A place called home

A shot from my 10k postal swim last year

For a very long portion of my life, I spent time finding solace in the water, chasing a little black line…up the pool…and down the pool.  It was peaceful, and gave me a sense of calm that I haven’t experienced from any other activity.

The occasional case of runner’s high has cropped up.  I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything similar while on a bike ride.  But the focus, the calm, the passage of time, when the rhythm of my stroke or the beating of my legs was the only real noise I could hear was always that the thing that separated me from myself.

There have been times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because everything else has gone to crap, and times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because it was a fun activity and the camaraderie around the sport was a win all in itself.  I cherish those times.  Some of the best friends I’ve had and still have are swimmers, whether they’re still in the water or not.  They’re still swimmers.

My life has fallen apart, a handful of times, perhaps just two or three over the course of my 45 years, on a level that it is at now.  This is the worst of the 2 or 3, my mind having betrayed me to the point where I can’t work, where I know that even though I have these momentary points in the day that I can put a few thoughts together, the idea of going an entire workday is preposterous.

I withdrew from school one semester when this happened, what would have been the semester I originally would have graduated.  I overloaded myself with all of the hours I needed to finish my degree during a summer session.  I would go on to return to school in the fall to limp my way to the finish line, taking a nearly perfect GPA, and knocking that down almost a tenth of a point, but still enough to graduate with honors. Truth be told, I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony and was announced “with high honors,” but when my diploma arrived, it was the next echelon down.

I started working.  I broke up with the guy I moved to LA with, and I joined the West Hollywood masters team, to try to find a place in life.  I was lost. I was working what would be the job that I came back to, and am employed doing now, and I met some very nice people and I still see some of them these days—sometimes at a swim meet, sometimes at a training camp.  I was very guarded back then, and wouldn’t really let people become my close friends.

Me swimming with the Grunions one weekend earlier this year
(Thanks, Kenny Brisbin for taking this photo)

So I moved. I told myself I didn’t like the city of West Hollywood—it was too cruisy, not my scene and I couldn’t deal with having to look like I was “on” to go to the grocery store.  After I moved, I continued to try find solace in the masters team I swam with as I went from one apartment to the next on the west side of LA for the next couple of years. I didn’t. I didn’t let myself. I told myself I didn’t like SCAQ because it was so spread out, too much like Corporate America meets masters swimming. But the truth is that I didn’t get to know anyone. I don’t even think any of them knew I was gay. So I moved, and moved again, eventually landing in Long Beach, and eventually finding the Long Beach Grunions, who were just starting up at the time, and who I found friends with and where I found my happy place in the pool.

The Grunions have ebbed and flowed for me. Some wonder why a place like Long Beach needs a gay swim team because being gay in Long Beach is just accepted.  To be frank, a former collegiate swimmer who happens to be gay shows up in Long Beach, and there aren’t enough fast swimmers to keep him or her interested in it, and they wind up swimming somewhere else, maybe with the team I swim with during the week now, maybe not. They push me to levels that I don’t get with the Grunions, but the Grunions have given me so much over the years, and my weekday team is never going to travel to a meet like IGLA New York during the 50th anniversary of Gay Pride and the Stonewall Riots, so there’ s a feeling on the Grunions that I just don’t get from the other team.

But now, after I’ve fallen apart, I don’t know what to do, really, to put myself back together.  Sometimes I need to stare at that black line for meters upon meters upon meters, and sometimes I just need to hear the rhythm of my stroke. My brain needs to sort itself back out. It needs to find its way back home.

I'm just gonna need a minute

...and it might be a really long minute.  I might just need a whole bunch of minutes.

I'm recovering from what would have probably been previously diagnosed as a nervous breakdown, but that diagnosis doesn't actually exist in medicine anymore.  So, officially, it's major depression with generalized anxiety disorder.  Unlike what you might think of something like this from how these events are depicted in Hollywood, there was no dramatic moment when I was drooling on myself in a corner and then saved by an incredibly handsome hunk of a man who swept me off to somewhere that they seemingly fixed me overnight.  There was no magic pill that suddenly turned me from being at a diminished capacity right back to my former self, and there was no self help group that made me realize that my problems are nothing compared to some of the people that are there and that I'm totally fine.

There was, however, stigma.  I am thankful for the people who reached out to wish me well--many of them had no idea what I was going through, and so many of them are just concerned and want me to feel better.  They're all rock stars.  I never felt stigma about this from the people who know me personally, so I consider myself lucky.  The stigma is about how society treats these things in general, and I got hammered with that in the week or so following this just in dealing with getting the paperwork filed to get me out of work on disability.

I'm a proponent of being open about mental health issues in general to help decrease the stigma around them, so thank you, Allison Schmitt for advancing the credo "It's okay to not be okay."

My psychiatrist immediately got the paperwork out to California for state disability, and that's going slowly, as expected.  Her office does this on paper, rather than using the online system.  Her office also wrote up a one paragraph letter to my work that I looked at and laughed a little internally, knowing full well that a 40-plus page set of documents would be coming that I'd need to sort through and figure out what needed to be filled out by whom, and then get those things done.  What I didn't know was that there would also be a 4 page long behavioral health assessment that would be used to determine my eligibility for my company's short term disability insurance.  There was nothing like this needed when I was out previously for a recurrence of Epstein-Barr/mono.  In that case, it was my doctor's opinion that my physical symptoms made it such that I needed to be out of work to recover, and that was good enough.  My psychiatrist's opinion that I'm not capable of working and need to be out of work to recover does not seem to be good enough, even when coupled with the fact that I had three appointments with her inside of a week (mostly to deal with paperwork, because her appointments are 15 minutes long, and she won't do any of this paperwork without me being present), and I'm seeing a clinical psychologist weekly now. Somehow, a 4 page form that assesses my capabilities based on 'ridiculously-complex' details like "Count backwards from 100 by sevens" is deemed to be the critical factor in this process.

I'm just going to postulate that this set of forms does not accurately depict any individual's decline in mental capacity accurately--in particular when you're dealing with someone who nearly had to go to college 3 years early, and only avoided that due to his parents' overwhelming generosity and desire to keep him a kid as long as he could be--and paid a ridiculous amount of tuition to send him away to a private boarding school to make that happen. I'm forever indebted to them for that--I got to experience my final years in high school that I might not have ever had without their foresight.

The problems I'm having are things like not being able to maintain a train of thought long enough to write an algorithm to calculate a matrix of partial derivatives for an optimization problem I was working on.  And for some reason, it's more important that a four page form be filled out that attempts to assess mental issues than it is that my psychiatrist and psychologist have concluded that I need to be out to recover.  And to further complicate these issues, this form has to be reassessed every 4 weeks, potentially because there is apparently distrust in my doctors' trained and professional capabilities in determining when I will be ready to return to normal life.  I want to get back to work--I just want to do it in a way that minimizes my chances of relapse.

My therapist told me that there was noticeable 'motor retardation' at my last visit, but it was improving.  I'm having issues with insomnia still, but that's improving.  I'm on increased dosages of drugs to help with these things, and my psychiatrist wants to leave them where they're at to see how I stabilize over the next few weeks.  It takes me significantly longer to do things than it used to.  Like all day long to pay the bills rather than the hour or so it used to take me.

My therapist told me that writing will help me--I just looked at my blog and noticed I haven't posted anything for a very long time.  He also told me that going out and being social is critical. That working out will help--I'm doing well at getting in one workout a day, but not so well at the remainder of training I would like to be doing.  I'm trying to feed myself enough, and I managed to make a banana cream pie for my husband's birthday, though it took longer than I expected and barely set up before we dug into it at the end of the day.

I don't respond to conversation at a normal cadence and find myself searching for words I can't quite seem to remember, so sometimes, I just need a pause to keep going.  You know, like when I wanted to have lunch at that brothy, noodle place down the street...what was it...oh yeah...Pho. 

So sometimes, I just need an extra minute to keep going.  I'm eventually going to be okay, but for now it's okay to not be okay.