Questions Not Answers

a heart pre-set to detonate

2009-08-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

I was going to write about some article I read in The New York Times the other day, when a dear dear friend of mine sent me this poem by Rick Hilles, called "Flashlight Stories." It is a long, beautiful poem, but I will share the two parts that resonated with me the most:

9. The Temple

Before they even knew what
it could do to you, they pulled back
my mother’s lovely midnight hair,
a moon and its reflection rising
at each temple, two strong men
pinned her down, put electrodes there,
a pincher here—cold metal on teeth
on tongue—and fired up the furnace

to her brain: the shock, electricity,

shrugging through her body, oh, oh,
she told me she heard the woman in the bed
beside her moan, as if on fire, already bending
at the knees. She still hears the woman screaming
sometimes at night, the screaming wakes her
and she says, herself, "My God, it’s me!"

10. Alarm

By your thirtieth year they say
it should manifest. If not, in most cases,
you have been spared.

But there are exceptions.

Even two years beyond my third decade
the dormant, snaky coil of DNA
might hiss itself

awake, snap its distorted spine
and strike. But my mother says: Honey
as long as you can point to
a reason you feel a certain way

you don’t have what I have. And even now
I am afraid I feel the alarm about to go off in me,
the harried beating in my neck’s

carotid artery, the green branching veins

inside my wrists. See now, if you can’t feel it here,

the second hand ticking its true course,

a heart pre-set to detonate.

(You can read the whole poem online here.)

I am struck not only by the way Hilles uses language, but also how true part 10 rings. It's something I've tried to write about before, though certainly not so eloquently, and something that still haunts me, especially when I'm having a bad day and just want to listen to this song on repeat. Sometimes I think I have seven or eight more years till I am out of the woods, but now I realize that is naivete--just like thinking a diagnosis, having a name, would change everything. It didn't and age won't. But I wonder if you just learn to live with it or learn how not to be scared by that possibility.

I am reminded of Christina Applegate, and how she got a double mastectomy when she found out she had breast cancer in one breast and had tested positively for one of the BRCA genes. For as much as I hate uncertainty, I don't know that I would do something similar if anything were ever available for mental illness.

Not to say the loss of body parts is not a big deal, especially parts of you so much equivocated with femininity in our society (I don't know if I could get a mastectomy unless that was the only way to prevent the cancer from metastasizing to the rest of my body), but messing with your mind seems quite different. Who knows how something like that could affect your personality? We already know that lobotomies and traumatic brain injuries can cause some similar problems.

Sometimes it's not the things we can't control so much as the things we think perhaps we can.

Unlike Huntingdon's Disease, most conditions or illnesses for which there are genetic markers are not based on definitive have-it-or-you-don't genes, just genes that make you more susceptible to getting them. And just because you don't have those genes does not mean it is impossible for you to get them. We are just gambling on where beneath the bell curve we will fall.

Would you take preventative measures against developing mental illness if there were, say, only a 50% chance you would get it without said preventative measure? Let's assume this is a relatively new procedure and little if anything is known about side effects or long-term effects. What about 95%? Or 25%?

I imagine it must be hard

2009-08-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jb-london/ / CC BY 2.0

Empathy is an amazing thing. The ability to put yourself in someone else's situation and relate to them is essential to humanity. Without it, isms would run rampant and there would be even more violence than there already is.

But there is something to be said for having someone you can talk to who gets it. Who has faced the situation as you, has had to make some of the same decisions, who truly knows exactly what you're going through.

On Saturday, I attended a memorial for family members of an acquaintance. Four members of her family died in a car accident last summer. Her two surviving siblings both have disabilities, and she is the guardian for both. She is in her late twenties. When she got up to speak, she thanked many people, and it was clear she'd had a lot of support from friends and family. She'd had a lot of sympathy. She'd had a lot of empathy. But she still felt alone, like no one really knew what she was going through. And then she got a call from a local organization who put her in touch with someone who lived in the area, had also lost her parents, and was raising a brother with a disability. I can't begin to imagine what she's been through, what she goes through every day. But I'm glad that she has someone she can talk to who does know.

I hope you have someone like that, and if not, I hope you decide to reach out and look for someone. Whether it's through NAMI or another organization that offers support groups for caregivers, or through the internet, through groups like Children of Parents with a Mental Illness, it will make a big difference. To mention something and not have to struggle to articulate the full scope of the experience. To describe something and have someone nod in affirmation.

We take for granted that understanding when we talk about relationship problems or being stressed out at work or school. When we talk about dealing with poor customer service or having to fill out twenty different forms to get our insurance to pay for something it's supposed to cover. It's easy to find someone who can relate to all the trivial things in our lives. And usually we can find someone who can relate to the big things, too: losing someone close to us, or becoming a parent for the first time. It's not always that simple for the things that we don't talk about, and it makes it that much more important. We all need to know that someone else has felt the same, survived the same. Not just in the helpful advice and mentoring way, though that is certainly beneficial. But ultimately what we need is proof that we, too, will be okay.

When is health mental?

2009-08-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

Ashoka's Changemakers and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are teaming up and Rethinking Mental Health. Or more accurately, they are sponsoring an online competition and will give awards to organizations* (nonprofit or for-profit) that submit the best ideas AND plans to help them carry out their initiatives. Find out the guidelines and criteria and all that kind of important stuff here.

And you can start reading some of the ideas submitted here, but it is early yet. Also, to be quite honest, I have not yet entirely figured out how this forum works since there seems to be an awful lot of clicking involved.

However, I can't wait to see what comes of this. I am pretty optimistic since RWJF places a high priority on funding initiatives that will help bring about widescale change and Ashoka, well, how can you not like a social change organization founded by a guy who, on a summer break from college, drove from Munich to India to join one of Gandhi's followers in redistributing land to the untouchables?

*(So yes, unfortunately you cannot apply as an individual, but if you have an idea you would really like to put into action, why not reach out to a local (or national) organization in the mental health field that might be well-suited to partner with you or help bring it to fruition? This is not to say that any of this is easy and it certainly require that you do lots of homework and planning and all that, but you never know. On the other hand, if you work for or with an eligible organization.....get crackin'!)

Regardless of whether you're with an organization or not and whether you will be submitting anything to this particular competition, how do you propose that we, as a society, rethink mental health?

How much better would your life have been if it had not been full of secrets?

2009-07-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

As much as I sometimes disagree with her and sometimes find her posts slightly manipulative, at other times I very much enjoy reading Penelope Trunk's blog for her voice, her sense of humour, the way she gets me thinking, and especially for her candor. And she's done it again.

She recently posted an explanation of why she is so open about things many of us would never dream of talking about, at least not out in public on the internet with first name last name picture and everything--getting divorced, having two abortions, her company's financial troubles, her romantic life, you name it. Here's an excerpt:
My point is that my childhood was ruined by secrets.

In hindsight, so many people kept the secret: my family, the police, teachers before my freshman year. Decades later, when I asked my high school friends what they thought of me in high school, two of them told me that everyone thought I was nuts coming to school beaten up so often.

I’m not kidding when I say that I thought I was keeping that a secret.

So what I’m telling you here is that I’m scared of secrets. I’m more scared of keeping things a secret than I am of letting people know that I’m having trouble. People can’t believe how I’m willing to write about my life here. But what I can’t believe is how much better my life could have been if it had not been full of secrets.

So today, when I have a natural instinct to keep something a secret, I think to myself, “Why? Why don’t I want people to know?” Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I’m trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I’m doing is fine to tell people.

That’s why I can write about what I write about on this blog.

And when you think you cannot tell someone something about yourself, ask yourself, “Really, why not?”

In some ways, growing up in house with a mentally ill parent is not unlike growing up in a house with abuse, alcoholism, or some other dysfunction. There's so much secrecy. So much feeling like nobody else gets you. So much wanting to be normal, trying hard to pretend that things are normal. As if growing up weren't full of enough fear of being judged.

Funny how shame maintains its grip even when we have done absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. For me, it is a mixture of a little bit of shame and a lot of fear about how people will react. Mostly because even after having written a lot about my mother's illness and what it was like to grow up with her, I still have a difficult time articulating a lot of things. To come up with some sort of elevator speech for it seems an injustice. But it's a really hard thing to understand if you didn't grow up with some type of dysfunction and secrecy at home, if you didn't grow up much faster than you should have.

And I want people to understand, but can't seem to communicate it, and so I don't say anything at all. And I'm still terrified of people rejecting me, or that they'll stop talking to me or not ask me questions because they're scared of it and don't know what to say. I hate when people say things like, "That must've been hard." Um, well, it wasn't fun. What do you say to that that doesn't sound like you're seeking pity? I'm also scared that they will ask me questions, and even though that's what I'd prefer, that I'll just lose it when they do.

How open are you? Who was the first person you told? Do your friends know? Your significant others? Coworkers? Random strangers on the internet?

Back to Normal

2009-07-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

I faithfully check PostSecret each Sunday. Last Sunday, this was one of the postcards. While it seems mean, I completely understood. Especially when I was a teenager, I found it so much easier just to be angry at my mom regardless of what she was doing, even when she was nice. When she was nice or not doing anything to me, I'd be mad at her for not letting me be mad at her. And while I felt/feel guilty about it...it was just so much easier to make her out to be the bad person than to recognize that she was human, multi-faceted, and that she wasn't necessarily control of a lot of her behaviour. That difference of what your head knows vs. what your gut feels.

I'm not sure what was worse, her screaming like a mad woman and being paranoid and obsessive, or the anxiety of never knowing what she was going to be like that day. To this day I still can't stand people who are unpredictable and/or inconsistent, even if it's just that they're flaky or impulsive rather than mean or anything like that.

For those of you who had a mentally ill parent, could you identify with this secret? And for those of you who did not, what was your first reaction?

Daughters of Madness

2009-07-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

I just started reading Daughters of Madness: Growing Up and Older with a Mentally Ill Mother by Susan Nathiel, which I initially heard about through the Facebook group Adult Children of Parents with Schizoaffective and Other Mood Disorders. (Another new and helpful Facebook group is Children of Parents with Mental Illness. There are probably others, but these are the two in which I participate. But I digress.)

Basically the book follows the stories of numerous women who grew up with mentally ill mothers from infancy through adulthood, guided and explained in the context of the stages of human development by the author, a psychotherapist. Just 50 pages in and there is so much that resonates with my experiences as a child, that uncanny feeling that someone does in face know exactly what you're talking about. There are also a number of stories that reinforce how fortunate I was to have a stable dad and how much worse it could have been. But already, it brings a lot back, and I am very interested to see how the book progresses.

I have done quite a bit of thinking about how my mother has affected the kind of person I am today--from being hypercritical of myself and anxious about making mistakes to being very responsible and not wanting to have kids too young b/c I want more of a break from being responsible for anybody else (along with a whole host of other unrelated reasons as to why I am not yet ready to be a parent!). But I've never thought about it in the context of the stages of human development, even though I studied that a little in college. (I was a wannabe psych major, I'll admit it.) So I'll probably write another entry when I've actually finished the book, but if you have read this book or similar books or have any thoughts on this subject, please feel free to comment!

Reaching out vs. Respecting boundaries

2009-07-07T20:38:00.001-07:00

Earlier today, I was talking with a friend about our 4ths and she mentioned her significant other's parents had visited and how the dad is wont to talk incessantly, not about anything necessarily related to the current conversation, and he'll follow you around and keep talking to (or rather, at) you even as you're shutting the door to the bathroom. He's always been like this, apparently. I really wanted to say, "My mom does that, too," but then somehow we changed topics and the moment passed.

I remember once overhearing a former boss say to somebody else on the phone about how her husband was depressed, and she was trying to explain it to whoever was on the other end of the line, but she didn't seem to be having any luck. I wanted to say something, to tell her that it's something I've also struggled with, but a.) I had overheard it, and b.) I didn't know if she wanted me to know.

Sometimes opportunities present themselves and usually I do not take them and then kick myself afterwards. What if I told them something they didn't want to hear? Like, hey, your father-in-law's odd behavior sounds like my mom's and she has a mental illness so maybe he does too! I mean, I guess it is better that he get treatment if that is the case, but then again it may just be some quirk of behaviour that has nothing to do with mental illness. And then there is always that question of how much is too much information to share at work.

Illness and abnormalities make people really uncomfortable. Just ask anybody who's an amputee or visibly a burn victim. Yeah, there's all this ra-ra-bust-the-stigma and it's cool to smash taboo and whatnot. But just like in cognitive behavioural therapy (or whatever that method is for helping people with phobias through gradually increasing exposure), I think dealing with stigmas is one of those things that is a nudge-over-the-edge type thing rather than a sink-or-swim type thing. (Such an articulate sentence, I know.) Sometimes getting to know someone of that "other" group or some other type of interaction/experience speeds this up a lot, but rarely are such planned occurrences effective. All those exercises about stereotypes in school were just awkward and sometimes self-defeating.

Sometimes too much too fast just pushes people in the opposite direction. Not trying to knock Augusten Burroughs, and admittedly I haven't finished the book b/c I can't remember where I put it, but Running with Scissors just seemed like another memoir in the veins of I-had-a-fucked-up-and/or-bizarre-childhood. Augusten Burroughs is "that guy" at the party, much like Dave Pelzer or [insert name of someone else who wrote a memoir about traumatic experiences here]. The further something is away from our own experiences, the harder it is for us to identify with them, to truly empathize, and to understand. We don't even try; we just pity them. For me, the first book that really spoke to my experience was Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's The Keeper. I read it and kept thinking, "Yes, I know that feeling exactly!"

Anyhow, getting back to my original quandary....

When do you reach out to someone, take that step in their direction? And when do you respect whatever boundaries they have set about what they're willing to share with you?

crying for help

2009-05-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

"I wish my parents would find my drafts of my suicide notes under the carpet by my airvent."
- postcard on PostSecret

Coming across this postcard on PostSecret this morning, it made me think of all the little (and not so little) cries for help. Sometimes they are in your face--explicit threats, violence, substance abuse, suicide attempts. But before those, and most of the time, they are the kind that requires paying close attention. Things mentioned in passing. Long sleeves regardless of the weather. Lyrics in an away message. Routines broken. Clues hidden, but just barely. The little things we do when we want someone to notice that we're hurting, but want to make sure that it's because they care enough to notice, that they're actually paying attention.

Two years ago, I was really stressed out at work about a project that involved many factors beyond my control. I felt powerless and overwhelmed and really really stressed out. My boyfriend was the only person who knew just how much of a wreck I was, since I was too busy at work to do anything but work.

And then my manager at the time asked me one morning if I was okay. She was the only person at work who ever asked me once during that awful project if I was okay. And I lost it. There are maybe six people in the world who have ever seen me cry when it wasn't the result of something like getting hit in the head with a softball. And two of them are my parents. I hate crying in front of people, but that day I just couldn't hold it together any longer. That one question was all it took to break the surface tension.

She handed me a box of tissues and closed her office door. And I don't remember what she said, but I do remember that she helped rally some troops for me to make phone calls and try to contact a few more people. And as comforting as it was to realize that I wasn't alone and that there were people who were willing to help, what meant the most to me was simply that she had asked.

A lot of times it doesn't take much. You don't have to know what to say or what to do. We just want someone to care enough to ask, to open that door and say, "I'm here. I'm listening."

just need to get this out of my system

2008-12-26T15:19:00.000-08:00

I have very little patience for my mother now, as if living away from her has just heightened my sensitivity or decreased my tolerance or something.

She keeps trying to make me into something I am not. Telling me that she bought some peach colored fabric to make me a dress because she hates seeing me in dark clothes all the time. (When's the last time I have ever worn anything that could be described as peach colored?) Or telling me it's important that I cook good food for my boyfriend. (I'm sure my cooking is the least of the things that would scare him away at this point.) And let's not even get started on how she's already planning for her future grandson. (Future father of my children: we're having girls. Or a girl. But XX chromosomes for sure.)

GAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Honestly, I do not care whether my future kids are boys or girls. I would like to be able to cook better. However, I have no desire to wear anything peach colored. Or hot pink. I don't want my mother to run my life. But at the same time I don't want to not do things just because she told me I ought to. As spiteful as I can be. Because that's pretty much the same thing as her running my life, just in reverse.

How do you talk to someone who refuses to listen? How do you reason with someone when all they see and hear is what they want to see and hear and all that they want is whatever they want? Yes, I know, we are all like that sometimes. But she's like this ALL THE TIME.

And I'm still angry. I'm angry at her for not listening and for not being considerate of anybody else. I'm angry at myself for not being a bigger person and not having figured out a way to deal with this by now. I don't know how my dad does it. I know he gets mad, too, but if I were the only one living with her, I think my blood pressure would constantly be about 150/120 and I would just be red in the face all the time. And I am generally a fairly calm person. Just not around my mother.

I'm tried of being angry. But I don't really know what else to do other than just not live with her. I don't know how to do anything else but escape.

Equal but Different?

2008-09-23T21:19:00.000-07:00

I am glad that both houses of Congress approved a bill ensuring parity in coverage of mental and physical illnesses. But I wonder (and sincerely hope) the bill will live up to its hype.

Here's the article in the Times:

Congress Backs Parity in Coverage of Illnesses

By ROBERT PEAR

Published: September 24, 2008

Congress moved close to approving a bill that would require health insurance plans to provide treatment of mental illnesses comparable to what they already provide for physical illnesses.

wishin' and hopin': mothers and grandchildren

2008-07-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

My mom has been egging on about grandkids (more specifically, grandsons) for awhile. And about marriage too, but I think she's given up on my boyfriend and I getting married anytime soon, and now she's all about how I need to have kids when I'm young. I'm 22! Biological what? Anyhow, so she periodically e-mails me and writes letters with "tips" and "advice" and I think this would probably be hysterical if she were someone else's mother and my friend was telling me this story. Okay, so my boyfriend gets a kick out of it once he gets over the whole being perturbed part. So here goes...

My lovely darling mother tells me that I need to take fish oil supplements to get my omega-3s or whatever, that eating meat is good for men, and that men are "more potent" in the morning. She also keeps telling me that I need to avoid lifting heavy objects, not drink alcohol, and make sure to get lots of bedrest. With my legs raised. Complete with stick figure illustration. Also advised was not to "part" immediately after sex and to keep my legs raised. Presumably so the sperm won't just drain out of me and possible grandsons go to waste. Fortunately there were not any illustrations for that little tip.

Oddly enough, what gets me is not her constant egging on about conceiving or giving me advice as if I were already pregnant (not planning on that anytime soon), but that it's always about me giving her grandsons. Nothing against boys but goddammit, if I believed in prayer I would pray for all girls.

It seems like in the past few years, she's become increasingly more traditional. (Granted, I don't think she ever entirely got over the fact that I wasn't a boy...) When I was younger, she was all about me doing well in school and being the best in...everything. She didn't think I should not do things or not learn how to do certain things just because I was a girl. But ever since I moved in with my boyfriend, it seems like she's always asking about what I'm making him for dinner. Now I'm not opposed to making dinner or any of that, but I resent that she asks me like it's my duty because I'm the woman. This is the same woman who told my dad he had to cook on Father's Day because it was the weekend, which is generally his turn to cook.

And then all this grandson business, oi vey. I remember asking her once, "What's wrong with having girls, huh?" and her response was, "Well, you can have a girl, too, if you want." I've never been super-feminist or rah-rah-girl-power, but I won't stand for being told that boys are worth more than girls. Especially not from someone who wouldn't stand hearing it from her own father. When my mom was young, my grandfather told her that girls don't need to go to high school (in Hong Kong in those days, there weren't free public secondary schools). My grandmother intervened on her behalf, saying, if she earns a scholarship, let her go. And so she did. High school, college.

My boyfriend points out that my mother is delusional, wanting me to give her grandchildren so badly that she already believes I am pregnant. But it still frustrates me to no end.

The Greatest Gift is Hope

2008-06-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

Schizophrenia: Disease or a Collection of Symptoms?

2008-06-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

An article in The New York Times online discusses new research that supports the theory that schizophrenia is not a disease in the way previously thought, in that it does not seem to result from a specific combination of specific genetic mutations (among other things). It seems that many people who have schizophrenia have combinations of different genetic mutations, which seems to explain the wide range in symptoms. And why medication is so hit or miss.

(My mother is currently taking Zyprexa, but she took a few others beforehand, and for the most part they did not seem to really treat anything so much as just sedate her. She is currently taking a very low dose, but she still takes it before she goes to bed on the days she takes it, zonks out, and is still really groggy most of the next day.)

I wonder how this will influence research/theories about other types of mental illness. Depression is a bit more straightforward (or so it seems) with the seratonin, but what about bipolar disorder or personality disorders? It just hit me that I don't really know too much about mental illnesses other than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. More reason to learn more...

out of office for my personal life?

2008-06-03T17:56:00.000-07:00

I know I just started but man, am I getting slammed at work. The resources post probably won't come until, oh, probably July.

Until then, if you are the random and unlikely visitor, please feel free to leave comments on anything you'd like to know or would like me to touch upon, post here, etc.

second post that should've been my first post: or why this blog

2008-05-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend repeatedly demonstrates how awful I am at remembering to introduce people, mostly because whenever we're in a situation where I should be introducing him, he ends up doing it himself.

And I realized the other night that I didn't really introduce this blog, just started off in media res (or whatever the correct term would be since it wasn't really mid-action so much as mid-years-of-thought-stew).

Why did I start this blog?

Growing up, I knew my mother was different from my friends' moms, from the neighbors, from the other adults I knew. I didn't know why or what it was called; it just was. Whenever I tried to explain it to my friends, it just never seemed to work. My friends made fun of me, and I never seemed able to convey the true extent and seriousness of the situation. I thought it was a word thing, that I lacked the language for it. But later I realized that it is because these are the things we never talk about, because we are ashamed of them. This is why my mother never received treatment until I was in high school, despite having shown symptoms before I was born. This is why, although it is estimated that about 20% of the U.S. adult population is struggling with a mental illness, most of us are hard-pressed to name more than one or two people we know with a mental illness. Growing up as an only child, I didn't know anyone who had a parent like mine. I knew of abusive parents, drunkard parents, and parents who couldn't care less. But I didn't know anyone who had a parent who thought the FBI was listening to our conversations.

After my mother was hospitalized for the first time, I started doing some research. In the current literary trend of memoirs and creative nonfiction, there have been increasing numbers of people writing about mental illness and especially what it means to live mental illness. As the person with the mental illness. Not to say that there are not books out there written by relatives, but there are significantly fewer (or so it seems, this is based on my browsing of libraries and Amazon.com, not a scientific study by any means). There are more and more resources aimed at helping families deal with a family member's mental illness--but very few are for children. Doing searches for resources along the lines of "children of parents with mental illness" usually just turn up resources for parents who have children with a mental illness instead. That's great for them, but kind of the opposite of what I was trying to find.

And blogs. I have not done a whole lot of searching as to blogs on this topic, but thus far my searches have turned up lots of blogs on living with mental illness but not much of anything on living with someone who has a mental illness or what it means to be a relative. (One exception of which I know: Heather and Jon Armstrong are a husband and wife who are both bloggers and have both written about her depression and the impact this has had on their relationship, family, etc. Okay, well Jon has written one post about it that I know of, but Heather has written about mental illness in her case and generally multiple times. These blogs, dooce and blurbomat respectively, generally cover other topics, but enjoyable nonetheless. I actually find dooce really entertaining most of the time. She cracks me up...but this is completely off-topic.)

Again, all of this is good. I am glad that more and more people are being open about their struggles with mental illness and what it means. I am glad that more people are talking about it. But in all this hoopla, the children of mentally ill parents are not forgotten so much as it seems that people don't realize we exist because we are overshadowed. And so many of us aren't open about our experiences for multiple reasons: we are ashamed, we don't know how to, our parents are not open about having a mental illness, no one has ever asked, and so on.

I used to think I was completely alone, and now I realize I am not. Through this blog, I hope that I can help others share experiences, feel less alone, and connect with resources. I did find some resources and do have some books to recommend, but as I just realized that it is 12:27 and I have to get up at 6:30 for work tomorrow, this will come later. In the meantime...

Any books, websites, or other resources you have found helpful?

more than the sum of our parts

2008-05-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

It's almost halfway between Mother's Day and Father's Day, and instead of reflecting on lives lost to war today (although Andy Rooney did an exceptional Memorial Day commentary on 60 Minutes last night, saying what too few are willing to say on days like today), I am thinking about parents and how they shape us.

To lay all of who we are on our parents (or whoever raised us) is too much, too easy, too simple. But there's no denying that I am who I am today because of my parents. I am who I am today because I have a mother with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar in her case), and because my father does not. I am who I am because they are who they are. And there is all this politics of saying that someone has a mental illness rather than that they are mentally ill. It is just a part of who they are, not all of it, stress advocacy groups.

Yes and no.

My mother was not diagnosed until I was 14. I'd always known there was something not right with her, and I always thought that once I knew what that something was, all my questions would be answered, somebody could fix it, and then I would get to have my real mom.

But my "real" mom is no more real or unreal than the "real world" postcollege. Socrates' postulation that "the more you know, the more there is to know" seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Sure, having a name (a label, a category) for some of her behavior was helpful. But for all the advances science and medicine have made, how little we know about the mind. Names and labels make things easier to talk about; they give you a handle, but the pot's still empty.

For all the categories, symptoms, and theories that I've learned about since my mother's diagnosis, all that I've really learned is that you cannot separate a mental illness from who someone is. Sure, the delusions and paranoia are symptoms. But what about my mother's propensity to talk anyone and everyone's ear off? Her messiness? The way she exaggerates everything? When is it a symptom and when is it just the way someone is? I don't remember where I read this, but somewhere I was reminded that mental health is a spectrum, not a definitive state such as being pregnant or having the chicken pox.

What about other lifelong or seriously life-threatening illnesses? Don't those affect people in similar ways? One of my college friends had cancer when she was in junior high. Fortunately, the cancer is no longer in her body, and she lives her life like any other 20-something-year-old, but I don't think being a cancer survivor will ever not be a part of who she is. And it's hard not to want to separate when it's a mental illness. I wanted so much to believe that my mother said mean things to me because she was ill, not because she was mean or hated or me or truly regretted having me. If my mother didn't have whatever this was, she would be constant, loving, stable. I truly believed medicine could flip the switch.

So maybe this is why I have trouble seeing anything as black and white. All my life, everything has been a gray area, everything has been a spectrum, everything is shaded with meaning I can't begin to understand. I love words and writing, but I am constantly frustrated by all of its limitations. I love to analyze, but if all the analysis in the world can't answer our questions, what good is it? What good is any of it?

One of my favorite quotations comes from Nancy Andreasen, who has studied the brain and mental illnesses for years. In one of her books, Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome, she wrote:

"The more we analyze, the more we feel we understand. The more we analyze, the more we feel we can control. We forget that megabytes and millimeters and millennia have no intrinsic meaning and are merely human inventions. By trying too hard to understand everything, we may understand nothing. We analyze so much and so well that we may also destroy the vital essence and meaning of things by breaking them into pieces."

Reading that, I realized that I had been going everything wrong. While I understand trying to destigmatize mental illness by saying that it is a disease that someone has, just like cancer or diabetes. It's not that that isn't true. Yet to simplify it in that matter fails to do justice to any true attempts to understand it. My mother's mental illness is no less a part of her (and no less a part of me) than an arm, a lung, a vertebra. The only real way to destigmatize mental illness is by talking about it, by being open. It is not by sugarcoating it, by using terms and labels and breaking it down. It requires being honest, being human, and realizing that we are all more than just the sum of our parts.

I make no claims to having achieved such grand enlightenment, but I am trying.