I do so love my opiates. They will kill a headache when nothing else will and have the added bonus of giving me a pleasant hypomanic buzz until they wear off. They make most people sleepy, or at least relax them. They wind me up tighter than a fiddle string, but it's a pleasant "up," and it only lasts until the drug's out of my system.
I find it interesting that there's been a whole study done on opiates and bipolar: A significant percentage of bipolar people go manic on them, while people whose brains are "normal" don't. (I thought it was only me until I accidentally ran across that study somewhere.) The percentage of us who do get manic on them is enough that it's considered a marker for bipolar if it happens, even if the person's never been diagnosed before. Kind of crazy, considering I've been having this reaction to them since I first started taking them, which I think was while I was still in high school when I hurt my shoulder playing softball. Too bad they didn't know that then.
I don't, however, keep opiates of any sort around much, and when I do have them, I make myself stay away from them. I like them a bit too much to have them at my disposal whenever I want them.
And that leads us to the actual point of this blog today. It's something I've been thinking about for awhile but haven't taken the time to sit down and write it out. But since I don't quite feel up to doing client stuff yet, I'm going to do it now.
As I've mentioned before, I used to work for a woman who's my age who was smart, business-savvy, and dedicated to making lots of money for both herself and the ladies who worked for her. I worked for her from mid-2008 to early 2011, which, incidentally, was the longest time I've ever kept the same job. (I was never good at working for other people, you see....)
But all that changed. She had weight-loss surgery in mid-2009, then left her husband in early 2010. She got hooked up with a man who'd been a cocaine addict for decades, and he convinced her to try it. Well, she tried it...and liked it way too fucking much. She started neglecting the business, then in late 2010, developed a nasty habit of not fucking paying her contractors.
And, just like that, a multi-million dollar business that created a decent living for 20+ contractors was gone. She snorted the whole goddamn thing up her nose...for a man. I couldn't think of anything more fucktarded if I tried.
She sold the business, and the new owners fucked us all over so much that we started leaving, one by one. I think now, there are maybe 3 of the ladies who were there when it was sold still there. I know I got the hell out and never looked back.
But it still makes me sad to think about it. I mean, that wasn't just her work that made that place the best in the biz. All of us put our blood, sweat, and tears into it. And now it's all gone because she's a dumbass. The new owners are steadily running it into the ground, and nobody's proud to say they work there anymore.
Ok, let me get to the *actual* point.
I watched this woman fall from grace. It really was one of the best places in the business to work for years. I remember when I first started this type of work. I saw her posting on industry boards and thought to myself, "I wanna be just like her. Maybe she'll let me work for her one day."
I finally got up the nerve to apply, and when she hired me, I think it was probably one of the proudest days of my life. I know that sounds crazy, but...there it is.
And then there was the downfall. At some point, she changed. She used to care about us, but she stopped. She cares for nothing but herself and her own comfort now. I used to be angry about it, about how she used to come crying to me, begging me to send her $50; she always had a sob story, but I knew it was just a ploy for the money for another hit of coke--this same woman who'd fucked us all over monetarily was begging us all to help her now. Yeah, I used to be angry. Now, I mostly just feel sorry for her.
At least until recently. You can still tell that she has no regrets at all. Oh, she'll pretend like she's sorry that she wrecked all our lives, but only if it'll elicit sympathy and get her some more of the attention that she craves. There's no real emotion behind it.
But now, she's self-diagnosed herself with Asperger's. Why? Because she gets to feel "special" and different, because she can use it to gain attention and sympathy, and, most of all, she thinks can use it as a get out of jail free card for every fucked up thing she's ever done and every fucked up thing she will go on to do.
Needless to say, when I saw that shit on Facebook, I lost my shit. I didn't say anything to her because I didn't want to reinforce her at all, positively or negatively, because people like her thrive on any kind of reinforcement, but Jesus tap-dancing Christ.
I know Asperger's and bipolar aren't anything alike. But they do share a couple of traits, namely that they're brain disorders you're born with and can't help, and they are things that make life a lot harder for the people who are cursed with them.
If you truly have any sort of mental/cognitive disorder, the last goddamn thing you're going to do is run around crowing about it on Facebook. I DON'T talk about it. My friends know. My boss, T., knows, but only because we were once discussing an anti-depressant that she's on. My mother knows, but she doesn't believe it.
I don't run around telling anyone who'll listen. In fact, I keep it a secret for the most part. Random people don't want or need to know. So why should I tell them?
I talk about it on this blog far more than I ever talk about it anywhere else. That's the main reason I created this blog, to have a place to talk about things I don't talk about anywhere else. I needed an outlet, and the (relative) anonymity this place provides gives me space to talk about it.
Knowing how bipolar has affected--and by that, I mean "nearly destroyed"--my life, I cannot in any way condone someone like her. You don't get to wake up one day and go "I know I totally fucked everyone around me over and all, but it's ok. Don't worry, guys, I'm just an Aspie!!!!" It doesn't fucking work that way. All that does is show that you a.) need to grow the hell up, and b.) still have no remorse whatsoever about the shit you've done.
I'm an everyday reader and huge fan of the website Cracked. Of all the columnists there, John Cheese is my favorite. Cheese is a recovering alcoholic who's been clean for over 2 years. His stuff is dry, full of black humor, and, most importantly, real. I find a lot of parallels in the things he says about addiction and my own mental illness. Also, he was pretty cute until he started going bald and growing the remaining part of his hair out and wearing those stupid-looking glasses.
*Ahem* Anyway....
He wrote a column back in January called 7 Things You Don't Realize About Addiction Until You Quit. The whole thing is very good, and I find a lot of things in it to be insightful, even if most of them don't apply to me. But it's #2 on the list that really fucking hit home: "#2. You Are Not Prepared For The Guilt."
I'm not going to attempt to sum the whole thing up. He says it far better than I. So I'm just going to quote part of it instead.
That guilt will follow you around until you do something about it. And I'll be straight with you here -- I just had to swallow my pride and start apologizing to people. Even the ones who had all of me they were willing to take for the rest of their lives, who I knew would simply give me the finger and say, "I told you so. Now fuck off. I'd rather spend the day drawing close-up portraits of my dog's asshole than devoting a single minute to remembering the many ways you made my life suck."
If there's another way to deal with it, I haven't found it. I'm not sure there is one, because the truth is, it wasn't the alcohol making you do that. That was you. You destroyed those relationships. You were the one calling the shots, drunk or not. You were the one who pissed in the dolphin tank at SeaWorld in front of 200 screaming children. Quitting drinking does not wipe away those old emotional debts you racked up. You did the crime, and you are accountable for it. A celebrity entering rehab does not wipe away the time he vomited a slew of racial slurs on stage. It was not alcohol's fault. Beer did not introduce those thoughts into his brain. He did. And he damn sure owes an apology for it.
Fuck. Reading it again for the millionth time still hurts as much as it did the first time.
I hurt a lot of people. A LOT. And they were the most important people in my life. Yes, my brain was in the grips of something stronger than I was, and, yes, my decision-making skills at the time were questionable at best and completely non-existent at worst.
But, still, I did it. I hurt them. Even if I did it under the direction of the demon in my head called "bipolar," I'm still the one who did it. And he's right: The guilt's not ever going to go away. The best I can hope for is to apologize to the people I hurt for the things I did. Not to assuage my own guilt because nothing is going to do that, but simply because the people affected by the crazy shit I did deserve an apology.
Will they tell me to go straight to hell? Probably. I mean, I probably would tell me to if I were them. But they do they still deserve to hear me say that I'm sorry? Yes, yes, they do.
And that's the thing Miss "Oh, It's Cool, I'm Just An Aspie" doesn't understand. Being a spoiled, self-centered, childish asshole does not mean you have a disorder. It means you're a spoiled, self-centered, childish asshole who's ready to seize on any excuse available, no matter how flimsy, to excuse your shitty behavior, so that you can duck responsibility for your actions *and* have a way to continue to duck responsibility indefinitely because you "have a problem."
It doesn't fucking work that way, hoss.
When you've legitimately got a problem, one of the first things you realize once you're better is that you've hurt yourself and hurt a lot of other people as well. And anybody who's got a soul is going to feel bad about that.
You realize you've basically destroyed your whole life because you went batshit crazy. You also realize how badly you've hurt other people, how you've destroyed their trust in you, how you've dragged others down in your own quest for utter self-destruction. You realize that people you love hate you now, and you've got no goddamn body to blame but yourself.
Those realizations, those regrets, are what set you on the path toward rehabilitation. You don't just want to get better because you're tired of feeling shitty. You want to get better because you realize you have a responsibility to the world at large to do as little harm as possible...and as long as your demons are in control of you, you can't live up to that responsibility.
You try not to look in the mirror much because it hurts you to see what you are.
You talk to Jesus a lot because you know He understands, though you're not so sure about God. You're not even sure about who God is anymore, but somehow, in your heart, you know that Jesus gets it, even if nobody else does.
You cling stubbornly to your business, even though it might be better to throw in the towel and get a real job, because it's the ONLY thing you've got left, and you're damn sure not letting it go without a fight to the death.
You try to become more compassionate, even if it's hard, because you know that you could've used some compassion in the past and figure that at least one of the people you run into in the course of the day is in the same boat.
And, eventually, in doing those things, you come to a crossroads in your life where you either become a hermit because you can't deal with what you've done and who you've become, or you kill yourself for the same reason, or you try to clumsily make amends.
I am at the point where I know I have to do the latter. I haven't yet figured out the best way to do it or when or anything like that, but I'm standing there at that threshold, just trying to get the courage to take the next step.
I have regrets. I am actively working on rehabilitation. I might one day achieve redemption. But even if I don't, I'm still a hell of a lot closer to it than my former boss because I, at least, have pulled some sort of cosmic lesson from the primordial chaos that was my life before.
Bunny, slayer of demons, is not gone. She hasn't surrendered. She's just retreated for the time being to regroup.
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