Spring Break, Mental Health, & how I gained Weight

I am being transferred from an intensive out-care program to the county's relaxed mental health care system. I am not sure how I feel about this, as memories of this county facility still haunts me --- being sent away repeatedly and then finally getting to see one befuddled doctor who wrote the incorrect prescription and left me without medicine for a good 2 months (while I was floridly psychotic).

Hopefully, I can make all my doctor's appointments without fail, otherwise there might be a three month wait period.

Wish me luck, I'll need it if this new care program is like the last time I remember.

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Good news = I am president of a club and I actually did get our event approved.
Bad news = I had no spring break because I have been working on arrangements for the event.
More bad news=I did like 2 pages of a 15 page paper only. I still need to do my programming homework.
Good news = I had a cup of chai and I'm feeling good,
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Lately, I've been reading a lot of race relations articles and I am feeling a little queasy from thinking about how many anti-immigrant/anti-minority people are running around out there. I'll keep it to myself for now, since I don't feel like going off on some political rant.

Ah heck, I'll do it anyways. marriage =. Immigration reform. Break the glass ceiling. Down with neo-nazis. Up with Bill Maher. Okay, I'm done.

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On my weight
OMG. I gained weight while taking two hours of martial arts twice a week! Four hours per week for nothing! Nothing! I now am at the heaviest I have been since I first modified my diet intake 2 years ago; 171 pounds. Yes, it's technically in the obese range. Yes, I hate my body (except for my boobs which have returned to a plump, seductive G cup). Yes, I gained a whopping 20 pounds in under 5 months. I don't know what to do. The more I think about my weight the more despondent I get and the more I want to comfort eat. I ate a doughnut today. I hate myself for eating that doughnut. The long walk to the doughnut store and back home only burned off a quarter of the calories I consumed in doughnut. I ate half my dinner today, but I didn't use my stationary bike or my punching bag as exercise, so I feel bloated and disgusting. My dinner was a couple of tablespoons of white rice and some nopales my mom made. My lunch was that doughnut. For breakfast I had a bowl of oatmeal with a bunch of fresh blueberries. Then, right after breakfast, my mom came home from taking the elderly neighbor lady to the grocery store. The elderly lady, in her naive kindness, bought my mom a tray of mini cupcakes. I literally doubled over when I saw them. My kryptonite. This is the reason why I don't buy any chips, baked goods, ice cream, or frozen pizzas. I have issues with moderation. I cannot eat a little handful of chips, or just 1 mini cupcake. I will literally flee the kitchen and hide in my room, without the treat. Then, for hours, I will think about the treat. Eventually, I break down, sneak into the kitchen, grab the entire bag/carton/tray of treats and secretly eat in my bedroom. This is the reason why I always buy roma tomatoes, cheese, and tea instead. When there are no sugary, sodium-laced, greasy alternatives, I eat quite healthy. But when a naively kind neighbor lady buys us mini cupcakes, I crumble after an hour of pouting on my bed and trying to distract myself by watching BBC documentaries on the internet. Yes, I ate 3 mini-cupcakes, and then I couldn't stop myself. I walked to the doughnut store and bought a coffee and a doughnut. I came home. 2 more mini-cupcakes. I despise mini-cupcakes. They must be walked into the jungle and left for the pumas. Down with mini-sprinkle cupcakes!!

I like my boobs. They are plump. They are the only part of my body I am fond of. I will now end this little blog entry by writing a positive, self-affirming statement about my fattened up body. My boobs are awesome. Guys always stare at my boobs. Sometimes, women stare at my boobs, too. Sometimes I think I must have spilled something on my blouse and people are just wondering what the stain is, which is why they are staring so intensely for so long, but then I look down and nope, just my boobs. Then, there is this awkward moment when both of us are standing there staring down at my boobs. I think I am kind of flattered. Still, it's like, what, am I wearing a dirty shirt? Are my nipples popping out? Is there like a stain that looks like a milk leak or something??

Recovered Mental Patient: I was not sane but I am now--can i have a cookie?

I am a former mental patient (a female schizo-affective) who recovered thanks to a regimen of medicine treatment mixed with cognitive behavioral therapy. I got healthy enough to return to college, finish my Bachelor's degree, and currently I have been in a Master's program for nearly a year. I also volunteer on the side and I am a leader of an organization on campus as well. Originally, I had wanted to follow up with my PhD after completing the Masters, but now I feel (as my therapist so bluntly put it) that achieving a doctorate was nothing but a pipe-dream.

I  have kind of given up on my dream of achieving a PhD. I am doing above average in my field, but my mother and the Department of Rehabilitation counselor both told me to go get a job instead.

"We're not funding PhD's," said my DOR counselor. "Our goal is to get you guys to pay taxes." Tact might not be his forte, but I guess he has a point. I am supposed to earn money, not just grants.

Humorously, the DOR counselor asked me what made me think I was schizo-affective. He seemed skeptical of this diagnosis. I almost started to giggle.

"Nothing, nothing at all. In fact, I think I am totally sane, with no mental illness. It is total fact that I am being psychically driven by hostile countries through long-range, low-wave frequencies. The voices I heard are totally a part of the psychic warfare techniques used against me to discredit me and get me to commit suicide. I can, in fact, read minds, and the minds I read are always plotting against me. It is an injustice that I have been involuntary committed into psychiatric facilities on a dozen separate occasions and 5250'd each time. I demand lawsuits! Lawsuits and a UN stipulation barring psychic driving!!!" I really wanted to say all that. I really did. Instead, I just sighed.

"I have been hospitalized a dozen times and the psychiatrists all diagnosed me with the same illness--schizo-affective disorder. I used to get audio and visual hallucinations, grandiose delusions, and extreme anxiety. I am on medicine and the symptoms have all gone away. To me, this tells me I was really sick because the medicine made such a huge difference." ----That's what I actually said to the guy. It really bemuses and frustrates me that I have to assert myself to others and state "yes, actually I am a schizophrenic, no kidding," and the whole time they're like, "why is she faking?" I guess it is difficult for society to accept that a person who can be non-functional one year can be a high-functioning student/volunteer/organizer with no hint of positive or negative schizophrenic symptoms. But it's true!

It is tough being a recovered mental patient. Often, it is very tempting to agree with people who never met you before but who judge you based on how you are at that very moment (perfectly socially acceptable), and who decide maybe you were never sick, you were just mishandled by the system.

I was mishandled by the system; I experienced sexual abuse in the wards, death threats, cruelty by staff, use of restraints without having made any threats or suggestions that I was going to be violent or a flight risk----but I can honestly say they didn't misdiagnose me. They just horribly traumatized me.

Now I am getting so irritable. Every time I talk about the stuff I went through in the psych wards, I get a migraine headache.

I change subject now.

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Currently, I am the president of a campus organization. I did not start the club but I was recently nominated to be president and so I am president now. I  have a meeting with the administration today to discuss our upcoming event, which I am now in charge of, as the last president just left with the paperwork for the event incomplete and not approved by the administration. I like the last president. I am just a little nervous because the choice to switch officer positions was not her choice. I think she might be a tad bit bitter. I must use my diplomatic skills to win her over. I will then use the diplomatic skills to win over the administration and to hold this event, which is coming up next month.

I must go make promotional materials for the event, that is not approved to take place yet. Better to be over-prepared than to come empty-handed.

Usually, I don't wake up at 2 am, but today I did, so I might as well make some promotional materials. Thanks for reading!!

Comments on Mark Vonnegut's memoirs

I grew up on Kurt Vonnegut's literature, having stumbled upon "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" at the age of 13. To this day, I still possess 10 Kurt Vonnegut books and an additional 2 copies of Welcome to the Monkey House. What does this have to do with his son, the illustrious Mark Vonnegut? Well, just imagine how much I admired Kurt Vonnegut...now transfer that feeling to his son, a man towards whom I feel a particularly kinship to due to his bipolar/quasi-schizophrenia disorder. Now, multiply that mushy Hallmark feeling times 10 and that's how I feel about his newest memoir, "Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So."

My favorite sentence thus far has been where he states that you can tell who has the mental illness in his family by pointing at the people who look ten or more years younger than their actual ages. I had to crack up. All of my classmates originally thought I was mid-twenties or younger until I laughingly confessed I was pushing thirty. "Must be all the laughing and crying...it keeps the facial muscles toned," says Mark Vonnegut on the subject.

I also had to crack up at the part where he states his new, post-psychosis goal of becoming a doctor: he had all of a 1.8 GPA in the math and science field going into college again. "It seemed natural," he said, then cited the optimism of mania. Thankfully for his patients, Mark Vonnegut was stable for the period during his medical schooling (take THAT Stanford professor who thinks no mentally ill person should bother to apply to med school because we shouldn't be allowed to be in the medical field in the first place~!! Ha ha, counter-evidence to your biased discrimination!). He is now an M.D. That's right, M.D. Capital letters and everything!

If Mark Vonnegut MD had typed up a bland, melodramatic memoir, I still would have been inspired. But his memoir is littered with wit, charm, self-deprecating moments, and a tendency to organize paragraphs slightly more loosely than one of those Normal writers (if there exists such a thing as a Normal writer, aren't writers generally moody? See "Touched by Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison for a psychology study on the prevalence of depression and mania in successful writers). This turns his book into a mental playground where the swings are sentences, the monkey bars, paragraphs, and the sandbox, whole chapters! I love this book.

It is not enough that he has accomplished so much---this is something he says---but what came in between all those accomplishments that is really the soul of Mark Vonnegut. I agree. Was it really my "intelligence" or "aptitude" that got me into graduate school despite my mental illness, or was it those years I spent lugging trash bags to the dumpster outside the pizza joint I worked at, delusional and convinced that my boss was plotting to kill me after everyone else clocked out? Horrifying, yes, but it helped put things in perspective. No injustice in academia is as bad as lugging restaurant trash into the night rain, checking behind me for the angry boss who probably really did hate me, wondering if there was anything in life outside of a pizza joint. There is, not that there is anything wrong with working in a pizza joint...I just prefer to write essays, I guess. 

Mentally Ill Killer in the News and Yahoo Users' Responses

Reading comments on yahoo is an act of masochism on my part, yet it is the only way to gauge how the general public feels about issues.

Tonight I read a story about a guy with a lot of 5150's who murdered a random psychiatrist with a meat cleaver. The comments were basically either making a joke out of the situation ("ban knives"), to making seriously anti-constitutional threats against people with a mental illness ("hospitalize or euthanize"--one man's ignorant reply concerning not just this killer, but ALL people with mental illnesses).

Again, to reiterate, killing bad. Peace good. That being said, I am a schizo-affective person who has heard voices. Don't worry---peace good, I  have no intention of committing felonies or running around naked.

It infuriates me that death threats are allowed, that discrimination and active persecution is tolerated in our society. Give the killer the injection. Next, hunt down these yahoo haters and charge them with terrorist threats against a group of people---the mentally disabled. Last time I checked, the average job of a mentally ill person was---wait---no one will hire them because employers tend to violate the constitution and actively discriminate against the mentally ill. So, in general, if you are really mentally ill, you'll either be one of two things: homeless or living with family but unemployed OR functional, employed, and keeping your illness a secret from everyone who is supposed to treat you equally. Why? Why would we keep secrets? Because society harbors ugly, ignorant, hateful, anti-constitutional, wannabe-vigilantes who tend to encourage ancient treatments not found since the Middle Ages when leeching, hanging, and brain-drilling were the norm.

I am so infuriated right now. If these yahoo users made the same statements about African-Americans that they do with the mentally ill, they'd all look like racist monsters. The same statement against a bipolar/schizophrenic group is A-OK in this country. Just because ONE freak kills someone doesn't mean that all 10,000 schizophrenics are going to go on killing sprees as well. 1% of the population is schizophrenic and most of us don't have so much as a speeding ticket, let alone felonies.

You confuse us with the other kind of disorder---the guy with sociopathic personality disorder.  

Failing Math or Why I am in the social science grad program not math

I knew going into my pre-calculus class that I would have a harder time than the other students. I was older and it has been 5 plus years since I took trig. The last time I took an algebra class was in high school, having been waived through the college requirements through entrance exams and an optimistic school counselor.

Still, I thought by reviewing my notes before the test that I would perform up to par with the other students. I did. Unfortunately, half the class failed the exam, and it was with these students that I was up to par with. I did excellent on the homework sets and totally failed the first test. Out of problems worth fifteen points I oscillated between earning the full fifteen points and then getting zero out of fifteen on the next problem. So it went: 15 out of 15 on problem 5, 0 out of 15 on problem 6, 15 out of 15 on problem 7, 0 out of 15 problem 8. While the rest of the class earned partial credit on the majority of their answers, I was an all-or-nothing case. My poor professor must have been exhausted scribbling “good,” followed by “?” beside various attempted proofs in which I decided the best method to solve the problem was to follow laws of mathematics that I had invented on the spot.

So, now I have a D. I am not too stressed out, as I have started going in for tutoring sessions on campus. I now know that it is not enough to read the textbook and do a couple problems. Truly, hours of concentrated efforts are required. I have been shamed, bent over the lap of math and spanked on my butt. Okay, I lied. I am totally stressed out. Given that I must maintain A’s or B’s in all of my classes, regardless if they are part of my graduate program or ridiculously difficult “electives,” I am wracked with nervous tics. I tend to get migraine headaches about 5 minutes into pre-calculus. My C programming class delights me, it fills me with glee. Math turns me into a gloomy loner, hunched over proofs that are either perfect or demented and riddled with cryptic methods for determining symmetry of an equation.

Still, it is too late to drop the class, so I am up late tonight, thinking about pre-calculus, writing about pre-calculus, and preparing to complete another lengthy homework set for pre-calculus before the sun rises tomorrow.

                I enjoy the math. I hate the failing. It is making me incredibly insecure about my competency as a college student. I know every individual has strengths and weaknesses, but I thought my greatest weakness was the skill of sanity. Ah well, I can compensate by studying longer and with more caffeine.

In tutor session this Friday, I showed up with five other determined students, armed with little sharpened pencils and gritted teeth. The tutor is a kindly fellow, an international graduate student in the math department. He has become a little accustomed to my nearly incoherent stream of thoughts that burst out whenever I have a question that I cannot keep to myself. Usually, I tend to keep my mouth shut until I outline in pen a little written script to myself about how to phrase the question for the teacher. Literally, I write a little script with dialogue, main points, and a sentence that rephrases the question in case the professor doesn’t get me from the first scripted question.  I then read my question off the paper, thus minimizing my usual flight of thoughts that happens when I try to speak off the cuff.

“Yes, yes, I just wondered,” I said. I had not written out my usual main points and I was doing acrobatic feats with my train of thoughts. “Where is the form we use—uh, that we put it in, I mean where does it go? Because I was just confused, where’s the…??? Square root of x plus one into f of x which is square root of x---does that work?” It all came out in a strand of loopy wordiness that somehow ended with the correct answer to what g of x and f of x could be given h of x. The tutor stood there for a few seconds before realizing that I had somehow magically tripped over one possible solution to the problem. The other students were eerily silent. The tutor wrote my solution on the board, saying, “Yes, this gets the square root of x plus the square root of x plus one. Good.” I then decided I should write out my solution and just read it off my notes instead of rambling like that guy in “Shine,” the film.

But I must pass this class or go totally insane attempting to pass the class. No sleep until I pass! Seriously, of all the classes I am enrolled in---graduate level and undergraduate, this math class is the one that may hinder me the most. :/

Return of the Love Handles

I finally jumped on the bathroom scale. My worst fear came true. Despite two hours of martial arts practice twice a week, I have somehow gained 6 more pounds. I think this might be because I am so famished after stumbling out of the two hour ordeal that I rush towards the student union’s food court and stuff myself with junk food.

Currently, I am 15 pounds heavier than I was last semester.  I was 152 in the fall. Now my fat is really making me hate my body. I train hard during class and I keep up a routine of kickboxing over the weekend, but to no avail. I am the heaviest I have been in two years. Every time I get a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a car window or in the mirror, I think, oh no, what happened?

Drastic actions must be taken. I must eliminate fast food from my diet and vow to flee from the sight of chow mein bowls topped with delicious, tangy, juicy, orange chicken. I must yield to the blandness of salad and the repetition of roma tomato sandwiches with pesto sauce smeared on it instead of ranch.

I will lose this weight I’ve gained and then some. My shrink says that I should not feel guilty when I eat food, but I do. The sight of it sends me into delighted conniptions. After that, however, comes the moment when I realize I just lost some of my daily allotted calories.

I am eating two cut up roma tomatoes with a half inch cube of chevre smeared on top of the tomato to add some flavor. I dribbled some olive oil on it (not even half a tablespoon), and ground some black pepper all over in the hopes that I could somehow trick my body into thinking I was eating a double-decker hamburger with extra cheese and layers of chipotle sauce.  

Earlier today I had (surprise) a roma tomato sandwich with pesto sauce and cubes of fresh avocado. I love it, but I was fantasizing about a handsome, charming man or a pretty, charming woman, holding a tray of pizza slices drenched in full-fat ranch. Delicious, greasy, chewy, cheesy pizza—gulp.

Grad school is going well. I have nothing terribly important to say about the experience or the stress. It is stressful, but what is more stressful is that ominous black screen on my bathroom scale, staring at me from the corner of the room, haunting me and really pissing me off.

Yum. I think this might be my fourth tomato of the day. If only water came in fat-free, sugar-free chipotle, burger flavor. :)

Ghost in the Machine

I have to admit, I'm not always happy with what I write here. Sometimes, I feel badly about what I wrote while in a bad mood, or while in a manic state. Then again, I try to promote understanding about mental illness by opening up my private thoughts to cyberspace. Not all mentally ill people are all horrible monsters, or incompetent people who cannot be trusted to work. Many of us live and let live, some succeed, others fail, some are only burdened by their illness, others find a special talent in it.

Myself, I love to paint, but I only paint when I am mentally ill. Painting allows me to express myself in a way that relates to my horrifying experience of hearing voices or feeling persecuted. Talking about these things would be deemed as "freakish," "bizarre," or "scary." But when I paint what I want to say rather than say it, I get praise and compliments from even total strangers. Painting allows me to communicate, to escape my mind for a while, and to establish a connection with the outside world, within the "appropriate" parameters. If it were not for my schizo-affective disorder, I really doubt I would have ever picked up a paint brush.

Now that I am "sane," and have been out of the hospital for the last 3-4 years, I find that I am not really compelled to paint as I once was. I find instead that I gravitate towards technical books on science, math, and computer programming. I can no longer tolerate the uncertainty of a blank canvas. Now that my head is clear and some of my personality has returned (note: mental illness can often cause disruptions in one's personality and the development of one's personality), I am more interested in the art of programming rather than the art of Picasso. I am still eternally indebted to the world of art for maintaining me through my ordeals, but now I can go pursue the goals and passions from before my mental illness struck in my late teenage years.

It is tragic that schizophrenia often hits right at the onset of adulthood. Likely, the pre-psychotic symptoms have been in the individual through their adolescence, inhibiting their true personality from proper development.

Sometimes I still feel like I am only 18 years old. That is around the time when my mind started to mutate, to become unbalanced. Sometimes, when I laugh at something hysterically funny, I forget how old I am (29). In that moment, it is like I got my early years back and I'm a new, young adult again. Then, I remember that I'm almost 30, and I have to keep from feeling let down.

Despite this, I can feel proud of myself because I have found some measure of stability in a time when little treatment is available to people like myself. There is no magic wand, no magic fairy that can turn back the clock or make you a success overnight, but the fact that I have accomplished some of my goals on my own without the help of a magic fairy ---like. earning my Bachelor's degree, entering a graduate program, taking science classes, volunteering, and earning financial aid and so forth ---- that is enough to get me through the hard times I know I will have down the line. At some point, my illness will no longer be the "ghost in the machine," the apparition that haunts me while I type into cyberspace, it may very well become a reality, but until then, I am happy. I hope you are happy, too!