And Once Again, I Prove That Failure is Always an Option
#caregivers #caregiverstresses #mentalbreakdowns #failure
It’s the middle of 2024.
I’m not even sure how that happened, just that it did and now I’m another year older and my life isn’t appreciably better than it was last year. I’ve had another significant breakdown - last week, in fact. Dealing with the hopelessly fucked up American version of healthcare is enough to put stronger psyches than mine into freefall. I recovered better from this one, in that I didn’t need a complete break from EVERYTHING, just all the non-survival stuff. I made sure we all ate, we all slept, and we all used the appropriate toilet facilities. I put my phone on DND and hid in the family room (my room feeling too close to my mum’s room) with pharmaceutical support.
In the 1990’s, there was a show called Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. You know, back when it and the other Discovery-ish channels (History Channel, Animal Planet… TLC was always a bit more sketchy, but they tried) were actually kinda educational? And yes, I’m bitter and old and mourn the loss of quality cable programming like a stereotypical bitter old person.
(Great show, by the way. If you can binge watch it on whatever provider of old cable shows, do so.)
The Mythbusters was a show hosted by Jamie Hynemann and Adam Savage. In the course of busting urban myths, the duo frequently had any number of problems, some occasionally explosive (missing eyebrows come immediately to mind). Eventually, this led Adam Savage to adopt the motto, “Failure is ALWAYS an option.”
It resonated with me, and I adopted it as my own PERSONAL motto as well. Except at first, I didn’t exactly use it properly. Which now brings me back to the matter at hand: Failure.
See, as often as I failed in life, I absolutely hated it. It made me angry and frustrated and deeply, deeply embarrassed. Later, it would contribute to the PTSD-like condition that’s now as part of my life as my tattoos. (Really, it’s more apt a metaphor than you think - I might be able to spend a lot of money and time and effort to get rid of it, but it wouldn’t be perfect and anyway, I’d always know it was there.)
So I used the motto as a defensive shield, to deflect any feedback (constructive or not) in an effort to spare myself from feeling the feels any more than I undoubtedly would.
Failure is not a defensive shield.
I also used it as an excuse when I gave up. Usually the giving up was ALSO to spare me from feeling the feels, as it was almost always a case of pre-emptive failure; I thought I might fail, I feared I might fail, so I gave up before I could fail and feel the feels.
Failure is not the same as giving up.
Eventually I even used it to give myself license to not even try, or to actively fuck shit up. If I was a failure, after all, why bother to try? Why not just burn the whole thing down as spectacularly as possible.
Failure is neither an excuse not to try, or permission to deliberately sabotage anything.
I used failure is always an option for so long in so many ways that it ceased to have meaning. Until I failed so big and so hard and (at the time what felt like) so irreversibly that I finally had to face the word and what it really, truly, meant.
Failure is when you make an unsuccessful attempt. It requires trying.
Failure is when you make an honest, unsuccessful attempt. It requires being honest about your result.
Failure is a beneficial thing, even when the effects of the failure are catastrophic. It informs and leads to change for the better.
All of these things actually require thinking about when wetalk about failure. It’s such a negatively-charged thing to most of us that we have a knee-jerk reaction whenever it’s so much as mentioned. I know all of the above, and I STILL struggle with the emotions that are invoked by the very word.
You can’t claim you failed if you didn’t try. You can’t claim failure when you sabotaged your own results. And failure can make you more successful if you let it. So you can’t really use failure as an excuse or a defensive shield or a license to fuck up because failure doesn’t actually work that way.
And in order to learn to understand and accept failure, you have to give yourself room to fail; to forgive yourself in advance for fucking it all up, but still give it your best go anyway.
And WHEN you fail, which will happen (if you’re honest with yourself, and understand the concept fully) your entire life in small ways to large - from the coffee you spilled on you shirt when you tried to drink it, to the major screw-up that costs you a job or a lover or a friend - you have to fight down all those negative connotations and examine your failures to learn why they happened if you ever want to have a successful result.
Of course, you may still fail to learn from your failures, or fail to change for the better, and ultimately fail in your failure. But if you’re truly failing at failure, think of it this way; you’re still mastering the process of failing; you’re honestly trying and honestly examining and one day you’ll put it all together the right way up and the right way around and you’ll succeed.
Until you fail again.
After all, Failure is Always an Option.
In Which I Even Miss the “Aim Low” Mark
#caregiverresentment #depression #suicidalideation #selfharm
Yep. Because it’s been a whole month without posting, when I told myself I would be diligent and focused and purposeful and instead ended up mostly in bed, under the covers, hiding from anything more than the responsibilities I have for the two other creatures in my life.
Namely, making sure the dog has food, water, and some kind of way to burn off his energy, and taking care of my mum.
Which is actually quite a lot of responsibility, when you get right down to it. Even doing the bare minimum of caretaking I can get away with and still live with myself is a shit-ton (imperial or metric, take your pick) of responsibility when your greatest desire is to hide in your room until the whole world forgets you exist, including yourself.
(Trust me, that last bit makes perfect sense when seen through the crazy lens.)
For someone who is now so easily overwhelmed by life that sometimes getting the mail is anxiety producing (No, as a matter of fact I haven’t gotten the mail in over two weeks. Why do you ask?), for someone who never wanted children, for someone who, for the better part of the 21st century has avoided dating and relationships like the very plague, suddenly becoming responsible for a largely helpless human being is kind of like getting kicked in the nuts.
(We’re back to the whole metaphorical nuts/ovaries thing. Why is that? Do I have some kind of obsession with the nuts that I don’t have? I mean, I’m almost 100% sure that ovaries are a magnitude worse, but yet I always come back to the swift kick in the daddy-bags. Huh. Maybe I should bring that up in therapy sometime. But I digress.)
Taking care of another human being is difficult. Taking care of a mostly helpless human being is even more difficult. Taking care of someone you love dearly who is helpless is… whoa. Which is why I now have all the respect in the world for single parents, especially ones doing their parenting without much outside help from family, friends, or the asshats in government who use the law to force people to have children while simultaneously removing any and all government assistance for them to A) survive pregnancy, B) survive childbirth, and C) raise a happy, healthy, well-adjusted human being.
Digression. It’s what’s for dinner.
Anyway, props to single parents everywhere. And to ALL caregivers everywhere, whether caring for a relative or a client or a patient; young, middle-aged, or elderly; at any point on the abled scale.
Because even for people with all their ducks present and accounted for, lined up in perfect ranks, and standing at whatever amounts to attention for waterfowl, caregiving is hard. Doing it with less than a full-duck quotient and with whatever ducks you can scrape together all doing their own thing and with one of them not actually a duck at all but a very confused aardvark… on TOP of being as self-centered a human being as has ever locked themselves in their own little world and refused to come out unless it’s to play with puppies and ponies… weeelllllll… it’s really kind of ugly.
And by ugly I mean OMG what is that terrible, suppurating mass ugly.
Speaking of which…
(And by which I mean caregiving, not suppurating masses.)
I just had an hour and a half pause in writing this blog post. Because I needed to change my mum’s briefs (when the house remodel is done we hope to start phasing the briefs out, but as of right now, it’s just too difficult to get her transferred to a bedside commode or the toilet, and originally her left side was too useless for her to be able to use either, so for the past year and change I have been changing very large nappies round the clock), get her up in the wheelchair for dinner, move her mouse, water glass, kleenex, etc to a tv tray, fetch and open another bottle of water, and cook and serve her dinner.
In a bit, I’ll need to help her back to bed and get her set up for sleep.
I’ve only managed coffee and some lunch for myself all day. I even forgot my morning meds because today was a relief caregiver day and I needed to run an errand for the remodel and take the dog out so he didn’t go completely stir crazy and only had two hours to do so. Not that I even wanted to leave my room, let alone the house, which brings us back to that whole ugly thing, which is my brain.
Because when you’re depressed and borderline suicidal and flirting with self harm and really only want to be selfish and take your meds and try to sleep because even being alive is just too fucking overwhelming for you but you have to get up and DO THINGS because someone you love is relying on you not to be a total selfish asshat and make sure they don’t sit around in a wet nappy (or hungry or thirsty or too hot or too cold) and you really WANT to be a total asshat but you just CAN’T, not and still live with yourself, you start to build up a WHOLE LOT of resentment.
And that’s ugly. It’s ugly to have to face the fact that you resent someone you love not because they can do things for themselves and don’t - that’s fucking normal and absolutely well-adjusted resentment right there - but because they can’t do things for themselves and you have to pull YOUR head out of YOUR ass to do things for them. I mean, come on, what kind of a dick do you have to be, right? But it happens. I’ve been told it happens to people who are far better adjusted and saner and just plain better human beings than I am.
So you feel this resentment, and maybe anger or irritation, and then you cATCH yourself feeling it, and you either get defensive (but I’m just so exhausted, or I’m just so overwhelmed, or whatever), and/or you get a nasty case of self-loathing to go with your exhaustion or feelings of being overwhelmed, and that just starts your own personal doom loop.
(This is probably why I developed a new kind of crazy. The old kinds got so maxed out by a downward spiral of exhaustion, self-loathing and anger that there was nowhere else for the feels to go except to manifest a new disorder. And which is why now I get to have periods of time where I can’t allow myself to be around anything sharper than a butter knife and I clutch handfuls of ice for as long as I can stand to over and over again until the desire to reduce all the feels to just one that I can control - pain - subsides.)
I’m sure normal people reading this are at the “Dude, that’s FUCKED UP” stage by now.
To which I say, DUH, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS.
Because how do you reconcile honestly loving someone and wanting to take care of them with the feelings of resentment or anger that happen when you do? That’s the normal fucked-up-ness of being a caregiver, and it’s not something that I think anybody has a real answer for, other than maybe simply acknowledging the fact that humans are pretty messed up to begin with. In Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett describes the human condition as “an ape on the back of a rat that grew out of a lizard”, which is kind of a disturbingly accurate picture of the human brain and one of my favorite quotes.
And I know that all I can do is try to be patient with my mum and myself, and try to be aware that the feelings are there and that I can’t always control what I feel, and to try to control my actions when I can’t control my feelings.
And Yoda? Wherever your cackling little glowing force ghost is?
You can totally stick your Do or do not up your wispy-haired green Jedi ass.
Metaphors Are Hard
#dispair #depression #suicidalideation #selfharm #relapsing
They say that glitter is the equivalent of craft herpes. Once you’ve opened that can o’ worms, you ain’t never getting rid of it.
Okay. That was a mixed metaphor that just didn’t work. It made sense in my head, but like a lot of other things that make sense in my head, something got lost in translation.
I had a point about the glitter. And the herpes. I’m just not sure what it was.
oh. yeah. that.
Mental illness is like glitter, only not as sparkly. Which would make it a lot more like, well, herpes.
So mental illness is like herpes, really. You might think you’re fine for a while and then suddenly you’re wearing your underpants on your head and things have gone oozy and manky.
Man, I am not on my metaphor game at all, am I?
ah, fuck it.
Let’s start again. Mental illness is one of those things that sometimes tricks you into thinking you’re normal. Sometimes you will have periods of time where things are pretty much okay. Maybe you’ve started some new meds, or are seeing a new therapist, or tried a different treatment modality. Whatever it is, it seems to be working. You think you’ve vacuumed up all the glitter and your house no longer looks like a Twilight vampire exploded all over it.
This is particularly true of people who are just getting to know their flavor of crazy. Ones that still have some optimism that crazy can be cured, who haven’t been riding the batshit coaster for years. Those of us who are in it to win it (and by it I mean a gold medal in the Fucked Up Olympics) know better but sometimes even we can get caught up in wishful thinking.
Because it never just “goes away”. It’s still there, lurking like a creepy stalker. Just biding its time until you get a little complacent and it can sucker-punch you in the mental equivalent of your nuts. Even if you don’t actually have nuts, you totally have the mental equivalent. Or maybe they’re the mental equivalent of ovaries, I don’t know. I dunno that you can be sucker-punched in the ovaries, exactly, but you can totally get sucker-punched BY your ovaries.
Sorry. I almost squirrelled there. Because my ovaries and I? Have a HISTORY.
Regardless.
That shit (and by that shit I mean the crazy this time, not the ovaries) will sucker-punch you the moment you think you’ve got your shit sorted and can maybe have a normal life. Suddenly, nothing is working any more. Not your meds, not your therapist, not a single god-damn one of the tools you’ve learned over the years. Maybe not even your terrible, unhealthy, last-ditch coping mechanisms you spent nearly as many years trying to un-learn.
There is, in fact, not enough ice cream in the world to fix it, not even a little.
I’ve been crazy since my teens. Maybe even earlier. But I wasn’t officially “diagnosed” until my early twenties, and didn’t start medication until my mid-twenties. And I would go through periods of time where I would almost have my shit together. Where I seemed to be effectively juggling work and home and hobbies and the kind of fun a lot of people get up to in their twenties that generally falls under the heading of “partying”, although mine was a lot geekier than what you’re probably picturing because it involved LARPing.
Where I was no more messed up than the average twenty-something. Because EVERYONE gets a little messed up in their twenties, BY their twenties. You’re doing some kind of weird on-the-job training in being a successful adult, and half the time don’t have a fucking clue what’s supposed to be happening.
But it would never last.
My life has been an endless game of Jenga where I would think I was building up a normal, successful life, never realizing that it was all resting on one very wobbly block; a brain that somehow got volunteered for some neurochemical fuckery when I wasn’t looking. And it would all come tumbling down, and I would painstakingly build it back up again only to have it fall apart. See, the higher-functioning you are, the more you can be lured into thinking that everything will all be okay one day, and when that day comes you stupidly expect the okay to last.
Which it won’t.
Because the crazy? Is a bag of dicks.
I am no longer a high-functioning crazy person. I realized that when I attempted to return to the “normal” nine-to-five working world after ten years as a self-employed gig worker. It was like half my Jenga blocks were made of jello. I couldn’t even fake it. I was already failing miserably when life decided that shit wasn’t fucked up enough and I ended up as my mum’s full-time caregiver after a stroke left her with left-sided hemiparesis.
Because, you know, I was clearly not able to adult for myself so I might as well try to adult for another person as well.
Of course, this time, because I was already failing at Being Okay, the bit where shit goes pineapple-shaped wasn’t so bad. Then again, I might just have been so focused on nearly losing my mum that the grief and stress overwhelmed my usual cocktail of depression and anxiety. Or maybe even it was because ten years ago I finally realized that no matter how many times you vacuum, the glitter always comes back.
Always.
Either way, I was actually kinda prepared for the inevitable relapse when it happened. And I wasn’t even surprised when this time when I reached the suicidal event horizon and just… stayed there. After all, the mental illness never goes away. It only lets you think it does.
And it’s a sadistic. little. whoreson.
Because this time I got a new flavor of crazy, one I’d only previously very, very briefly experienced due to a drug reaction.
I wanted to hurt myself.
Not kill myself. Suicidal ideation is old hat to me. I wanted to HURT myself.
I pictured taking a knife and jabbing it into my leg. Digging my nails into my forearm and ripping the flesh from it. I wanted to feel that pain. Needed to.
I hate pain. I have dozens of old soft-tissue injuries from my days as a crash-test-dummy throughout my teens and twenties and… okay, I stopped actively doing dumb things in my thirties but started passively doing dumb things instead so I’ve continued to injure myself (or to re-injure old, poorly healed semi-scar-tissue). Point of fact, I have enough trouble with chronic pain that I can tell you unequivocally that I. Hate. Pain.
But I still wanted to hurt myself so. badly.
So. Very. Badly.
Once again the shrinks and I are dealing with acute mental illness. To bring it back to the terrible metaphors, awkward questions are being asked about how many strippers I hired and what they must have been doing because, otherwise, where else could this much glitter come from? Wasn’t that shit vacuumed up a long time ago?
So I’ve got some new drugs, and they’re helping me sleep if nothing else, because nothing feeds the crazy like sleep deprivation. And I’m gonna enjoy every little thing that feels better while I can. I might be cynical in outlook, but at least I know enough to grab hold of the “better” and the “okay” or even the “I don’t actively feel like I want to hurt and/or kill myself right this second” and appreciate it. After all, it won’t last.
Nothing ever does.
Except glitter.
So it begins
My goal for this blog is to overshare with whoever comes across it. I hope to overshare every day, but in all honesty if I can manage to share anything at all on a daily basis it will mean I am functioning way better than I’m expecting.
Aim low. That’s my motto.
so, first of all, I’m apologizing in advance for a number of things. Like, the half-assed state of the website. Second of all, I’m gonna tell y’all what would be here if I wasn’t apologizing for the state of the website.
Except I’m not that organized. (See motto above.)
Okay. Apologies are due for the unfinished state of the website and for any clicky-clickies that don’t work. Also for my language, because I swear like a person who has never developed any kind of mental filter for naughty language.
WAIT! Hold it right there. I must absolutely make this clear before things go any further:
NOTHING ON/IN/AROUND THIS WEBSITE IS APPROPRIATE FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY. MY BRAIN AND ITS CONTENTS ARE RATED PG-13 AT THE VERY BEST.
Right. Now, back to the apologies in progress. I have mentioned I’m crazy, right?
Grammar errors should also be apologized for before you encounter them, because I never pay enough attention I write from the heart and the gut and neither my heart or my gut are good at grammar. (Yeah, no, really, I should have this crap beta’d but I’m too crazy/lazy/half-assed I like to live on the wild side.)
I apologize for anything that you might find triggering in these pages, whether in the blog or in my writing.
I won’t apologize for the writing itself. If you like it, great, I’m super duper uuper pooper glad. If it’s not your cuppa tea, that’s great too, just not AS great, and thanks and godspeed and may you find your cuppa out there somewhere.
As for what I’d like to have magically happen without any effort on my part create in this space…
Eventually, it will be a repository for stuff I’ve written that I share with y’all and a list of what I’m currently working on, as well as my blog. I understand it’s currently a paean to wishful thinking and procrastination, but these are the bits I’m hopeful for:
Again, a place to put what I’ve written and what I’m writing. Some of it may already be online elsewhere, like FFnet or old LiveJournal posts or Inkitt or Wattpad or AO3.
A way for any artists who find themselves wanting to share artwork related to any of my projects. I will have something set up where you can submit your art with full credit given, and any links back to your own bit of virtual headspace.
A way for people to donate to my world, whether it be a gift directly to me or to one of the things I support.
Probably other stuff I haven’t even thought of yet that I can’t actually list because they haven’t been thought of. Because today I feel surprisingly optimistic and shit. It likely won’t last but hey, good for #4 because it’s proof that I sometimes can feel something other than hopeless!
Shit. How do you stop apologizing and planning and listing and actually get to what was supposed to be the first real blog post? Fuck. Man, I suck.
Yep. That’s about what I expected. Failure right out of the gate.
Be safe, love each other, and AIM LOW, everybody!
Intro
Hi. I’m crazy. How are you?
The name of this blog, Chasing the Dried Frog, is (if you don’t already know) a reference to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and the substance (dried frog pills) used by one of the characters to treat his insanity. My online name, Totally Bursar, is a reference to that character (the Bursar of Unseen University), who becomes so synonymous with insanity that in later books insane behavior is known as “going completely bursar”. Because I am nothing if not totally and completely bursar.
No, really, I’m not kidding. I have usually moderate-to-sometimes batshit mental illness. I used to be a much higher-functioning crazy person, but as I’ve grown older my mental illness has either become more severe or I’ve gotten a lot worse at coping with it. And I’ve recently picked up a new flavor of crazy because I’ve become shite at coping. So, yeah, crazy person, right here.
I will be trying to tag my blog posts with adequate trigger warnings for my fellow crazies, because we need to look out for each other. But because of that whole being-a-less-than-fully-functioning-adult thing I mentioned, I may on occasion fuck that one up too. (Please note that I will not be tagging my blog posts with adequate trigger warnings for my potty mouth, my bitchiness, my truthiness, or my judginess. Deal.)