NO CONTROL

None of us necessarily chose this life: our mental health and physical health, all in shambles as they’re tied together. So in addition to having bipolar, I got the doctor’s reading from my MRI last week and I’ve fully torn my ACL (“ACL: Tear of the anterior cruciate ligament proximally, favored full-thickness”) in a spite of mania, thus slowing down my management in assembling a mental care team and also getting the care that I’ll need, seeing I’ll have both PT and surgery.

I’ve been going on and on with my therapist about control. I won’t submit to some higher power, unless I feel that I’m right, in which case I own said control and power. I choose to be a vegetarian, based on ethical beliefs, yet I’ve received pushback from some psychiatrists that it’s only acceptable, given my current state of anorexia, to be based on religion, and if it was based on religion, I would get a pass. What’s the difference though really: ethics and religion seem one and the same to me, or at least close enough. The same principle applies to the two something decades of living in pedestrian-first cities; it’s not like that here, and I still want to be right.

I’ve given control of my health, via a POA, to my brother, and while I do need him to help, I want him to come to the same conclusion as me, which he often doesn’t, and I can understand that: he’s dyslexic, not bipolar.

There's no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end

That psychiatrist MD has burrowed in my mind and continues to make me doubt myself and my own diagnosis. Looking back, it’s unlikely that she had any of my paperwork from my history, but she was happy to interrupt my storytelling to question my mental well-being, suggesting multiple diagnoses (and maybe she’s not wrong). I took these feelings to my therapist, who then ensured me that my current “psychiatrist” sees my pain. Needless to say, I won’t be seeing that MD again.

I saw my PMHNP-BC (quite the mouth full) this week, and the new physical injury just makes things more difficult, but she’s okay taking things slowly, not that that does my day-to-day any better. She’s not as aggressive with trying medications (and I’m not going to give advice on them here), so it’s a long, slow, daily burn. I can’t find my/didn’t bring my DBT handbooks when I moved, which is more than unfortunate, as they aren’t something that I can just buy; the hospital had made their own, and being familiar with it, it worked for me. (Anyone in the DBT program at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, CA?)

Monochrome coloring books for me for the time being.