KosAbility is a community diary series posted at 5 PM ET every Sunday and Wednesday by volunteer diarists. This is a gathering place for people who are living with disabilities, who love someone with a disability, or who want to know more about the issues surrounding this topic. There are two parts to each diary. First, a volunteer diarist will offer their specific knowledge and insight about a topic they know intimately. Then, readers are invited to comment on what they've read and/or ask general questions about disabilities, share something they've learned, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about the unfairness of their situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered.
Today's diarist is Oke
At 16 I was a top student, a Violinist in the Des Moines Youth Symphony, I came from what appeared to be a normal upper middle class family.
So to most people it made no sense that on a warm September Midwest evening I figured up my pay owed me at my after school job, slipped the $120.00 out of the drawer, and got on a Greyhound. Never would I return to that "normal" life again.
The courage to run was fueled by the afternoon drinks I’d started having at the bar down the street from my high school, the weariness and fear of physical abuse in my home, and sexual abuse by a neighbor who was even older than my father.
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For many years I drank to numb the pain that had consciously began when I was ten years old when my grandfather, who was severely bi-polar, had hung himself.
I vacillated between blaming myself and blaming others for all the physical and emotional pain my life had been.
From the ages of sixteen to eighteen I would love to romanticize about being a free spirit and my adventures of hitchhiking across the U.S. several times, but the reality was a very lost girl who knew something was wrong, didn’t quite know what, and sadly wouldn’t know for some time to come.
At 17 I was ready to try something different, find some solution. I’d given up running, only for the moment, and my choices were juvenile detention or voluntarily going in for an evaluation. I agreed to go into a mental health unit for an evaluation. Being a minor from an upper middle class family with the Cadillac insurance of those days I was conveniently tucked away for a couple of months.
During this time I had ten minute visits twice a week with my quack psychiatrist. This "professional" called me a liar because good upstanding people like my parents did NOT abuse their children. And, in addition, he loved to ask for detailed accounts of what went on with the neighbor man, not because he believed I was abused, but "to get to the bottom of my rebellious and promiscuous nature."
He also loved to push pills and didn’t adhere to the disease concept of alcoholism.
The true symptoms, the sadness, anxiety, racing thoughts, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, crying, and self medicating with alcohol, the real signs of depression in a young adolescent he discounted.
Pot wasn’t my "gateway" drug to the "hard stuff", his prescriptions were. Me and my roommate, Karen, made great fun out of finding out what pills he’d prescribe us (Dr. P was her shrink, too) given what bullshit symptoms we'd come up with.
Karen and I had more than that in common, well off families, physical and sexual abuse that no one wanted to know about or believed, and besides each other, our best friends were whiskey and vodka.
We’d get passes and come back drunk every time, he still gave us passes. As long as I could get out at least once a week and drink, and get by with his cocktail of pills daily in between, I thought I was good. But I knew that I was not okay.
The fun ended abruptly after Karen and I got a pass one Thursday afternoon. I went AWOL with someone I’d been meeting there on a regular basis; Karen decided to go back to the hospital. The following Monday I finally turned up at my Grandmother’s house to learn that Karen was dead. She had left on a pass with her parents on Sunday, upon her return she had smuggled in three bottles of 500 count aspirins and took them all.
The nurses ignored the other patients’ desperate pleas to attend to her; they had always dismissed both of us as pain in the ass brats and had no time for either of us.
By the time they realized something was wrong she had bled out internally beyond any help.
That began one of many suicide missions for me. My grandfather had committed suicide, my friend had, and self-blame, however irrational, permeated my being. I went on a three-month non-stop binge.
New Years Eve when I was 18 I attempted suicide with liquor and pills.
Convinced I was a loser with no willpower, a slut, a whore, a rotten friend, and would continue to be a failure.
Ending up in the hospital with the same quack Dr. didn’t help, the nurses tried in vain to get him to send me from the medical floor over to the chemical dependency unit.
Hell, I even knew at this point I needed to be there. Dr P. refused, citing "adolescent adjustment" problems as a diagnosis for attempted suicide.
On my own determination I left that hospital, got a diploma and a clerical job at a good company. I was going to show all of them I could be a success. And I was, then the "thing" settled in. The anxious jittery feeling that I just had to keep going, doing something, not just sitting there. The god awful depression that no matter what I did; exercise, pray, read, talk, eat, not eat, sleep, not sleep, nothing worked, but a drink would numb it. Having vast amounts of energy one day and then barely able to conceive of making a bowl of cereal the next was an out of control feeling I couldn’t comprehend. Mood swings and angry outbursts at people that came out of nowhere were my daily demons. Every message I’d received so far from those who were supposed to know told me that it was me; I was an inherently flawed fuck up.
A drink was the only thing I knew to slow me down or bring me up out of the pits. It was my self prescribed medicine.
At no time have I ever taken A drink. If I had one I had two, two meant three, and on and on into whatever disaster awaited before I sobered up again.
From 18 to 21 I had several good jobs, even co-owned a bar for a year. Of course, I drank my share of the profits.
But life was an exercise in survival, I wasn’t living and didn’t know anything other than I had to figure out how to fix me, I was broke but all signs said it was my fault I was broke.
At the age of twenty-one I was sexually assaulted at gunpoint after leaving an after hours club one night. My mother worked for the police department. My belief system then was that I sure as hell wasn’t going to report it and shame her more than I already had my entire life. A co-worker talked me into going to talk to a crisis counselor.
That counselor got me to go to my first 12- step meeting.
Even now I get overwhelmed with emotions recalling the relief of finding a multitude of others who had done all the things I had, tried all the ways to stop that I had, and still hadn’t been able to pull it together on their own.
I jumped in with both feet and did what was suggested, all of it. Steps, sponsors, service work, regular meetings.
Over many years I would put together long periods of time without the use of mind altering substances, in whatever form. My life would fall into place and things would improve.
Then the "thing" would return, I’d short circuit and be back at it again.
For many years I ascribed to the die hards of the programs who’d tell me I wasn’t doing the steps right, or I wasn’t really ready to surrender.
About six years ago withing a short span of time my grandmother had died, my then husband found out he had to have open heart surgery for the 2nd time, just months after a stroke, I had three teenage girls I was dealing with every day . My family practitioner sent me to the Dr. who was to quite literally save my life and give me the means to really have a life.
That Dr. looked at my family history, looked at my history, did some tests and sat me down to tell me I had Bipolar Disorder Type II.
My first reaction was truly the words, "just fucking shoot me, I'd rather die than end up like my dad or grandfather."
Dr G. is one of the good ones, he listened, he explained and educated. And he did what no one had ever really done. He acknowleged my huge success in the large amounts of substance free time I'd put together over the years while battling another untreated disease.
Today I do believe in co-occurring disorders. I suffered untreated for years from the disease of addiction and a disease and a chemical imbalance, each setting the other off.
Different people have different beliefs about addiction and disease. I'm not here to debate that. I'm here to say that my addiction progressed over the years and will always be something I have to be responsible for managing the rest of my life. The same with my other diagnosis, I take my medications as I'm supposed too.
It's amazing: If I don't drink or get high the medicine works and I don't want to drink or get high and kill myself. If I quit taking my meds, no matter how many meetings I go to or other things I do to take care of my disease of my addiction, I will short circuit and the dominoes will fall. That, folks, is not a pretty sight for this gal, at this stage in my life it's almost certain death.
Over the years there were many times I came very close to suicide. For anyone reading this, please never, ever, ever give up. If I can make it, there's no one that cannot turn their lives around.
There are five reasons I did not go through with my own selfish solution.
My Grandfather, and my friend Karen. They devastate those around them, what they did was sad and selfish. The pain they inflicted on me I could not inflict on others. So I thank them, they saved me.
The other three reasons are my daughters, they truly saved me. They gave me the reason to get up when I wanted to die. They gave me the reason to stop using. When I had given up on me I couldn't turn my back on them. They gave me a reason to save me until I could want to save me because I deserved to be save.
If you see yourself at all in any of this, you too deserve to be saved.
Want to know more about Depression or Bipolar Disorder? Click here.
Find a Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance chapter here.
Find a DBSA support group here.
Join a DBAS online support group here.
Do you have a friend or loved one with depression or bipolar disorder? DBSA forums, found here, can help.
More often it took the form of the depressive side. But the manic was there, it just wasn’t the extreme mania that people associate with Bi-Polar disorder.
Most of all I was not crazy like my father or my grandfather, both of whom had Bi-Polar disorder. To end up like them meant stigma, failure, hurt and pain.