Friends!

Have any of you studies a foreign language outside of high school/college? What resources have you used - either to study a new-to-you language or to buff up on a language you started already - especially podcasts, computer software, or community things?

Help me meet PhD requirements!

I'm alive. I've passed my exit exam (yay!), as well, so I'll be graduating in about a month - there's about five weeks of class, twenty students, and a thesis in between now and then, though, so I continue to be busy academically.

I always intend to be write more but become conflicted about whether I want to use this as a personal blog or whether I want to convert it into an author blog, and how much I'd like to share in either respect.

Now I'm going to ignore that problem completely and say that this enneagram test is spot on (to the point where I'd like to pretend it isn't because I think it makes me sound very needy in a whiny, clutching sort of way I'd rather not be):

( text )

This is mostly for me, who has no paper for jotting things down at the moment, but may also be some manner of sweetness to the writers amongst you:

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes." - T.S. Eliot in The Metaphysical Poets.

It's no secret that I have never found talk therapy terribly helpful. For other people it may be beneficial; I do not know, because I am not other people. In my talk therapy experiences (there have been several, over six years and four professionals) I would try to explain the rolling ocean of feelings I had but could not name, and they, the professionals, would do what they were trained to do, which is to repeat back what I was saying but in clearer, more emotion-specific phrases (which is basically how I teach. But that is another post!)

I had this conversation a number of times, for example:
Chelsey: I feel bad.
Professional: Bad, how?
Chelsey: Like I'm on fire internally? Like I might explode into a kicking and screaming fit at any time?
Professional: Ah, okay. You're angry.
Chelsey: I... am?
Professional: Yes. Who are you angry at?
Chelsey: I don't think I'm angry. It's more like, a boiling? Like a too-loud rock concert?
Professional: You're suppressing your anger. It's okay to feel anger, you know.
Chelsey: Yes, I do know. That's the thing. I know what anger feels like, and this just doesn't seem to -
Professional: It's because you're turning your anger inward. You need to learn to express your anger in healthy ways. It's okay to tell people you're angry!
Chelsey: ... Well, right now I find you kind of irritating.

( You'd think how confrontational I am with you would indicate I handle anger just fine... )

Congratulations! After years of ups and down, of anxious trembling and crying you didn't understand, days spent sunk in bed and nights spent trawling the hallways in agitated thought - after eight different medications and five different doctors and six different years of illness falling down like dominos, after all this! you have found a medication that works.

A combination of medications, that is. Ones that must be taken in careful order. The salts that put you to sleep and the tablets that yank you back up, each balanced against the other, so many you feel like you ought to look must sicker to warrant this many bottles, that a stranger looking in your medicine cabinet must assume you are about to die - but nevertheless! You have found medication that works.

This is what you have been looking for, for years. You can think clearly again, your moods seems somewhat stable, your thoughts are not tumbling toward suicide and blackness with every breath. It has been A Long Haul, but You Made It. You are one of the lucky ones. You are cured!

And yet you are not cured. Because even though your illness (bipolar, unipolar, in some respects it makes no difference) has been reigned in, you are left to confront for the first time, with clarity, the damage it has done.

First there is the financial. Not just the tabs for the pharmacies and the psychiatrists, which you do not resent, not really, but also, if your moods swung this way, the staggering debt or the undone taxes. The dozens of shoes, the cameras, the boxes and boxes of shiny trinkets that will never have a use - everything bought in a manic panic glee, a ruinous glee, that (but this must be secret) you miss a little, now (chin up, chin up, now you are cured!)

There is your work. If you still have a job - if you have ever been able to hold one - you awaken to the realities of where your former self has gone wrong. The coworkers who do not seem to talk to you as easily as they do to each other, the boss who does not trust you to complete even this simplest of tasks, the pile of papers pushed aside again and again when you could not drag yourself out of your melancholia. How behind you may be, or how shoddy the work in front of you clearly is, and what shame you feel, for this is your handiwork, tied together in a knotty wreck.

Worse, there are the people. Family, friends, close to estranged now, because you had been afraid of the phone, or unable to draw up the strength to lift the receiver, let alone make pleasant conversation. And if you have been manic, you may not even remember what it was they might have seen in you - if you were paranoid, or shouting over other voices (real or imagined), or espousing some kind of scatter philosophy - and you have no idea if you are the person they think you are, or if you were ever the person they cared for in the first place.

You have no idea who you are anymore. What parts of you are you, and what parts of you are a disorder? You wake up in the morning feeling normal and alert, but can't remember what it is people are supposed to do now, when they do not wake up wanting to die. How do other people fill the day? Your brain is no longer frozen in lock down, and you have some energy to spend, but you can't remember what it was you cared about, before. The tasks you fought to complete in a day now take a few hours, at most. The rest of every day stretches out before you, terrifyingly empty.

What are you supposed to eat? Before, you ate heavy things: breads, cookies, comforting things that seemed to fill a bit of where you were carved out and dark. Or you lost your appetite, hyped up like a chattering child, and ate odd things: jellybeans, celery, pot after pot of coffee. You don't remember how meals work, and in the absence of clear direction it is so, so easy to go back to the way you were. After all, being mentally ill may be the only thing you know.

Your mind may be clearer, your moods more stable, but you have been living life as a sick person for years, stuck on damage control, and you aren't sure how to stop. You have more energy, yet still you sleep and sleep, because you can't think of anything else to do, and there's no one to call because you've left relationships untended so long they've withered, completely. You feel a fierce need to protect yourself, to give yourself plenty of time to recuperate, plenty of safe space in which to retreat.

You do not trust yourself. Your illness has taken your work ethic from you; it is not simple to take it back. The fog is beaten back by medical miracle, but there is a long road to be cleared of habits - the lifestyle of the mentally ill is one of lying close to the ground, and at times you may cast a sidelong glance at your medication (it works! you're thrilled it works!) and consider, against all your better judgement, casting it down the sink so you can have the other you back - the highs, not the lows, or perhaps even more so the familiarity of the terrain.

And most of all, you must strangle the fear that you will get sick again, that you will really and truly go mad. You cannot allow it any second of attention, or it will yank you down with it, for fear of fear of fear.

Congratulations.

So, uh... long time, no anything. Here, have some lists:
( 25 Thoughts Now That I Am 25 )

( 26 Things I Want To Do Before I Turn 26 )

Oh my. Another school year approaches. I am now a second-year college instructor as well as a second-year graduate student. I'm also busy reading/writing already, which is neat.

Because I am one of those people who abuse their books, I tend to underline, dog-ear, and note-take with wild abandon. I don't dislike lending books because I am worried the other person will harm them; I dislike lending books because I am worried the other person will stare with increasing worry at the margin where I have scribbled, "Ha! I am right about the mouse circus! Bring me Voice and swordfights!" and stop talking to me because their mother wisely instructed them to Avoid Lunatics and then I will never get my book back.

What was I saying? Ah, yes, the coming school year.

My university has asked that faculty include a go-to plan for handling any student who comes down with the swine flu. I find this rather odd, as it seems like the obvious go-to plan is yelling "get away from me, you're one of the infected!"

On the positive side, I no longer feel new-teacher anxiety - in fact to the contrary, because I am teaching essay writing to freshmen this year I have decided to take the laid back approach, because after all, these people cannot legally drink.

Because less of my time is taken up with lesson planning, and also because my gentleman caller STILL lives 3,000 miles away, I am sifting through hobbies to keep me entertained. Conveniently, my roomate has a piano, and relatedly, I have strong headphones with the right output jack, which has lead to a lot of delighted banging around on my part without any Stab The Mad Piano Player With A Fork on her part.

I am also baking. I decided to start of slow, with boxes. You may think this would not be necessary, but then, you have not heard the epic story of Chelsey's Home Economics Class, where the phrase, "Good God, what had you done?" was uttered more than once. Baking from boxes means the only practical step for me to master is cracking eggs, which I currently do with a lot of fearful tapping followed by less fearful cursing.

I am finishing a story that includes all of hte following: medical terminology, a charging rhinocerous, a practicing faith healer, pig dissection, and an argument over jelly. I'm so proud.

I don't know what normal people do when they feel sad about something they can't change.