Yes, that is me up there. I have always loved to read. Also: I have not given up on the giveaway! It will go up either today or tomorrow. This particular post doesn’t feel congruent with a happy giveaway; my apologies.

I just wanted to ‘fess up on some things, here.

I am so appreciative of everyone who writes to me and tells me that I am so strong and brave. Those two words hold tremendous power. Keep going! You’re doing great! (Which is, by the way, a print in my store, ahem.) At the same time, it makes me feel like a fraud.

Every morning, I fall out of bed because of the Clozapine. Every morning, I find that my entire top is wet from drooling, which is another side effect. I have been having so much trouble with cognitive functions, and yet I have already taken so much time off this year that Dr. M says that I just need to DEAL with my impaired abilities so that I can go on. The delusions haven’t entirely gone away, but it’s like my brain doesn’t care enough to fight for Reality anymore. Why not live in this nice house with a man and a dog? Why does it matter whether or not I recognize them?

And oh, the stress. I am constantly at the end of my rope. I have raised my voice briefly a handful of times, and that bothers me. I am just so angry, you see. I wake up in rages. The rage spikes if I knock something over; if I hear something that scrapes at my nerves; when I realize that I can’t type correctly.* I am also perpetually tired.

So I just wanted to let you know. Because living like this, with this disorder, is not easy. I look it in the eye, but sometimes it gets to be too much and I go out and smoke a cigarette. I’m just a woman who snaps and yells and cries (a lot of crying) and doesn’t know how to deal with this — this schizoaffective disorder. Schizophrenia plus bipolar disorder. It exhausts me to just write the words.

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*this sis what it loks like when I actuall rype without going back and retyping things. when i just tqkh i as lI I normally do. This is why it talks tforever to correct and post things so ghthtye they o normal. cognitive function, hqn d to hkey coorctiof.

Here’s the weekly round-up of things I found particularly interesting.

• I met Kimberley at one of Rachel Cole’s Retreatshops, and this particular recipe on her gorgeous blog, The Year in Food, (really — go check it out) sounds like heaven. White peaches and asparagus? Yes, please.
• This post, from Two or Three Little Birds, jumps off by talking about the new Sarah Polley movie, which I am on tenterhooks about because I love all of the movies Sarah Polley has directed — and then meanders, softly and with tremendous love, into discussing the myriad ways in which Rebecca has relied on family mythology to act as memory. Highly recommended read.
• Ready for another summer salad? Oh So Pretty shares her Watermelon Summer Salad with us here. I reckon I’ll be heading down to the market for a melon soon.
• I think I’m late to the party on this, but this cover of “Shake It Out” (Florence & the Machine), sung by a children’s choir, is devastatingly gorgeous. Try not to cry during the line, “It’s hard to dance/with the devil on your back/so shake him off.”
• Fellow bibliophiles, do not be angry with me if you spend forever browsing this website known as BOOK/SHOP, or if you then commence spending the remainder of this year’s paychecks on reading materials and gorgeous table bookshelves that you MUST HAVE.

Have a gorgeous weekend. Come back on Monday for a special giveaway!

(Yes, there is a ghost face of my face in the above photograph.)

The new site is up. I turned 30 last weekend. I am still mired in dissociation, remnants of delusion, confusion. Dreams and reality seep into one another. Nightmares. The new medication makes me collapse out of bed — rather, I have to spend the first ten minutes or so unable to stand upright, but must be hunched over, and when I speak my tongue is a heavy and useless muscle. I take my morning pills. While I wait for them to work, my mouth fills with saliva. Drooling is a common side effect in the first few weeks. I wake up and the shoulder of whatever I’m wearing is positively sopping. Glamorous, I know. The first hour of  my day is useless. Clozaril requires bloodwork every week for the first six months. There is only one pharmacy in San Francisco that is certified to dispense Clozaril, and only a week’s worth at a time. It has not been easy, this month or more of feeling lost and confused, but I am grateful for the friends who were able to come visit me for my birthday, which was a beautiful experience. If only the fatigue and grogginess could slip away and leave me alert and whole. Still, I have hope. Hope, the thing with wings.

A huge thank you to the talented Jo Klima of The Darling Tree, who helped me with this renovation. I was concerned that the time difference between us would cause the transition to take up far too much time, but the site was really only on Maintenance Mode for a day or two. I think it looks beautiful. Let’s all give Jo a hand, shall we?

I know that there is so much more that I want to say, but I am tired, too tired to explain or say those things, and so I will leave it for now, and thank you for your patience. There is a giveaway coming up. Oh, and there is a possibility that my RSS feed needs to be re-subscribed to, so check to make sure you’re up to speed with the new site.

All my love. All, all my love.

• Sas writes about the complicated nature of forgiveness.
• Give me your hand.
• Traci discusses whether “beautiful” portraits are any less artistic than the ones folks don’t consider as such.
• Are you “needy,” or starving?
• I’ve been learning CSS and Photoshop skills through CSS Pretty, Pugly Pixel’s amazing e-course. Fantastic stuff.

I think I’m getting better. Not all the way yet. Not even halfway, maybe. But a little better.

Some of my friends are frequently frustrated by my need to walk everywhere as though I were horribly late for lunch with the Queen. To me, walking has been a means to an end. I don’t drive. I don’t ride a bike. I walk, and walking is how I get places; I do it as quickly as possible, to get to where I need to go.

Walking has also frequently been prescribed to me as a low-impact form of exercise, due to my physical ailments. I always smiled and nodded, said okay, nodded and smiled, and then proceeded to do nothing but sit in front of my computer all day.

I don’t know what caused me to start really walking. Part of it was buying this gadget called the Fitbit Flex, which tracks my daily activity, sleep, and food intake; such a gadget has been keeping me fairly honest. But I’ve also started walking as a way of looking. Often I bring my SX-70 with me; other times it’s just me, wandering around with no particular destination in mind.

It’s good for my mind right now, I think. I start the Clozapine today. I don’t have a lot to say, and I still feel reticent even around my closest friends, so forgive me if I take a little hiatus from posting. I might post pictures, though. Love.

I spent last Saturday at a Retreatshop led by Rachel W. Cole, which was a gorgeous experience, and quite eye-opening. Here Rachel describes three recent well-fed days, including that particular Retreatshop on her Well-Fed Woman Retreatshop Tour; try to catch a seat at the table if you live in one of the six cities left. I’ve also been using her guided meditations for sunrise and sunset, which you can download from this post — she has such a soothing voice!

When I’m feeling better, I’d like to have a dinner party inspired by Smitten Kitchen’s sangria shindig.

Justine Musk talks about mastery and soul-making.

So I’m probably going to spend an afternoon wandering around on Girl Crush, which interviews amazing women. And my goodness, the web design is spot on.

This post from Alexandra (Franzen) is full of amazing stuff, but I particularly love the free I AM worksheet available for download near the bottom, which helped me to construct the short(ish) bio you see in the right-hand column.

If you’ve got a three-day weekend, I hope you have a lovely one that’s full of rest. Be well, loves.

It’s been fifteen days of delusion at this point. Frankly, I’m exhausted. My mind trying to keep itself from spinning into terror is tiring. Work is tiring. Being normal at home and behaving normally with the dog and husband is tiring, not to mention being normal in front of people who are not the dog and husband.

I turn thirty on June 8, which is approximately two weeks from now. Two of my closest friends are flying in from New York to be with me, which is its own kind of miracle. But I worry that when they arrive, I won’t really know them. They’ll be as unreal as C and Daphne currently are. I won’t trust that they are who they say they are, and therefore I won’t be able to be affectionate without feeling a deep, aching sense of fraudulence.

I spent Monday night sobbing on the floor of the dining room, feeling lonely as all get-out because I don’t belong where I’m supposed to.

Dr. M has suggested that I try Clozapine. I remember Clozapine. I first heard about it the first time I was hospitalized, in 2002; it was what the patients with schizophrenia took. However, it is also shown to cause agranulocytosis, which causes a dangerous decrease in the number of white blood cells, and has caused fatalities in some patients. The FDA has only approved Clozapine, also known as Clorazil, for patients willing and able to regularly go in for blood draws and neutrophil counts. It has five black box warnings. And it’s usually used as a last resort, which means me — I’ve tried every atypical antipsychotic on the block. Dr. M told me to think about it. It is, in most ways, my choice, and I don’t know what to do. Do I keep living like this, and potentially let the illness (literally) eat away at my brain? Potentially live for more weeks, or months, without feeling love toward my most loved ones? Exhaust myself over and over again to keep up a front?

What do I do?

I thought I’d say a little bit about my comments policy. I haven’t addressed it before, but with all the kind notes people have been leaving on my virtual doorstep, I feel I need to say something.

Right now, I don’t respond to comments. I read every single comment that is left here. I often copy comments into what a friend of mine calls a “Win Book,” where I keep compliments and sweet words for those days when I feel like a total waste of flesh and bone. I do notice when people come here and comment repeatedly; I think of you, those repeat commenters, as friendly voices in the crowd. I appreciate your words deeply, and it is partially the comments and emails I receive that keep me going on with this blog.

However, I don’t respond to comments for a very simple reason: I don’t have time. I know that some bloggers would argue with this reasoning, giving me flak about how one “makes time” and such, but I honestly struggle with the amount of time I’m given in a day. I get into bed at 8. (Not kidding.) I wake up early, but have only three hours before I must start working at my day job, and I get less time if I need to commute to the office, which I do once a week; in that period, I do anything from blogging to working on my next book to going on a long, head-clearing walk. By the time I’m off the clock at the end of the day, I’m completely exhausted, and often in no mood to look at the computer anymore. I take a shower instead, or read magazines. I chat with friends. I talk to C. I make dinner and eat it. So I don’t respond to comments.

If the fact that I don’t directly respond to a comment bothers you, please don’t feel obligated to write one. I really and sincerely appreciate them; I really and sincerely appreciate your time and your energy. If you have a direct question that you’d like me to address, feel free to email me. I’m slow about email sometimes, but I try my best.

Thank you, all of you, for reading and for visiting. I am deeply grateful.

NOTE: No, mom, I did not get a tattoo. The above picture is of a temporary tattoo, which came with a purchase I made a few months ago. So don’t worry.

The last week has been challenging. You might think that living with the same chronic mental illness for nineteen years would make it more understandable. More logical. You’d start to look out for the same signs, the same signals, You’d settle on one medication regimen, and that one set of pills would have you going for life. All of this could not be further from the truth; at least, it hasn’t been for me. My illness has changed shapes. It takes off masks and puts on new ones. It alters my metabolism so that the pills I use to fight it become less and less efficacious, until I’m taking ten pills of the same medication to get to the bare minimum of therapeutic levels. I live with hallucinations for years, and then they become quiet and fleeting, leaving me with delusions and louder symptoms of schizophrenias. Maybe it’s like running on a treadmill. Some days, it goes fast. Some days, it goes slowly. Some days it doesn’t move at all, and I find myself standing, not knowing whether to get off or run in place to keep up my strength. And one day, the darn thing just decides to go backwards. Next it’ll turn into a eagle, and fly above our house in search of prey.

So I’m trying to protect myself in the best way that I can. I’m working with people on brainstorming contingency plans, and I’m reading blogs like Sustainably Creative for tips on how to do my job and keep up my work while allowing myself the space to rest. I asked my supervisor if I could start work an hour earlier, working from 9 to 6 so that I can have that built-in hour for walks, naps, or sipping tea on the couch while I stare out the window — whatever my wise mind tells me it needs at the moment.

On another note, I bought my first iMac (refurbished from Myservice, a company that I can’t recommend highly enough for Mac-related repairs and sales) for my home office, and I’m completely and utterly smitten. Oh my gosh! The HUGE screen! I’m in heaven, folks.

Am I totally asymptomatic right now? No. Am I functional? Yes. And I’d love to keep being functional, walking slowly on that treadmill, and taking care of myself.

You take care of you, too. Be well.