[Serious] Has anyone had any experience with mental illness?

[arewethereyet]

Taking mushrooms years ago, I could still feel my arms and legs as well as use them, but they where no longer part of me.
They felt like they weren't attached, just floating beside and underneath me.
Is that similar? I feel like it is. The feeling was like being on the brink of sanity, very scary.


Oh yeah, I'm not proud of the drug use I am doing, but I do have a lot of fun. :-)

Sort of.  Nothing was a part of me.  Sometimes it would feel like I was watching a badly edited movie with garbled sound that I couldn't remember the beginning of.  Things were confused for each other, or just not there - like the whole world suddenly went on mute.    Or..we'd be out somewhere and I wouldn't realize how I got there.   Or I would...but all at once.  Or I'd remember seeing things happening but think someone else did them.  I had trouble remembering my name or where I was from.  To the point that I would agree to being someone else, and then play it off when I realized what had happened.    

On the other hand, it was very serene.  I wasn't worried, I didn't think that anything was wrong.  I wasn't anything at all.  Just totally dead stick man, lol.  I didn't care that any of that was happening, it seemed like it was always the way it was, at the time.  I didn't care what I'd done.  Like things had never been any other way.  I'm a really nice guy, and I was fast tracking ,maxing out my points, I followed the rules - and I had a genuine concern for the people who lived around our little rock...but I was getting increasingly violent and dismissive in routine searches.  To the point that I did two patrols with the bolt taken out of my saw before my squad leader pushed the issue to my co. I spent a few weeks back in comms pushing paper talking to a counselor, lying about the extent of the problem, minimizing it...and then they flew me back to the real world to see a specialist.  Then I spent a year trying to convince them to let me keep my job and trying to get my record amended to leave out some of the worst parts - but that, combined with other injuries I'd been piling up as a groundpounder, eventually meant that I couldn't be in the infantry anymore.  

The whole time I was on rearguard and I had the barracks pretty much to myself so while I was being processed out I just went full on binge drinking dirtbag.  I got lost once wandering around germany, drunk as shit in a sweatshirt..in the snow... and they thought I'd gone awol, lol.  It was all just a huge joke to me.  Started dating one of the specialists that interviewed me (ended up marrying her and having my first kid - so there was an upshot to this).  All in all, the whole thing was bizarre.  I spent the next couple of years in a pretty unstable state.  The most pronounced symptoms faded with time as expected but it left little holes in me, I guess, fundamentally changed who I was.  My family didn't recognize me and that marriage fell apart.  Tried to get back in, twice.  When you do a bunch of shit not feeling, when you get back to something resembling a sound state of mind..there's an incredible sense of shame and self disgust that comes at you all at once.  Even more for things you worry you might have done that you can't remember, that no one has the heart to tell you that you did.  Or the things they do tell you, that are funny to them and horrible to you. The bad way to handle that..the way I handled it, is to distance yourself from anyone who knew you, or knew things they could tell you.  To reject treatment.  

All of this, and other things, came to a head one night.  I was alone in my apartment feeling sorry for myself, I got all dolled up, grabbed my sks, went into the bathroom, and spent a long time crying into the mirror like a bitch...trying to work up the courage to pull the trigger.  I didn't have it.  It would just prove that I was an even bigger fuckup than I already was, a coward who would rather leave than face the consequences of his actions.  So I went to the bar instead, got too wasted to see, and collapsed into a plastic chair outside.  That's when a big red blur on the other side of the table said "Thank you for your service".  The current wife.  She put me back together.  She'd stay up way too late on a workday while I poured out my soul.  She'd hold my head in her hands while I cried..even if I was crying about another woman.  She put up with me screaming incomprehensible shit at night, and..once, I tried to strangle her in my sleep.  So, she convinced me to go down to the VA and get back in treatment.  She got me smoking weed again, I'd quit when I joined, to mellow me out.  She introduced me to her family..bunch of super murrican born again christians, lol.  All they saw when they looked at me was what she saw.  Even when I told them some of who I actually was, and what I'd actually done.  They really believed in that whole radical forgiveness thing that people preach but rarely follow.  I volunteered at their church for a few years, and it was more of the same there.  People saw what they saw.  Eventually, if you want to, you can become the person that others give you space to be. 

She gave me back everything I'd lost.  Myself, family..eventually, a daughter.  Then another, then two sons, lol.  To the point where, If you didn't know me or I didn't tell you, it never even happened.   She kept us from being beggars while I transitioned to a different career that I was pretty bad at in the beginning.  I originally got into ag as a suggestion that growing a garden might help me to cultivate more than just tomatoes.  A stillness of mind, my zen.  Then it was community gardening, and then it was a demo farm in south florida..just me sort of spreading outward and reconnecting with people.  Doing things for other people, and just generally being around them, has this tendency to make you forget about your own issues in my experience.  Meanwhile, she's just this impossibly certain optimist.  Bleeding out money, I'm cashing in every cd I have, selling off property...and all she sees is how much people love to come out to my little garden, and how different I am explaining to them how it all works and how it can help to solve this or that issue.  How sweet the strawberries are.  How colorful the the swedes get.  Eventually we figured it out, and removed the financial stressor, lol.

I'll probably have nightmares until the day I day, Ive shared a bit of that (and all of this, pieces here and there, on the boards) and I'll never stop regretting how I destroyed relationships that I can't put back together...and sometimes...I do a little check around me to make sure I am where I think I am, when I think I am, make sure I remember how I got there...but...where I'm at is night and day to where I came from.  None of this happened fast, it's coming up on twenty years in the making. All of that...and I still have nothing but the most generic advice.  Take your meds, lean into what's good, allow yourself to believe in people who believe in you...accept their help, and their criticism, when they offer it.  All you really have to do is hold the line.  One of my favorite tunes sums it up.  

Help won't help tomorrow if you give up today.

Heavy stuff.  It's no wonder you adore your wife.  You found the human you needed when you met her.  I am in awe.

I guess maybe the saying rings with some truth - When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

Here's to hoping that you have many years of raising those kids and enjoying and growing from a relationship that you weren't looking for and didn't expect to find.

I may be a tad jealous.