At the end of May, I hit a very low point. I’ve been struggling, as I usually do, for a while. But it had gotten a lot worse. I hit a point of being about one bad thing away from a mental breakdown and was having ideation daydreams several times an hour. The tipping point came when a very sweet, young woman walked into the office where I work and handed me a resume for my position. That’s when something in me broke.
I very quickly emailed my doctor who recommended that I go to IOP treatment. This has been recommended to me several times before. This time I agreed. I let my supervisor know about how bad my mental health had gotten. The doctors wanted me to participate in a three-week intensive therapy program. Luckily my job understood and let me take the time off needed to get treatment for my mental health.
While this was going on, we’d discovered that I have sleep apnea, which was proving to make the amount of sleep I was getting ineffective. And every pill I was taking for my mental health, with one exception, had a side effect of putting me to sleep. Which was suspected to be why I just couldn’t stay awake for the life of me. I was falling asleep everywhere. At work, sitting in my non-moving car, at Disneyland. It had become a very serious problem.
IOP came, and it went. And it didn’t help. After a week of shuffling around, because things were clearly not good, I enrolled in ICMP. Which, started to help. Sort of. Listening to the people enrolled in the group and how they were processing was helping me start to get a handle on everything plummeting around and beating everything inside of my head. Until I hit the lowest week I’ve had, where I couldn’t get out of bed for more than 10 minutes at a time. I didn’t really talk to my friends. I didn’t leave the apartment. I didn’t attend therapy. I stayed in bed and figured the time was probably passing. But I stared listlessly at the room around me, at Riley – who kept pushing her small furry face against mine in concern or annoyance, or I just sobbed into the bare mattresses of my bed.
No one told me missing the sessions for two consecutive days would have me automatically discharged. Others had been coming and going with larger absences. When I tried to go back, I was really surprised that I had been discharged. Which, made things worse. And I had a moment of extreme weakness, and then my case manager enrolled me in something new.
I’m finally at the point where we’re doing what I was told initially we were going to do – partial hospitalization. Intensive treatments in both group and one-on-one sessions with a team of therapists and psychiatrists throughout seven hours every weekday. I’m somewhat hopeful, as much as I can be at least. If the past couple weeks are any indication, I am in for a very hard time but also to have actual hope to reaching okay.
I know I miss feeling things like I used to. I miss not wishing I would stop waking up, or that I’d stop existing. I miss not feeling like I have to pretend to have or know joy or any other emotion. Or just, feeling genuinely myself. I miss me. I barely know me, but that vague semblance I have is missing.
I’m getting ready to take a week break that has been planned since January, with massive amounts of homework for therapy and text check-ins. And I’m scared. I just found a safe place and now I’m leaving it. But its also a part of getting my life back on a track where I can go to work and live a life outside of treatment.
That should be the goal, right?
Shpunkey 