Functional? (Patreon)

But I’m not going to hurt myself, I told my psychiatrist, and she still strongly recommended (commanded?) that I enroll in the Intensive Outpatient Program at the hospital. If I didn’t, she would like to have me actually hospitalized there. 

I was blindsided.

But I’m functional, I told her. I go to work, I socialize, I post pretty pictures on Instagram. I’m articulate, I make jokes. I know I’m not in a good place, but I thought functional was good enough.

I guess it’s not.

If I don’t “make progress” through the IOP and therapy, the next thing she wants to try is psychedelics and electroshock therapy, though I don’t think that’s what it’s called anymore. That’s what it is, though: electricity zapped into your brain to shock it into working order.

Part of me is upset that I’ve reached this point in spite of still being functional and part of me is scared the IOP won’t accept me and give me the care I need BECAUSE I’m so high functioning.

I think of hospitalization and IOPs as being for people who are so broken that they can’t function any more. People who can’t go to work, can’t maintain their relationships, can’t maintain themselves.

That’s not me. 

My crazy is generally under control(ish). I’m 36 years old and I’ve (mostly) accepted that my brain just doesn’t work right and it never will.  In spite of being medicated and therapied most of my life, my mind is still broken and I just have to accept that my crazy thoughts will be my constant background noise while I do all the things an adult is supposed to do to operate in polite society. At my baseline I’m a crazy person but I can generally impersonate a functional adult if I try really, really hard. I’ll never fix my brain but I can function. It’s like THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST I CAN DO, I CAN'T DO BETTER THAN THIS. 

I do need help, though. I need the IOP. Or electroshock therapy. Or whatever. I need something. Because I’m functional… but it’s steadily decreasing. My brain feels like it’s on fire when it’s not incapacitated. It’s affecting my ability to work efficiently. It’s affecting my ability to be a good friend, a good partner. It’s affecting me. 

It’s so interesting(?) to me to skim over my Instagram page and observe the cognitive dissonance between what I post there with what’s actually happening inside my mind, in my life. Like. Pages and pages of lovingly shot photos of my garden, introspective essays, pretty pictures of my life, jokes. That doesn’t look like the #content of somebody who’s about to be assessed for an Intensive Outpatient Program at the hospital. But. That’s who I am. This is how I do it. Crazy and functional, baby. Crazy and functional.

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