25. The Beginning of The End

A podcast and piece about losing myself to illness almost completely

Hello Beautiful Human,

I am so glad you are here with me today. This world is feeling quite heavy these days and I keep asking myself if sharing my writing makes it heavier or if the writing is itself an offering to a less-isolating place. I don’t know the answer exactly. I do know that it is what I am doing currently even if subscribers drop off daily.

I’ll likely modify the framework of this newsletter in the new year – adding in more short stories, mental health news, healing out loud writing prompts, and all-around short and sweet mental health hacks, hopes, and hilarity, in addition to the long narrative pieces. But, for now, even with the heaviness of this Earth, I continue onward as I promised I would and I keep writing it out in front of you all.

This week, my piece is a chapter in the ongoing Maura + Me series. The piece does include vivid descriptions of experiencing a fugue state. Additionally, I have a podcast for you all that I recorded with my sister, Josie. The podcast recording was such a gift and I salute your patience with me given how long it took me to sit down and begin the family recordings. I go into the roadblocks of why it took me so long to really begin this part of the project during the episode but what it really is about is the truth of family fallout in the face of serious mental illness. It is raw. It is deeply sad. And it is so darn important for it to exist. Only when the truth of serious mental illness is shared with radical transparency will people like me be safe. This week it is that truth in action and I’d be honored if you took a listen.

Now, without further ado, I take you back to my therapist Atlas’ couch after I shared my Big Little Victories framework with him …

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25. The Beginning of The End

After my ADHD diagnosis, unbeknownst to me, a long, elaborate path of dominoes began to fall. At first, they fell slowly, as if the dominos were stacked up a steep hill — a stimulant prescription, a depression diagnosis, bouts of sleeplessness, and rage that presented like hypomania. Then — after a tumultuous first semester at college, upon my receiving the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, the dominos fell at a speed that left no option but complete wreckage as the end result — polypharmacy, electroconvulsive therapy, long-term memory loss, paranoia, OCD, psychosis, sexual assault, fugue states, agoraphobia, and chronic psychiatric hospitalizations. 

It’s simple when I look back at the path of dominos now – when I see the chain of events that brought me to Maura. But one factor that grounded me, honored me, and supported me throughout the chaos of those many years was Atlas, my long-time therapist. He had championed me since that first diagnosis of ADHD at 16. He had been my therapist for 8 years – all the way through Middlebury College. Being before the normalization of Telehealth appointments, I had actually driven the hour and a half drive to his office every single week. In rain, hail, sleet, and snow – I had gone to see him every single Tuesday. In many ways, he was more influential than anyone in my life. I trusted him implicitly and as I sat there on that couch, a wave of relief rippled through me as I saw him finally take pride in my being for the first time in years as I shared the progress of big little victories with him.

As the relief washed over both of us, I couldn’t help but name it. Cracking a joke with my omnipresent self-deprecation, I was met with an unusual response — frustration. Thereafter, came a flood of his own personal news.  It was as if my good news had conjured a door to the world beyond our therapeutic relationship and my humor had opened it for him to walk through.

What started as an expression of his exhaustion at my “relentless symptoms and self-pity” quickly divulged into full anger and an onslaught of updates about his personal health. Startled by his frothy outburst, I shrunk as deeply as I could into the couch. Pressing my body fully into the vegan leather, I made myself as small as I possibly could.

Just breathe Kate. This isn’t about you. Wait it out. Wait it out. Kate. Just wait it out.

But waiting didn’t work. His frustration turned into anger and his anger became rage.  Before I knew it, there he was – the man I respected like a god, loved like a father, and followed like his disciple – weeping in front of me as he admitted he had stage 4 colon cancer and it was terminal. 

Ice flooded my veins and the room fragmented into a chaotic kaleidoscope. The scene in front of me — this man — my therapist — my lifeline — in the same rocking chair he always sat in every Tuesday afternoon — was dying. Atlas was dying and dying soon. 

The room fissured and fragmented and soon I was lost in a maze of endless replications of my view shed. Stuck in a maze, I saw Atlas over and over again - his office duplicated a million times like hexagons of honeycomb. But there was no sweetness in the madness I saw. There was no peace like I usually found. There was only the relentless reality that my life as I knew it was about to be over.

I lost myself to a fugue state after that. I came to a day or so later in a sleeping bag in the backwoods of Strafford, Vermont. Covered in my own blood, feces, and vomit, I had no idea where I was or how I got there. I only knew I was freezing and had to get out of the woods if I wanted to survive. Tracking a path of bloody paper towels,  I found my truck and there I saw the true war scene — decimated boxes of donuts and pizza and a smattering of used razor blades and bloodied rags scattered around the cab of my soiled truck.

What. The actual. Fuck?

Those next few weeks were a blur of binging, NyQuil benders, self-harm, and terror. I relapsed completely. I stopped going to work. I stopped doing my Big Little Victories framework. I stopped getting out of bed. I even stopped talking to Maura on Saturday afternoons. 

The dominos fell and they fell fast. My life became a blur of hallucinations, lying to work about how I was too sick with the flu to come in, and losing time to fugue states that I did not yet know how to identify. It was a total mess and, all the while, I obsessed about Atlas — in sorrow, in rage, and in terror about what would become of me in this world if Atlas no longer lived within it.

After a few weeks of skipping everything and cutting everyone out of my life, I showed up at my Dad’s office, hysterical, after a binge-bender. His assistant knew immediately what was going on. Everyone at his office did. I was the mentally ill daughter who fueled the urgency and meaning of my dad’s esteemed health policy work and my state of deep disability was a widely known reality. 

My Dad was stuck on a call about the Affordable Care Act with Obama’s Team, the one call he couldn't leave, so his assistant tried to get me into a room – to get me out of the hallway where I was a sight – an exhibit for everyone who passed by. But I simply couldn’t move any longer. I had nothing left to give. Enough was enough. I was just done.

Two weeks later, after a zyprexa-induced sleep marathon in the unit, I had a lengthy meeting with my entire team of in-patient and out-patient practitioners. There, with the care team somber and stoic, I heard the very words I had feared weeks earlier – my fate of long-term in-patient residential care was rapidly approaching. I was too sick – too critical and too suicidal to keep living independently without oversight, they said. They told me that Atlas's assurance that he could manage the severity of my condition on an outpatient basis was the only reason I hadn’t been placed in a long-term unit already and unless I could secure another therapist to supplement my treatment over the course of the next few months, there would be no choice but to send me away – to lock me up, for good.  

And that’s when it became clear – that’s when I  realized that it wasn’t only Atlas who was running out of time. No. I was running out of time too. We were both fighting for our lives and the next few months of my life would very well dictate its entire course.

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That’s it from us this week. I hope you are acknowledging the heaviness of this world with whatever it is you need. No matter what you do, I hope it honors you and you know you deserve it.

We love you. Wishing you a weekend.

Kindly,

Kate, Tug and Waffy

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