The Rumination Room

The first time the concept of rumination was introduced to me – as something not concerning bovine digestion – I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Nor could I stop thinking about the irony of not being able to stop thinking about thinking too much.

In clinical terms, rumination is the constant going over and over, in one’s mind, things that have happened – actions taken, behavior displayed, decisions made – or things about which one is trying to reach a decision or plan a follow-through. Or…just…things. And the constant thinking about thereof.

That intentional terrible grammar, I think, underscores how rumination can mess with one’s mind and mental faculties.

I was 63 when the diagnoses of PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder were finally added to my lifelong chronic depression and anxiety. This discovery brought with it more than a dollop of relief and insight, as it served to explain – finally – the debilitating mess that had been my life: The suicidal yearnings. The fear of speaking. The loathing, sometimes, for all humans. The physical ailments that seemingly had no cause. THE INABILITY TO STOP CHANGING MY MIND!

That last one spoke the loudest among the many mental minions that manipulated my mind. It, even alone, explained decades of my hitherto inexplicable behavior.

The quiet quitter. That was me. Truth be told, it’s still me.

You might think that learning you have yet another mental health disorder would affect you somewhat negatively but, when you’re given a name to make real and identifiable what has so long confused and tortured you; when it is described as an actual thing that could explain (mostly to your parents, sadly dead at this point, given I was in my 60s) your behavior and the uncertain, wobbly track your life had followed; despite their appeals that you act sensibly (“You’re too intelligent to be acting like that.”), you are relieved. Not happy, because you’re never happy. You’ve never been happy. You have no hope that you ever will be happy. This assurance has an evil counterpart that I’m sure many have confronted. Maybe, just MAYBE, you will finally find happiness, if you’re able to recognize it after its eluding you for a seeming eternity. And, if you’re brave, you may allow yourself to feel happy – maybe just a tiny bit – and let down all the protective guardrails and barricades you’ve constructed around your heart and soul over many years.

Happiness. Feel it. But be prepared for the sidekick of this newfound happiness to sashay in on your suddenly good time. His (or her) job is the arbitrary placement of landmines across the swath of your emotional landscape. Pay him or her no heed if you can. It is this evil accomplice who will try to thwart you, deploying the landmines to shatter the gestating belief that happiness is yours. And, once you have made the acquaintance of this outright asshole, you will forever question what seems like something good happening in your life. You are afraid to lower your shield and dare to believe that – hey! – maybe this time it will be OK. And, maybe it will, but you will never fully be able to enjoy it because there’s roughly a 50/50 chance you’ll step on a random (yet strategically-placed just for you) landmine.

So, just when things could, ostensibly, improve, rumination sets up shop and you mull, and you question and you worry. You’ve forgotten how to trust…your emotions, your efforts, even your own eyes.

My first thought when I was told about my Borderline Personality Disorder was that I wished my parents were still alive so I could provide them the proof that my emotional and mental troubles were a real and actual thing. I wanted them to know it was no failing on their part that had condemned me to an unhappy, unfulfilled and tenuous life, ever teetering on the brink of something bad, though not certain what it was. Sometimes deeply engulfed within the bad thing, yet still uncertain as to its cause, what it was or even how it was making me feel.

I just didn’t know.

And I know I didn’t know because I never stopped thinking about it all. No matter what was happening in my life at the time, I know I couldn’t go as much as a day without mulling over my mental health in my head. Trying to understand what it was I wanted or didn’t want. What would make me happy? Why had I been made like this? It was so unfair. I knew no one else living a life wasted as I believe mine has often been.

“She’s too smart for her own good.” I heard that condemnation lobbed in my direction, though I took it as a compliment. Being too smart for one’s own good stood in stark opposition to the view that I was too smart to be the way I was. Which is it? I’m so smart I should be normal or I’m too smart to be abnormal?

Well, “normal”, whatever that is, is something I have never been. I was normal for me, I suppose but, in a crowd of regular, run-of-the-mill, socially-adapted people of my approximate age (throw in gender if you’d like), I both stood out like a sore thumb and disappeared into the carpet or wallpaper so as not to leave even a whisper of my presence. My footprint was not only not carbon; it was, for the most part, non-existent.

When I received the PTSD diagnosis, it was no surprise. I’d long imagined I had something like it though I associated it with war veterans and people who had been through real physical and mental hell. It seemed arrogant of me to appropriate the disorder for myself. Typically one may imagine (or so I imagine) that PTSD begets depression and anxiety; that these two mental health conditions are the response to trauma. I’m not sure about myself. From what I’ve been told about me, as early as infancy, I seemed to have been pretty depressed and ill-suited for this world. I hated everyone and cried if even the most well-intentioned person who wasn’t my parent touched me. Sometimes, my mother had to defer to my father in dealing with me at this tender age. I’ve been told that only he could calm me 100% of the time.

What followed, very soon thereafter, was the first traumatic episode. It’s my first memory. I was two. The next came at four, then there was a mad flurry of things I was told to think of as teasing, but they were humiliating and lasted for most of my childhood. I’ve been assured these, too, are part of my trauma. The worst, and most deeply traumatizing event of my younger years, occurred when I was 15. It affected me in ways that, even now – half a century later – still inform my moods, actions and reactions.

There’s no need to describe the details of these events that so affected me. Many people have experienced what seems to me much worse, and they are affected as they are affected. I may be made of less stern stuff because, even though I didn’t realize it then – other than something very upsetting – the combination and culmination of everything that happened in my life, to me, still packs a herculean wallop that can knock the wind out of me all these years later.

In the years that followed my being effectively traumatized, I lived life according to trauma. Everything I did, or aspired, how I responded or acted, how I spoke, how I dealt with other humans, all bore the scar of damage done, and done again, too many times to count. I recognized this in myself and, of course, I ruminated about it.

I’ve always written poetry as an outlet for all the emotions trapped within me; in fact, I won a few contests while in elementary school and was wild chuffed to see what I’d authored in the local newspaper.

It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I wrote my first song. You would think, what with all my ruminating, the connection would have been obvious, blatantly and screechingly. But, it was only a few years ago that I put these two realities together: The worst and most traumatic thing that happened, and would forever affect my life, happened when I was 15. In July, to be exact. I wrote the song in October. I thought it an excellent song, as did others to whom I sang it; so proud was I of it (and my guitar and vocal skills) that I sang it with a friend, harmonizing, at a school recital. So, it got a lot of traction and, yet, it was only a few years ago it hit me square in the face.

The song was about a girl committing suicide.

How had this not occurred to me? I’m very well-read and –informed on mental health issues and clinical conditions and it wasn’t as if I had been repressing memories of the trauma that summer of 1969, and I had, indeed, written the words. And sung the song many times. And, yet, I only realized, nearly 50 years later, that I’d written the song about me.

That’s how I’ve gone through life. Desperately wanting things to be different. Yearning for it but, through it all, wanting everything to end. Contemplating it. Praying for it. Thinking. Thinking. Always the ruminating.

I neglected to mention that, along with my diagnoses, at 63, of PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder, there was a third, something I knew intuitively and inherently because it lived within me. I didn’t know it had been accorded a specific category among the plethora of mental health disorders: suicidal ideation. So, add Suicidal Depression to my roster for further rumination.

It’s exhausting, the never-ending cyclic thought patterns. Nothing is ever achieved. Occasionally, I have sudden insights that move me to behave or think somewhat differently than is my norm, even (silly me) feel a modicum of hope but always, inevitably, it hits a dead end and I’m back in Rumination Room.

I write of my experiences not for any ‘poor me’ reasons. I don’t need sympathy or empathy or consoling. I’ve made it this far with very little help. I write because, occasionally, people experiencing similar emotions and concerns and mood troubles may read what I’ve written and realize they are not alone. All these abnormalities or exceptionalities are much more “out there” now. They are researched and studied, written about and applied.

I will complain, truth be told that, when I was young and going through all that I did (including 25 years of anorexia, but that’s another story), no one seemed to have a clue what was wrong with me. Not doctors; not therapists; not gynecologists; certainly not psychiatrists. It was a lonely, most confusing path.

But I’ve somehow made it through, and I have experiences to share and true sympathy to offer to those now suffering through similar life issues. Indeed, I have quite a few young people who share with me things about their mental health that they don’t discuss elsewhere, because they know I understand. No one, not even a psychiatrist - despite years of training and practice - can understand fully what it’s like to live in a tortured mind. We who do, gravitate toward each other, across generations. I don’t advise the young people who share their troubles with me. I certainly didn’t find a way NOT to be like this, but I understand and, sometimes, that’s all that’s needed to be of help.

Here I’ve mentioned the waste I often think my life has been, and wonder at its purpose. It seems pointless and unfair that I’ve lived these many years without a single one of my mental health problems being resolved, much less cured. But, then, someone who spoke to someone who told him or her that he or she would find an understanding spirit in me, contacts me and wants just to talk, I feel that, just maybe, that’s my purpose.

But I still ruminate the shit out of it.