'Tis Not the Season for Me

The most pathetic, miserable time of year starts tomorrow. Goddamn the holidays, & goddamn all the puke for which they stand.

Really, is there anything more painful than ignoring every dysfunction in our lives -- & doing it for a month and a half out of every flippin' year?

I do love my family & friends, I swear. But I love them because they're flawed, like me (though usually they're more subtle about their shortcomings). The last thing I want to do is sit around & pretend we were all invented by Norman Rockwell, complete with the fat uncle who smells like rum punch & Chesterfields yet retains his jolly sentiment when he plays Santa Claus every year.

Such families -- such people -- do not exist. Never have, never will. I've done enough genealogy over the last five years to know this.

'Tis the season, for those of us with seasonal mood patterns anyway, to get depressed, sleep until noon every day (claiming we "worked from home" in the morning), & gorge on pure starch constantly. I always make sure to keep a bag of flour, a soup ladle & a spare bucket of insulin handy this time of year.

Besides which, turkey sucks ass. Yes, I said it. Did these flightless freaks of nature never learn to drink water? No matter who cooks them, no matter how lovingly & carefully they do it, no matter how freely the damn things range before someone whacks their heads off, turkeys always taste like tree bark, only drier and stringier. Trytophan helps with depression, apparently, but only if you're willing to eat a U-Haul full of Butterballs. Goose I can stand, but who the hell actually cooks geese anymore?

One thing exists to make the holidays survivable: rich, yolky eggnog, by the half gallon. Also, lefse.

My Problem with CBT

Saw a new shrink today. He was very good, very empathetic, very sharp, & he made his diagnosis based on my narrative history & recollections rather than on the standard bipolar checklist. This helps, since I tend to answer "no" to most of the classic bipolar trigger questions (did you ever believe you were King Henry VIII? Did you ever drop $50,000 on lawn ornaments? Did you ever try to break your way into the porn industry?).

He seemed to peg my diagnosis as bipolar not otherwise specified (NOS), that funky-ass catchall category that acknowledges you can be manic-depressive without drawing up plans to build a nuclear power plant in your backyard. This reading certainly makes sense. Like I said in an earlier post, I worry that I see manic depression where it doesn't exist. But this shrink pointed out specific symptoms that do suggest a bipolar-spectrum disorder: My depressive episodes often involve some sort of high-stress trigger (Kerry losing in 2004, for example); my mood changes tend to be seasonal, at least when they're relatively stable (OK in the summer, up a tick early in the fall, then noticeably down around January, & back up again in early spring); and my sleep patterns fit, at least at their worst (staying up later & later every night until I'm sleeping during the day, then crashing & snapping back to a pseudo-normal-human schedule).

I switched to this guy mainly because I was getting tired of the behavioral dreck I was getting from my therapist. It helped for a while, but I keep seeing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as a kind of modern-day blame-the-patient approach: It's not your fault that you never learned to behave properly, but we'll fix that. As much as I appreciate the need for personal responsibility, you won't get very far telling me the reason I'm crazy is that I failed to grow up. My therapist never went so far as saying he didn't consider bipolar disorder a real disease, but he always seemed to lean in that direction -- taking medicine is a good idea, & you shouldn't stop, but our biggest concern is making sure you learn how to behave like a responsible adult. More than a little condescending, frankly -- I doubt many therapists who've actually lived with mental illness would feel that way.