Joanna Shares Some Feelings, Part 4

(Pretty sure it's Part 4. I think.)

[[[ PART 4-1 ]]]  I have felt slightly out of sorts lately, not really on top of things. I'm planning to talk with my family doctor about the dosage on my Adderall - I'm not noticing as much of a difference between when I take it and when I don't, as I used to. I think I remember when he started me on it (A year and a half ago? Is that possible?) he said this would happen at some point - it's a stimulant, so I'll need more. Matt's worried this means I'll have more increases in the future, so I'll ask about that too.


Matt and I had a discussion a few weeks ago, during a long car ride. He's read a lot from the Driven to Distraction book our pediatrician recommended when she diagnosed Simon with ADHD, and a fair amount of the book is dedicated to adults with ADD; there's an entire chapter about marriage and what both the "ADD partner" and the "non-ADD partner" might experience. Matt reminisced about the early days of our relationship, when he loved hearing from me, "I have a plan." I thought about this for a few minutes, and offered the following thoughts (stay with me, this may make little to no sense to anyone but me):

• Matt and I met a little less than a year after I finished graduate school. In both undergrad and grad school, I was pretty driven/ambitious and highly organized, with a plan and an outline for just about everything.

• This probably served Matt pretty well at the time - he was about a year out of undergrad and was not really sure what he was going to do with himself, so meeting up with someone at the beginning of a career and lots of plans for everything may have been helpful for him. So, he would likely remember it as a positive thing.

• This goes along with what the neuropsychologist said when she diagnosed with ADD, that to be as successful as I was in school, I probably had to work much harder than I otherwise would have, if not for the TBI. It took her bringing it to my attention to make me see how much work I put into making lists and plans for everything - she said I'd probably been doing it so long I didn't even notice it or think anything of it. However:

• My job in Washington DC (child welfare social worker) was about as exceptionally stressful as one might imagine, and I went for a few sessions with a therapist at the Employee Assistance Program. She was great - very supportive and helped me realize how much pressure I was putting myself under, and how I was trying to make the same organization methods and perfectionistic tendencies from school apply to the current job (and I guess I'd done the same at other jobs). She helped me to see/understand that hey, work is not the same as school. You may be thinking, well, obviously, but it was not obvious to me. 

• My previous jobs likely had been more like school; I was the only social worker on a psychiatric unit at a hospital, and then a case manager at a county health department. In both jobs I was fairly independent; in charge of my own duties and workload and while I made plenty of referrals in each setting, it was different. The child welfare job depending on so much interaction among various levels of services, red tape and people, especially the cases that were involved in the Family Court system and you had to explain everything you did to a dozen different people and the interplay among families, schools, law enforcement, social services, and mental health services was so complex it really defies description. So, I had way less control over things (to the extent I had previously deluded myself into thinking I had lots of control at the other jobs), though I and plenty of other folks (like the attorneys) were more than happy to let me assume responsibility for everything. 

• So anyway, I explained to Matt during this conversation, I may have let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. Again, the dosage on my Adderall may have something to do with this, because I felt pretty hyper-organized when I first started it. But I would agree that here lately, it is hard for me to do much in a timely manner, or in some instances what seems to Matt like a timely manner. :) It takes forever for me to make a simple phone call, or accomplish relatively simple tasks, because I don't devote as much time to thinking about what it will take to actually finish each thing, and I'm easily derailed when I don't have something I need. 

• Yeah, Adderall. 

• I tried for a long time to be a much more laid-back, peaceful, go-with-the-flow type of person than I finally concluded I actually am.

[[[ PART 4-2 ]]]  Along with the distraction is a mild, but definite melancholy here lately. I think it started a couple of weeks ago when I took Simon to visit my undergrad campus, which is about 30 minutes away. I've taken him for several visits and he loves seeing the "college kids." I usually enjoy taking him, and talking about what things were like when I was a student. This time we were sitting on a couch in the University Center ("UC," I think I went in there once when I was a student but it looks a lot better now), and for some reason I chose to tell him that although I liked going to school here, I was often lonely and sad, especially after "Grandma Jean" - my mom - died when I was a sophomore. It turned out to be a good thing to share, because he asked if I ever felt shy when I went to a new class for the first time. This is about the move we have to make this summer, so I acknowledged that often I was shy and nervous at first, but that everyone was nice and pretty soon I made friends. That is a much rosier picture than the experience I actually recall, but what else are you going to say to a 5 y.o., when you want him to get on board with the plan?

Since that day I've been thinking a lot about another emotion that predominated, though I didn't realize it for a long time, at that time. Anger. This was after my mom died, and of course I know the Kubler-Ross death/dying Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance thing by heart. And I know that anger is generally secondary to grief, fear, etc. I have not really ever thought about the way in which I grieved this loss; at the time I totally acknowledged all the primary emotions but never got around to directly expressing the anger. Most of my classmates and other friends knew about my mom's death, and I would say to them that it was tough, or some other general statement that put out there that I was not doing the Denial thing. I never really talked to anyone else about it, not in any depth. I even saw a guy at the student counseling center for awhile and I remember talking a lot about the grief and sadness, but not a whole lot else. Of course that doesn't mean we didn't talk about it, but I don't remember it.

The other thing I think I did was to be sad for awhile, then sort of think I was concentrating on class or homework for a bit, then flip the sadness switch on and off again later. Does that make any sense? I would acknowledge the loss for awhile, like in the afternoon, and it's not that I would have denied it if you'd asked me about any other time that day, but I just didn't realize or acknowledge how all-encompassing, all-permeating (is that even a term?) it was. And of course you never realize it all at the time, it's only later looking back, but it's simply odd to me as a mental health person that I haven't really thought about the process that much since it happened. And I suppose doing it the way I did helped me accomplish my main goal at the time, which was outstanding academic achievement. I talked to the counselor some, and I talked to some other humans some, but otherwise I buried myself in work, with the idea that I had to go even more above-and-beyond than I had previously in order to make my (dead) mom proud of me, when I knew full well, even at the time, that my mom would not have cared less whether I graduated summa cum laude or not. So why am I talking about all this right now?

Since that last visit to campus, I've been thinking back to a couple of years ago, when I read through a bunch of my journals from those days. I was surprised to find all the anger there, but again never about the loss, which I'm assuming now is what was behind it. It was always directed at other people, and especially whatever guy I was with at the time. I never felt happy or secure in any relationship for more than a day or so, and my neurosis about "Is he going to call? When is he going to call?" went way beyond any normal insecurity. The worst thing I discovered was all the time and thought I devoted to wanting to hurt other people - whenever I felt mistreated in the slightest, my reflex was to lash out/strike back. Not physically; I suppose I wanted them to feel really bad/sad/guilty/ashamed, and I suppose the logical extension of that is, I wanted them to hurt as much as I was hurting. "Some" of just about any emotion is expected after a loss of this magnitude, but ... it was way more than "some."

If you are wondering, I'm not beating myself up too much currently about this whole thing; I was only 20 when my mom died and I think of college as a great time to not know what the hell you are doing, most of the time. It's more that I'm ... interested in examining the process, in a slightly-but-not-too-much detached way.  

So what was I so angry about? Who was I angry at?

(1) My dad, who in his profound grief and loneliness got engaged to someone else less than a year after my mom died. I really hated her and they eventually broke up, thank goodness. Even at that time, I was able to recognize my dad's loneliness and need for companionship, but it wasn't enough to overcome my own feelings about it.

(2) The rest of my immediate family, which would be my older brother and younger sister, because we were all in different places and we weren't really talking about it and we were all dealing with it in our own way but there was never a good, real talk about it. I was at my college, my sister was a freshman at hers, my brother was married with a kid and my dad was all alone and we were falling apart. My exact thought is, if it had been my dad who died, my mom would've held us all together. She would've made sure everything was okay, that we were all doing okay and our family still existed for more than Thanksgiving dinner.

(3) My mom, I guess, for (a) leaving me/us, and (b) leaving us in this mess.

(4) It's common to be mad at God or whatever your higher power might be, and I supposed I never expressed or even let myself think about that too much because logically I looked at it as irrational and a waste of time - it happened, there was nothing that could've been done to prevent it (brain aneurysm), God didn't "make" it happen so why even talk about it? Logic still rules a lot of my thought these days (again, not the free spirit I would've once wanted to be), but back then it was about the only way I knew how to do anything.

(5) My dad my dad my dad my dad - he was the parent, he was supposed to either prevent this from happening or make it less terrible, he was supposed to check on us and us real questions about how we were doing. This even though we were all adults now and none of us lived at home and I tended to push him away because of some other issues in the past - we needed a parent and Mom was gone and Dad wasn't stepping up and he should have made everything okay, dammit, because he's the parent.

(6) I was lonely and sad and I felt completely untethered to the world - I felt like a balloon someone had snipped the string to and I was just floating off into space by myself and nobody knew and nobody cared and I was all by myself. I felt as if my Mom was not only my main cheerleader but my only cheerleader, that I didn't really matter to anyone else in the world, not really. 

That last one made me cry to type it, though I've made that exact 'balloon' image in my head before with no real problems. 

Maybe that's why I never thought about all this being connected before, huh? Difficult, yes. 

Once again, not judging myself too harshly on any of these thoughts, either the ones now or the ones then, but it is painful to think about all of this at the same time. Writing this out, though, with the idea of sharing it with other people, is forcing me to think about it in a different way, to organize it a little differently in my brain, is helpful.

I'd also never linked the loss and resulting anger to an overall feeling of helplessness and powerlessness, along with a complete inability to deal with or express the anger in any productive way. Not that I'm alone in "not being able to deal effectively with anger." It's more that I'm not sure I'm much better at it now than I was then, even knowing and verbalizing/acknowledging all the other crap that comes tied up with the anger. The anger and powerlessness fed each other in this unending loop of being able to write or say anything that made the anger mean anything to anyone else

... As a social worker who has worked with a lot of teenage girls, I have heard the term "self-esteem" so much that I almost laugh out loud when I hear it now. The general concept is okay, it just gets generalized as the reason why girls do anything. And as I read somewhere, sometime, prisons are full of guys with great self-esteem, who hold themselves in plenty high regard. "Plenty high regard," did I really just say that?

... I prefer the idea of self-efficacy, the idea that you are in control of your life, and what you do and say makes a difference in your life and in the world. Not so much that you think you are fat because of the models in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, but more that you are capable of determining what is really important/relevant in your life, what your goals are, and your ability to make changes in your life and in the systems that surround you in order to meet your goals. And, the ability to sort out the things over which you do not have control - you don't have to feel good about them, you just have to recognize your own limitations and work within them.

[[[ CONCLUSION ]]] The family stuff (with Dad and sibs) has more or less straightened itself out over the years, and the family system has survived more or less intact. I have gone on to establish a pretty good life, with a beautiful family and a career I love, though each job setting is a lot easier to look back on and love once I've been out of it for a year or so. Mood issues are variable; there is other, ah, pharmaceutical assistance than the Adderall so maybe those can be looked at too. Things are generally cool; I think this piece was something I needed to write in order to understand it better myself. This is not tied up as neatly as I would've like, but for goodness' sake I need to do other things. If you've hung in here until this point, thank you and may God bless you. You are awesome.