Totes Normal

When people ask how I am, that’s what I want to say: totes normal.  It’s not a reply that answers the question.  What they want to know is “how is your day going?” or “is anything notable happening in your life right now?”  So this reply is obviously insufficient, but it’s what I long to say.  The truth is, the answer to that question is too complicated even for me to explain.

Here’s the problem; I’m mentally ill.  Not a little depressed or slightly anxious, but totes cray-cray.  I’m not even suffering from dual diagnosis, but some sort of full-on multi diagnosis that is as dynamic as the freaking ecosystem.  The list?  Borderline Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder, Chronic Depression, Eating Disorder- Not Otherwise Specified, Epilepsy, Opiate Dependence, and Schizoaffective Disorder. 

Yes, totally crazy, and utterly mentally ill.  But living with it, and hopelessly in love with a girl that manages to live through it with me.

Some people know the details of my life, some don’t.  Let me take a breath to speak to what happened to me two years ago, or maybe more accurately what I did to myself in the wake of totally losing my mind.  I was working as the manager of a grocery store, finishing up a dual-degree masters program, and managing a nine-year (and somewhat imperfect) marriage with grace and dignity.  Then the Epilepsy hit, I cracked under all the pressure, and totally lost my mind.  I stopped eating and lost 75 pounds in three months, fell back into the depths of heroin addiction that I had left behind with my teenage years, and anxiety and depression consumed me.  The Borderline in me resurfaced, and then the psychotic break came.  Within six months I lost my job, my savings, my wife, my housing, and all semblance or normalcy that I had built in the nine years since I left home at 18.  I was a disabled wreck.

To my credit, I refused to give up.  Over the next year I spent weeks at a time in the hospital, freaked out a therapist or two, and finally found my saving grace: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.  If you don’t know what it is, look it up.  It’s life changing, and in most cases, life saving.  I pulled myself together, whilst living on disability in a tiny but clean SRO, and I started to date again.

Which is when I met her, the girl that I fell in love with, who inspires me and encourages me, who didn’t know what she was getting in to, but has stuck through it like a champ.  She reminds me to take my meds, helps me with my therapy homework, and is always available for reality testing and talking down the voices chattering behind me.  And we even fit in the normal stuff like dinner with friends and trips to the grocery store.


But then we started to feel isolated, like we were hiding the truth of our mostly crazy but pretty normal life.  So we started this blog.

-E