Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts

Monday, November 9, 2009

Could Superficiality Get Me Through? Day #4 Withdrawals.

Here is a super fab video from gorgeous Robbie Williams and my saviors, The Pet Shop Boys sing back ups for Robbie.

A perfect mix: Robbie plays the drag queen/sexy lounge singer and the satirical or not so, musicians, The Pet Shop Boys of great hits like, the monotonous memorable contemporary urban question,  "You Pay My Rent", provide the music. 



Yes, good superficial desires are pulling me back in or as they say these days, GROUNDING ME . Don't get me wrong, things are still throwing me in around in a spastic habitrail, or rather, I feel like I'm standing on the side lines, bouncing around and out of rhythm.

I treated myself to Sally Hansen nail strengthener, cut them cuticles and soaked my fingers in a bath of anti-bacterial suds. I am on the way to real lady fingers... something that might make my life better. I have to give it a chance.

The inner and brain zaps, depersonalization, other words, my arch nemesis "the existentialist solitary confinement". 


Thanks Jean-Paul Sartre for the breaking through to the other side. Or rather inside. Damn' you, I love you.


They are still there. And the ever annoying to others, 'repetitive thinking' which manifested in days of  incessant crying and self-loathing. Some of the others seem of the lighter malfunctions: headaches, and nervousness, paranoia, etc. 

There have been so many epic nightmares crossing continents and centuries, violence and apocalyptic brouhaha that could have gained me several screenplay Oscars if I had found the time to detangle their senselessness.  

My doctor says write them down. They always say that don't they. They want you to believe you are the next Ann Sexton or Francis Farmer.... crazy and fucked up but with some intellectual redemption. Or maybe they just want to teach you how to pass your time instead of eating yourself alive.

But, let's get back to superficiality. In the worst of times, shopping and the Pet Shop boys has gravitated me back to ground floor.  What ever it takes. You might have your own secret superficial endeavors. I call them joie de vivre... so, why do I deny myself "The Love Boat" episodes on a regular basis to keep my head above ground? 

I suppose too much of it would turn me 180 degrees back to depressive thinking. I esteem those who walk through life with little irritation for the most banal of activities. Everyone, needs something to believe in and for some it just might be that SUV with tinted windows.

So, for your listening and visual pleasure, the super sexy and super genius of Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant have satirically pulled me through the worst of times when there seemed to be no one around. And yes, before Facebook when you might get a heads up and notic e.

Here is a super fab video from gorgeous Robbie Williams and my saviors who flatly sing in a memorable contemporary question: "You Pay My Rent". The next is hot, hot, hot.

For a great look at an interview with Tennant and Lowe:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariston-anderson/pet-shop-boys-write-socia_b_210648.html

Time to walk Moishe and Howard and then a revisit to any errors in this draft. 

For those of you who want to look at the longer version of an interview with Robbie Williams in drag and hairy chest check out the following:




With cheezy whizzy interview!

Thursday, July 30, 2009

A Short Story From My Memoir, "Tangled Sheets"

The last couple of weeks has been taking care of my dear Moishe. The good news is that he is back in action. A true miracle for the little fluffy who came into my life in 1998, a couple of months before my father died and a year after my mother had died. He changed my life, little by little. And without him and the security and sense of hope he gave me... I would have never been able to accomplish all the things I have been able to do since he arrived into my life.


"Moishe's Staple Stitches After Gastro Abdominal Surgery", 7/09, Jersey City, N.J.


He was only 3 years old. Now he is 14 or 15. No, one knows his story. I adopted him on a hot August day from the ASPA shelter on the Upper East Side. It was a classic love story. I needed love, he needed love...we found each other; he in a cage and me in my own self-made one.

I wrote this following short story back in 2002. I was taking a memoir writing class at Gotham in the West Village. My life was very different and very difficult. I need to remind myself of this when I hit walls or swing up and down, from one mood to the next.

This was the beginning of a series of pieces I have written with the hopes of publishing one day in the future. Blessed ones only know it's a lot cheaper to have a lap top and a ream of paper than it is to work in fine art or documentary photography.


From: "Tangled Sheets", Juliana Beasley

4/12/02

We have a complete relationship. We can read each other’s minds. We have the sort of relationship where we can take a shit in front of each other.

Most of our time we spend in bed, me at her feet or sometimes by her side, my head on her pillow, her left arm folded over my body, our bodies not curved spoons. Over the last four years, I’ve learned a lot about her in bed.

Before she retires for the evening she pops some pills. Sometimes, the orange bottles sit by her side on a nightstand amongst the half-filled water glasses; in worse times they lay on the floor commingling with partially read books, aluminum take-out trays, and empty seltzer bottles.

Her sleep is erratic. I’ve witnessed her suffer through nights of drug induced sleeplessness. She watches late night shows on t.v. where twenty- somethings openly display their libido and stupidity for the all the lonely insomniacs to see. At four a.m. the commercials for sleeping pills come on; she hates the model/actor who raises his blinds and arms, refreshed and ready for a “brand new day.” She frantically leafs through her phone book and looks for someone to speak with in a later time zone and settles on calling Paolo on his cell in Tuscany. 

I’ve heard her talk at night while she sleeps. She has lengthy conversations in broken Russian and French. She laughs aloud and carries on like a dilettante. There are nights, when she’ll awake and pull a strange stick plugged into the wall from under her bed, bringing it between her legs, vibrating and tensing her body until she gives herself over to temporary limpness. But, she still lies awake. Other nights, she turns on the lights, crying and coddling me in her arms. She tells me, “I love you Moish.” and I know what she means. One morning, she awoke from a couple of hours sleep, embracing her pillow and kissing it like a desperate lover never returned.

Late afternoons, she calls the Guayanese restaurant for take-out. The doorbell rings and she searches her bags for money; this is the most exercise she’s gotten in months. She’s just plain unpresentable. She pays the deliveryman and tips him. “Thank you,” she says, and closes the door behind him. He’s the only person she’s had a conversation with all day. She removes the foggy plastic cover, pulls a fork from the overflowing sink and washes it briefly. It’s a fast and gluttonous feast. She’s ordered the largest portion of chicken stew as usual and if I’m lucky she throws me a piece on the floor. Afterwards, she says, “Come up,” and I spring onto the bed of tangled sheets.

It wasn’t always, this good. There was a time when I never saw one scrap. It was a cold winter; our first year together and we lived in the East Village. And then it happened; the depression set in and we went to the local pizzaria. We were standing at one of those circular tables, the kind without the bar stools and I was sitting patiently at her feet while she ate a pepperoni slice of pizza. She looked down on me and I knew exactly what she was thinking--she needed to share with someone, she needed to be a part. She threw me down a greasy circle and that’s how it all began.

We’re a perfect match. I’m an irrevocable beggar and she’s an incurable slob. Even though she tried for many years to reform, her piggishness is inherently coded, a maternal birthright. She remembers the last years of her mother’s life and how her mother had begun to keep her own home clean. The collectables were stored and obsessively labeled. And even if the white tile ceramic floor in the kitchen was hopelessly dirty and the oriental rugs were imbedded with the permanent stench of dog piss, there was a marked difference. Juliana is holding out hope for a similar rebirth. Or possibly she might consider what every one had suggested, especially her therapist—a cleaning person to come in and take care of the basics. 

The meds are working and she sleeps throughout the night. She stores her nighttime pills in the medicine cabinet and her daytime anti-depressants and mood stabilizers in the kitchen. Her home is tidy and organized. She spends hours editing her photographs and writing. She has found a new faith in life.

Better times for her mean longer walks for me. She wakes early and doesn’t feel so alone. I lick her face. We yawn and stretch. I do a downward and upward dog and she twists her torso side to side. Sometimes, I linger in bed until I realize for sure she isn’t coming back. Trailing behind her, we go to the kitchen and she begins the morning ritual, dumping yesterdays coffee grounds in the garbage, pouring in the half decaf, half not. Mornings like these are the sweetest. I can see it in the way she slips from one task to the next. National Public Radio hums in the background and she’s barely paying attention; she’s at her laptop reading e-mail religiously, looking for messages and trying to connect beyond the drawn curtains her last boyfriend put up for her.

This is my favorite part of the day and perhaps hers too. She grabs her shoes and I know right away. I bark and spring in the air, circling a 360. I run for one of my toys and she says in the low scratchy voice her father used when he told her secrets at the kitchen table. She still hears the good ol’ Southern boy in her head. “Go, on boy, get the toy.” We dance to disco music. She’s still in her dirty bedclothes, the thick Polo sweats the ones she cut at the bottom so the elastic wouldn’t bunch at the bottom-- the last thing she wants is to show off her surburban roots. She showers later in the day or every other day. She never smells or that’s is what her friends have told her when they found out it was days before she hit the shower. We are the same, we are as adverse to water as cats who hate the assault of hard drops on flesh. She prefers to soak in the embryonic bath water alone. When she does shower, it has to be incredibly hot, force deep into her muscles. When she bathes me in the kitchen sink, I shrink to half my size and frankly, I feel irritated and simultaneously, tormented.

Springtime is here. We walk out the door together. We’re going to do the usual walking meditation, a yogic trinity around the preferifery of the park. I go and she picks it up with the plastic bag as she watches the showered and gelled nine to fivers walking swiftly and diagonally through the park. They’re on their way to the smothering Path train. She wonders, “How do they do it? How do they go to the same place five days a week and see the same people, playing the office politics game and laughing aloud but not too loud at witty banal jokes? They look so perfect. It’s freezing out here and they’re wearing stylish thin coats while I’m loaded down with two layers, a pair of long johns and a down coat. They’re stronger than me.”

The march of the office workers ends. It’s just me and her and her cell phone. She sighs with relief, stretching side to side. Actually, she’s very fulfilled to be on her own. We sit on a bench in the sun and gaze upon the yellow daffodils.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Farewell Dr. Sonner

X-Ray from abdominal view of my dog Moishe's, heart.


X-Ray View of Moishe's Heart from lateral Position.
Notice light white areas showing possible first signs of Mitral Valve Disease.



January 14, 2009 @ 7:16 PM

Dear Dr. Sonner:

I decided not to come and see you anymore. I can't afford to see you because I no longer have enough money to pay for health insurance with Oxford. Therefore, I can’t pay out of pocket for once a month visits with you. We had spoken about this on several occasions. Despite, my fears of economic destitution, you have not been willing to change your policy, allowing me to come less frequently. In the past, I worked with doctors whom only expected me make visits 4 times a year, in order to check the status of my condition or fiddle with my medications. I would see the psychiatrist more often should my depression become less manageable.

Presently, I would self-diagnose my condition as a clinical depression with the occasional massive mood shifts towards mania. I am certainly not in remission, and definitely, beyond the state of my usual Dysthymia.

I have not called you or in your case, e-mailed you, about my emotional upheaval because I learned from the past that it was absolutely pointless. I have become accustomed to sitting in your waiting room many times over the last couple of years, in a depressive state, but made a clear decision before entering your office that I would not share this information with you. There were times that I feigned happiness in your presence when I could do nothing more than lay on my sofa and cry for days.

After three years plus, you never changed my medications in order to find a way to ease me from my emotional pain. The best you did was up my Lamictal or increase my Nardil by 15 mg. This is the same recipe of medications, plus the others, that Dr. Silverstein had prescribed me when I left his care years ago. What was the point of telling you how I felt or filling out those redundant Xerox sheets with my improvement or my decline, when I knew I would walk out the door with the same ol’ prescriptions? In other words, my old feelings of helplessness increased and I started to believe once again that no doctor could help me, let alone you. Perhaps, I am drug resistant.

I don't believe in my heart that everything has been exhausted...I need to work with a sensitive and creative physician. Someone who can work in tandem with my therapist.

There were days, I walked into your office, considering how quickly, I could get out of your office with the prescriptions in hand. I would put a smile on my face, bite down on anger, pick up the recipes and get out the door as quickly as I could. Perhaps, to you, my depression/anxiety or as you had yourself diagnosed me, on my first intake, “Bi-Polar 2 Disorder” seemed under control. In fact, I was exhausted and resigned to feigning my emotions in your presence.

I have never had to talk with any doctor through e-mails, nor has my therapist. Natasha whom also agrees that it is bizarre and unprofessional you did not want to communicate with her on the phone. It's frankly impersonal and on a fundamental level, I don't feel like you care about me. As you know I have a long history of terrible neglect. Yes, it would have been reaffirming if you could have simply picked up the phone over the last months when I did not make any appointments.

I created a lie and told you I was leaving the country for France and never mentioned a word about picking up my prescriptions prior to this fantasy trip. Instead of hearing directly from you, I began to find messages on my voice mail from one of your revolving intern secretaries. Maybe at least, a detached e-mail from you, would have made me feel like my presence and my health mattered.

I am now in a daily struggle and yet, I refuse to come back to you. This is not a personal problem with you, but completely professional. I have decided to see one of Dr. Silverstein’s colleagues who has made himself available when I need him. Again, as you know, I no longer have insurance, and having a doctor available when I need him or expects only quarterly visits is a relief to my financial worries.

Juliana

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Unity and Micheal



I took this photograph a couple of years ago with a digital camera. It was the first time that I had gone out to the Rockaways without my Rollei Twin Lens.

It was an overcast late summer day in August.

Before I left home, I put on a melon colored dress that I had bought at Old Navy. I wanted to look pretty; for once, my friends in the Rockaway's neighborhood would see me in something feminine. I wanted them to see me beyond the tough ruffian who trolls the streets with an over sized photo knapsack and a bandanna wrapped around my head.

"Oh, Juliana, you look cute!" was the first reaction I got when I ran into Richard when I got off the train on 116th st. His voice was less monotone than usual... an exclamation, no less. He grinned and looked downward.

I went over to Unity's boarding house on 113th street. I hadn't seen her for a while. Her lower appendages were swollen, making it hard for her to leave her room. I found her leaning her head out the window on the first floor. She was standing in the corridor. She was petting her cat, Micheal who twirled in circles with every stroke she gave him.

It began to drizzle. We went inside.

"Oh, darling", she said in a thick Scottish accent, "you haven't lost too much weight, have ya?" She passed her hand over to the V neck of my dress and pulled the material closer together, covering whatever cleavage there is to show.

"Oh, no, dear, you must be careful...you must be careful someone might say something. They might think the wrong things"

Micheal came in from the sill. I took this picture. And not until this evening did I find it amongst the deluge of digital files eating up my external hard drive.