My Beloved Sophie, Part 2

Two years missing and a long road back, indeed.

Hello beloved humans,

I started moving for my mind again this week. For clarification, that means I started exercising again. I’m on day two of two and feeling all sorts of sore. Is this what aging is? Getting sore from a two mile (walk/)run? Well, I’m all about it because it is proof that I am showing up for me.

I think we often look at discomfort as weakness but I refuse to subscribe to that framing. I honestly subscribe to the opposite of that framing. Discomfort is growth and I am damn proud that I am growing in all the ways that I am, even if I am having considerable trouble getting up off the toilet currently.

So yup, that’s my introduction for you this week. Discomfort is badass and if anyone is skilled at installing hand rails in bathrooms, give me a shout.

Now, as I alluded to last week, this chapter is another heavy one. It’s safe to say I will be thrilled when we make it through my twenties. That said, for your own understanding and so you can preserve your own well-being, I do want to share that this piece includes discussion of: Electro Convulsive Therapy side effects, memory loss, paranoia, panic attacks and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Knowing this, please choose you. Yes. Always choose you.

With love and a dork dance,

Kate

ps. The girls say hi. (and Waffle kindly requests a granola bar)

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Next Wednesday, April 27th at 5:30pm EST, will be the second THE PATIENT IS IN zoom so please mark your calendars. Zoom link to follow. We will discuss subjects of your choosing — not limited to service dog training, mental illness, recovery and more. This hour long zoom is open to paid subscribers only. To join, sign up here.

Of course, if affording a subscription feels untenable right now, please choose yourself and send me a note. I am not here to create more barriers to entry in this barrier filled world. xo

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My Beloved Sophie, Part 2

After electroconvulsive therapy, there was a quiet that found me first. My family took a trip to Hawaii and before I realized the extent of the memory damage, I found peace on the beaches of Kauai.

Each day, my family would choose a new adventure to go on and I’d find myself following along, content - just to have my breath – to have my being – to still be alive and on this planet. The trip was healing. It held a softness and a brightness within it. Time passed effortlessly. I spent days staring blissfully at the sea crashing to shore or at sea lions simply being their true selves. I watched them flop in the sand with a sigh and just revel in the breeze for hours. Everything was pleasant on that trip - and everything offered hope.

My parents brought their camera along. It was a Nikon d40x and I fell in love with it that trip. I captured everything I could. Dancing rays on rippling tides. Tide pools swelling with the sea. My family. Smiling. Together. Laughing at everything and nothing.  I captured so many moments - so many snapshots to save for a rainy day. The big moments and the small moments and better yet, the in between moments - the ones that hold our whole souls within them. 

I drank everything up with each click of that camera.  No amount of pictures satiated my appetite. I had to capture every single second - every single moment -  to keep each memory, for always. I had to drink in the life that I still had - the life I got to live – in full color. I had to preserve the life I almost lost and with each click, I did exactly that.

The quiet of our time there and my desire to soak up each and every second quickly disappeared when I returned home. The deans at Middlebury had approved a temporary health leave, but that did not absolve me from the workload that was required to pass my courses upon my return to campus. In preparation to head back, I took a weekend at my parent’s house to get my bearings. I planned to organize my notebooks a bit, write out a new schedule to catch up on homework and missed assignments, and then drive back to school in my truck. It didn’t turn out to be that easy though. 

Advanced Spanish literature. Advanced Calculus. Environmental Economics. Each notebook I read through felt more foreign than the next. Each syllabus was a reality I no longer spoke or even understood. How could I be taking these courses if I couldn’t even read the overview?

I did the only thing I could think of. I called my old boyfriend. After a few rings, he answered in notable apprehension. “Katharine? Is that you? Are you okay? It’s been so long.” His words tied a knot in my chest and our conversation was short and jumbled… “Well, I don’t know if you are taking those courses but of course you know Spanish. You always did, since even before I knew you.” Each sentence he uttered clarified more and more of my newfound reality. We were not together. We had broken up two years ago. We were not even friends. We didn’t even talk. 

Terror rose in my chest as my ex-boyfriend spoke and he explained what little he knew of my current life. I was a phenomenal student and I had a lot of friends, more than anyone on campus he theorized. I was majoring in economics and Spanish. I played JV lacrosse since my health was so bad my first term that I never tried out for the team. I took pictures for the paper and was really good at it. The story felt like one of the make-believe stories he used to tell me when I couldn't sleep, the kind where only happy endings live. It was soothing and certain but it definitely wasn’t my life. There was no way he was describing my life because I couldn’t remember a single thing he mentioned. I couldn't remember a single thing and no matter how hard I tried to cling to his description, I knew – none of it was mine. None of it could be mine. That life wouldn’t have landed me in the psych ward.

Ever still, I tried to find my breath, to hold onto his words, to make sense of them as they hung there, floating between us on the line.  I scanned thought after thought and memory after memory for something that resembled the story he had just shared but before I could ask more questions or follow up further, he cut our conversation short.  “Shoot Katharine, I’ve got a date with Liz so I’ve got to go now.” He hung up abruptly and just like that, he was gone, our relationship ended for a second heart-wrenching time and I was devoured whole by a panic attack. 

I awoke to find Sophie licking me. Her tail thwapped the floor and she licked the tears on my cheeks over and over again. Propping myself upon her, I clung to her tangled mane. What was happening to me? What had happened to me? What the hell was even going on? I tried to gather myself, to inventory the room, to find some clue that would make it all make sense. All I needed was one fact, one truth, one piece of me from the last two years. Just something to hold onto. And then there it was. Amidst the hospital discharge papers on my desk. The letter I’d written the night before ECT was staring me in the face. 

~

Dear Kate,

You might not remember things and that’s okay.

Your favorite color is turquoise.

Your best friend is RD.

Pano, your therapist, he knows everything. You can trust him.

Love,

Kate

~

I grabbed the note. I re-read it. And then re-read it again. That couldn’t be it. That couldn’t be all I wrote myself. I flipped it over and over but those three lines were all that was scrawled in my black and white handwriting.

You might not remember things and that’s okay. That’s okay, Kate?! How the absolute fuck was that okay? And how could it ever be okay? Memories are who we are. Memories are all that we are. And mine - mine were missing. Part of me was missing. An entire part of me - two whole years of me - was gone. 

Hyperventilating, a second panic attack took hold. I began to beat my fists into the floor in fury. I was one of “those” patients. I was one of the patients who lost herself to the procedure. I was one of them. I had lost myself and I only wrote a mere three sentences to help me get by. What a god damn shit show.

The terror of the next few hours was inexplicable and that terror carried itself back to Middlebury with me. I used the note to guide my return as best I could. I found ‘RD’ in my phone and called him. He talked me through where I lived and who my friends were. He kindly told me that I loved to write and that my emails and facebook might help too. His words were oddly similar to my ex-boyfriends. The picture he painted seemed far rosier than I expected. I called Pano, my therapist, next. He talked me through all he could and encouraged me, just as RD had, to look through my journals and emails and past photographs.

Not having a better idea of how to re-learn two years of my life, that’s exactly what I did. I set out to find myself that day and every day thereafter. Using Facebook, old photos, past emails and texts, I built enough of a roadmap to get back to school. Fortunately, my ex-boyfriend from high school, the one I had called misremembering that we were still together, was a year older than I was and also attended Middlebury. My memories of visiting him when I was still in high school were intact so the layout and familiarity of the campus felt manageable.

The issue of my coursework and social circles, however, did not feel manageable, to say the least. I had no memory or working knowledge of Spanish or all the prerequisites for the courses I was enrolled in. Determined not to give up my major, I tried to petition the college to let me retake the introductory courses a second time so I could re-learn the material. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was laughed out of the administrator's office at such a request. 

My Dean, attempting to be empathetic and soothe my extreme overwhelm, suggested a short respite from my major. Seeing my camera clutched to my chest, he suggested that I take an art class, and, after pulling some strings, got me into ‘Introduction to Art - 1’ as my sole course that term. While that temporarily helped my academic situation, it didn’t change the fact that I did not remember my friend group or peers whatsoever. 

I had made peace with the fact that letter I had written was all I had so I blindly accepted that RD was, in fact, my best friend. Beyond that though, additional friends were hard to compute. With RD’s help, we tried to explain my current memory-loss predicament to my extensive friend group. Enthusiastically, many offered stories about my past two years at Middlebury to fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, no stories helped me remember the reality that had been wiped from my brain. Nothing said brought the memories back. I simply no longer knew what I had done or lived through while I was there. And on top of that, nothing anyone said could admonish the anxiety and truth that they knew my past life at Middlebury better than I did. 

Within a few weeks, I descended into a complete state of paranoia.  That state of fear and anxiety was only exacerbated by the stories I kept hearing. Although kindness was at the core of each story that my friends told me to help resuscitate my memory, the stories were bold and often uncivilized in nature. They shared my more manic moments and every story told was another reminder of how unwell I had been, and how unhinged and unpredictable my life had been before ECT.

Within a month of being back at school, I was so affected and overwhelmed by the stories I had heard and so ashamed of the colorful ways I had lived that I stopped hanging out with that friend group entirely. Unmoored and overwhelmed by the shadows of my past, I set out to find a completely new and different group of people to socialize with. I set out to build a new me and find a new home that was built on even ground.

I quickly fell in with a wild and colorful group that consisted predominantly of nordic skiers. Lively, dynamic and endlessly loud, I fit in perfectly. They accepted me in all my seasons of health and zest and I, them. Best of all, I was new to them and they were new to me and that – that felt as close to safe as I could feel given the situation. 

Always shenanigan and laughter filled, days with the nordies passed quickly. They were always up to something - running up a mountain in drag, building an epic, campus wide treasure hunt or playing debaucherous charades - so no amount of manic mood or colorful language phased them. In their company, I fit in. In their company, I was just colorful Kate in a world where color was a currency of value not shame. It was a match made in mutual exuberance.

Hell-bent on preserving this newfound normal I had discovered with them, I began to catalog my days in detail and research my past with vigor. I was terrified that my new memories of our playful adventures would one day disappear just like the two years had. So, I took upon myself to become a photojournalist of my own existence. Since I was only taking one course, I filled my days with photography, journal reading, and writing. Each day, I would photograph all the people and places I went to and at the end of the day, when the adventure or debauchery ended, I would retreat to my room, upload my photos and write the day out in detail. 

What started as an inconsistent practice quickly became a routine and then, after another month or so, it became a compulsion. It started with just the pictures and daily write ups and then it extended beyond that. I wrote down everything I did. I wrote down everything I ate. I wrote down lists of what to do, how to do it and when to do it. I wrote out, in overwhelming detail, ‘how to be me.’ And then, it moved beyond writing and became a practice of doing things in sets of three. Three times brushing my teeth. Three turns in the lock. Three sets of three miles running. Three lathers of shampoo and three of conditioner.

I kept telling myself this was how I would make sure I would never lose me again. If I wrote everything down, if I photographed all the parts of my day, if triple checked every step I took - my tooth brush in the cup on the sink, the key in the lock, my access card in my pocket, the sd card in my camera, the backup to my backup to my backup hard drive - then everything would all be okay from here on out. Yes, everything would all be okay because I would own myself again. 

But, the thing is, it wasn’t okay and I didn’t own myself. Although my routines and compulsions grew and kept me organized and in college, they didn’t contain the symptoms and side effects of the medications I was still taking. The suicidality had disappeared with ECT but my mood swings had not and each time I swung high in a hypomanic flight or dropped low in a depressive episode, my pursuit of control, my pursuit of owning me, my pursuit of containment grew ever harder and ever more consumed by rituals and routine. By the end of that term when I returned home to take summer courses at Dartmouth, I had developed full fledged OCD on top of the mood swings and wildness of my undiagnosed anxiety disorder. And that, that was just the beginning.

That summer treated me far better than expected. Much to my parents and my surprise, I took three courses and did well in them all. But behind the good grades and my portrayal of the perfect student, my moods grew wilder and my compulsions grew stronger. The highs of my mania scaled to heights never seen and the lows of my depression grew dark and volatile, reminiscent of the months leading up to ECT. Everything became more exacerbated and so, in predictable psychiatric fashion, my doctors did what they thought best. They added more medication and as a result, that fall, when I returned to Middlebury, that is when the voices began.