The Trilogy of Bipolar Management: Part II Grounded: Facing the Down Side

By Kris Rock

This book is the second part of a trilogy about the author’s battle with bipolar disorder. In this volume, the author struggles with depression as it affects every part of her life. The medications she is prescribed make her feel detached from her emotions and dumbed down. She learns ways to deal with these obstacles and finds better medic

• Language: English
• Publisher: LitFire Publishing
• Release date: May 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643984872

Kris Rock

Kristina Rock is a technical writer who has hadmany homes, but presently lives in NewportNews, VA. She wrote and edited documentsfor NASA Langley and contracted for manyaircraft and financial companies. She recentlywrote financial manuals, guides, and softwareinstructions for the US Coast Guard FinancialSystem. She attended many universitiesand earned more than 500 college credits insubjects as varied as mechanical engineering,anthropology, business, nursing, languages,journalism, and others. One day she hopes towrite a dystopian science fiction classic. She is a happy wife, mother ofthree, and grandmother of three. She enjoys reading voraciously andwatching edgy movies. She is highly interested in plant medicines andthe potential they hold for treating mental illnesses. She has two largedogs that she lets in and out all day long.

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The Trilogy of Bipolar Management

Part II

Grounded: Facing the Down Side

Copyright © 2018 by Kris Rock

ISBN-13: 978-1-64398-487-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

Printed in the United States of America

LitFire LLC

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Contents

Starting Over, Again

Head-Butting Dad

Menotony, MI

Down Then Up

A Great Job and a Married Boyfriend

Problems

Office Politics

Sexy Babe

House by the Tracks

Business Trip

Hard at Work

The Morning After

Sex at the Thunderbird

Test Results

Easter and Abortions

Pregnant and Happy

Playing with Matches

Cheating

NASA Langley Research Center

How Could Work Possibly Be More Boring?

Super-Conducting Supercollider

In and Out of Silicon Valley

Popping the Pills

Moving Back Home

Breaking the Rules

Psychiatrists—Bah!

Cornucopia

S. Divinorum

Little Yellow House

Fire, Fire

Late to the Airport

Halloween and Suicide

Engineers

My Kids Hate Me

Love, in Spite of

Patterns

I Can Kill Myself Tomorrow

The Electric Kiss

Into the Valley

Downward Spiral

The Furniture Comes

Books and Blades

Group Therapy

Printer’s Ink

Repossessed

Living with Lara

Off Meds

In the Bin

Day Program

Back to School

Playing with Matches

Survival of the Unfit

Mile-High City

Adderall and Klonopin—The Best Drugs of All, Said the Addict

An Aluminum-Head’s Journey to Ozzfest 2007

Feeling Better and Back on Meds

Nick Goes to College

Stay Tuned

Plan for Recovering from Burnout, Manic Episodes, Depressive Downturns, and Losing Weight While on Meds That Were Designed to Make You Fat

Y:\Fulfillment 2018\PUBLISHING\LF244110_KEstebo\GLOW\Interior\lotus girl.jpg

I wish this was me, but it is my daughter,

who has inspired me to get well.

She lives in balance, and I dedicate this book to her.

Starting Over, Again

We drove to Michigan and moved our things into my parent’s garage. This wasn’t the first or even the second time we had moved back in with mother and dad. I felt not like the prodigal daughter returning to open arms but like a little kid coming home after running away for the a fternoon.

They were as accepting as they could be, though, and Dad paid all my hospital and credit card bills. At that time, he was doing very well as the manager of a small paper company. He was a big man around town, a large frog in a small pond. He was happy and at the peak of his powers. He had no conception of what had happened to his golden girl. My mother was ill, as usual, and spent most of her time sewing in bed or on the couch in front of the TV. She had pretty much given up socializing, though she hated being so far outside of town.

It was fall and time for school to start. A small rural town was not going to provide the kind of education we were used to back in St. Paul. I might have never left Minnesota had I realized what a shock the new school system was going to be to Kassie and Donnie.

We lived sixteen miles out of town on a beach on Green Bay, and the kids had to catch a bus to school out on the highway. We were used to life in the North Country by now, so the freezing rain and gray, dreary days were not new to us. Maybe life would not be so bad here. Donnie started football and seemed to enjoy it. Kassie joined the basketball team. Both kids hung out with the fringes of their school society, the interesting troublemakers.

Kassie developed a crush on one of Donnie’s football teammates, but he did not like her back. I shouldn’t have been all that surprised when she took a razor blade and scraped a huge hunk of skin off her upper arm, leaving a six-inch scar. She claimed all the kids were doing it that year. I sent her to a therapist, but she refused to go after the first time. I had never seen her depressed before. She had seen me acting out all those years in Minnesota. She was unable to express how unhappy she was with the move to a backwards hick town after the sophistication of St. Paul, and I think she felt too guilty to complain. It was the first and last time she ever took her depression out on herself.

I slept all day, I wrote, and I examined the new Macintosh computer dad had bought. It made no sense to me. I couldn’t read. I watched endless movies with mom in the TV room. I paid quality attention to the kids. Finally, in the spring I began to feel better, and I tried out for a part in a play presented by the community theater group. I got a singing and dancing part, which pleased me highly. I went to church, and I sang in the choir. I used Nautilus equipment, lost weight, and got into shape. I went to my dad’s company parties with him. I befriended a gay man who lived down the road. I thought I was getting along just fine until one night when the kids were watching TV and I was sitting on the couch uncharacteristically doing some needlework that mom had convinced me would be a good activity for me.

Head-Butting Dad

I’ve always been close to my dad. He is my kindred spirit. He has always treated me like a boy, like someone who is to be free of typically dreary female jobs like cooking, doing the dishes, and taking care of the kids. I was supposed to be his little engineer. It wasn’t surprising that I would rebel from his exp ectations.

I knew a fight was coming after I had struggled so hard for years to live up to his expectations and failed so miserably. Amazingly, I was not drunk at the time. In fact, I was attending AA meetings and hadn’t had a drink in quite a while. Of course, I was taking psychotropic medications, and they made me sleepy and passive, not emotional or angry or distraught. This was the first time I ever crossed my father.

Menotony, MI

It all started in the whirlpool. I was enjoying a leisurely morning after the kids had gone to school. I had run two miles and done a little weight training. I was headed for the steam room, where I liked to breathe in the damp air for a few minutes before I got into the whirlpool. I was joined by a woman I knew only vaguely. Her name was Joan, and I was introduced to her by my brother Derek. Derek was madly in love with her.

We began our conversation by talking about our psychiatrists. She hinted at problems in her marriage, and I thought, Oh Derek, if only you could be here right now. I’m talking to your dream woman, and she’s naked and telling me what a bastard her husband is. We had a few things in common, at least.

Then Joan mentioned some problems she was having with her pets. It seemed that one of her cats was getting beaten up by her two larger dogs and by her other two cats. I immediately felt sorry for the poor kitty. After all, I had lost all my cats in between moving and freaking out. I wanted to take her poor kitty home with me.

The kids and I had always adored cats. We’ve owned at least a dozen of them. In Michigan we were forced to be cat-less. I really couldn’t face the fact that my parents hated cats with a passion and always would.

When I told Joan I would take her cat home with me, I suppose I knew what I was doing: disturbing the balance of the household. I couldn’t live with the repression I had grown up with any more. I decided it was my job to shake my family out of their safe tree dwelling.

I could surely keep a cat upstairs in my room. What would be the harm in that? Besides, there were little brown Mickey-mice in my room, and I needed a good mouser to get rid of them.

I had set up the household for a big blowup as surely as if I had planted a bomb. I really wanted that bomb to go off and break through that shell of phoniness in my family.

I promised Joan I would take the cat out of its misery, and I went home to prepare the family for its new addition. The kids were delighted, of course, but my parents reacted as expected. They refused to allow the cat in the house; that was final. It wasn’t my house, and they still made the rules, just like when I was a kid. By treating me like a child, they got a childish reaction.

The evening passed slowly. Dad and I and the kids were watching The Amazing Mr. Limpole, with Don Knotts. It was a silly movie, but the kids were enjoying it. Dad got up to get a beer from the kitchen. The kids doodled with a game on the floor as they watched TV. All of a sudden, I started to feel really sorry for myself. I was a grownup adult with rights and needs. Who were my parents to tell me whether I could keep a cat if I wanted to?

Then the sobs burst from me in a torrent, and I was crying in front of my family, something I had never done in my life, even as a kid. I couldn’t let anyone see me this way. I jumped up from the couch to flee to my bedroom, where I could hide my tears in peace. With my head down, I attempted to go through the narrow doorway to the kitchen. Dad’s 325-pound, six-foot-one frame was blocking the doorway. He didn’t get out of my way fast enough to suit my mood. I wanted to go have a serious crying jag out of the sight of my family. I didn’t want him to see that I was upset. By then I was chanting to myself, No one cares, no one cares, no one thinks of my happiness, no one loves me, I’m all alone.

I butted into my father’s big belly with my down-turned head. I could smell the beer on his breath. I wanted him out of my way, and knocking him over seemed to me to be the easiest means to accomplish that goal. All the while, I was yelling, Get out of my way, you’re in my way.

Dad has a terrible Norwegian stubborn streak to match my own, and the more I rammed against him, the firmer he dug in. When I realized he wasn’t going to move, I started to pound on his chest with my fists. You motherfucker, get out of my fucking way, goddamn son of a bitching whore. I was screaming obscenities at him and pounding as hard as I could on his bulky body. The volume of my shouting turned up a notch, and he grabbed me around the waist. With my head hanging down at his knee level, he dragged me upside down to the dark living room.

I kicked and punched with the great but undirected strength of someone completely out of control. He grabbed my arms with one iron grip and then pinned me to the floor with his knee on my chest. It hurt, and I screamed even louder, You cocksucking bastard, get off of me, I’m going to kill you, goddamn it, I hate you. I kept up the yelling while he pressed his knee harder into my chest.

Then I couldn’t breathe, though I kept struggling against him with some adrenaline-induced strength. I had no sense that I was crazy. My outburst seemed perfectly normal; I had no idea where it came from, but it was real, and it came from a hidden place deep within me. Consciously, I had never felt anything negative toward my father in my whole life. But god, it felt so good to be angry, to be in a fury, to be so mad I was high again, as high as when I was drinking or running or fucking, and I wanted to keep it going, for as long as I could.

I was so angry I wanted only to destroy something, anything. I wanted to break glass, I wanted to damage electronics parts, and I wanted the stereo to leave the house through the picture window. I wanted to rip my father’s guts out and strew them about on the floor. I wanted to watch the life slowly blink out of his eyes. I got into the swing of screaming, flailing, cursing, and wailing at a man who weighed a hundred fifty pounds more than I did. His greater bulk prevailed, and I was not allowed to break anything, nor did I hurt him seriously, or even at all. I must admit it; the passionate, angry high I experienced was a feeling drug addicts would kill for.

I don’t know how long this would have lasted, but then mom and the kids joined in for the spectacle, good-naturedly, as though they were tuning in to a good TV show. After all, there were no scenes in our household, ever. When mom realized it was no joke, and that I was truly out of control and screaming obscenities, she herded the kids upstairs where they couldn’t hear or see what was going on. As I listened to her trying to cover up the situation with banal explanations to the kids, I was filled with shame — a pure, deep horrible shame that I had