shame

In case you're keeping score, I'm still plugging away on the cleaning. Last night and today I spent a considerable amount of time working on my bedroom.

I was going to write a kinda cutesy, lightly amusing entry today about how two of my walk-in closets had morphed into stand-in-the-doorway-and-wrinkle-your-nose closets, but now had regained their walk-in status, perhaps with a little mildly poignant nostalgia thrown in about some of the things I found in them. The sort of blog post that entertains people and makes them think I've said something about my life, but which has very little emotional honesty at all, you know?

But I've changed my mind. I've changed my mind, and yet I hesitate, because I'm really kind of afraid that I'm going to lose people with this. I'm afraid that people I like, people whose opinions I care about, are going to read this and think... Well, I dunno. Think that my life is far more fucked up than they care to know about, I guess. What I want to write about is how my bedroom got to be in the state it's recently been in. I've never told most of this to anyone who hasn't been through something very similar themselves. I've glossed over it at best. But here's some truth, with a side of emotional transparency.

Two years ago, D spent the summer, off his meds, in a state of psychotic mania. He did things like go for walks in the middle of the night, leaving the front door open. (Not unlocked--open.) He'd be up for 48 hours straight, then crash. He read the encyclopedia from front to back. He wrote the same word hundreds of times on one piece of paper. He paced. You couldn't talk to him without his snapping at you. He--and this is the most painful for me--stopped bathing for weeks. I was sick with anxiety, sick at heart, and there was nothing I could do, for or about him.

Then at some point during my first semester back at school, over the course of one weekend, he "flipped." It was like someone turned a switch. The mania stopped and he became very quiet, subdued, and depressed. He started bathing again, and changing his clothes, multiple times a day. And after not talking to me for months, he came to me and asked me about school, about what I was doing there. I asked him very gently, didn't he think he should go to the doctor, get back on some medicine. And he said, in a scared voice, which I didn't understand until months later, "I don't think I can, mom. I don't think I can now. You aren't mad at me, are you?"

We spent the next six months with a progressively quieter, flatter, and yet more scared and then clingy D. He watched certain DVDs over and over and over again for reasons known only to him. He was still having trouble sleeping at nights, though not during the day. And as time passed, he started asking me if he could lie on my bedroom floor at night and watch his DVDs on my TV. I didn't understand why and I didn't know what to do, but I knew it made him feel better, so I let him. Then when I got up to go to work or school, he'd crawl into my bed and sleep in it most of the day. At first it was once in awhile. Then it was every day. My bedroom--or the shower--was about the only place he felt safe. And as he got sicker, he got more clumsy, spilling soda on my rugs, and more careless, leaving candy wrappers and other detritus around, pulling stuff out of closets as he searched for other things. I was so stressed and worried and numb at the same time, I just couldn't bring myself to care.

A lot of you know how this comes out: he eventually finally admitted to hearing voices, progressively more and more, and soon after that, decompensated so much that he agreed to go to the hospital, where he stayed for two and a half months. It's been all uphill since then. But part of the reason that I've avoided tackling that huge mess in the bedroom that's needed cleaning and organizing is because it brings me back in my head to that helpless and scared place. If I were a drama queen (oh, shut up), I'd call it a bit of PTSD.

Yeah, I know. "Thanks for sharing."

xoxo