A Dark Path

They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like [a] drunken [man]. Job 12:25

Throughout this blog, I have noticed that I try to be upbeat even in the worst of circumstances.   I’m not being ingenuous and I really feel that attitude of heart and mind helps us to achieve the best results in our recovery journeys.

This week has been unusual. My emotions have been all over the map.  Going into the depths of the deep and dark Amazon forests and then the sunshine of an Asian isle.  I’m remembering things too.  Also, some of the very best times of my life and conversely the absolute worst.  Frankly, I am exhausted.  I took time away from my recovery group this week to try to sort out all these feelings, experiences, and memories.  Today I used an anti-anxiety medication to calm myself but wound up asleep for hours.  I guess I needed that sleep!

It may have been a mistake, but Roland and I went out into the woods after my drug-induced nap.  I thought twice about it.  I had a medication hangover and worried that I might get hurt.  As usual, Roland won out.  It was not a remarkable trip.  The trees are still leafless.  The ground is wet and boggy in places and the best I could do was watch my steps and make sure I did not fall.  I didn’t, and Roland got what he needed, fresh air and a place to stick his nose to the ground.  I’m glad I did it for him, but if it were only me, I would have skipped.  It is strange that I did not pull some extraordinary glimpse of God’s creation from these woods.

Part of this is because of the week I had.  My moods have been all over the place and my sleep is disjointed.  I believe the problem is that I am tired and therefore volatile.  I can solve this problem myself with a little more sleep and a little more self-control in group.  This isn’t working.  The staff of clinicians I work with are all aware of my memory difficulties, or so I thought.  Our newest, a very sweet young lady, had no idea of how deep my memory lapses go.  She assigned us a project to write about our past and something we had learned from it.  My emotions just went off on their own.  I was able to leave the room before I said something I’d regret, but I spent the rest of my day in tears.  This was until another assignment where we all discussed one thing in our lives that had made a huge difference.  I don’t know what the difference was, except that as each person in the group talked, I started to regain memories of things I’d done in my past.  Now I was crying for a different reason.  I went home that night, overwhelmed, and unpacked all of this the next day at home.  I was a little toy airplane, buzzing around, telling anyone who would listen about my experience.  Not only this, but as a result of my experiences, I devised plans and projects that I was going to tackle and change the world.  Too many plans for one person at one time (but I’ve written them down for future consideration)

Then I was down again.  I went through the motions at some social obligations I had and hid behind thin excuses to avoid others.  I’m tired.  I’m not sure if it is from the ups, the downs, or the fear of a new form of illness that I haven’t experienced in years.

God bless my psychiatrist.  He has his head on straight and I don’t know if I would ever know if he was seriously worried about my symptoms.  He is just a calming presence. He described my last couple of weeks as Rapid Cycling.  Just the sound of that describes how I have felt.  We are taking a wait-and-see approach.  I haven’t really gotten manic and my depressiveness has been mild.  I love a doctor who doesn’t always want to throw drugs at symptoms and see if they stick.  This is my psychiatrist.  I am blessed to be his patient.

So what does this all mean?  I didn’t want to ask about a diagnosis.  While helpful to him, they are a bit of an encumbrance to me.  I will go down a rabbit hole researching it and comparing all I read to myself.  It really isn’t helpful, so I wait until my doctor sees fit to discuss my symptoms as a diagnosis.  I’m finding out that mine really isn’t fitting neatly in one box. (I would guess that not many people do!) 

So what does all this mean?  It means that I am struggling again and angry and frustrated about it.  My doctor reminded me that I am still doing “well”, just not the “very well” where I had been.  I’ll be careful about decisions, try and keep myself out of dark rooms.  I’ll use the training I’ve gotten over the past few years. 

What I know I’ll have a hard time with is picking up my Bible.  There is so much hope in there, but so often I feel that I cannot live up to the people that God used through these times.  I have to remember that they are humans too, and even if the text doesn’t always say it, they struggled too.

I think I’ll be reading about Job tonight!