The Feminine Urge To Randomly Stop Taking My Meds

And quit showering. And not brush my hair. Or my teeth. Ugh.

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As I write, I am sitting in my kitchen trying to make myself go and have a shower. I’ve been trying to talk myself into showering for the last eight hours now. I’ve expended vastly more energy on this futile self-convincing than I would’ve expended on the fucking shower if I’d just had the stupid thing the first time the thoughts of it had occurred to me back when I woke up and realised with a squirm of shame that it’d been four or five days since I’d last washed myself.

Now, you may be recoiling in horror at the idea of leaving it that long and I get that, I get that being unwashed is not ideal. And I get that resisting personal hygiene when you have the privilege of accessing hot water and soap and a fancy candle and clean towels… well, it’s probably hard for many people to understand.

It’s actually even hard for me to understand to be honest. I’ve struggled to articulate the apathy I feel towards personal care for years now. I hate showering, I hate brushing my teeth and I hate brushing my hair. Other people hate laundry or cleaning out the bins but these three are my three bete noires in life. Seriously, if given the choice I would probably opt to clean out the compost bin over just jumping in the shower for 10 minutes.

In the summer, I go swimming a lot and I use this to (as I think of it) ‘force my hand’ on the showering front. Again, why why WHY do I need to be forcing my hand to shower? Anyway, if I’ve been in the cold sea that will usually give me a bit of push towards the soap and shampoo but in the winter I can go days and days dodging the simple act of washing myself. It’s such a baseline thing to achieve, what is the avoidance all about? Why is showering so monumentally difficult?

My husband cannot understand it at all but tries to encourage me on this front. Yesterday morning he suggested it was time for a shower.

‘How do you know?’ I shot back.

This was met with a rueful sort of shrug. ‘I know in the usual way,’ he said.

‘Stop smelling me while I sleep,’ I ordered and proceeded to still not have a shower.

Mortifying. But even the shame won’t drive me to do it. Instead I’ll just sit around shame-spiralling and STILL unwashed.

This New Year’s while everyone else was probably setting lofty intentions about career goals or lifestyle changes, I wrote down: ‘have some fucking showers for fuck sake, you creepy weirdo.’

On the morning of January 1st, I sat on the edge of the bed and wavered.

‘I should have a shower.’

‘I don’t want to have a shower.’

This went around for a few minutes and then due in large part to the fact that I was staying with a friend who deserved to be spending time with a person who’d washed, I gave in and had the shower. When I came down to the kitchen, I proudly displayed my wet hair and she was duly (and very sweetly) impressed.

‘Why do you think you find it so hard?’ she asked gently and I found that I couldn’t come up with any answer beyond the fairly flimsy reason of ‘it’s just such a palaver’.

I have one friend who is my partner in shower-avoiding. We frequently update each other on the dismal days that have passed since the last shower. Sometimes we are each other's shower hype women.

‘I can do it. I just need to fucking do it.’ I text her.

‘You CAN do it,’ she replies.

The no showering thing feels shameful to admit. I imagine people grimacing reading this. I know the face my mother makes if I ever let slip how long it's been. This reality of being mad is rarely included in the cultural image of the ‘mentally ill girl’. It’s like how we never see a fat person with an eating disorder in films. Directors know that this fat phobic society won’t relate to or feel sorry for a fat person with an eating disorder. And likewise, we rarely see a really dirty person with a mental illness because we, as an audience, will be unsympathetic and repelled. But being filthy, with greasy, matted hair and furred teeth is much closer to the reality sometimes. Closer to my reality. I am ashamed of this, I swear I am. But the shame rarely overrides my antipathy about it. I think back to my friend’s question: ‘Why is it so hard?’

My honest answer is I don't really know. When I reach for the reason, I come up empty.

The most obvious answer is that I must be depressed. Taking care of yourself is widely known to be one of the things that falls off a cliff during bouts of depression. But the thing is the shower refusing (and look if I'm being thoroughly honest here I may as well include the toothbrushing resisting and hair brushing avoiding) seems to be a pretty consistent feature of my life. It isn't tethered to particularly low times though it might worsen a bit when I'm in a bad patch.

My total lack of insight on this is frustrating. I want to understand it but when I try to examine this aversion towards something that is basic and something that some people even find enjoyable… I get nothing. A blank where the reason should be. Perhaps it’s why it is called ‘losing your reason’. This is the thing with having a mental illness, as baffling as our behaviour may be to others, oftentimes it is just as strange to ourselves. Inexplicable actions driven by opaque, inchoate motivations that elude us as well. I find this is something that’s not mentioned all that much with mental illness, this frustration and struggle to understand your own actions (or inactions as is the case here). Basically being mentally ill unfortunately means that there are times when your brain simply can’t be trusted, like for example when my brain, in all its wisdom, decides to randomly stop taking my medication.

I know, I know. SMH.

I have a mantra: Keep my meds straight; keep my head straight.

Do I live by this mantra? Fuck no. Instead I like to CONSTANTLY find out the hard way why I need my stupid (lifesaving) medication.

It’s a cliche we see in films a lot – someone goes off their meds cue ominous music – so I know that it’s a ‘bad idea’ but then in my own mind I think ‘I’m not like those mad people… I know what I’m doing.’ Lol.

Taking my medication every day has proven to be such a struggle that I finally resorted to getting ‘Take your meds’ tattooed on my wrist, which has helped somewhat. I also have one of those jumbo pill sorters and am making a pretty good go of keeping on top of my prescriptions. The thing is with the pill sorter, I can see at the end of the month all the times that I didn’t take my meds because the pills are still rattling around in there forlornly.

On the days when I am a good little mad person I take my meds with a jolly: ‘Time for my expensive TicTacs!’ because it can often feel like the medication is doing nothing, though I know that I undoubtedly would be far worse without it. But then there are days when I find myself sort of drifting away from taking my meds. It’s not exactly a conscious thought… more like a not-quite-accidental slip of the mind.

I take three different meds and two of the three I am very consistent with – though probably only because not taking one of these results in immediate unpleasant withdrawals and the other seems to have no discernible effects, but the third one – an anti-psychotic so, ya know, arguably the most important one – is the one I occasionally skip. It is quite a tough drug to be on for me. The effects are heavy going. It slows me down (that’s THE WHOLE POINT, SOPHIE!!! You manic bitch). And so, as I said above, it often not-quite-accidentally slips my mind. Then, like clockwork, my mind speeds up and my husband starts looking concerned and, well, like I said above… I learn the hard way (over and over) why it is that the MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL thinks I should be taking this drug.

Taking psychiatric medication is not as straightforward as taking other kinds of medication. You’re never going to see infuriating ‘takes’ floating around about chemotherapy or insulin injections being a ‘quick fix’ or the ‘easy way out’, but people will say all kinds of shit about brain meds.

The ‘easy way out thing’ in particular always tickles me.

It’s been 16 years since I started taking medication for my mental illness and while I know I owe it my life, there's nothing ‘easy’ about taking head meds. There's side effects, weaning on and off can be tricky, not to mention this stigmatising rhetoric still pedalled by people lucky enough to have never been sick in the head. The worst thing is even with years of mad miles on the mad-o-metre, rhetoric like that can infiltrate your own feelings towards the very meds that are possibly saving your life.

So yeah… it’s defies logic but for some reason these basic things like take your meds and have a shower are bizarrely difficult to achieve sometimes and that can be hard to understand for people who haven’t experienced mental ill health and no doubt find it frustrating trying to fathom the sometimes irrational behaviours of their sick loved ones. They can’t understand why, when you’re depressed or anxious, you wouldn’t just go for a nice little walk or brush your hair. These things have perhaps never been a struggle for them.

I often think the thing we don’t highlight enough in this conversation is that when you’re sick in the head, you’re not just sad or anxious or scared, your cognitive function is fully impaired. In broad terms, cognitive function refers to ‘mental processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information, and reasoning’ and one study found that people with bipolar disorder (my particular brand of loopy) have ‘impairment of attention, memory and executive function.’ YAY. Showers et al would definitely fall into the realm of requiring decent executive function, I reckon.

This is something of an explanation but having ruminated for the best part of a week on this (and what a time the first week of January is to ruminate!), I think I’ve landed on another thing in play here and that is the kind of ambient self-loathing I have going on at all times.

Sidenote: I feel even more embarrassed admitting that I hate myself than admitting that I avoid showering – it feels so melodramatic: ‘oh… I hate myself! Woe is me. I am woe!’ And if you’re saying ‘fuck sake, get a real problem’, don’t worry I too am saying ‘fuck sake, get a real problem’ to myself all the live-long day. It doesn’t really improve anything just ensures that I feel like an even bigger loser – brains are great.

This low-key self-loathing definitely ties into the lack of self care thing because why bother caring for someone who you think is fundamentally shit and undeserving?

The self-hating bit is mortifying though another part of me is like… doesn’t everyone hate themselves? Answers on a postcard/in the comments please!

I had this little micro epiphany about the self-hating and lack of self-care as I was getting ready to leave for AA on Saturday night – wild times.

As I was heading out, my 10-year-old rushed to catch me at the door to give me a big hug and a kiss and as usual I had to consciously fight the instinct to draw away. Not because I don't adore him and love kisses and all that. It’s because in these moments of affection from my kids, I always have this knee-jerk, gut-punch of self-loathing. It palpably rises in me like bile. As their little arms encircle my neck, a powerful conviction that I don’t deserve them hits.

I don’t deserve his beautiful kisses.

In these moments, my immediate instinct is to draw away. I am conscious of my ugliness, my wrongness, of my pathetic self. I feel guilty that he has me for a mother. I don’t want to perpetrate myself on him. I feel sorry for him. I feel fully sorry that he must kiss this grotesque person.

It’s a lot to cram into one moment, I grant you, but I am nothing if not excellent at multi-tasking. I credit my years as a chef.

Being a parent is an exquisitely beautiful but acutely difficult thing and being a mentally ill one is something else altogether.

In AA that night, I said the quiet part loud about how my children’s affection always triggers feelings of disgust with myself. And I described how I sometimes skip my meds and let my hair get matted and put off having showers for days – all the while convinced that the people sitting nearest me were probably like: ‘Yeah bbz, you don’t need to tell us that’. And in laying it out like that I actually saw something of a solution for me. I am a mother and it doesn’t matter if I think I am pathetic and undeserving of self care, I need to model self care for my children. I never ever want them to feel this way about themselves and the fastest route to self-loathing for them would be for me to give them an extensive how-to guide on it in the way that I treat myself.

So I guess I have to do self-care now. So I stuck it on the list beneath ‘have some fucking showers for fuck sake, you creepy weirdo.’

Though, I’m not even going to call it self care because it actually feels like the ‘care’ part of ‘self care’ is something I’m going to have to work up to. Instead I’m going to call it ‘self giving-a-shit’. That feels achievable and we all know New Year’s resolutions need to be manageable if they’re going to be effective.

So I am off for a shower. I am GOING TO DO THIS. If you are attempting any similarly ambitious resolutions just know that I am cheering you on. XXX

PS. Take your meds.