Documenting my journey through the mental health system

A polar vortex is moving through Washington, specifically, Eastern Washington and Idaho. It has been so bitterly cold, down to 1 or 2 degrees Fahrenheit. I constantly worry about the pipes freezing at either of my two properties when the weather gets this absurdly cold. I sound like a broken record reminding my tenants to keep the water on drip. I force my coworkers to play games like temp check and step check. Games I made up – everyone guesses what the temperature is outside and whoever is the closest to the correct answer is the winner. With step check, the winner is who had the most steps in the night, and we all wear watches that count our steps. Loser buys pizza.

I did my taxes last week. I made 24k on my rental property and made a ton of overtime working for agencies throughout all of 2024. I had five W2s. When my accountant finished adding everything up, I owed 5k.

Sounds like a lot. It is. But I expected it. I knew it was going to be bad. Despite being detained and hospitalized, and undergoing three months of intensive outpatient treatment, I made 130k last year. But I hardly put anything toward my inevitable tax bill.

Part of it is W4s. They’re confusing now. You have to use a percentage instead of the number of standard deductions. Now that I’m in a higher tax bracket, I have to go update my W4s at both my jobs with that tax bracket’s percentage so the same thing doesn’t happen to me again next year. I just really hate when they take too much, I’d rather owe a little. But 5k is a bit much all at once. I have till April to pay it.

There is a lot of tension at work. We work at VA and there is a wrecking ball currently tearing through the government. I’m much more nervous as a patient than I am an employee, but I’m worried in that respect too. The resignation buyout was stopped by a judge. We also got notified by the VA that most positions are exempted from the buyout, meaning, our positions are not eligible for the buyout anyway.

I’m always trying to be funny. I’m not that funny but I keep trying to be. I make Shelly laugh pretty good. We were talking about Teslas and Musk came up and I said “that’s president Musk to you,” and everyone laughed. Everyone is laughing at him. That’s hope, right? That’s progress?

It’s funny, but it’s not. Can someone be simultaneously stupid and crazy? Where’s the hope when he has everything – the courts, congress? Why have laws if there is no one to enforce them? Judges are great and all but they don’t make the laws. Courts can stop a madman, until they can’t.

So there’s this giant orange elephant in everyone’s face but we have to be good government employees and stay professional and focus on the patients and try to ignore that terrible orange blowhard making a spectacle of himself right in our face.

My mood is surprisingly elevated. I take my meds every day, without fail, but I confess I’ve missed a few night time doses of the mood stabilizer. I need it every 12 hours. But it’s chalky and sometimes gets stuck in the roof of my mouth and I choke and gag on it. I have a really sensitive gag reflex, and I eventually choke it up and spit it out. After that I don’t want to try again because my gag reflex is revved up and the taste of nasty chalky pill is in my mouth.

I think back a lot to feeling constant depression, agony, and abject despair. I was making plans for suicide, I could not imagine going on another day, month, year, 30 years. Every moment was pain.

I also think back to elated grandiosity, not just believing, but knowing, I’m smarter than anyone I know and I’m going to write books and go back to grad school and run a hospital. Staying up endless nights, talking a mile a minute, but thinking even faster.

Sometimes there is a mix of the two. Despair, voices insisting I kill myself, paranoia, feelings of persecution, and weeks without sleep or food to really cement the feelings in deep.

I know myself better now, I know a lot of my triggers (and they remain stubbornly strong, defiant, and stressful) and I know that I tend to decompensate hard and fast. It’s just different every time – I cannot predict when I will next go manic, or depressed, or some kind of mix of the two. I get used to my meds too fast. I have to see the doctor more often because of this. I have to somehow be ready to change them when the slightest symptoms appear out of the ordinary.

I’m constantly avoiding triggers. I have to drive by the mental hospital every time I go to work at my part time job. I could take an elaborate way around, and I’ve thought about it, but I don’t want to give in either. Every time I hear an ambulance my heart skips a beat. Every time I see the cops or a cop car, I panic a little bit. I go back in time. I remember everything.

Then there is Sacred Heart hospital, the hospital in which I work that part time job. Just walking through the entrance I can see down to the ambulance bay and the ER within. I was detained there and the psych unit is only a short walk down the hall from the elevators up to the floor on which I work. I have to re-center myself every time I go to work, and I specifically avoid looking down at that ER. Some of my greatest trauma took place in that very spot.

Reliving the past and having constant flashbacks isn’t as bad as it was. I still have them, the sound of a siren brings me right back to my time in an ambulance against my will, but my meds and my mood bring me back to right now and my plans for my book, making money, getting my house ready, inevitably moving back in…I have put off working on the book. It is written but I need to format/edit, and otherwise finish it up.