Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

I’ve been feeling down the past few days – overwhelmed by the media I consume, processing some difficult things in therapy this week, not eating well, not having much energy. Some of that is the weather of course.

But June is historically a tough month for me with regard to bipolar depression. I have what’s described as ‘reverse seasonal moods’ – I get low in June/July and swing up in the fall.

This year, however, I’ve made it almost all the way through June okay mood wise. That just hit me tonight. And it feels good, a big step in my recovery. Even though I do feel those early signs of depression. The not eating is a big one. Then of course the lack of sustenance makes it harder to prepare sustenance. Vicious cycle.

I hear this wailing in my sleep and waking hours. It is from an Instagram video of a pregnant woman whose husband is being kidnapped by bounty hunters in the guise of ICE. Her heartbreak is soul wrenching. I don’t know what happened and maybe she doesn’t even know. I don’t want to just stop the cries in my head, I want her cries to stop because someone saved her husband. I want to hear her laugh and her birthing pains and the murmurs with her husband as they welcome their baby.

Do I go digging for information or will I just torture myself? I don’t know what the right thing to do is.

Also in therapy, we are working on attachment. As a child from a deeply abusive and neglectful moray, I did not learn healthy attachments. I was born and then sent to live with my grandmonster as a newborn because my mother had to be hospitalized and my father had to work. Grandmonster began grooming me literally at birth. Somehow I stumbled into adulthood with quite a few healthy relationships. So we are looking at that. It is painful, but also empowering. I feel ridiculously proud that I survived to age 54 and have brought some good into the world.

And I’m lonely. My dinner/lunch friends have been busy and I desperately miss that socialization. It feels like everyone is going on vacation but me. Everyone has holiday plans but me. Everyone can jump in a car and go wherever but me. In my head, I know that’s perception. In my body, it feels so achingly true.

When I say everyone, I mean it. People have walked away for whatever reason and left these gaping holes in my life. The cries of that woman fill those holes. That’s not great.

At the same time, people with whom I’ve set boundaries are pushing them, perhaps sensing when I say “I’d like a lunch companion” generally it means I’m lowering that boundary. I am not. And it is not okay to push it just because you can or try to confront me. The boundary is the boundary.

So depression is dancing with me. I told my two therapists and my psychiatric nurse practitioner. Just five more days of June and I”ll feel such accomplishment.

Accomplishments don’t hold back bipolar depression. It is an ugly demon. A recent study found bipolar disorder linked to early death more than smoking. The rates of suicide attempts are astronomically high. So I talk about it. I talk with my therapists, my friends, strangers. I talk about it because I want to challenge stigma, but also because I need you to know. I need your support.

Truth be told, I don’t really want to go somewhere on the Fourth, I just don’t want to be forgotten. I want to plan a weekend away. I want to put down my phone and watch a movie in a theater. I want to play a board game.

I want to eat.

Maybe I want to try getting attached to some new people.