Can’t You Wait Until I’m Dead? ~ Chapter 5: Blogging to Self-Awareness Part III

The fast-running stream of the fourteen-week Fall Term distracted me so completely that I didn’t need to write another blog post. Sarah and I finished 2015 with a two-week vacation in December to the Big Island of Hawaii. Although vacation was often a certain trip to introspection for me, I focused on hiking, snorkelling, and sunsets to keep most of my emotions from bubbling up. We had matching swimming tights for sunblock, and I loved how they looked and felt on me. Their warm hug calmed me like no other pair of pants had.

After Sarah found a red and white plumeria-print sun hat at a pop-up roadside market, I experienced wardrobe jealousy for the first time. She noticed my irrepressible attraction to the floral print and asked if I wanted one too. It was my first chance to say “Yes,” even open up about my dysphoria, but fear paralyzed me, and I said I wanted a bracelet instead. The turquoise bead bracelet we found at a Tibetan Buddhist shop was just the right amount of feminine to ease my distress, but not obvious enough to give me away.

It wasn’t until February that I started writing again, and it was probably a sign my brain was working behind the scenes. Over the course of three weeks, I wrote three essays that came back to my mental health and subconscious. The first was about discovering that life could be unfair and featured the poster for the 2006 movie Idiocracy.

On Human Nature

7 February 2016 – The moment I realized that life could be unfair came very late for me, at the age of forty. The Mike Judge movie Idiocracy came out on DVD, and on seeing how society treated the main character in the dystopian future, a light bulb went off in my head. It was such a striking point in my social development that I started calling it “my Idiocracy moment.” When I described my reaction to my partner, she explained that her Idiocracy moment came in elementary school when a teacher sent her to the principal’s office because her father was chair of the school board during fractious contract negotiations. The disgruntled teacher decided to make trouble for her to get back at him. How had I missed opportunities like that to see how people can act irrationally and callously? The only way I can explain it is that I’d been a naïve optimist and brushed off what I’d seen and never thought much about it.

There were bad bosses, like the one who threatened to fire me just to get a rise out of me, and one who demoted me when I said I was interested in exploring other opportunities within the company. There were rude co-workers, like one who called me out for not contributing to a sales discussion (I was in research), and another who had a sex worker call my hotel room to offer her services while I was travelling. Stuff like that didn’t really stick until I saw Idiocracy. I was happy enough in my subconscious ignorance, and had enough positive experience with parents, teachers, and academic supervisors to carry me through brief negative blips in my rosy world view.

Since Idiocracy, I can’t help but think that the world has changed. I know it was the optimist in me knocked down by the epiphany, but it’s easier to blame external forces. The glass is often half empty now, and my partner explains that we have a realistic view, not a pessimistic one. Ten years later, I’m still mourning the naïve optimist and disagree.

***

A week later, I reflected on how I’d overcome anxiety and depression in the hope that someone random out there might benefit. The post featured a picture of mom holding a baby me smiling in 1966.

On Mental Health

14 February 2016 – After reading a few of my earlier stories, you might have guessed that I’ve struggled with mental health from time to time. I don’t think that I’ve struggled any more than anyone else—I’d like to believe that I’m normal and everyone does (struggle), but few talk about it and even fewer stop to think about it.

We don’t choose our parents, and our parents don’t decide which genes they pass down to us, so no one is to blame. The idea that we have complete control over our behaviour all the time is an illusion, so I don’t blame myself or anyone else who does stupid things under the influence of an unstable mind. With that out of the way, I’d like to say that bipolar disorder and depression have hit my mother’s side of the family, and alcoholism and suicide have hit my father’s side of the family.

I felt like I was the happiest person in the world up to about twenty-eight. It was then that I painted my first and only oil painting, which featured clouds building over a once sunny beach and patio scene. Soon after that, I noticed that my partner was smiling more than I was, and smiling with her was harder and harder. The first symptoms followed four events in my life that might have triggered my struggle with depression. The first was moving from sunny Southern California to the cloudy Pacific Northwest. The second was a bicycle accident that cracked open my helmet and caused a concussion (I don’t know how long I was out, but it was probably brief). The third was starting to drink coffee. The fourth was my parents’ divorce and estrangement from my father.

About two years after moving to the East Coast, I experienced suicidal thoughts, crying, and feeling like I needed to change everything in my life. Before I saw a psychologist or psychiatrist, I took St. John’s Wort, and it worked to get rid of the suicidal ideation, but it didn’t really touch the underlying depression. I started seeing a psychologist and got a prescription for Prozac from a psychiatrist, but over a few months, I didn’t see much more improvement over St. John’s Wort.

That’s when, against the advice of the psychiatrist but with the blessing of the psychologist, I made some life-changing moves. I started a new career, moved from one end of the continent to the other, and became a temporary foreign worker. Sometimes I wish that I’d listened to the psychiatrist who said, “Never make any major decisions when you’re depressed.” Other times, I’m glad I jumped into the unknown and survived. That’s just the way it’s going to be.

Finding myself in a foreign land, in a foreign career, but still depressed, I continued to experiment with my mental health. I tried cutting out alcohol for about four months and didn’t see any changes. I cut out all caffeine (and alcohol) and felt a lot better. The suicidal ideation went away about three months after stopping caffeine, and the depression lifted after about six months. A few months later, I tried drinking wine and hard cider again (one to two drinks a week) and didn’t have any trouble. I tried one beer and found that I was depressed after a week, and it lifted after a couple of months. I stayed away from beer. The next experiment was caffeine, particularly my old favourite, chocolate (I loved Coffee Crisp bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups). Again, seven days later, suicidal ideation and depression returned. It was caffeine—and if there was enough caffeine to do it in chocolate, then coffee, tea, and pop were also off the list.

Over the following years, I tried to add back at least Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and found the safe dose was two normal-sized cups. Three or more were enough to trigger it again. I even tried decaffeinated coffee and discovered that even the few milligrams in that were enough to be a problem. The most bizarre one was a homemade ginger drink from a street vendor in the Caribbean.

Fast forward, all was well until the age of forty-seven when a co-worker posted some private, negative comments about me on a department folder and a mix of anger and depression started to derail what must have been a shaky world view. Fortunately, I visited my family physician to ask about medication, and she suggested a program called BounceBack that used cognitive behavioural therapy to discover my negative triggers and how to prevent them from affecting me emotionally. What I’ve got now is my recipe for a happy and contented life. Here’s the list and my best scientific guess at why each one works:

1. No caffeine of any kind—this includes caffeinated tea, chocolate, coffee (even decaf), caffeinated pop, and anything “natural” like guarana that contains caffeine. My guess is that caffeine, as an adenosine antagonist or phosphodiesterase inhibitor, messes with my fragile neurotransmitter chemistry. Maybe my concussion damaged an important pathway, and even a slight dip is enough to cause depression.

2. No beer or ginger—I don’t know enough about the chemistry in these to speculate. Maybe there’s some stimulant in common between hops and ginger.

3. Avoid negative people and negative spirals—this is from BounceBack. It took a lot of effort initially, but I got better at not reading the disturbing and depressing headlines when I was already feeling down. I had to learn to stop thinking about the unfairness at work and in the world at large. If I wanted to keep moving forward, I had to let go of the past and not let the present drag me down. Rumination was a drug that was too easy to get and abuse. Mindfulness was the best antidote.

4. Write down three things that went well the previous day every morning—this is straight from BounceBack. Remembering yesterday is a good way to stimulate memory and helps me see accomplishments adding up.

5. Get a hobby—I took up classical guitar and am trying to write more. Having a life outside of work builds a sense of accomplishment that’s not tied to the ups and downs of professional life.

6. Keep up with family and friends—social connectedness is critical to mental health. It keeps me grounded and gives me perspective outside my head.

7. Get outside and exercise—I tried exercising indoors, and it wasn’t enough. I needed to smell the outdoors, see some people, and feel the wind and rain. Cycling to work is good, but “power” walks (30 minutes or longer) lift my mood better. I think a combination of endorphins and the fight against gravity builds happiness. Have you ever noticed that walking or running forces you to smile to keep your mouth from sagging into a frown?

8. Have a happy list of songs to lift mood when it gets serious. My list has seventy-two songs, and I never get tired of hearing them on random play (when I don’t need to concentrate). I got this idea from Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap radio program one evening while I did my BounceBack reading.

***

Two weeks later, I wrote about nearly blowing myself up in one of my first university jobs. The story was probably another subconscious metaphor for blowing up my life and featured a photo of blue flames in a gas furnace.

On Youthful Inexperience

1 March 2016 – One of my most sensory-rich memories arose from youthful inexperience. I was working campus security over winter break with a partner when an unusual request came in. The temperature outside was twenty degrees below freezing, and a woman living off-campus was cold because her furnace had gone out. It was about 9 p.m., and she couldn’t get anyone from the gas company to come out, so she called campus security, hoping we could help. A security full-timer would have usually been on duty that evening, but it was the holidays, and it was just the two of us, second-year students, answering calls.

We were more than capable of unlocking doors for those separated from their keys, and we were good at driving around in a large Crown Victoria sedan, keeping an eye on the nearly empty streets, but when it came to lighting a furnace, we had no clue. We didn’t let that stop us from trying. She led us down to the basement where the rusting furnace sat cold and quiet. We looked the old thing over and found something that looked like a gas line with a valve on it, and at the bottom, we found something that looked like burners. We were both science majors and had lit a few Bunsen burners, and this didn’t seem very different, other than the fact that the burners were bigger and the valve was a few feet away (on the other side of the furnace).

Somehow, my partner got the job of turning on the gas, and it was my job to light the burners. I had to crouch close to the opening at the bottom to see the burners and waited until I heard the hiss of the gas to light the match. Suddenly, there was a bright blue and orange flash, a loud bang, and the smell of burnt hair. I jumped up, and my partner turned off the gas. The ball of flame had singed my hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, we had to leave without accomplishing our mission and admit we didn’t know what we were doing.

What did I learn from that unpleasant surprise and subsequent years of experience with gas appliances? Two heads are not always better than one. Research everything new meticulously, maybe too thoroughly. The safety features on newer gas appliances were long overdue. And above all, call someone who knows what they’re doing and learn from watching them do it the right way.

***

Blogging gave my subconscious an outlet, but it could only keep my gender issues under control as long as it had metaphors and allegories to hide them. Once those ran out, I’d have to face my gender identity and fears of personal and professional disaster head-on.