

Not sure how clear that was, if it made sense-- hope so!

[DemExpat]

11. Good clarification there, KK....

I also do not miss my acute anxieties and depressions....

and I love your description of mental health:

But the other--the feeling of being grounded in the real world and reacting to it, all of it, with the totality of my being. And finding the strong sure voice of my true self ... that to me is emotional health...

I had to do it without meds for some reason, so that would also perhaps come across as saying I "liked" the experience. Or miss it now that I have found my balance in the storm.
:silly:

DemEx

[knowbody0]

13. clarification-in my case

my season in the attic was not what i consider mental illness, rather allowing myself to feel deeply.
in one week my mother died, i found out my SO of 7 years had another girlfriend on the side, and had given me an incurable STD.
after the funeral my children went on vacation with other family members for two weeks and i returned home alone. it was then i ascended the stairs to my attic room i used to paint and draw in.
the flood of emotion, and my submission to it is what i speak of.
raw, pure, powerful feelings of anguish alone for the first time in my life.
10 years prior i had been left for dead by a serial killer, but with small children stayed strong, feeling lucky just to be alive, pushing away the experience from my thoughts.
in the attic, everything was real and i was "crazy" with grief. today i am medicated, diagnosed with PTSD, and go to counseling regularly. although i did indeed have a panic attack recently, i consider myself at peace with my universe. my children are thriving and my garden is prolific, but i wonder at times what it would be like without my meds which have given me an extra 25 pounds like a comfort blanket of protection for my former stick figure. music, meditation, yoga, and pow wows soothe me now..........but there is a silent scream running through me, and i remember the attic.

[mopinko]

14. i guess we are talking here about the fine line

between righteous anger and an internal rage that may or may not be connected to anything. i think all of us here at du have a righteous anger at what is being done in our name. no doubt for some of us, it is breaking the camel's back, and poisoning relationships and hard fought peace. the destructive forces in the world that lead to renewal are so important. those that just lead to more and more destruction have to be stopped if possible. whether they are in our heads, or in the white house.

[Kashka-Kat]

15. omg

Some horrific experiences there...

dont know how old you are but it seems to me that life goes in cycles-- time for keeping it together & maintaining & doing what you need to do... and time for upheaval and diving in & coming to terms w/ things. Sounds like you are doing what you need to do right now for your children? I know I needed to spend many yrs. just holding a job and getting some stability in the here & now.

One other dimension to feeling the deep feelings that I value-- the feeling of asserting ones life and one's existance -- its like "I live and damn it you can't take that from me" -- for me it was and is very much an expression of life force energy and as such a very positive thing indeed. On one level there's the pain and grief and rage and fight for survival, but underneath that--there's love of life and will to live. That I think will always be there for you ...

[Maraya1969]

16. Now that I can understand. I have experienced feeling overwhelmed

with grief and howling with pain. And it was a good thing. I remember after one long bout of illness I lied on my bed one day and cried for hours. I felt like I was grieving my own life. It was almost like a birthing process of letting the old me die and allowing the new me to be born. I wish I could say I never experienced mental illness after that but I did. Maybe death and birth are a continual process we go through. I believe that it has made me a better person. Better not in a moral sense but better because I have periods of real beauty and bliss and they are not marred by inside demons. I understand what it means to have a lightness of being. And that is not mania either. Mania is a frantic place that can feel good for a while. It is not looking at the first Gardenia of spring and seeing God. That is what I can experience today. That is the gift of my illness.

So I suppose I really do understand.

[Kashka-Kat]

17. yeah you got it

not clear thoughj what your last few lines meant re: looking at the first Gardenia of spring and seeing God.. and "that is the gift of my illness." Are you saying it's sympptom of illness to see God in the first gardenia of spring.

AAACKKK, words are sometimes a big p.i.t.a.!

[DemExpat]

18. Yes, words can be just that, KK.....

but I took her words to mean that the gift of mental illness to her was her ability to know the difference between mania and feeling good, feeling light.....seeing God.

:hi:

DemEx