Tag Archives: school

Twelve years ago, I was almost flunking out of high school, only in part due to getting could-not-do-anything-productive migraines 4-5 days a week. My moods shifted faster than my classmates’ relationships, and though I didn’t have the name for it I spent most of my days in generalized anxiety spiking into panic at every casually or pointedly cruel thing said around me — so only several times a day. I sent off applications to safe colleges, everything on the west coast, comfortable, familiar. I mostly did not get in.

Ten years ago, a good day’s accomplishment was getting out of bed. Getting dressed was worth celebrating. Housework was far beyond me. Working as a temp — a call at 8:30am, “Can you be there at 9?” “Make it 9:30.” — relied on my ability to flick so quickly into what I now know as hypomania, relied on knowing I would never see these people again, on knowing tomorrow would likely be another day I did not have to pretend to be what I thought a real person was supposed to be, would not have to force myself vertical and presentable. I did not take longer assignments.

Eight years ago I was withdrawing from college. Again. I’d started medication, divalproex sodium, and that was going to cure me; we’d packed up our possessions, bought furniture in flat boxes, and drove it most of the way across the country to this town with one redeeming feature: the college from which I had just withdrawn because it was better than flunking out from chronic absences. I did not know who I was, what good I was, if I could not do college, be a student. I could not see a future, and mostly did not believe I had one.

Six years ago I was in therapy. I had walked away from the campus I’d once looked to as my salvation, and now, in a falling apart house not two blocks away, tried to ignore its omnipresent reminder of my failures. I measured my life in weekly appointments; talk therapy Tuesdays, massage or acupunctures Thursdays. I had half a dozen nearly-maxed-out credit cards, a partner stuck in a place without employment for him because of my proven-false belief that This Time Would Be Different, a concussion I never sought help for from a coping mechanism I never told anyone about, a coccyx and back in so much pain I could hardly lie or sit down — but could hardly do anything else –, and a house that immediately let the rare visitors know of my two incontinent pets. Life was surviving each day, hoping and trusting and often despairing that somehow, eventually, the work I was doing on myself would pay off.

Four years ago my partner started a dream job in Portland, all our possessions and two of our pets were in Indiana, and I was in California with my mom and my dog and a round-the-clock rotation of hospice aides, waiting for my father to die. I was off medication and on fish oil, suddenly away from my professional support system, grieving for a parent not yet dead, and yet, somehow, more stable — less crazy — than I could ever remember being. I was bleeding every 27 days, hoping somehow that the weekend visits from The Man would mean this month no period would come.

Two years ago the Boychick was one and a half years old; I’d survived his infancy, become a valued member of the moderation team on a large parenting discussion board, and was about to gamble $10,000 — $20,000 total over the life of the loan — on the idea that I was well enough and committed enough to massage that I could, and would, make it through the 555 hour program at Oregon School of Massage. The three hours a week I was to be in school would be the longest I had ever been away from the Boychick in his life, and neither of us were sure we were ready for it. It was to be the most I had asked of my body in a decade, apart from the six hours of the Boychick’s labor, and I definitely wasn’t sure it was ready for it. There was a blog registered in my name at raisingmyboychick.blogspot.com and the tagline “Feminist thoughts inspired by parenting a presumably-straight white male” in my head, and I, familiar with the defeat of attempts never given a fair chance, assumed that would be as much as would ever come from it.

And now: I’m one quarter away from graduating and becoming a licensed massage therapist; I write a frankly magnificent and provocative blog with regular, substantial updates; am, according to Babble, the Most Controversial mom on Twitter; have my work referenced in college papers and used in childbirth education classes; get mentioned in newspapers internationally; edit one of the most honest, raw, and breathtaking anonymous blog series on the web; have gone from daily spikes of 9/10 pain, weekly migraines, and severely limited movement to having little pain, monthly migraines, and a body more and more able to dance through my days; have started submitting work for paid publication; and, while writing this, received a rejection from a magazine editor — and survived. And I do it all with a not-quite-four year old in tow, keeping the both of us alive and more or less well by myself 32 hours a week.

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I will always be bipolar. I will likely always have pain and the need to be especially considerate of the limits of my body. My life will never look “normal”, I will never work in an office 8-5, and I may not ever earn enough to solely support myself and my family. There are so many things I want to be doing for which I simply don’t have the time, or the spoons; maybe eventually I will add more, or, I am sure, change what I choose to do; maybe I’ll be able to do less, and will scale back as needed. I still don’t know what the future holds — though I have some hopes, the foundations of which I am working on even now — but, most days, I am reasonably sure I’ll be there for it. Most days, I live, not pausing in awe at what a wonder, and a change, that is.

That is how far I’ve come.