Documenting my journey through the mental health system

My mother is having a little bit of a meltdown and left town. She’s in Portland right now. I mean, on the one hand, good for her. She needed a change of scenery, and god knows I can’t get her to do any of the things she used to do and I can’t make her stay in contact with friends and she has chosen this weird isolation thing and makes it out to be everyone else’s fault and brings it up a lot. So I’m glad she took off for a few days. Or however long it will be. There are six cats at the house so I’m checking on them on the way to my apartment. I can also use the time to assess the place – there’s a lot I need to do before I can move back in. I know I want to replace the carpet and paint my room. At a minimum. There is too much crap in the garage, in the carport. I have to somehow make room for me again. In my own house.

I miss it. I still remember the elated feeling I felt when I bought it, eight years ago. It’s not much- two bedrooms, 900 square feet, wrap around porch. But it was mine, and I was only 31 years old. I had spent the last couple years trying to put my life back together after a catastrophic psychiatric breakdown, violent detainment, and incarceration in a mental hospital for a couple weeks. That meant having to move, and I didn’t really have any housing stability. I knew I had the VA home loan for home buying so I started looking into that and closed on my house by Halloween 2016. My mother moved in a year later.

She’d still be in her house with my father if he was still alive. He died while I was in the army. Later the house was foreclosed and she lived in an apartment, bought a condo, then sold it when the condo authorities wouldn’t let her run an airbnb out of it. She got away with it for awhile, made some decent money. Eventually though, she was forced to sell and move in with me.

A year ago I got out of the VA psych ward and moved out. I missed, so much, everything about living alone. I still relish it, being able to walk from my room to my bathroom naked in the middle of the night to take a piss. I will eat peanut butter out of the jar in nothing but my underwear just because I can. I don’t have to consider anyone in my environment because there is no one there.

IOP wasn’t just important because it’s going to help me deal with crisis if and when it comes, and hopefully avoid detainment in the future, but because I have to get ready for the difficult process of going back. I ran from my problems, mainly my mother. I have to go back and reset all my boundaries and get really good at enforcing them. Not just for me, but her too. The way she lives isn’t good. Endless amounts of cigarettes, liquor. I know she’s depressed. Blames it on me, on anyone. Won’t accept any kind of responsibility for the way she feels and if there’s one thing I’ve learned through a lot of therapy, through the last two months of IOP, it’s that – only you can deal with the way you feel.