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Grocery.

Feeling a little drained of my writing juice again. One must push on, though. We don’t get better or accomplish anything by sitting on our laurels. Now I am at the point of writing in multiple drafts before I hit my groove and finish one. Maybe I finish this on this sentence, or maybe I go to another draft and keep writing. One will be finished.

I’ve felt I was beginning to ramble a bit there but I think that is a good thing. Sometimes I still ramble, and sometimes I am still really uncomfortable and just don’t feel mentally healthy. A thing that I no longer feel uncomfortable about is going into grocery stores.

Something happened after I lost my marbles. I was terrified of grocery stores. I think the most interesting thing about it is I have always been able to explain it — I even owned it when it was happening. I would refuse to go to grocery stores alone and be very uncomfortable in them. I’m pretty sure when Alex visited me in Hawai’i we only went to ABCs and the like. Mom did the grocery shopping.

I have not been able to explain completely why, but the repetition of all the items made me feel really uncomfortable.

I’d hazard to say it was almost like a form of claustrophobia? There’s plenty of room in grocery stores so that is the worst way to explain it. I felt like all the products on the shelves and produce in the baskets were aggressive. Like they were an army encroaching with knives lodged in their teeth to pounce on me. That was a terribly oppressive feeling to be getting from Aunt Jemima, Mr. Peanut, & the Green Giant.

I felt like shopping carts were warthogs snorting and charging at me. When a squeaky wheel went by it would summon a twitch.

I would still at times have thoughts that the people handing out food samples might want to poison me.

This was after getting out of Kahi Mohala, this was after starting therapy, this was just an every day thing that I had to deal with and fight against. It lasted up until around five or six years ago as well. I have Megan to thank for helping me through it because those feelings don’t come up any more. I used to have even more that I can’t even remember and am happy to be so far removed from the ordeal now that I don’t.

Megan accomplished this feat in the sweetest of ways, too. She would just softly nudge me to go to the grocery store for one thing. In and out. Just continually dip my feet in. I think there was one day where Megan was out of town and I needed to get more than one thing. If I remember correctly she stayed with me on the phone and walked me through the aisles so that I didn’t lose myself in there.

That’s certainly a laughable matter, a grown man getting lost in a grocery store — but I wasn’t laughing at the time. It was a matter that needed to be taken seriously and I needed to keep myself grounded and focused. Otherwise I very well could have just lost myself in an abyss of madness again. Who knows what I could have done the second time, and I surely would have broken my probation, therefore giving me a cool one-hundred-twenty years.

I can’t remember exactly how the DA came up with that one, but I think I remember it having to do with my plea deal then being broken at that point, so the assault would revert to being on a police officer — and they would have the ability to double the max sentence of all crimes committed. That would be a really hairy situation to put myself in over beef jerky looking at me the wrong way.

It’s my awareness about these feelings and the fact that they were unhealthy that differentiated me from the person who makes an irreversible scene. That’s it.

I think that’s something that some people don’t realize about mental illness. I am much more balanced now that I’m far removed from my substance abuse and mental break with reality. For the longest time, though,  I was just on the verge of cracking again.

This was before I got on medication, I was still refusing my diagnosis of being bi-polar. Let’s be honest here too — these things I  was dealing with go a bit beyond bi-polar anyways.

Megan’s small pushes in the direction of getting myself acclimated with them was perfect, though. She wouldn’t ever belittle me or make fun of me for it, but she would totally call out my nonsense and say that it was something I needed to work on to function. That I would need to go to the grocery store at times because she wouldn’t be able to go for me.

When I write it out like that I feel like it may make her sound a bit motherly. She definitely wasn’t motherly. At that time it was more like an embarrassed girlfriend wondering what cuckoo she had gotten herself stuck with. I needed every bit of that.

Megan would often make me laugh at all the ridiculous stuff that coming out of my insanity would cause me to do. The fear of grocery stores sticks out to me most of all — and the others were so minute that I would have to ask her, I have forgotten.

This is another time where I am not sure what the meaning is, but damnit I am going to try and find one, and it’s going to be about conquering your fears. I picked this draft because I just needed to pick something. I had a fear that I wasn’t going to be able to write a full article because I haven’t in a couple days and lost a bit of my spark for it.

Here I am nine-hundred-ninety-five words in. Just a few more to go and I have a full piece to edit and post in the morning. Just like my fear of grocery stores. Conquering it started small but then it grew into something more and more. Until the journey to the end becomes so overbearing compared to the fear of the beginning that you end up seeing the end much sooner than you may have thought.

It’s really nice to set the mind to conquering a fear, and then doing it.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms.
Featured Photo by Trevor Elms ©2016
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Pops.

This isn’t something I was intending to write yet. I’m going to be honest though, I was drinking and I got to thinking about him so couldn’t help myself. Don’t worry. I don’t write inebriated for the most part — I will start a draft, close it, and finish it another time as I am now.

My Pops, my Dad, my Father, my Hero, my Man, my Idol, my Map; has saved my life.

Probably more than I can recall. I’m sure he knows more than I do. This is about the one time, though. The one time he had a conversation with me that I know he remembers maybe more than any other.

I’ve heard it a lot of times from his perspective, but I’m not sure yet I’ve shared it from mine. This will be the closest in the timeline yet that I have written about — to when I lost my mind.

Kahi Mohala
The courtyard my family and I threw a football together in, at Kahi Mohala. Photographer unknown.

I was still in the mental hospital at this point, Kahi Mohala. It is a facility that I volunteered (was deftly convinced) to put myself in after being bailed out of jail, in tow of my Mother. I remember trying to hide from the “Yakuza” in the car seat — backed all the way down so nobody could see me, on the way there. It wasn’t even just on the way there. We stopped at another facility beforehand that didn’t have the capacity? Or something. Before that we went to the Punchbowl memorial. That is when I remember realizing I was being “followed”, though it wasn’t even the tenth time I’d made that realization in the preceding few days.

If you go to the memorial today, I remember signing the guest book. It was 2008. If the page is still there I may have signed it Trevor, Trayber, Travor, Trebor, or otherwise. It would have been December 24th.

That and my soap totem are a story for another day, though.

I remember my Pops and I sitting in some furniture. It was on the other side of some glass, with an enclosed garden beyond it. There was a, if I remember, budless tree surrounded by rocks within the garden.

I sat in the chair, facing parallel with the glass on its right side. I cannot remember the color — but the pattern was raised, and consistent. It created a sense of comfort.

Pops sat nearest to me in the corner of a sofa. The sofa was placed in a ninety-degree rotation of the chair, facing to view out the glass. It was of the same fabric. I need to place the scene very deliberately because that is the last I can remember of it.

Everything else I can remember is the pure intensity in his eyes.

I wrote earlier that I was deftly convinced to volunteer myself unto this place. It couldn’t have been seventy-two hours after that — I decided I was perfectly sane and should be released. Pops’ entire mission was to convince me not only to stay, but that I wanted to stay, and he succeeded.

He remembers the exact words he used with much more lucidity than I. What is in my memory though is that he made me feel like I needed the people in that place. Not only for my future as a functioning adult in society, but as a person.

Pops remembers convincing me to stay because I needed the doctors to tell the lawyers and the judge that I was just some kid that made a mistake and needed to learn from it. I remember him convincing me that those doctors, and those nurses, actually had my best interests in heart.

That I was safe. That I was where I should be and that I wasn’t okay.

It was like a pinhole camera. My Dad was the light and he found his focus, holding on for dear life — my dear life. I was not at this time capable of looking outside my insanity. I was still bopping to random Beyonce songs on the radio and drawing really uninteresting tribal shapes thinking I was some sort of messiah.

He broke through, though. I can only explain how by the intensity of the love that he had within his eyes when he spoke to me. I’m not sure I have ever seen so much concern and care in a man’s eyes before. It makes me feel like a better person just thinking about it now. The connection he made with me, and with his eyes in that time — legitimately brought me into a moment of true, realistic, clarity.

I don’t remember what it looked like, but I know he does. He’s told me about it. That he could see my body language, facial expression, and own eye contact — return to normal for just the slightest of moments. Enough for it to register.

It wasn’t shortly after I went into an existential conversation about how the Devil & Angels live among us and I am a combination of them both realized — or some such nonsense of the like.

I stayed, though. Without much more complaint or argument.

Details of my time in there are still rather fuzzy for me, but I did stay, and did behave; as well as have a number of the patients enjoy spending time with me. I did the activities and talked about my feelings and must have balanced out a bit — because I was out a week or so later.

Another powerful memory I have about that place was leaving it. I can remember how satisfying it was to finally smoke a cigarette again. To smoke it just outside the premises before getting in the car with my Mom to a hotel room. It gave the experience such finality to me, at least the Kahi Mohala portion of it.

I still wasn’t right for a long time, and I’m not sure if I ever will be. There’s definitely a lot less wrong with me today maybe than ever before in my life. I owe a lot of that to all the support I got from everyone throughout the ordeal.

In this piece though, in this moment in time, I owe it all to Pops.

Thanks for being there for me, Dad. Thank you for finding a way to get through to me that day. I’m not sure anyone else could have.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured photograph taken by Derek Lofgreen ©2013
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Friendship.

I want to preface this piece by saying that I have a good amount of friends and I care for them all deeply. Moreso than I can express. This is about one friend, though. The one whom through most length in my life has always accepted me for who I am and loved me regardless. Without him I do not know what I would do.

Not shortly after my mental break with reality I told my friend Alex Thiessen.

Alex Thiessen is not just a friend. Alex Thiessen is the closest and best friend I have ever had in my life. He is not the only person in this category, but he does have a category of his own within it. Just as each of my friends does.

Alex Thiessen literally owns a piece of me, and not by choice.

He is someone who I am uncontrollably myself around. Whom when we do not speak for days, weeks, or months at a time — it feels as nothing. We are the same as always. Like a rock in the sea. Life bashes against it and it changes over time, but in the end it is always the rock. Ever the rock.

It was not but 60 seconds into the phone call that Alex told me he was flying himself to Hawai’i.

You have to understand — I was a nineteen year old recently bailed out of jail/mental rehabilitation center dragger on, and he was an eighteen year old hard working, putting himself through college badass.

Friendship 3
Pictured from left to right: Neal Radia, Jack Russel, Kisa Vanderford, Austin Haigh, Trevor Elms. Photo taken by Neal Radia in the Lexus February 1st, ©2009.

Alex didn’t think twice about dropping everything to come and see me. And I didn’t have to wait long at all. If I am remembering correctly, I was able to pick Alex up in the used Lexus that was purchased with one of the last drops of my college savings — which wasn’t going to legal fees, less than a week later. That car was too good for me.

One of my favorite things about Alex is that whenever I get around him I just want to spend time with him. We were always using our imaginations and playing trading card games. We can talk about video games, Pokémon, comic books, really any kind of media that until recently wasn’t all that accepted in pop-culture — for hours.

Even though Alex and I are odd ducks that got into real trouble in our teenage years, we never got into any with each other.

I think, mutually, we never wanted to be a bad influence on each other and we never wanted our parents to dislike us spending time together. So when Alex and I spend time together, we spend time together. It’s almost like no one else is there, because honestly I don’t think in those moments they are.

I think something that people don’t understand about true friendship is that it is true love.

I have a relationship very similar to Alex that I have with my wife. I tell him everything. Everything. 

Friendship 2
Photo taken by Alex Thiessen in Honolulu ©2009

Alex is one of the friendships in my life where I have true love for him, and him for me. We always try to end the phone call by telling each other we love one another. There is nothing subtextually or overtly sexual, but I love Alex Thiessen with every fiber of my being. He is one of the greatest people I have ever gotten to know in my life and we have both helped each other improve as human beings over our time together.

The morning after Alex arrived, the first thing we did was take the car for a walk to go to the rental store.

I can’t remember if it was a Blockbuster or not but I do remember that we grabbed a few movies and video games. The games being Prince of Persia (2008), and Infinite Undiscovery. We also grabbed an unhealthy amount of junk food and soda.

This was further rehabilitation for me, support.

Something that I believe anyone from any walk of life who goes through a hard time needs. I had a lot of support from a lot of people, which a great many people unfortunately are not afforded — and that is a tragedy. There is a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy that goes on in a person like myself’s head & life when we do not seek and gain the support we need to function.

Alex’s support was exactly what I needed at that time.

I’ve been trying to find a meaning within the words to end this piece on and support is the word to focus in on. I could probably write 30,000 more words just about Alex, but I think being as concise as possible can more often than not get the point across most clearly.

Please support your fellow humans, you do not know who they are or what they have gone through.

I feel if we spend more time supporting one another and less time judging one another then maybe we can accomplish more than we already have as a species — and that is a pretty cool idea to think about.

Give a homeless person extras while walking to your car, give a glass of water to a person working in your home, give a person who looks alone just a little bit of your time and introduce yourself. Just a little can do a lot. I have seen it and experienced it myself.

Support and give to your fellow human beings, you never know when they need it most. Give them friendship. Give them love.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured Photos taken by Kathleen Thiessen & Edited by Trevor Elms
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Rude Awakening.

This was a writing prompt for my writing class in my freshman and only year at the University of Hawai’i. I didn’t even complete but a semester.

September 22nd, 2008 — It’s interesting to look back and see that I was already in a downward spiral at the time. I was very confused and had no idea what to do with myself. So I was taking the time to explore life, my body, and my mind in all ways that I could get a sense of adventure — as well as experience beyond the walls of accepted society.

The picture featured in this post was taken 5 days before the writing of this poem. I was not remotely sober. This was just months before my mental break with reality.

Rude Awakening

Not once did I have a second thought,
I would succeed!
I’ll show them.

Now I sweat as I sleep,
shivering, shirtless, and scared.

Afraid all I ever told myself…
were excuses for my unbalanced, unregimented,
LAZY
ways.

I thought I was mature and ready,
but seems my bones are all that’s fully grown.
I feel disgrace, disappointment… and distant from home.
I realized how much I missed my own mother,
While having to conquer a fever alone.

I know what I have to do,
it’s quite simple and straightforward,
the question is not if I can,
it’s if I will.
I can try.
That’s all I’ve ever said… it amounted to nothing but lying in bed.

I hate myself for these ways I’ve created!
it’s as if I’m not failing my desires aren’t sated!

Never interested; always dreaming.
seething, teeming with ideas.
useless to those who don’t listen.
So what does a lazy troublemaker do?
He breaks habits and carves his way through.

I still haven’t broken some of those habits, and I certainly didn’t at the time of this writing, but I was at least acknowledging them at the time.

Thank you for reading.

©2008 Trevor Elms
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Waking Up Bipolar.

“I am not bipolar, no matter how many doctors have attempted to diagnose me with it.”

– Myself, February 12th, 2009.

I am going to use this as a bit of a writing prompt for how things change over time. How a person can grow up and come to realize that just believing in something hard enough, isn’t going to make it true. This is a part of my story.

I am not bipolar. That was a fact.

The thing is, I am bipolar. I just wouldn’t or couldn’t admit it to myself due to a sense of pride, or something larger. A feeling that after my mental break with reality that I could still be a normal person. It was just a one time thing, I could pick myself up and go on going on in life like everything was normal.

And I did, and it was — except for that it wasn’t.

After completing out-patient and probationary treatment I didn’t take anything or talk to anyone for my bipolar for years. I kept at my job and my relationships with my then girlfriend (now wife) and family continuing to find opportunity after opportunity to find work and succeed. To an onlooker from the outside looking in, I’m sure everything was normal. I’ve gotten good at that — normal.

It’s inside though. It’s the roller coaster of two very associative emotions that constantly feed into each other in the worst of ways. I do not have typical bipolar, you see. I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression. I still have moments of mania, but it isn’t as frequent or as unmanageable as BP1. This is an extremely important distinction. Typically, with a lot of the anger I would regularly feel — I had just gotten used to hiding it from the rest of the world, or, at least not giving in to it outwardly. This would result in absolute eruptions about the smallest of things. In fact, I had two nicknames growing up, one “Meat”, which sticks to this day and came around purely because I don’t consider a meal a meal without it. The other however is less endearing, “Angry Man”.

I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression.

Angry Man came around when all stamping of every little micro-frustration just couldn’t be stamped down any more. I would erupt at something as small as someone asking me to pick up my things. I can’t think of a great example right now, because usually in those moments I could only see red and I no longer am able to think or control myself before I speak or act. It got me in trouble plenty of times.

My depression is not as strong as some other people, thankfully. It’s fairly easy for me to “ignore” in a way without medication. I used to like to describe myself in two ways. I had two emotions to share: ambivalence, or anger. The ambivalence is my depression. I just didn’t care, and don’t care about life and myself sometimes. Like it doesn’t matter.

But then, things all came crashing to a head one day.

I can’t remember the exact day precisely, but I know it was about two to two-and-a-half years ago. It was about 3:00 in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. Then a thought crossed my mind that hadn’t in quite some time.

“I should just kill myself. I know I have the balls to follow through, why the fuck not?”

This was, if I am remembering correctly, after a night where Megan and I did not get along very well. I believe there was something trivial she did that set me off and then we preceded to escalate on each other. This is a low point in my life because I think I came very close to hitting her that night.

So that exchange, coupled with my inherent nihilism and depression fueled by anger gave me the thought. Why not? There’s plenty of reasons why not that I don’t need to get into here, and what’s nice is I had plenty running through my head just after I asked myself that question. However that is a very serious question to ask oneself, for that to be a serious thought after nearly hitting my wife? I knew something was wrong with me.

So I went into the bedroom to wake Megan up and tell her I was concerned about myself.

Talking about my concern turned into “I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”, but it wasn’t that clear. It was a different kind of eruption that I’m really not all that used to. An absolute deluge of tears and blubbering facial contortion while huddled in the fetal position grasping at my wife like lost child.

It was that night I realized that maybe my ambivalence was also me just stamping down my depression as well, and that was the first of what could be some very bad eruptions ending in the worst kind that affects everyone who loves us.

The next morning I looked into my health insurance and found a psychologist with good reviews nearby. I found someone who I felt based purely on a few lines of text and other superficial nonsense could mesh with me — so I went for it. I mentioned my suicidal thoughts and made an appointment as soon as possible.

When I got to see him we hit the ground running on those thoughts to find out the why, and evolved from there. In just a few sessions we did in fact settle on bipolar which I had been previously diagnosed with. However he was the very first to mention bipolar 2, cite its differences, and how they are relevant to my behavior in every day life.

“I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”

My psychologist who I am still seeing about 4 times a year then referred me to my psychiatrist who worked with me on the long journey over a year through about 5 pills to find the exact one that would work for me. This is an adventure to say the least, and I will say that my prior drug history allowed me to have a very quick grasp on how different medications affected me. It also gave me a very clear idea of exactly the type of pill I wanted.

I wanted something that I could not feel or tell was in my system whatsoever. Couldn’t even tell a change in my behavior at all, but I wanted everyone else around me to be able to tell. And I found it, Trileptal, Oxcarbazepine, my magical Yin-Yang pill.

Magical is entirely the wrong word and right word at the same time.

Pills are not a magical fix for everything, or even anything. They aren’t magical and especially when it comes to mental health they are a tool in a wide breadth of tools within the box for someone to use. They do not and will not ever fix everything entirely, but they should if used correctly help make it easier for the person to function and be aware of themselves. I was even lucky in that I knew what I wanted and it only took me about 5 pills to get there. I just hope it doesn’t ever stop working.

Pills though are magical in that I often am truly far more in tune with my body and mind and am balanced to boot. Balance is something I have always really had difficulty with, and I always will. The balance that Oxcarbazepine has helped me be able to find along with family support has really made me feel like I am finally in a space where living in tandem with and being open about my bipolar is a healthy thing.

I just need our country and the world to understand that mental illness isn’t a disease that keeps us from being human, or functional, or caring. If there was less of a stigma maybe people would get more help.  I believe there is a vast majority of people out there with mental illness struggling because they are afraid of how they will be perceived. I can assure you it is much more freeing and healthy to just accept it and try to find a way to work with it.

This turned out to be much longer than I was originally intending, but it is an important subject to me.

I believe everyone should talk to a therapist, they don’t even need to be a psychologist.

We as imperfect human beings need an unbiased third party to just dump all our head trash that we don’t want to burden anyone else with. It’s unhealthy to keep those things inside — they can develop into worse problems if not taken care of.

So to bring this back around to the beginning, I went from being staunch about not being bipolar to coming to and understanding years later that it is okay to be so. If you need help, get it. Sometimes even if you don’t believe you need it.

National Suicide Help Line: Call 1-800-273-8255

Please call someone, anyone if you are having suicidal thoughts. Sometimes just talking to someone can make all the difference in the world.

©2017 Trevor Elms