personality « WillSpirit!

Almost a week has passed since I last posted something on the blog. I’ve been engaged in a pitched battle with some of my worst demons. Trying to survive. Living minute to minute. That sort of thing.

Seems like I should check-in with everyone. I haven’t the courage to look at my web-stats, but even though I’m sure the number of visitors is way, way down, I know there are several readers who do care. I want to reassure them I am still kicking, albeit less strongly all the time.

I’m pretty much out of ideas for how to get out of this pit, which mostly is one of very low self-esteem. I don’t mind the anxious, sad, and angry feelings like I used to. But I am sick of my personality and see little chance of change…

About half my therapists have been willing to give me the diagnosis of a personality disorder. Of those, at least two seemed to enjoy slapping me with that accusation. Of the ones who have held back, I suspect there has been a sense of not wanting to further lower my opinion of myself, or further anger me, or somehow make things worse. One psychiatrist said she thought there might be a difference between ‘borderline’ characteristics that are reactive and defensive, but not necessarily integral to the personality, and true BP disorder. That seemed like a nice way of saying that I sure look like someone doomed to eternal conflict with others, but maybe there’s a small chance I can improve.

One of my curses is being so self-aware. I can see all the hostile and counterproductive things I do and even understand why I do them, but I can’t seem to stop. I’m not someone who puts the blame on others or thinks that if only people around me would cooperate I’d be fine. I see myself do and say the most appalling things sometimes, and yet I have no more ability to redirect my actions than I would of turning a train running on a straight track.

The sad thing about so-called ‘borderline personality disorder’ is that it mostly results from childhood abuse. So you get rejected and mistreated as a child, then grow up into a confused and mistrustful adult who invites rejection and mistreatment. The only way I can manage self-forgiveness is to recognize that almost anyone who lived through a childhood as traumatic as mine would turn out just as badly messed up. Perhaps a few abused children escape without major personality flaws, but most suffer with rage, shame, and mistrust. I suspect close to half end up imprisoned, on the street, or dead.

So just surviving, remaining outside institutions, and having one close relationship must be counted as a kind of success. There was a time when I could point to my surgical career to prove I had beaten the odds. But time has mocked that victory. So now I just try to be OK with making it from day to day, sustaining a marriage, and continuing my efforts to improve. I think some would question how hard I try (“If you really wanted to change, you could”), but I know how many years I’ve spent in therapy, how many groups I’ve attended, and how many books I’ve read. I didn’t do those things just to piss off people who tried to help me. I really wanted (want) to improve, but somehow couldn’t get past all the obstacles. Just because I built the many of the barriers myself does not mean they aren’t there.

This was supposed to be a one-paragraph check-in to let others know I’m still alive and fighting. It ended up a rant on my current despair. I hope it somehow helps others feel less alone. At least I feel that way, even if all my readers have long since gone.

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Last night sleep came. Since stopping Cymbalta 13 days ago, most nights have provided only a few hours of true dozing. Once or twice in the past fortnight I took zolpidem to knock myself out. But that does not lead to refreshing slumber, just a kind of drugged unconsciousness. Even with the sleeping pill, no more than five hours were spent sleeping; the rest of the night passed with me either laying in bed trying to relax, or else reading and eating blueberries (there must be a bumper crop this year, the prices are so low). But yesterday I retired early, then slept almost ten hours without awakening. What’s more, after arising I sat in our hot tub like I often do, but afterward got out and dozed for another hour.

We have a two-person spa on our deck, with a fine view to the east. Most mornings as dawn brightens I sit in water heated to 104° F (40° C), while I take in my surroundings in a silence broken only by a few buzzing insects and the first active birds. I leave the nozzles turned off, since I dislike the mechanical noise. I overlook a line of forested ridges rolling toward Yosemite, where the horizon is jagged with granite peaks. With an early enough start I am rewarded by a view of the sun rising into a salmon-colored sky, usually cloudless and marred only by the contrails of passenger jets in the stratosphere. These aircraft cross over the Sierra Nevada mountains on the last leg of their flight to San Francisco. One time I looked out the window during such a flight, and saw Yosemite Valley below the wing, looking like a small broken slab of gray stone. As I soak in the morning, loosening the tension in my damaged neck, I look up at those specks gliding through the twilit sky, and wonder about the travellers drinking morning coffee while looking down at the expanse of conifer forests and rock mountains. I wonder if it occurs to them that someone lives among those trees, watching them as they soar in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. I think about how insignifcant my corner of the world must look from their perspective, my home invisible in the green carpet of sugar pines. It amazes me that we will never know each other, that we will each live our entire complicated stories, each entirely unaware of the other’s drama. Our only connection is my fifteen-second reverie about a stranger in a jumbo jet, drinking coffee as her plane travels hundreds of miles per hour, drawing a rose-colored line across the dome of morning sky. Today such warm water thinking put me back to sleep.

After all that, my point is that I feel better. Yesterday my mood stayed pretty solid, with only a slight dip toward depression in the afternoon, something I experienced my whole life up until starting SSRI antidepressants. This morning, after finally getting up for good, I have been productive and energetic. Could it be I am finally getting past the Cymbalta withdrawal syndrome? The past two weeks have been brutal. If I did not have a strong commitment to survive and be here for my wife, suicide would have been the likely result of how badly I felt. Life seemed so very pointless, and not at all worth the torment roiling in my heart and soul. Countless times each day I dreamt and prayed (to the extent that I pray, since the God of my belief is not the kind that keeps an ear to the mutterings of mammalian nervous systems) that I just drop dead on the spot. Now I feel ready to engage my corner of the earth once more. Not that I am thrilled to be alive, singing like Julie Andrews on a grass-blanketed mountainside. No, I am still the not-too-optimistic failed surgeon. I sit before a small computer screen connected by a wire to my even smaller laptop, typing with nine fingers and one elbow (actually a finger in a thick dressing). The hillside I gaze upon is covered by an expanse of dead weeds baking in the August afternoon sun. But today I am pleased enough with this little drama of mine to stay in the production until it finishes its natural run. Once more, I survived all-out assaults launched by the mood-demons who dwell in the darkest recesses of my mind. Thank you, big Pharma, for marketing a drug that required me to weather such torment in order to release myself from its grasp.

That altering my brain chemistry by withdrawing a drug had such an effect on my worldview brings to mind, once more, my curiosity about what it means to exist as a human consciousness. I wrote earlier about the origins of decisions and intention. This ordeal has made me wonder, too, about the locus of attitudes and feelings about life. When something as fundamental as whether I think my story is worth living can be affected by removing a synthetic chemical from my bloodstream, then who am I? Is there ‘nothing’ more to ‘me’ than proteins, and cell membranes, and DNA, and myriad organic molecules? That kind of musing resurrects my whole philosophy about the relationship between living things and (what I for convenience call) ‘God’.

Aside from feeling that the Cymbalta wash-out may be behind me, I also cheered up after looking a bit at my web statistics. OK, OK, I know doing that is pointless. Numbers are not my objective, and obsessing about how many computers connect with my site will drive me (even more) nuts. Still, I noticed that my post ‘Is Depression Sane?‘ has been viewed two-and-a-half times as often as any other. This strikes me as great news, because I enjoyed writing that essay, and it touched on a number of philosophical points. I like to include in my blog my homespun views about the mind, mental distress, and how one can lead a satisfying life. Knowing that one of the essays that most does that also attracted the most interest encourages me to continue.

I resolved to keep my posts short. What I’ve written so far is the introduction to my real topic: the relationship between the chemicals that traverse my brain and the ‘person’ that the organ produces. In particular, how does an organism acquire the gifts of pleasure and pain, instead of just having a drive to move toward or away from certain stimuli and experiences? Rather than launching into that now and even further exceeding my supposed daily word quota, I will put the topic out there as something to either look forward to or avoid, depending on your attitude.

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