The first worst part

In a few minutes I'll be off to explain what is going to happen to my mother. I dread this more than anything else. It's hard for her to handle this kind of thing, and reminders that I still have a serious illness even though I've been doing well are tough. I also am going to ask something that she is not going to understand: I do not want visitors. I don't want others to see me in that environment. I don't want that to be part of anyone's memory of me. I also don't want her to see what I believe would be shocking to her: if she saw me there she'd see me with other people equivalent to me in terms of disability at that moment, and I think that would be hard for her. The other reason, and this is maybe the biggest, is that I do not have a support network of real-life people with this illness. Where I live is so rural that the nearest NAMI meeting is 90 minutes away and I don't really feel comfortable going to one anyway because I don't want my diagnosis to be known in my professional life. I've never been able to sit in a room of other people with mental illness and talk about it. I'm anxious to be able to do this. This hospitalization offers me the first opportunity I've ever had to be real about this and how I feel outside of the offices of my doctors and the internet. The rest of the time I walk around with a fake smile and fake "see, it's not so bad" attitude. Which I do not want to have to pull out during that week. If I have to go through this I want to go through it without pretending. I also just will not be feeling social and will be spending a lot of time being made to be social in the various groups and activities and therapy and testing and frequent nursing assessments. I will be through enough by the time I taper down to a low level in the next few weeks. I don't know the taper rate yet, but I'll have to be pretty low the last week I work. So I already will have been forcing myself to be ok for a while. Plus, if my doctor tells me I'm going to feel pretty bad, I'm going to feel pretty rotten. If she says I need to be in the hospital then I'm going to be bad for a while. This is the doctor who has done everything in her power to keep me out of the hospital for many years, even when Dr. Mind has been strongly advocating for it.

So, hopefully I can do this without hurting her. That's not the plan, but I also know that this is a time that being a bit selfish in my wants is ok. She who has to choose to make herself sicker to get better and who is choosing to be locked up and kept away from shoestrings gets to be a bit selfish. It's my new rule of mental illness.

Here goes nothing.