For the armchair-therapist Dwellars

[anonymous]

I've been considering going to a therapist again, but 1.) I hate therapists and 2.) the only thing I'd really want from the experience is to say out loud a thing I don't dare tell anyone IRL, and hell, I have that here for free. (And believe me, I'm fully aware that number 1 is a stereotypical complaint, and is precisely the attitude that makes me need to see a therapist, blah blah blah. But look, I have respect for the concept of what they do, and a skilled one can be great for some people. It's just that I'm smarter than 99% of them and can see what they're doing a mile away. I can't stop myself from thinking, "Well if I answer this way she'll think X, and if I answer that way she'll think Y, so what's the image I want to portray in this moment?" The last (and only) time I did a stint with one, she wanted me to make a "safe place" in my mind, and create a mantra, and all of that bullshit, and I even did it because obviously my shit wasn't working so let's be humble and try her shit -- but her shit worked even less, the only thing that worked was time and the eventual elimination of my actual problem. Oh, and also she really obviously felt it was her job to coax me into divorcing my husband, which I did not want and would have objectively made my problems much worse, not better. Every time she tried to not-subtly prod me on those issues, I gave her some sage, concise answer she was not expecting, and basically ended up giving therapy to her on why her own divorce didn't need to go down the way it had. Every therapist I've ever met has been divorced at least once, by the way.

Anyway. The point is I'm going to unburden without a copay, and tell y'all some stuff. Better get out now if you don't want to hear me whine.

First, I have an irrational fear of mental illness. Second, it's not really irrational, because it's becoming kind of clear that it's an issue for me.

As to the first, my quasi-stepmother (dad never married her, but she was a massive part of our lives for upwards of 4 years) was bipolar, and my dad ultimately decided he couldn't cope with it despite being, to this day, deeply in love with her. So obviously there are clear abandonment associations there. But also, it's just a fact that nobody trusts the crazy person. They may like the crazy person, consider them very-talented-despite or even extra-talented-because-of their craziness, but at the end of the day the one thing the crazy person can never be is reliable, and I put a high value on reliability. On top of that, some mental illnesses -- say, bipolar disorder -- can make you think things that are objectively, confirmably untrue. I also put a high value on objectivity and rationality.

Now, as to the second, the real meat of the post: I have partial temporal lobe epilepsy, first confirmed by EEGs a decade and a half ago. There are weirdly specific symptoms that commonly go hand-in-hand with this, like hypergraphia (e.g. my 6-inch stack of notebooks detailing my children's daily medical symptoms over the course of 7 years, or the fact that in the beginning I wrote down every instance of my seizures in order to be helpful to the neurologist, which he laughingly said told him all he needed to know about what part of the brain my seizures were occurring in.) Another common symptom of TLE is cyclothymia, which is like bipolar-lite. You go up and down and up and down, but the sine wave is more frequent than the classically bipolar, and neither up nor down is so extreme that it's destructive to your life. Mostly it just makes you super productive, and sad a lot. You may do a 10-hour task in 4 hours when you're manic, but you never spend $30,000 for no reason; you may wander through life with a permanent smiling depression, but you never go numb and can't get out of bed in the morning. This describes my life to a T, and I'm fine with it, actually kind of like it. It makes me good at stuff, and it's manageable.

But one of the other weirdly specific symptoms that goes along with temporal lobe epilepsy is hyperreligiosity. It doesn't have to be associated with any particular religion, and often just manifests as a general sense of "one-ness with the universe." In extreme cases it escalates into straight-up hallucinations of angels and such during a seizure, and in fact the association is so well-documented that most holy orders won't allow you to become a nun if you've ever been diagnosed with TLE. The slight way this has manifested for me is in an occasional feeling of predictability about the future. Not on a daily basis, but there have been a handful of occasions in my life where I just knew that a certain very unlikely thing would happen. And often enough, it does. And of course I forget the times it didn't, because confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. But awhile back, I had a dream and then woke up with a related conviction that a particular astronomically-unlikely-but-technically-not-impossible thing would happen on a very specific date over a year away. And I just lived with that knowledge for a whole year, the rational part of me knowing it was stupid and not going to happen, but absolutely unable to shake the calm certainty that it would, and that when it did it wouldn't even be surprising or exciting because I already knew, like a Christmas present you've peeped at early. Casual thoughts about it leaked ito my head on a near-daily basis, not obsessing, just always being aware that it was coming.

Then, for unrelated (but actually maybe not) reasons, I had to up my anti-seizure meds. And boom, overnight, the conviction was gone. Just as suddenly as I'd woken up believing it was true, I woke up knowing it was not true. Four months later, the date came, and of course it didn't happen, and it wasn't even disappointing, because duh. The thing is, I missed the belief. It made me feel happy to anticipate it, and I'm sure that if I hadn't made the conviction go away with real drugs, the drug of confirmation bias would have made me forget about it far more cleanly than now. Because now, I am completely unable to forget it. My brain maintained a ridiculous "psychic" anticipation for a full year, stronger and longer than anything I've ever been convinced of before, and this is really disturbing to me. I'm terrified that this is creeping towards bipolar-level hallucinations. The medication I'm on is in fact used off-label to treat bipolar disorders with such frequency that doctors are almost surprised to learn that I take my anti-convulsant for actual convulsions. Except, maybe I kind of don't. Apparently.

I really, really don't want this to escalate with age, as mental illness often does. I am in zero danger of stopping my meds, which is good, but not the point. I am terrified of being the crazy person, successfully medicated or not. And unlike all the other problems I generally overcome with force and ingenuity, there's not a damn thing I can do about this one. Have I mentioned I also put a high value on control?

Anyway, that's me spewing all over the floor for free. Mostly I just needed to say it, but if anyone happens to have any advice that doesn't start with "think of your fondest memory," I'm happy to hear it.