TKM

Reality shows learn ourselves alot of stuff. Like, myself has learnt “myself” is alot better then “I” or “me” when myself talks about I. Of course myself’s English “teacher” learnt myself wrong, or efforted to, when myself was little, but myself never liked herself!

Myself was messed up by “school,” so when themselves on reality shows—their so way awesomer then wrote ones, and whom cares about a dumb “writers” strike anyways now because ourselves just say ourselve’s own words on TV and stuff—were all like “the alliance is Lance, Brett, and myself,” myself was like “whoa!” because myself’s English “teacher” was all like “the alliance is Lance, Brett, and me (or I?).” But now myself knew herself was wrong! “Myself” is alot righter then “I” or “me,” unless myselves are talking about myselves, then myselves are all like “Myself is so full of me (or I?).” Know what myself mean?

Let ourselves review:

“I am only concerned with me, myself, and I.” Wrong!
“Myself is only concerned with me, me, and me.” Rite!

“Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.” Wronger!
“Like a bridge over troubled water, myself will lie I down.” Rite!

Maybe next time myself can learn yourselves about “lay” and “lie,” if myself is all like wanting to write and stuff.

With all due apologies to my male readers—both of you.

How have I managed to menstruate all my life—OK, not quite, but I can barely remember a time when I didn’t—without knowing about The Standards? My partner knew about them, but apparently hadn’t seen fit to fill me in until I pointed out the little chart on her box of o.b. tampons, laughing at the idea that any woman would have any clue how many grams of menstrual blood she passes during any determined period of time. I was totally ready to chalk up such a silly notion to her preferred brand, as I’ve never quite warmed to the o.b. gospel. I want my applicator to be as environmentally friendly as possible, but I want a goddamn applicator.

“Oh, yeah, those are industry-wide standards,” she said confidently. “All the brands have to use the same terminology for the same absorbency levels.”

Of course I had to look it up for myself. Not because I don’t trust her, but because I don’t always believe her, and those are two very different concepts.

Oh yes, there are federally mandated standards, and like the miracle of nature the theretofore unregulated products sought to contain, they didn’t come without bloodshed…

Remember when talk of toxic shock syndrome tripped from the tongues of every lady in the land? It was around 1980, at the precise time I and many gals who read this blog were just becoming acquainted with what it means to be a woman, and it was fucking scary. It turned out that the selfsame products that enabled us to ride horses and row boats like nobody’s business—because any incapacitation a woman may experience during menstruation has everything to do with errant leakage control and nothing at all to do with the physical sensation of birthing a bowling ball—could also, by the way, maybe release bacterial toxins that could KILL US DEAD SUDDENLY AND WITHOUT WARNING!

TSS reached a fever pitch around the time of the Rely Recall epoch. In late 1978, Procter & Gamble rolled out a new technology with the Rely tampon, sporting the zippy tagline “It even absorbs the worry,” which is some pretty damned powerful absorbency. Indeed, Rely “gently billows out into its unique cup shape” in the vagina, offering “virtually wall-to-wall protection,” ready as it was to absorb 20 TIMES ITS OWN WEIGHT in fluid due to its fun new shape and combination of tiny polyester sponges and super-absorbent fibers.

You see where this is going, right? The bacterias Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes, better known by their gang names S. aureas and S. pyogenes, thrive on protein (mmm, menstrual blood) and oxygen, which is introduced to typically anaerobic vaginas via porous tampons. Bacterial toxins can then enter the bloodstream through the vaginal wall, which is particularly vulnerable to tears and lesions in conditions of extreme dryness. Sponges and super fibers, anyone? As P&G might—and actually did—say, “Remember, they named it Rely.”

Tampon-related toxic shock syndrome, which wasn’t even identified until 1978, was diagnosed in 813 women in 1980, 40 of whom died. Between 60% and 70% of those diagnosed said they had used Rely tampons—samples of which had been sent free to millions of women in the summer of 1979 in a marketing blitz that promised, “Rely is so different it will change the way you think and feel about your period.” And did it ever!

Rely was pulled from the market, and federal agencies got busy trying to prove they cared about women’s health—despite the 40+ years tampons had already been on the market all footloose and fancy-free of regulation and safety controls. (Historically made almost entirely of cotton, tampons hadn’t caused any known physical problems until 1978; that’s the year tampon engineers—chortle—introduced super-absorbent manmade fibers, which counter-introduced the bad bad bacteria in question to the vaginal environment.) The FDA, which had back in 1974 designated tampons a class II medical device and therefore subject to “special controls,” agreed with the Centers for Disease Control and women’s health and public advocacy groups that perhaps it was time to impose some actual special controls in the form of industry-wide standards. All concerned parties met periodically with Big Hygiene for the next decade or so to argue about the nature of those standards. Hell, it took them two years to agree on so much as mandatory product labeling warning users of TSS risk.

So it was that, even though an apparent causal link between TSS and super-absorbent varieties of tampon was identified during the Rely era, tampons were still so unregulated in 1985 that, according to The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation—oh yes, I own it; e-mail to borrow—Playtex regulars were twice as absorbent as Tampax regulars, and more absorbent than any other brands’ supers excepting its own. This really fucked with women’s attempts to follow their doctors’ advice to choose the minimum absorbency required for flow containment in order to avoid actualizing that feeling of death menstruation affords us all.

Do you remember where you were on October 26, 1989? That’s the day the FDA released The Standards, only nine years after the TSS crisis was linked to super-absorbent tampons. And here they are:

• Junior = Less then 6 grams
• Regular = 6–9 grams
• Super = 9–12 grams
• Super Plus = 12–15 grams
• Ultra = 15–18 grams

Awesome! Now all we have to do is find a way to measure the fluid weight of our menstrual discharge in any given one- to three-hour period. The only wrinkle being that, as Americans, most of the scales we keep around to measure menstrual discharge and such display fluid weight only in ounces, so I guess we’ll have to convert our readings to grams. One fluid ounce is equivalent to just over 28 grams— Oh Christ, never mind. TSS is now so rare that the CDC no longer even conducts surveillance on the disease. In 1998, the last year for which records are available, there were just three confirmed menstruation-related infections.

So basically, I guess I can use a regular and chance leakage, go crazy with an ultra and trust my antibodies to do their immunizing thing, or choose something from the magic middle. In any case, S. aureas vaginal colonization is even less likely than any decision on my part that my period would be an awesome time to go horseback riding. Besides which, the last time I visited with my mother, as I stood in her kitchen populating her hair with rods in anticipation of pouring hot chemicals all over her head—oh yes, I know my way around a home permanent; e-mail for appointments—we got to talking about my impending 40th birthday.

“So, you’ll probably be getting the hot flashes soon,” she said, all cavalier-like.

“Isn’t 40 kind of young for menopause?”

“Nah. You’ll be there before you know it,” she said confidently.

So, according to my mother, the expiration date on this carton of eggs is nigh, and I can shift from the TSS hysteria of my teenage years to the contemporary hysterias of middle age, like recent research showing that women who have never had children are at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer, the latter of which has earned the moniker “the silent killer” for its propensity as a difficult-to-diagnose disease with a nearly asymptomatic onset and propagation to KILL US DEAD SUDDENLY AND WITHOUT WARNING!

Surely there’s an unregulated product of vague Chinese origin to blame.

I have long harbored fantasies that I will one day publish the funniest book ever written about bipolar illness. I know, right? It’s about time. And I’m not just talking about the good times to be had with party girl hypo- and her edgier cousin mania—they’re already laughing at their own jokes, most of which aren’t funny unless you’re in their head space. No, it’s depression I want to make fodder of, if for no other reason than the self-serving one: so that I can bring the funny wherever I go, even on a long walk down a dark corridor of indeterminate length, with bottomless cliffs on each side, yawning infinity straight ahead, and an entry point some ways back that sealed itself shut even as I stepped through.

Comedy seldom throws down with depression in a way that’s at all successful or satisfying—at least to those who have done lockdown time in its super-max cell block. That said, props to Avenue Q’s awesome Bad Idea Bears who, finding the lead male muppet Princeton bereft in the second act, suggest in a voice reminiscent of Snuggles the fabric-softener spokesbear, “Well, you can always hang yourself! Yayyyy! We found this rope!” at which the cuddly yellow girl bear proffers a noose.

Seriously, I laughed my ass off.

For the record, I’m basking in the sunshiny light of day right now. Truly. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that here, and I really ought to set aside space to honor it. Having felt despondent through damn near the entire 21st century to date, I am now entering my seventh straight month of largely unbroken fine mood. Neither up nor down, I am simply and blissfully well, and believe you me, I don’t take this gift of stability for granted.

Still, I never know whether I’m out on furlough, parole, or straight-up time served, and I’m forever on the lookout for the warden, ’cause that bitch hates me. So it is that, while I don’t plan on returning to the big house anytime soon—and the first commenter who suggests I can avoid such by embracing the awesome power of The Secret is on my lifetime shit list, very much like the friend who once told me that people who wear glasses only think they can’t see without them—I am realistic about the chance that I will be thrall to depression’s long arm in future. That’s why psychologist types call this thing a disorder, not a silly old patch of sad.

Therapists tell folks like me to put together survival kits during these up times, when we have the clarity of mind to select entertainment and mementos best turned to in a crisis—because the depressed person will reliably reach for the worst possible companion to her mental state. The ice cream that feeds my depression comes in a variety of drably irresistible flavors, including but not limited to: documentaries about down-and-outers; nonfiction on subjects like genocide, addiction, and prison; memoirs by people with mood disorders who may or may not have already tried to or managed to kill themselves; and, perhaps the worst influence of all, my own racing thoughts. In short, I reach for that which reflects my world view.

Say, doesn’t this post cry out for pictures of baby animals?

At times I’ve sought solace during dark periods by reading about the disorder and the workings of the brain in general, trying to get the lay of the land, as if one can rationalize the irrational and thus disempower it once and for all. But a visit to any bookstore’s psychology section will leave a person feeling more pathologized and diminished than before: The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide, Surviving Manic Depression, Surviving the Crisis of Depression and Bipolar Illness. The ubiquity of this word survival in the bipolar literature presumes a couple of things: that mortality is my primary concern, and that survival is an end in itself. I appreciate all the parachutes, but I’m looking for something beyond living through each episode.

Depression can be fatal not so much because it just makes a person so sad they want to die but because it brings meaninglessness into high relief, taunting its host that the past is empty, the future is hopeless, and nothing can ever change those “truths.” And no matter how many missives I write to myself in better times, earnestly telling the depressed me who will eventually read them that it gets better, that I’ll get through this episode just as I’ve gotten through dozens before, my own words of encouragement fire as blanks when I’m in-country. The dialect of wellness is inaccessible.

That communication gap affects humor as well. Most things that are funny or uplifting when we’re in a good place simply deflate in the depressed brain, as if a different language is being spoken, stripping comedy of any meaning. Yet there is great meaning to be found in humor, and funny is possible in depression. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder, inwardly or out, than I did during my last couple of days in the psych hospital. I didn’t laugh in response to any intended entertainment, whether on TV or in the book I was reading while there—Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a work of pure fiction which, incidentally, two of my nurses took to be a physics textbook and noted how very smart I must be to read such a thing for pleasure. (A minimum deduction of 50 I.Q. points is assessed all who enter the clink, as though mental illness is but a euphemism for mental retardation.)

I laughed on the inside when my intake nurse—amid her recitation of about a thousand rules as to what patients are and are not allowed from home, as related to my partner when she came to visit me that first surreal night—said in the direct company of my somewhat addled but nevertheless conscious self that “they can’t have caffeine because it stimulates their brains.” On being relegated to third-person status in such a situation, especially when the stimulation of one’s own brain is under discussion, let me just say that the ability to laugh is the only mechanism that’s going to save your ass from the eight kinds of crazy you assumed in the staffers’ eyes the moment the medical transport dudes wheeled you through the door.

I laughed audibly not at our actual “movie night” entertainment but at the fact that the films came from a distributor that edits videos exclusively for exhibition among institutional populations—primarily prisoners and mental patients—omitting all depictions of violence, sex, nudity, profanity, drug use, drinking, self-destructive behavior, mental imbalance, and anything else that might be deemed disturbing or stimulating to their brains. What was left, you ask? I’m not sure; I retreated to my room to read instead.

When I earned a promotion to ward 3—the lowest-security unit, housing all us high-functioning types; my stay had been initiated on unit 2, where they keep the low- to medium-functioning patients as well as folks on suicide watch—I at last found some gals I could relate to and laugh with, the camaraderie and normalcy of our interactions helping to defuse some of the feelings of stigma and self-doubt that inevitably come with having traded freedom for safety, having committed one’s own care at the most basic level to the discretion of others. It is, readers, a head trip of the most explosive sort, a virtual tear-down of the psyche through which one’s foundation may emerge reinforced or compromised—but the change itself is inevitable. Those unit 3 girls, together with my amazing partner—who was there every minute of every available visiting hour to laugh at my jokes and stories about this Jabberwocky world I found myself in—helped to ensure my essential soundness on release.

My less corporeal savior was writing. Every day, whenever the grid didn’t command my presence elsewhere, I wrote. And every night I processed each day, lying prone on my tiny institutional bed, by scribbling random thoughts with a felt-tip coloring pen I had pilfered from the day room—the grown-up rollerball pens my partner had brought me on night one were segregated as sharps, contraband, and sent back home with her, though I was allowed to keep the writing tablets she’d thoughtfully packed.

While I have on occasion looked back on events in my life with slight regret for having experienced them more as a journalist than as an intimate, my mad detachment skills came in pretty handy in the clink. The ability to become a wry observer was not just useful but necessary in maintaining a measure of dignity and self-respect. So long as I was noting the weirdness of my situation, I could assure myself that I was still me, that I wasn’t that subpar being reflected in the staffers’ eyes, the wild-eyed mental patient who needed to be reminded to groom herself (right there on the grid, between breakfast and group therapy). “Who, me?” I could say when the patronizing air of the nurses got too thick. “Oh, I’m just here for the material.”

Happily, I probably won’t be returning to the big house. Studies of mental hospital recidivism—interestingly, the same term used to describe repeat trips to prison—find that only around 30% of those who have ever checked into a mental hospital, voluntarily or not, will return. (Perhaps that speaks more to the non-luxe accommodations than improved mental health, but we’ll gloss that for now.) On the other hand, I remain realistic about the fact that hope is a tenuous, intangible thing—ebbing and flowing with the tide of my corrupt brain chemicals—and when its absence coincides with my mind’s ruder machinations, well, commitment is a far better choice than that offered up by the Bad Idea Bears.

As it goes, finding the funny in humor-averse situations is quite a lot easier than articulating it—unless one happens to live on Avenue Q. But those takeaway memories of transcendence lend us strength and give meaning to the rudimentary act of survival. Of course there’s more to life than the comedy therein, but that other stuff can be a devil to access when we need it most, whereas laughter has never, ever failed me. Funny takes the edge off when we’ve been unfairly judged, and it restores that measure of respect and integrity so rudely wrested away when we acknowledged a weakness and asked for help. It’s not for nothing that we’ve coined the term gallows humor: When our hands are tied and we’re face-to-face with our would-be executioner, the refuge of the mind is our only irrevocable freedom, and in that moment, when the mind can’t help but race, I’d rather dwell on life’s absurdities than on what it’s going to feel like when the rope catches and my neck snaps.

If you’re thinking right about now that this whole post about humor really isn’t all that funny, I agree with you. It started with a couple of funny ideas, then, as with so many of these posts, it grew quite beyond its author’s control—in this case, my rangy, wisecracking teenager matured into a somber adult who rather insisted on talking about this difficult period in her life that she’s still trying to make sense of. Because even as it’s just about impossible for me to initiate any serious conversation without cracking a joke, it’s fairly inevitable that the truth lurking therein will eventually break through to sternly ask what the hell everybody’s laughing about. And I guess that’s my quandary. The reason I’m almost certain to fail in my effort to produce the funniest book ever written about depression is this: Humor builds a bridge to what’s real.

That also happens to be why I find it essential.