I'm bound for that beautiful city the Lord has prepared for his own,
Where all the redeemed of all ages sing glory around the white throne.
Sometimes I get homesick for heaven, and the glories I there shall behold......
What a joy that will be when my Savior I see in that beautiful city of gold!!!!

I'm not often in the habit of posting poetry.  However, this is the chorus to a song that is best sung unaccompanied by any instruments, and the tune, tone and beauty of it are awesome.  It's the kind of song that sends shivers down my spine and not just because of the way the music is arranged.

I realized the other day that I'm homesick.  This is the song that was going through my head at the time.  I believe in heaven - there's many times I just don't know if I'll make it there or not.  Those are the times that I'm stuck on my own methods of salvation instead of what I believe from the Bible to be true.  But anyway, sometimes I catch myself daydreaming about it. 

The other thing I daydream about, more frequently recently, is the place where I grew up in Canada.  Some friends of mine just took a trip up there, and I found myself envying them to no end.  I miss the First Nations people I grew up with.  I miss growing up, actually.  There are time I feel like I've gotten so old, and I want to be young again, to have less responsibility, to just go up and see people.  I would love to skate on the lakes, and feel the icy spray of snow in my face as I race a snowmobile with no hat on my head.  I'd love to visit the inner city areas again and have coffee with my old friends at Tim Horton's.  I want to paddle a quiet canoe across a glassy lake at sunset, and go out early in the morning to fish off the dock.

Why does getting older have to be so difficult?

The process of trying to "get normal" is such a long one.  Since I posted in June, I've been through several different medication trials finding something that will calm me while still providing me with the initiative and motivation to Get Things Done.  In the past, I've had problems with terrible tension in my shoulders, arms, jaw - whole body, in fact.  I had racing, repetitive thoughts, irritability, volatility.  It was a struggle every day to react quietly to things that bothered me, and afterwards, I would just obsess about it.

When my incident happened in May, the psychiatrist placed me on Paxil.  That helped a great deal to calm me; however, I've had problems for years with music in my head playing over and over again, interfering with my thought processes.  The Paxil did nothing for that.  She added Trilofon, which did nothing but space me out.  She tried Zyprexa at night; it helped me go to sleep, but did nothing for my auditory hallucinations.  Now I'm trying something completely diferent:  Effexor.  This is a whole seperate journey - I'm just starting it, and I have a horrible time getting to sleep at night.  Then once I go to sleep, I sleep lightly.  I have heartburn and nausea.  They tell me that all this will go away in time, but right now, it's miserable.  I've been drawing a great deal of support from www.dr-bob.org where he has a "psycho-babble" chat board.  In the meantime, though, it's nice being able to go about my business during the day without pushing myself.  If something comes up that I need to do, I just do it.

I'm ashamed to say I still smoke.  In December, I honestly thought I was done, but that episode of severe depression kicked my butt.  I don't sit around and make excuses for myself - I made the decision to start again, and haven't been in the frame of mind yet to quit.  My diabetes still presents a challenge.  My last HgA1c was 8.6, sharply higher than the previous three months.  I'm on my second endocrinologist, since my initial one suddenly left practice.  Dr. Snitzer is an amazing guy, very knowledgeable, and I trust his judgements.  However, I'm still self-adjusting my basal rates on the pump.  My sugars run so high during the day, even when I don't eat anything.  I'm considering asking him if it would be ok to once again do a trial of metformin to slow down my liver's production of glucose.

In other news..... I still love my wife.  My wife still loves her dog.  This does not mean I love the dog.  My wife still loves me - I'm so glad because I'm not very lovable sometimes.  But neither is the dog.  Andrew is a senior this year - he continually talks of quitting school which is causing us some stress.  He no longer takes his medications, and we can't make him.  So we go from day to day with him, something different every day.  As long as he's not violent or abusive to his mother, I can handle it, I suppose, but I still perform mental gymnastics every day to keep myself calm about it.

Thanks to everyone for your support.

People tell me I've been away for a long time - well, I'm back (Robert DeNiro in Awakenings)

Depression and anxiety - lethal combinations of negative emotions that have turned unhealthy.  It's natural for a person to feel sad, or to have worry about an event or situation.  But when that person begins to process those events over and over in his mind, dwell on them, until they become his whole thought process - well, that's the unhealthy part.  I've had a long journey in depression and anxiety recently. 

In May, things came to a head.  Something had to give, and I did.  After a short episode of "snapping", screaming at the 911 operator across the phone and jabbing a knife repeatedly into things that weren't met to meet the point of a knife (not myself), I was led away in handcuffs.  They're coming to take me away ho HO, they're coming to take me away ha HA to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time.  Some of you may remember that song.  Well, it wasn't the funny farm, but Dover Behavioral Health helped save my life and my mind.  I spent 8 days there, receiving much needed rest, some solitude, group therapy, and medications.  Now I'm back.

It's a long journey climbing out a hole like that.  I receive outpatient counseling and see a psychiatrist.  Imagine me, the guy who likes to read people and can intuitively tell who they really are or what they're feeling, needing to get advice on life.  But one gets to the point where he realizes he doesn't know everything about life.  I am happy to say that I don't, not even about my own life.  I need people to tell me things that, quite frankly, are not new to me, but the fact that they apply to me is affirming.  They're things one would usually learn in an AA meeting, like, you cannot control the world or other people - the only person you can exercise control over is yourself.  Wow, what a novel idea!!  But you see, your subconscious mind needs to learn stuff like that.  I'm an intellectual person and I tend to overanalyze and think things through way too thoroughly, which leaves me paralyzed from action.  I have a passive-agressive personality, which holds things in until they explode, then I say things I don't mean in ways I don't mean to say them, and do things I shouldn't do in ways that I don't mean to do them.  I'm working on becoming more assertive in my communication.  If that doesn't ring a bell with anyone, well, look it up on the internet.

To think of myself as having a diagnosable mental disorder is no longer a horror or a crutch.  It is a necessity so that I can receive some help.  Bipolar II disorder, unlike bipolar I, is a little harder to discover, but it is treatable.  I work with people at my job every day who have mental illness themselves and need me to be at my best so I can understand, support, and treat them.  I live with a boy who is (slowly) becoming a young man and who has definitely been diagnosed.  He needs me to be at my best also, and his mother my wife needs someone to lean on and understand her as she continues to receive the brunt of his freqent irrational behavior.  I am slowly returning to that state of being.

I'll be in touch......

"This evening, as I viewed a fantastic lightening display and the thunder rolled, I smoked my last cigarette.  I don't usually litter, but I threw the rest of the pack out the car window as I drove home from work.  It felt final.  I know enough about overcoming addictions to wonder at people who think "Just say No" is all there is to it.  That is certainly one aspect.  But it's a very complex approach, and the manner in which this decision will impact my whole life frightens me a bit.  However, others have quit and so can I."

I was reading back on some of my posts..... it's been 4 months, and we're both still clean.  Lori Jo chews lots of gum, and I just will not to do it.  It's hard, because much to my chagrin at admitting it, I didn't really want to quit smoking.  Hey, does anyone really want to overcome a vice?  It's the human condition that, deep in our hearts, we really want to continue.  But if you're able to see where things will lead, sometimes you can get beyond some of those things.  So it was in my case.