Wow, it’s been five years.
Friday, January 30th 2009 was five years ago. In case you are reading this and don’t know
me that well, that is the day my worst fears were confirmed, the day I was
diagnosed with cancer. I was 17 at the
time and in these past five years I have been through a whole hell of a
lot. But this blog is not about sharing
my struggle, though at times, I will.
This blog is mainly an introspection, to put in words how I feel about
life at this time and the lessons I’ve learned, so I can look back to it in the
future to remind myself where I’ve been.
So here we go:
In my last blog post I talked about how life is a river that
constantly pushes you forward, and that sometimes in life, we encounter rapids
and have to pick the right path to get through those rapids. I still believe that for sure, but one rapid
that I have been/still am struggling to find the right line through has to do
with mental health. About two years
after my Leukemia diagnosis, right around the time of my second bout of
pancreatitis, I became intensely sad. It
was the first time that I can specifically remember completely ignoring my
phone, sleeping as much as possible and just feeling overwhelmingly sad. So after about three weeks of that, I went to
see a counselor, it kind of went away and I had a pretty good summer that year
(2011). Then in fall, I was back in
school, feeling better, but I was inexplicably tired and sad all the time. Fearing relapse, I went to my oncologist who
told me that I was in good health. So I
went back to classes and picked up my books, but something was different this
time. In every quarter in college before
Fall of ’11, I had gotten pretty much straight A’s and my cumulative GPA to
that point was about 3.85. But when I
tried to study that Fall, it just was not happening. I still had not figured out what it was, but
then I got a flu and that really took me out, to the point where I dropped some
classes. So I figured it was just pre-flu weariness. I finished 2 classes that semester with a GPA
of 2.8 I think, my lowest to that point.
Once I got over my flu, the quarter ended and I had a nice winter break,
but I could tell something was going on.
Winter quarter 2012 started and I
was taking classes again and feeling pretty good about it. I made it to week 5 and had completely aced
the first round of midterms. Then one
day I went to visit my dad, and on the way back, I was driving on the freeway
and I just had an intense urge to drive my car off the road. I fought the urge, but as soon as I got home,
I was completely freaked out. I had
never to that point contemplated suicide in my life, but at the time I was
taking 5 classes and had a lot of homework to do so I just tried to ignore what
I was feeling and get on with it. But
when I opened my books, I just could not focus no matter how hard I tried. So I decided, maybe I just needed some sleep
and would hopefully feel better in the morning.
I went to bed at about 11 pm if I remember correctly, the next day I
slept through my alarm and my reasonable amount of needed sleep quota and
woke-up at 1 pm. “F***,” I thought to
myself, I just slept through class and did not do the homework I planned to
wake-up early and do. “But the day’s not
lost,” I told myself, I had a laundry bin full of clothes I had been meaning to
hang and I still had the opportunity to do homework. But then this intense feeling just took
over.
Before I go on, this next part of
my story will by all means sound a little “crazy,” but it’s my reality and may
be similar to other moments many people with depression can relate to and
though I’m a bit ashamed/embarrassed by my actions; what happened,
happened. There’s a huge stigma around
depression/mental health in general that I believe people need to get
over. It’s a chemical imbalance in the
brain and sometimes manifests itself in weird ways, but it’s nothing more than
that. There are a lot of negative words
associated with mental health: psycho, crazy, mental, loony bin; and I think
that the vocab needs to change. Now don’t
get me wrong, if you have a problem that leads you to hurt people, that is not
okay. But I think that violence as a
result of mental health would happen a lot less often if it people with issues
knew that they could reach out, be accepted for who they are, and then get
help. I That is partly why I’m writing
this, to share my story, even though it sounds out of the ordinary; to just
show I have struggled and still do struggle with mental health problems and I
may have done some out-there things, but I’m not ashamed, it’s just part of who
I am.
Now anyways, enough with the
preachy-preachy, more with the story:
What happened was I got an
overwhelming feeling of misery. When I
tried to hang my clothes I found myself unable to do even that. I couldn’t focus enough to even make myself
coffee. But I needed to do something to
not feel the way I was feeling in that moment.
So I tried to read, but it made me angry and sad that I couldn’t so I
tore all the pages out of the book I was trying to read and threw them
everywhere. But that didn’t help remove
the feeling either. So at this point I
realized I needed help. I called my
brother and told him, “I’m not okay, please come over now.” After I hung up the feeling just seemed to
get more intense and the sadness deeper and I just couldn’t handle it. So I started breaking things in my room, and
eventually snapped my phone in half. At
this point nothing I tried had worked and I thought to myself, “People cut to
get rid of pain, maybe there’s something to that,” so I slashed my wrist. Immediately after I still felt the intense
feelings and was angry at myself for doing something so stupid and also pissed
that it did not help at all. I started
looking for the next thing to do to not feel the way I was feeling for another
moment. It was right about this time
that my brother had been let in by my roommate, came upstairs, asked me what
was wrong, and my response was just to curl up in the fetal position and
cry. Yeah, that was a pretty rough day
in my life lol.
After that whole debacle, I had my
brother drive me to Harding Hospital where I spent the next week of my
life. I appreciate the care I got at
Harding, but it was definitely tough feeling as if I had lost control of my
mind. It was after a few months of treatment at OSU that I was officially
diagnosed as manic depressive/bipolar. To
explain a little bit more, I’m not bipolar in the sense that I will feel elated
one second and immediately get angry or sad the next. For me (when not taking medicine), I spend a
lot of my time in deep depression and every few months/years I will have a
period of intense elation. Also to note,
I’m a generally happy guy and as often as I can I remain elated, but my major
manic episode, I thought I had special powers and the ability to read people’s
minds. I know, crazy right? But again, it happened to me and is a part of
my past and has helped me grow into the person I am today.
To sum up the next 2-3 years: after
trying 4 different medicines at OSU, I kind of gave-up on the crapshoot that is
finding the right psychiatric meds. The
difficulty of finding a medicine combined with my Russian family’s general
weariness of modern medicine led me to seek out alternate means to deal with my
depression. I started eating better,
exercising, and meditating. All of those
things definitely helped to improve the situation I was in, but it just seemed
that depression kept looming over me and would pick and choose when it decided
to enter my life and f*** everything up.
In a word, these years have been rough.
Now, this seems all miserable…but
on a brighter note, in the last three years I feel I have accomplished a
lot. I’ve delved deeper into my
spirituality and have a good grasp of accepting my situations as they
come. I’ve volunteered with some amazing
organizations: Local Matters, Ohio Staters, and Children’s Hospital, and I’ve
grown closer than ever to my family and friends. I also got accepted into a program in school
where I was one of the 18 people to get in.
I am very grateful for the life I was given. And now I get to the good part, the lessons I’ve
learned.
Remember that program that I told
you I got in 2 sentences ago? Well, I
failed right out of it this fall when I had my most severe run in with
depression for a while. It was at this
time I decided that I just could not do school in the state I was in. After being stuck in my room without
contacting barely anyone for about a month, I came to realize that I can live
life without the standard course of counseling and medicine, but if I choose
that path I have to be prepared to face some dark times. After what I faced in Fall, I decided hell no
I don’t want to live through that again, it’s time to give the standard course
another try. After some time I found a
counselor I like and a medicine that works and so far I’ve been doing a lot
better.
My battle with depression/bipolarity
has taught me a lot of things and I want to see if I can put those lessons into
words for your sake, the reader, but mainly for mine when I read this later.
1. It’s okay to be who you
are. Due to bipolarity, but mostly due
the fact that I’m a weird person anyways, I have done a lot of things I’m not
proud of. I used to beat myself up about
it a lot, to the point where it would keep me up at night. My mind would race with regrets of how I
acted or how I didn’t do this, or didn’t accomplish that. Though recently I’ve been thinking about how
I can be happy. And I think the way for
me to be happy is that I do my best with the resources I have available while
accounting for and the obstacles that are happening in my present
situation. For example, I recently
dropped out of school and burned a big bridge that could have led me to my
dream of being a dietitian. I was sad at
first and did not know how to come to terms with it. But I realize when I boil it down, in the face
of depression without medicine, I didn’t stand a chance in my program, and that’s
okay. I know now that I have to first
focus on myself and deal with my situation and then when the obstacle is not
too much to overcome I will work towards my dream.
2. Depression is real. I say again, depression is real. I have always had a positive attitude in
life, and before I had it, I could mentally wrap my head around the idea of
depression, but I never truly believed in it.
I thought things like, “If I could get over cancer and still be happy,
why can’t people just think positively and just get over it.” But it’s wrongful thinking like this that
leads to misunderstanding and then to stigmatization of it. Depression is not just having a bad day, or a
few bad days, everyone has those. It is
more like putting on “shit-colored goggles.”
Everything around you just looks and feels terrible and no amount of
positive thinking will completely take it away or absolve it. It’s a natural chemical imbalance in the
brain. The way I deal with it is a
combination of lifestyle choices and medicine and counseling, but that’s not
the only way. Accepting depression as a
chemical imbalance in my brain and not a defining factor of my life was a huge
step towards getting out of it.
3.
Be grateful for what you have.
Sappy lesson I know, but my friends and family that have reached out to
me, not only in my struggle with depression, but also my battle with cancer,
and most importantly, when neither of those two things are a big issue in my
life at the time. I love that I have such
a strong support group behind me and I really don’t know what I would do
without you guys (if you’re reading this, if you’re a stranger, sorry for the
corniness). When it boils down to it,
our health, wealth, and happiness, is not assured; but it helps to have someone
there when you’re struggling. I’m also
grateful for my mind, my health, and just my life in general…it’s pretty
fantastic.
4. And finally, this lesson is the
same I learned when dealing with cancer, life keeps moving. What may seem like a huge obstacle or a big
deal or an end all be all right now, will not seem as important to you in the
future. I’m not old, but even things as
big as the time I had a stroke on both sides of my brain are kind of moving to
the back-burner of my mind. Not to say
that I don’t struggle and every day is nirvana and bliss. If anything, adversity gives a person
perspective, and my lesson here is that even though I’ve experienced a lot of
tough times, once they pass, that’s it, dunzo.
The only time that it bothers me is when I cling on to how bad things
were, or try to grasp at good times and relive them. It’s only in the flow of the river where I’ve
found true happiness, and at some point I realized whether I was happy or not,
the river of life keeps moving forward.
That was very long winded and I
hope not too preachy. Probably should
have thrown in a few more jokes to lighten the mood, but eh, whatever. To end this post and to kind of give people a
sense of where I’m at in life, I would like to quote Raekwon the Chef in the
song C.R.E.A.M. when he says, “It’s been 22 long, hard years, and I’m still
struggling…” But instead of taking that
quote directly, I’ll make a slight adjustment that fits my life better. “It’s been 22 long, hard years, and I’m still
smiling.” So I leave you with that and
if you stuck around to this point, you’re either me, or deserve a very big
thank you.
Good
Night and Good Luck,
In
friendship,
Max
